u/johngreenink

I had to buy something from a Japanese web store, and in order to meet the minimum for shipping, I had to buy a few other things. This was a fun opportunity, so I bought cool stuff like an incense burner, a box of neat looking crayons, and an iron wind chime. The chime was (apparently) something you'd find at a temple; it has two small bells with a clappers that sits between the two. Attached to this clapper is a long vertical paper prayer which is supposed to catch the wind, which then moves the clapper between the two bells and make the sounds.

Anyway, I ordered the stuff, and when the chime arrived, I hung it up outside on my porch. I should add that I live in a pretty windy section of my town, because I'm right near the inlet of a bay. The wind chime had been hanging for no more than a second and it began ringing. It made a very interesting sound, as the bells are just slightly different but closely pitched (like semi-tones of each other) so they have a kind of soft, maybe wistful sound. The paper prayer was whipping around in the wind like crazy and the bells were playing a lot. What a success!

After an hour or two, I'd been back to work at my computer, and I could hear the chime faintly in the background and damn was that chime cranking away, now especially that the wind had picked up. I went outside to check on it and not only was it playing wildly, but it seemed to be getting louder and louder. This might have been me. You don't hear a ton of wind chimes in my neighborhood (it's just not a thing around here), and I guess I became slightly self conscious about it... was it a bit much? I decided to just leave it there, and so it stayed for weeks and weeks. But eventually, the wind proved to be a bit much for the thin string that held the prayer, and a few times I found it had wrapped itself around the other threads that held the bells in place. I would have to unwind them, and when I did, it was as if the bells were unleashed from prison and they banged out louder than usual.

And then one day, the prayer card was gone. I don't know if it was just too fragile, and got pulled off by a particularly heavy wind, or if a neighbor just said "Enough," and ripped it off. I left it as is for a few weeks, but then thought to repair it. I did as best as I could, with a new piece of paper, and new twine, but the twine is heavier, and so the clapper moves much more slowly and lethargically and so the bells do not ring nearly as often. I wonder if I've actually made an improvement, since the ringing is a bit more "normal" and less crazy now.

Many years ago at my job, the VPN had a weird, bad habit of just losing its connection at random times, and a number of us would complain about this (it's mostly fixed nowadays). Of course, it would happen when you were getting a cup of coffee or using the bathroom when working at home, and then you'd have to log in again, which is sort of time consuming and not very practical. I did notice, though, that it DIDN'T log off if I had another file running; so, for example, if youtube was open and I was watching / listening to something in the background, the connection wouldn't break. Then again, sometimes it still would. So, I tried to test it out to figure out what was going on.

I also would listen to music files on archive.org quite a bit, and I noticed that most of the time, the VPN would not disconnect when I was listening to music on there. Finally, I figured out that it was the length of the piece of music which was maintaining the connection. So, if I was listening to a full album that clocked in at 45 minutes, then I could be sure of a good connection for that long.

Now, add to this, however, that I can't listen to music with vocals while I work, it's too distracting for my head for some reason. So, I started doing strange searches such as "long instrumental music pieces" which led to a lot of very intriguing finds, usually experimental jazz, very long classical music compositions, and even a rabbit hole of "the longest pieces of music ever written" which was pretty wild. Anyway, I wound up finding some of my favorite new genres, which includes French instrumental bossanova / film music from the 60s / 70s, of which there is a ton! All because of a faulty VPN.

So I have this friend who creates content online, and he kinda takes himself a little too seriously about it. One of the more frustrating parts of this is when he posts plant stuff. He takes pictures with his phone of plants he sees here and there in his travels and he writes about them online on his social media account. Once, I was reading through some of this and it all sounded a little fishy (like, he doesn't write this way)... A quick search-eroo online and yep, he literally picked up text from Google / Wikipedia / chatgpt, etc, including the Latin names of plants and everything. And he uses one of those plant identifier apps to tell him what the plants actually are, as well.

If this wasn't bad enough, one of his fans commented "wow, I can't believe you're a botanist, how cool!" Of course he should have said "oh, no, I'm just lifting all this information off the Internet, I have no actual experience in botany," but instead he just replied with a smiley face emoji.

I've been on a no-buy policy for a while now, which has been cool (not buying anything I don't really need - no clothes, no cool stuff I just see online, no vinyl records or books, no anything extra), but then I was picking some mulberries off my tree outside and I felt like I really wanted to try to make some mulberry ice cream.

