Waiting On Snow

As I write this, it is Monday morning. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. As it is a national holiday here in the United States, I was under no contractual obligation to have this communication in your inboxes at 0500 this morning. I haven’t decided yet whether I’ll release it into the wild tomorrow morning at the regular time, or let it squirt out into the world later today. Such are the great decisions ahead of me.

Weather Map as of 1140 hrs Monday 15 Jan.

The Lady of the Manor and I are driving into the Big City later today to meet up with a dear friend in town on business. We’ll pick him up at the airport and then dash off for some sushi. Ordinarily, this would be of little consequence, but today is not an ordinary day. SNOW IS COMING TODAY.

I am not a climate denier. All the evidence I need that the climate is changing can be described by the now seventeen winters I’ve spent living on the Eastern Shore. I am however, no less confident in humanity’s capacity to adapt, and so the Gen Z/Euro-toff mania about climate change is lost on me. We’ll figure it out. We have opposable thumbs.

I do not recall any snow accumulation last winter, and that was a drag. I honestly cannot remember the last time we had a solid snowfall here—probably three years ago or more. But yesterday—as I was doing some advance planning for today’s dinner—I was greeted with the news of SNOW coming our way. Two-to-four inches of glorious SNOW. The various weather forecasting entities are divided in their timing, with at least one suggesting that things will get off to a slow start this afternoon and intensify after taps/lights out, and another suggesting that it all comes after 2200 hrs. Either way, the current plan will be to go ahead with things and be safe in our bed before the heavy stuff gets here.

We live in a house that is on the end of a long farm lane. Recent storm activity knocked over three trees that we were able to have moved out of the road (each fell perfectly perpendicular across) but which still require removal. We have an old Toyota Land Cruiser (2003) whose main reason for retention recently has been for snow use (both for mobility and for flattening snow down in the lane via multiple trips up and down it) that I’ll need to go out and re-attach the battery cables to.

I have a good snow shovel that has seen little use, and I am of the “get out and deal with it while it is underway” types, wherein multiple passes are made, none of which is particularly grueling. I suppose if I lived where it snowed more often and more substantially, I’d have some engine-driven implement at my disposal that I’d employ when it stopped snowing. But my experience with living where it snows more often and with engine-driven implements being insubstantial, I do it my way.

The last time I remember living anywhere that there was a lot of snow was the winter of 87-88 in Newport RI. Not only was there a lot of snow, it was—pardon my French—cold as balls. I was attending the Steam Engineering Officer of the Watch course, which at that time was being taught in trailers positioned on the east bank of the Narragansett Bay. Occupying the low end of the officer ranks at an officer-loaded officer training base, our parking lot was—I think—somewhere in Middletown. We had to walk from the lot EVERY DAY that winter directly into what was invariably a 20 knot plus wind directly into our faces. I was equipped with the standard issue Navy Peacoat (still have it, still wear it) which is ordinarily quite fitted to the task of cold weather. It was utterly useless in this cold wind. By the time one got to the trailer, frostbite was a real possibility.

Tomorrow morning (Tuesday, Jan 16), I imagine I will wake somewhere around sunrise and gaze out at the backyard through the large picture window in my bedroom at an untouched blanket of snow. Well, untouched but for the squirrels and the nicely formed fox that makes a sunrise patrol through the yard each day. He (or she) is sometimes espied by my dogs at the other end of the house in the kitchen, and when they see him they absolutely lose their minds. This makes for a jarring start to the day.

I have a morning medical appointment that seems in jeopardy. I’ve reached out for what the snow protocol is, and unless it is just a dusting, I’ll likely not show if the 2-4 inches predicted comes to pass. I realize this is not a manly approach to the weather, but I am unconcerned with your judgement.

On The Making Of Lentil Soup

Until very recently, I was not quite sure what a lentil was. I knew that it was food of some sort, but it was not a food I was aware of having seen, sought out, ordered, or eaten. My diet is—generally speaking—a high fat, high protein, low carbs and sugar affair, although I have a decided weakness for bread pudding, Christmas candy, and bread with dinner. My weight fluctuates over time depending on my mastery of cravings for the latter.

