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Thank You for Voting<\/strong><\/p>\n I assume that most if not all of this blog’s readers understood the importance of making their voices heard and their votes count in the recent election. As a result, Trump and Trumpism suffered a humiliating setback, the unreliability of polls and pollsters and the mainstream media got demonstrated anew, and many of the worst excesses of the christofascist right got nipped in the bud.<\/p>\n With that said, given the dire threat to democracy that we currently face, anything less than an 85-90 percent turnout of sane and reasonable voters from the center to liberal-left this year gives cause for early alarm about the possible outcome two years down the pike.<\/p>\n This midterm election represented a chance to hand the radical right a resounding defeat. And to give the Biden administration a decisively winning hand to pursue an agenda that, with cavils here and there, I think most if not all of us left of center agree on. We failed to do that. Consequently, energy that could have gone into moving forward on progressive issues, the Biden administration will spend much of its time and skill fending off the christofascist insurgency.<\/p>\n Consider this: “A swing of 3,340 votes from GOP to Dem in the 5 closest House races would have allowed Dems to hold the House,”<\/a> according to Tom Bonier. That’s not just sad, it’s pathetic, and does not bode well.<\/p>\n “Trusting the voters” isn\u2019t the issue. It’s the non-voters in the liberal-left mainstream who should scare us. If the current state of affairs \u2014 with armed militias in the streets \u2014 doesn\u2019t “motivate” them, I can’t imagine what will.<\/p>\n So the work’s not over, alas. Indeed, it’s just begun. Go ahead \u2014 take a holiday break, but then return to the good fight in January 2023, as we usher in a new year that promises more of the same, all the way through to January 2025.<\/p>\n Getting the Jab (Again)<\/strong><\/p>\n In late October I got my omicron booster at the local Walgreen’s. Early on I decided to take no chances with this pandemic, so I have followed the prescribed protocols pretty much to the letter.<\/p>\n Though this is hardly Trump country (quite the opposite, in fact), up here, as it seems most everywhere, people generally have decided they’re simply tired of the plague. They wander around the nearby supermarket maskless, assuming themselves \u2014 and everyone with whom they come in contact \u2014 impervious to the harm that lurks in the old and new variants now circulating. To make things worse, the holidays loom ahead, with their potential to serve as super-spreader events.<\/p>\n So far, so good. The pharmacist explained that this latest jab should last a year, though that doesn’t factor in possible new variants<\/a>. Aside from a slightly sore left bicep and negligible sluggishness for 24 hours, I have experienced no adverse symptoms from any installment of the vaccine. I encourage my readers to follow my example and the advice of their chosen medical professionals.<\/p>\n P.S. I got my seasonal flu shot too. A word to the wise.<\/p>\n For the Birds<\/strong><\/p>\n On the morning of November 15 we had below-freezing temperature here, so I put on my long underwear for the first time since I stopped wearing it last spring. I also set up our bird feeder on the glass door to the deck, so Mini can sit on the cardboard scratching box Anna made for her and watch the local residents of the feathered persuasion, plus a squirrel or two, eat their fill \u2014 months of prime-time catavision ahead for her.<\/p>\n Though we don’t qualify as birders, and have no aspirations to that status, we do pay attention to the local air traffic here, as we did on Staten Island. I’ll introduce them here as we go along, starting with the ones least familiar to us. To begin with, the tufted titmouse<\/strong><\/a>:<\/p>\n Tufted titmouse<\/p><\/div>\n We saw frost on the dry grass when we went food-shopping later that morning, and that afternoon we had our first snow of the season. Which made a mug of hot chocolate mixed with strong coffee and a slurch of brandy mandatory when it got to be 5 o’clock somewhere.<\/p>\n \u2022<\/p>\n Olivia Wilde’s Special Sauce I do my level best to avoid celebrity gossip. However, thanks to the internet, as a Ted Lasso<\/em> devotee I became aware, inevitably, of the maudlin details of the now-off-again affair between Jason Sudeikis’s ex Olivia Wilde and Harry Styles. The unexpected role that vinaigrette salad dressing played in the breakup<\/a> struck me most forcibly, with the intertubes gushing over Wilde’s version \u2014 simply swiped from a passage in a 1982 Nora Ephron novel \u2014 treated by all concerned like some magic love potion.