Now, before this, I made a "life hack" version of ice cream, which is pretty good, which is just mangoes and powdered milk mixed together in the food processor and frozen. It works good (best if the mangoes are ripe and sweet), but for mulberries, I thought "Hmm, this probably needs the full shebang, with cream and sugar, etc." There was a sale at an online store for a good ice cream maker, and I thought "Yeah I should get this."

I knew I was still on my no-buy policy (I'm paying off some debt) but for some reason I just felt like it was a good investment to get this ice cream maker. I kind of justified it by seeing holidays in my mind, friends over my house and I'd be there saying "You taste how good that ice cream is? Heh heh... well guess who made it??" and they'd be all impressed and the conversation might go something like this:

"Homemade ice cream always tastes better"
"Sure was worth it to get that ice cream maker, johngreenink"

I know I'm justifying it, probably.

The ice cream maker arrived today. I got scared for just a second because on the outside of the box it said "Perfect for sorbet, frozen yogurt..." and... and??? There was an envelope covering up the rest of the box. I moved the envelope "...and ice cream." Whew!

I'm waiting to catch a flight, and a woman was sitting about 4 yards away from me. The arrangement was already kind of weird, her husband (?) and another male friend (brother, brother in law?) were standing nearby, and her child was laying very precariously on a seat next to her, and none of the adults seemed at all concerned that the kids was either going to fall over or get wedged in the seat.

Anyway, she was also one of those people who has 1) a carry on bag 2) a large purse and 3) another large bag, which breaks all the rules for flying, but again, anyway... But as she's talking to the two guys and playing with her phone, she proceeds to pull out and drop a series of things from her bag: her air pod case, a pen, her phone (after she put it away), something I didn't see, and then I think the smaller bag. It was so ridiculous?! And each time this happened, I was hoping "ohh ok now she'll see that she's got to pick up her damn kid before he falls over," but no she just goes on talking or looking at videos or whatever.

Also, at no point does she or her family / friends acknowledge her clumsiness (I feel like all my friends would have said "Damn, johngreenink, you've dropped FIVE THINGS today!?!?") nor does SHE acknowledge her own clumsiness, either (e. g. "Wow, I sure keep dropping shit today!?!")

They finally walked over to the other side of this wing of the airport to get their flight, I think they were only here to use the outlet for a charger.

EDIT: Hey folks: I wanted to acknowledge some people added some helpful context that the woman who dropped stuff could easily have been tired / overwhelmed / neurodivergent, any number of things and that I may have been harsh in my critique. I appreciate the points of view, and it helps add context, thanks all :-)

I have to travel to the opposite coast next week for about six days, so I realized I can't buy a lot of fresh groceries (they'll just go to waste) so for the next 4 and a half days, I need to make some meals with stuff I have on hand. It's presented a kind of funny challenge, like things they do in those cooking shows "You have to make dinner for 6 people only using the things you find in aisle 4", etc etc. I have some odd things in my cabinets from times when I wanted to get fancy trying out some new cooking things here or there. Anyway, lately I've just been making sandwiches for dinner, but I'm trying to make them kind of interesting if I can, and this travel challenge sort of gave me a kick in the butt to do something better.

Last night I had a craving for this thing my dad used to make when I was a kid. It's very regional and some people hate it - it's called "ham salad" - it's very simple: You grind together left over ham and pickles together, and then mix in some mayonnaise, and voilà - ham salad. It's a bit like a poor man's pâte. You can't eat much of it, obviously, because it's heavy; ideally, it's just a smear on some bread with some lettuce and tomato, etc.

Here's the problem, though: No ham. I only had a can of Spam (close enough.) And no lettuce or tomato. BUT, I did have pickles and celery, so I got a little fancy: I chopped up the Spam, chopped up celery and pickled some shallots with vinegar. Then I thought, ugh, mayo. I don't want to use a lot of mayo, so I remembered this trick where you can make a lighter version of mayo by mixing it up in a blender with cottage cheese. So I did this (and it's also really tasty.) But, couldn't I make this just a bit fancier? Sure, why not. I found some pickled red peppers in a jar in my cabinets, so I chopped them up as well and added them into the mix along with the cheese/mayo. It made for a pretty nice sandwich, and I get to use up a bunch of stuff before I travel. Win-win.