I am currently a bit heavier than I’d like to be, and so I have been more disciplined. Some beast of the sky, land, or sea gives its life for the central bit of each meal, and I have a healthy serving of vegetables at dinner. None of this is a solicitation for diet advice mind you. I’m simply setting up the rest of the story.

My girls got pretty hardcore vegan during the COVID days, and over time have to varying degrees have stayed as vegetarians with a bit of seafood now and then. Probably not enough to call them “pescatarians” (I don’t like using that word for some reason), so I’ll call them vegetarians. I tend to enjoy much of what they eat for main courses as side dishes, save for the tofu. When they are home, I make extra veggies to accommodate them.

The Lady of the Manor generally eats what I make, but while the food is (I am told) tasty and nourishing, she has decided to move in a different and (to her mind) more healthy direction in 2024, a direction that looks a bit more like the girls’ than mine. And so I am alone on “Carnivore Hill” at least for a time.

Although I am an old dog, I am not immune to new tricks, especially when I’ve had a chance to accumulate information. I recently watched a Netflix show called “Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones”, with Blue Zones being a demographic term describing areas where people tend to have notably longer life spans. The series is REALLY interesting, because it looks across diet, exercise, spirituality, family—a number of inputs, in five separate Blue Zones across the world, and tries to draw out commonalities. I really enjoyed it. But it was clear that the cattle industry (or pork, or poultry) was not involved in funding the research, as NONE of the five cultures studied seemed to reserve a central place for red meat—as my current diet does (usually 2 or 3 dinners a week).

And so, I have decided to slowly integrate some of the things I learned about diet from the show into my routine. I’m not going overboard. I will continue to eat all the things I eat now—just less of them. I made it a goal to have at least one dinner a week (I get probably 60%-75% of my daily calories at dinner) that is vegetarian, while also trying to substitute more seafood in for main courses. This was the week I began this practice, and it started with homemade lentil soup.

Why lentil soup, you may ask? Because I was at a lunch function recently where I wanted to eat lightly, and there was a nice salad available and a vat of lentil soup. I figured, “what the hell”, and I got myself a cup. I took my seat and with my humdrum lunch and began to do whatever conferencing activity it was that I was attending, when I took my first bite of the lentil soup. What’s this? It has substance. Texture. Taste. It is warm and wonderful. My goodness, where has lentil soup BEEN my whole life. I got up and got another cup, and I made a note to add this to the rotation.

Recently, a guy I follow on Twitter talked about his new Soup Machine, something he got for Christmas but was dubious about. He’d tried it that day, and was sold on the concept. It seemed like the universe was talking to me, first with the acquired taste for lentil soup and then with a potentially efficient manner of cooking it. I’m not ready to buy a Soup Machine, but I did want to take a stab at the lentil soup, so I located a fantastic You-Tube video recipe and got busy. Nothing in the video struck me as high art, so I was confident going in that if indeed I was able to achieve anything remotely like the soup I had at the conference in November, I’d be in business. I was not adequately prepared for the result.

I made the soup on Thursday night and had it for dinner, and Catherine joined me. At the start of the meal, she informed me that she wasn’t really a lentil soup fan, something I would have discovered had I asked the direct question, but since I was so excited about the effort, she let me roll on in ignorance. It turned out better than I could have planned—almost like a nice winter chili without the beans and meat. Catherine said it was good and seemed to like it, but she has excellent manners and I couldn’t imagine her saying anything else.

It wasn’t until the next day when I heated some of the leftover soup for lunch that I was able to verify her positive statements about the soup, as I watched her spooning some of it into a bowl for herself, unbidden by me. Success. I made something that we both appear to like, that is a healthy choice, and that I can make for the whole group the next time “Team Vegetarian” is in town.