Handbill Handout

 The gourmet tea bag specifically.  You're lovingly assembled from bespoke ingredients, put in a bag and live in a box for a while and when your big moment comes you get soaked in near-boiling water for 5 minutes and that's it.  Into the trash or the compost.   What a letdown. I buy my fancy tea from Rishi and this is what they have to say about their bags: "Rishi tea bags are made from a plant-based material called polylactic acid (or PLA for short). PLA is an inert, DNA-free material that is produced by breaking down starches found in plant sources. Through this process, no plant DNA is left behind, making these hypoallergenic and allergen-free. PLA is NOT derived from petroleum and will not leak harmful plasticizers into your brew. True to our sourcing ethics and to help showcase Rishi’s high-quality teas and botanicals, this material is purposefully sourced to provide you and your family with the safest and most delicious cup of tea! " So I got that going fo...

 We’re currently driving around with a box of medical waste from my most recent turn as a recipient of IV antibiotics at home.  The last time I had one of these boxes I had to take it to the hospital on one of my follow up visits and got sent from place to place like Batman trying to get rid of a bomb in the Adam West movie version until finally I took it to the lab, put it on the reception counter, said to the nearest person “I was told to drop this off here” and bolted as much as someone with my damaged limbs can bolt. Now they give you a box with a mailing label that you have to take to the post office and mail to a disposal facility.  Unfortunately, every time we’ve been at a post office to mail letters the lines to mail packages have been longer than we were comfortable standing in so back to the car it goes. Is it the weirdest thing we can’t get rid of?  Not unless you think my father’s old prosthetic leg is weirder. We inherited that when my now-late sister mo...

 The garlic we planted last fall must've liked the heavy rain yesterday, the greens are starting to poke out from the soil. Scapes in a month maybe?  We're down to the last three heads of garlic from the greenmarket that we stockpiled before  everyone ran out.   Life without garlic is sad.   The new lawn guy/gardener/landscaper/whatever the term is for the person who takes care of our small patch of grass and bushes and trees (It’s not much of a lawn and “landscape” certainly implies a scale that we lack and we don’t let him touch the food-growing-garden) came today to do a spring cleanup.  Did a nice job too, I was worried that the squirrels and birds would be annoyed by a sparser space, but the squirrels showed up for their afternoon peanuts and I hear the birds and they don’t sound any different than normal so it’s all OK, I guess.  There’s more daylight every day.  

 We now have a milkman.  I can say milkman without being sexist or gender-insensitive because the person we talked to (on the phone!) identified as male.  So we have a milkman, a guy who brings us milk once a week.  It’s better quality milk than you get in the supermarket, fresher (it comes from “farms upstate”, you know, those places where that dog you had as a kid was sent by whoever raised you (see I didn’t just say “parents” which proves that I’m properly 2021-model sensitive)), and even better comes in glass bottles that you leave out for the milkman to take back to the bottling facility where they get sterilized and reused instead of thrown in with all the other recycling that probably doesn’t actually get recycled.  The milkman used to do his deliveries overnight Wednesday into Thursday which added a cool factor to it because it made me think of the Milkman’s Matinee .   Unfortunately, an impending snow event made him decide to deliver during the d...

 I walked outside to bring in the trash can this morning and there was a guy in a cherry picker next to the telephone pole in front of my house.  I greeted him and he said "Hey, you're getting your very own 25 Miles Per Hour sign".   So, I got that going for me on a grey morning at the end of winter. 

Once upon a time I was ahead of the  times .   Up until college I did fine academically coasting strong test-taking skills.  I'm not sure where they came from or why, but I always did well on tests, particularly multiple choice tests because I could usually eliminate the no-chance answers and guess between the plausible ones.   Engineering school was a different matter.  First year calculus was something they used to weed people out and I found out I was a weed.  To be fare I spent a fair amount of time exploring the neighborhood my school was in rather than spending it in class or studying.  Having been a cultural prisoner for almost the first two decades of my life the escape into mid-1980's urban life was an irresistible attraction.   After I was weeded, I festered at a local community college for a semester, got my bearings back with a slate of courses that actually interested me resulting in a perfect GPA and advanced back into...

 Apples are better cold.  Now that the weather's slowly warming I'm keeping my apples in the refrigerator.  They taste brigher, crisper, more awake, which is weird because cold usually mutes flavor. I wonder what Harold McGee thinks about this.