Seared Tilapia & Creamy Cilantro Sauce with Vegetable Barley & Pepitas
Category: Outside
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Stuffed Peppers
I forgot to mix the romesco sauce with the lentils for this first run, (didn’t notice it in the list of ingredients used in that step in the recipe) so I just dumped a bit of romesco on top before eating
Blue Apron: Lentil & Farro Stuffed Peppers with Fontina & Romesco Sauce
Hamhung Kalguksu Chicken Noodles 
Hamhung Galbi Jjjim 
Jook Hyang Abalone Porridge 
Kaiser Emergency Room for Ear Infection
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Kaiser Emergency Room
I started feeling a chest pain in the middle of a Zoom meeting, so after consulting with Kaiser’s emergency line, I went to a walk-in Emergency Room for the first time in my life. (I had been taken to ER on an ambulance after a bike accident before, but waiting in line for ER was a first)
I was very cold and very bored waiting for an hour while they went through my covid rapid test results before they could let me inside the building so we had some fun on group chat. After medical staff told me that all the readings in my heart was coming back normal, I was discharged but they told me to wait to give me paperwork. And then there was yet another 15+ minute delay, so I just escaped the waiting area by calmly walking past the cordoned cones.
Blue Apron: Creamy Mushroom & Spinach Flatbread with Fontina & Garlic
Blue Apron: One-Pan Chickpea & Curry Shakshuka with Tomatoes & Spinach
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Chair Cushion
At the coffeeshop where I like to sit for sunlight has chairs that are too deep, so I brought a cushion from home
there a cushion someone threw away by the entrance too? Tacos el Venado has a pop-up stand by Wilshire and 6th St. They stick a pineapple at the top of the rotating gyro grill and chop off a piece on top of each taco
Al Pastor Tacos 
Bangkok Eggplant 
What is this thing? 
8-screen setup challenge -
Possible Covid Exposure
After going to a musical last week I got a CA Covid Tracker app alert two days later saying that I might have been exposed. Got a rapid test, and tried to get a PCR test, but all the free PCR test tents from ktown disappeared!
Then three days after, on Monday, I started feeling fever, so took another rapid test, got some soups, and went to get a PCR test at the Angeles Community Health Center at MacArthur Park, which according to the LA county website has appointment-less walk-in tests. Once at MacArthur Park I noticed that there were free test tents everywhere. Interesting. Is this a funding thing?
japanese mini cookies, our secret convalescent period hero 
All tests came out negative. All taken through nasal swabs. I looked up on Google how to take a throat swab as that was recommended by folks, but came across a Forbes article that said “Rapid antigen tests are calibrated around a nasal tests’ detection range, so if you do it via throat, which is not what the test was designed for, you are purposefully taking it off its higher precision conditions”.
I was originally scheduled to go to a day-long work group retreat, but given all the mixed signals we decided that I would join via Zoom out of caution. There was already a pretty high-tech Zoom setup being prepared for people with contingency situations like mine, complete with the weirdest looking webcam/mic combo.
The fever slowly subsided over the next three days.
Also finally went to check out what was the deal with this strange “dessert” place snuck between other restaurants near home.
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Saturation mail
USPS sells a mailing option called “saturation mailing”, which is what companies use to send their weekly supermarket sales ads to every single person in an area. That’s how you get those annoying sales ads, and which I use as facial hair trimming aid.
Apparently today our mailman was like “fuck this, I don’t get paid enough for this shit” and left the entire box of ads on the side, without inserting each piece into our mailboxes.
Blessed be his heart. This is the hero we need, but didn’t deserve.
I may or may not have committed a federal felony, U.S. code 18 section 1708 and punishable by up to $250,000 in fines, by interfering with interstate commerce and tampering with corporate free speech 😔
Please, think of the kittens 😿
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Ride your buses people
wth why does a friday purchase of a metrolink ticket expire in 7 hours, when a saturday purchase lasts all day??
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Roasted Vegetables
Blue Apron: Sweet Chili Roasted Vegetables with Brown Rice & Cilantro-Yogurt Sauce
For 15 years I’ve only used Humana as my health insurance because it was the cheapest from the options, and this year I tried changing to Kaiser Permanente. Omg when Koreans explained me what Kaiser was like, they were like “yeah it’s like those big integrated hospitals in Korea that Koreans feel at ease in” but I had never heard about their top notch website. I went in at 10am to my first doctor’s appointment, the doctor listened to my concerns about back pain and being tired and made some recommendations and prescriptions, and I got the blood test and prescriptions and was out at 12pm! And the first blood test results came in via email at 1pm, and various result components kept trickling in throughout the day. All results are (relatively) neatly organized in the website.
Compared to the experience I was having with the previous doctor, where 1) it took me 1-3 months to see the doctor again and get the results and 2) them never sharing paper copies or any copies at all, this is crazy! I had implicitly assumed that something in the process was prone to taking a long time. Maybe they dry the blood sample out in the sun, or do centrifugal liquid separation for a couple weeks, who knows.
All in all, a very positive experience.
Seven Grand Bar -
Nothing to do
I was thinking last year that there was a bit of a personal journey for me in the turbulent progression of events that led to our mass departure from KRC two years ago. And that might have started in a protest march on January 19, 2019.
When we went to the Women’s March in 2017, ten of us got off the Pershing Square subway station, with our drums and drumming clothes ready, and got stranded in the station surrounded by tens of thousands of people who had flooded the station. There were some 20 more people from our group that we needed to get together with before we would start marching, because we each had pre-arranged roles. Many were drumming, some were to lead the chants, some would walk closely with the seniors to make sure they don’t get lost, someone would go get some snacks for lunch after the march, coordinate the cars, take photos and prepare a press release to submit to press, talk with reporters, post on social media, etc. We also couldn’t communicate with each other – there were so many people that cell towers stopped working.
I think another group of like 3 people who also got stranded elsewhere just decided to go marching on their own. That was probably the right decision. Our Pershing Square group made a little space in the corner and waited. We watched thousands of people emerge up from the subway staircases. We drummed a bit in our tight little corner. We waited there for like 2-3 hours hoping to miraculously link up with the others, and then decided to go back as the march was folding.
In 2019, I think our Orange County team went to join marches in OC. In LA, we decided to not go this time – people were exhausted from recent campaigns. Then on that Saturday morning, I decided to go join the march alone.
That experience was refreshing. People were walking. It was a chill warm sunny day. Some were holding signs. Some were chanting, sometimes. People who had come in groups were chatting.
There was nothing that I had to do. That’s.. kinda obvious, but it did hit me as a cultural shock. I had joined very few protests in 20 years where I didn’t have an assigned role. It was always busy, always on the clock, always checking to see how our timetable was moving along. Or carrying our heavy metallic gong. Or running. But here, there was none of that. I walked a bit, chanted a bit, then hung out at the park for a bit, chatted briefly with some people, and then at some random moment felt like that was a good day, that I might leave. So I went home.
It was a very strange, foreign-feeling experience. If there was a spiritual starting point to the journey that ended with me joining others in leaving KRC after 13 years with the organization, this was probably it.
The song is 잠이솔솔 from J Rabbit. I think it captures the vibe well.
