Fun

[mallorys_camera]

First frost! The grass around the house was silvery & crunchy as the morning broke. I am thinking this is it: Autumn Intractable. Resolute! Immutable! No more hot weather holidays. (It was close to 90° F just five days ago.)

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I finished a Remuneration project. Shipped it off to the client. Billed it—which means I will spend the next five days in a state of hysteria: But what if they don't pay me? what if the kiskas & I are forced to move into the refrigerator box beneath the bridge???? Such paranoia is the bane of the freelancer's life.

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Then I went to the upscale supermarket.

There was a particular treat I loved as a little girl: stewed dried fruit. I hadn't thought of it in years, but for some reason, I thought of it yesterday, and went hunting around for dried apricots, dried peaches, dried pears. They don't sell those things in one convenient package anymore—& I was hit by my foolish naivete: I mean, of course, there will be trends in food! There are trends in everything else! And as an old person, I am now on the wrong side of all of them.

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In the evening, I played around with the Shawangunk Dems' website. It's on Squarespace, a popular website building/hosting company that I'm not crazy about.

Back in the days of HTML & CSS, I was fairly proficient at building websites—not great, but better than okay. The switch to using a template-based interface like Squarespace is a bit like driving an automatic transmission when you're used to manual. In some ways, it's easier, but in some ways, it's not, plus you have much less control.

I didn't bother to read any manuals. I just rolled up my sleeves and plunged straight into the backend. One real problem with Squarespace is that it doesn't have a preview mode. All the mistakes you're making, you're making in real time where the whole world can see! That means you have to figure out how to correct those mistakes right away! I was up past midnight.

It was fun the same way working out a complicated organic chemistry problem is fun. (You have ethanol and every catalyst known to man. Synthesize isobutyronitrile...) Or preparing a complicated tax return is fun. (Noah, a U.S. citizen, is also a digital nomad and a business owner. He is in the midst of a divorce from Imane, a Saudi Arabian national. His children, Homer and Lisa, are joint nationals...) Or interpreting the Torah or Upanishads is fun.

And, yes, those things are fun for me.

Comments

[asakiyume]

Your hypothetical tax situation was giving me the complete fantods, but at the same time I can see how figuring it out could be fun (.... sort of. OMG I'm going to spend the rest of the day glad that I am not Noah. So... thank you for this moment of gratitude?)

Congrats on finishing the project!

And did you buy single packages of all the different sorts of dried fruit to mix all together?

[mallorys_camera]

Nah. That would be too much. 😀

[rebeccmeister]

One of the other things about the GUI-based webpage design interfaces, is that from what I understand, some of them have pretty horrible security flaws baked into them. (I believe more true of Wordpress, don't know so much about Squarespace, either).

I learned to make webpages in an Intro to Computer Science class, so that was all HTML. Even a CSS update was a bit much for me. But I totally agree with you, I vastly prefer those tools over the GUI-based stuff. It's the same smoke and mirrors one sees all over the place now: vibe your way to a website without any real idea of what fundamental information has been used to actually generate that website.

Sigh. Oh well. Done is done.

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For Stewed Fruit, do you just add hot water back to the dried fruit? Or is there more to it?

I don't think dried fruit should ever go out of style, but of course specific combinations of it might.

[mallorys_camera]

The way I used to make it as a kid is I'd take eight or so ounces of dried apricots, peaches, pears, & prunes, throw them in a pot, add a cup and a half of water, bring the water up to a boil, turn down the flame & let it simmer for 15 minutes.

Yeah, 8 ozs combination of apricots/peaches/pears is off the market. I could probably track down the individual dried fruits, but I'd have to buy them in larger bulk, & I'm not that nostalgic for the childhood treat. 😀

[fauxklore]

Can't you buy small quantities of dried fruits from bins at some dusty ethnic market? I dislike most dried fruit but I can get a few slices of dried pineapple or some apricots at the Iranian markets in my neighborhood or even at Whole Foods or Wegman's. When you go to NYC, I also recommend an excursion to Sahadi in Brooklyn.

[mallorys_camera]

Too much work. 😀