and things went downhill from there

I admit to being a bit disappointed.

When I saw a flurry of activity from people who had been silent here for months, and even years, I had hoped that maybe the pandemic was nudging some people back to dust off their old accounts on Livejournal and/or Dreamwidth.

It's starting to look like it was more of a hiccough than a general movement, though. There are 2-3 of you who continue to make this a moderately interactive, social experience, and I know of a few who read this journal even if they don't respond. It's enough to keep me posting here.

But I miss the larger community that used to hang out here.

Since I seem to be getting back into a semi-regular routine of posting here, I decided to buck up and buy a paid account. I've been happy with the service Dreamwidth is providing, so I don't mind tossing a few $ to support them. You can probably expect to see a few new user icons from me going forward.

I did a lunch experiment today to see how quickly I could turn out a fast, cheap, reasonably healthy meal with a minimum of ingredients. The idea came to me when I walked down to buy coffee this morning, and I noted that I would be walking right past the butcher shop on my way home. I stopped in there and grabbed a pound of their ground pork because it's remarkably inexpensive.

It was past 12:30 by the time I got home, so I wanted to make something as fast possible so as not to eat late enough to spoil dinner.

I grabbed the wok and peanut oil and set to work. I started by cutting a medium yellow onion into eight pieces, then I minced a couple cloves of garlic, and halved a half-dozen stalks of frozen asparagus. Prep work done, I tossed about half of the pork into the wok and broke it up, tossing it until most of the pink was gone. I threw in the onion and when it looked to be about half-done, I threw in the minced garlic. When the garlic was suitable fragrant, I added equal parts of tamari and mirin (I could have used soy sauce, but we are almost out of it, and I wanted something with a bit less salt). Finally, once the onions looked like they were about done, I threw in the asparagus and tossed it in the wok until the asparagus was heated through.

The result was very good, and very fast. From the time I got in the door until I was finished eating was about 20 minutes. This probably could have served two if I'd served it with rice or rice noodles, but I didn't want to spend the extra time, nor add the extra carbohydrates.

If I was going to change this, the only things I might do is add a bit more mirin, or maybe add a dash of five-spice.

Unless I have buggered up the settings again, this post should automatically cross-post to both LJ and Dreamwidth. I will keep posting to both for as long as my LJ account remains active (I don't tend to delve into the kind of politics that would get my account banned by their new TOS), but DW is my new backup plan, and probably my long-term future plan as well. Once I start building up a bigger network of friends over there I am probably going to spring for a paid account.

I have about a half-dozen posts to just LJ that I thought were posting to both sites, but I derped the settings in Semagic. I've fixed that now. I think. This is my test post to check that theory.

If you are still reading me here, and want to follow me over to DW as well, you can find me here.

I went for a walk last week and caught a couple of post-melt pictures. Other than some of the larger stacks, our snow is effectively gone now.


As I was walking past the cemetary, I barely spared it a second glance before I backpedalled a quarter of a block to capture this shot.

I have noticed a few people here have mentioned that they are moving over to Dreamwidth, or at least mirroring their entries over there. I gave it some thought and decided that's not a bad idea. I created an account over there years ago, and Semagic makes it very easy to mirror my posts on both sites.

I am not looking to abandon LJ yet, but going forward I am going to start mirroring my posts on both sites. If you are looking for me over there, I am on the site as ... plonq.