<\/p>\n As someone who has enjoyed vinaigrette dressing and\/or sauce since I spent several childhood years in France (October 1950-December 1952), I find this sudden attention to it perplexing, to say the least. It may qualify as the oldest known salad dressing; in Europe it dates back to antiquity. It reached the U.S. (via cookbooks) in the 1880s. Pretty much every classic cookbook since then offers a version; by the 1960s, that included The Joy of Cooking<\/em>, bestsellers by Julia Child, Craig Claiborne, Graham Kerr, and many more.<\/p>\n Wilde’s version, via Ephron’s Heartburn<\/em>: “Mix 2 tablespoons Grey Poupon mustard with 2 tablespoons good red wine vinegar. Then, whisking constantly with a fork, slowly add 6 tablespoons olive oil, until the vinaigrette is thick and creamy.” (I don’t have patience for whisking, so I put it all in a small covered jar, add a few drops of water to thin it, and shake vigorously.)<\/p>\n Let me be clear: This is an excellent salad dressing, simple and versatile. It goes well on all raw veggies and most steamed veggies and all kinds of other foods. You can also use it as a marinade. Part of its excellence resides in its idiot-proofness; any doofus can make this, simply adjusting the proportions to taste.<\/p>\n Why, I’ll bet that even Harry Styles can whip this up in his deluxe kitchen while wearing nothing more than a bustier, jodhpurs, and Doc Martens. Which makes the haute<\/em>-gossip version \u2014 Olivia sneaking out of the house with a jar of it for a tryst with Harry, a heartbroken Jason lying down under her car<\/em> to stop her from sharing their aphrodisiac secret dressing with his rival \u2014 just … well, worthy of a feature in the (fingers crossed here) fourth season of the comedy hit.<\/p>\n Battening Down the Hatches<\/strong><\/p>\n Due to the July move here we put in our garden late, and as a result got two months’ worth of fresh tomatoes and tomatillos but not much else, despite Anna’s best efforts. Still, we learned a lot about the local weather, the angles of the sun on our little acre, the soil here, resident pests, knowledge that we’ll apply to next year’s plantings.<\/p>\n The leaves have all fallen now. We raked enough from our property and elsewhere on our lane to cover our planter boxes, pack around our fruit trees and berry bushes, and fill about two dozen trash bags that we stacked in the garden to decompose on their own over the winter until we mulchify them next spring.<\/p>\n With the trees bare we can actually see clearly our neighbors on three sides \u2014 two private homes north and south of us, and, west across the lane, a building that houses HowGood<\/a>, “a SaaS data platform with the world’s largest database on food and personal care product sustainability. With more than 33,000 ingredients, chemicals and materials assessed, HowGood helps leading brands, retailers and restaurants improve their environmental and social impact.”<\/p>\n Far enough away that we can’t see into each other’s windows, these structures, obscured by the greenery from April until now,\u00a0 have a comforting presence in this season, indication that we’re not isolated and alone here.<\/p>\n Over the past four months son Jacky has cleared brush and vines and dead trees around the perimeter of the grounds. If all goes as planned, after the holidays we will install a high-efficiency heat-reclamation insert in our fireplace and keep half the house toasty through the rest of the winter \u2014 and for many winters thereafter \u2014 with free homegrown fuel.<\/p>\n View south, Stone Ridge house, 11-14-22<\/p><\/div>\n \u2022<\/p>\n On the last days before the rain and chill set in, during the first week of November, Anna and I spent hours on the grounds of the Stone Ridge Library, harvesting the seeds of its female ginkgo tree. I take gingko biloba capsules as a holistic supplement, but Anna knows how to make a tasty, healthful, traditional Chinese dessert from the seeds. We foraged close to 4 pounds of seeds, enough for many such treats.<\/p>\n![\"No](\"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/No_covid_logo.jpg\"){kind=logo}
Meanwhile, I’m still wearing my KN-95 mask in any public setting, hoping to continue my success at avoiding any version of COVID \u2014 especially since long COVID, which can follow even a mild case, sounds like a horror. (See “Covid enters the brain and causes dementia, especially in older brains”<\/a> and “A mass disabling event: The effects of long COVID don’t stop at the individual,”<\/a> both published recently at Daily Kos.)<\/p>\n![\"Tufted](\"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/Tufted_titmouse.jpg\")
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The basic ingredients: wine vinegar and olive oil. Proportions vary. Some add mustard (dry or prepared); some add salt and pepper; some add minced garlic and shallots and basil. Some add (or substitute) balsamic vinegar and\/or lemon juice \u2014 though if you don’t use any vinegar I think that, technically speaking, it ceases to qualify as a vinaigrette. An online search offers up endless variations.<\/p>\n![\"View](\"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/View_south_Stone_Ridge_house_11-14-22.jpg\")
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