sambar
I was going to go to Central Cinema last night to see their annual showing of Groundhog Day, which I haven't seen in a while and is a great movie, but ended up changing my mind. I really just wanted to up the number of times I've gone to the movies, because as of year-to-date, I've only gone seven times. That's only one per week so far, and I usually average at least two, often three. It's just that the options this year have been so terrible. At least I'll go to the movies twice this weekend, as I'll be seeing the Oscar Nominated Shorts, both live action and animated, as I do every year.
Shobhit and I spent a whole lot of timing cooking instead. He made a stew-like dish he calls "sambar," but with pretty much all the vegetables we had available. So, he had me busy chopping a bunch of things, from onions to garlic to ginger to carrots to bell pepper to okra (yuck). He chopped the squash (yuck) into fairly large chunks. We also made chai, which we have been doing very regularly lately since he got the loose tea for it. Between that and the syrups I put in the tea I drink at work every day, I think it's pretty safe to say my sugar consumption is on the higher end these days. It's amazing I'm not gaining tons of weight.
Preparing dinner took a really long time, but it did yield five containers of leftovers for lunches. Once we finally sat down with our dishes and cups at the coffee table, we then watched the last four episodes of the second season of One Day at a Time on Netflix. And when it finished, I even said out loud, "I really like that show." I can't say enough good things about it. Rita Moreno is easily the best thing about it, but the rest of the cast is great too. And I love its pointed depiction of a Latino immigrant family.
Then we did the crossword puzzle at washingtonpost.com. I was in bed soon thereafter. A pretty quiet, and actually fairly relaxing, evening.
What else can I write about today? Hmm.
Maybe fifteen years ago, I read a piece by Robert Ebert talking about "peak oil" and the chaos-inducing potential of running out oil in the world before renewable energy can keep up. To say it unsettled me would be an understatement. It literally kept me up at night, for days, maybe even weeks.
And then, of course, I settled down, life moved on. We haven't had society collapse just yet.
And besides, guess what? Thanks to a National Geographic article posted recently by a friend on Facebook, there seems to be something else we should be much more immediately worried about: drinking water. Sure, Cape Town and its "Day Zero" where they expect to be rationing drinking water to its citizens by mid-spring of this year is just one city, far away from here. But we all know water is going to become an increasing problem the world over, probably in our lifetimes.
This isn't freaking me out the way the "peak oil" idea did. Every once in a while something comes along that seriously freaks me out like that, but maybe I have finally grown out of those sustained reactions for good -- I really can't remember the last time it happened. Right now I'm just inching closer to coming to terms with my own mortality, broadly speaking. We'll all be dead soon enough. I still think this is the biggest reason to have as much fun while we can: the ability to do so could change dramatically with little to no notice. I don't want to keep putting stuff off until it's finally impossible to do anymore. I need to visit Australia, for example, and it needs to happen within the next couple of years. Uncle David and Mary Ann are certainly not getting any younger.
But I digress. In any case, this Cape Town story is still unsettling. I knew nothing about it until seeing this article. And although I've long known the long-range climate change forecast for Seattle specifically is that the Pacific Northwest is expected to get warmer and wetter -- far more other places will be getting dryer. I'm not worried about not having water so much as the potential demand from other regions who want to come for it. I kind of think about that a lot.
So that's what's on my mind at the moment, anyway.
[posted 12:27 pm]