Hi! I hope everyone is having a nice holiday season. I’ve had better.
Happy February! Like many of us, particularly Minnesotans apparently, I’ve added playing Wordle to my daily routine for the past month or so. I’ve also started photoshopping my scores into classic children’s books.
Thanks to everyone who contributed to schlazathon 2021! We ended up raising over $7,000 for 46 different nonprofits! I finished making the ornaments on Saturday and was able to get everything packaged up Sunday, so if you were a contributor, expect to see your priceless treasures soon. I’m already thinking about plans for next year.
| Note: schlazathon 2021 officially ended on December 13, 2021, but I do have a few wallets remaining. You’re more than welcome to contribute and I’ll do my best to send you a print, but it may not be your first choice. Thanks! |
Hey there! Remember when I had my awesome photographer friend Betsy take pictures of me in my pandemic garb and then I mailed a bunch of you wallet prints and some gum? Check that link if you don’t recall. I had a blast hearing from many of you after you received your pictures, and if you were a recipient I hope it brightened your day.
It also encouraged me to look for other ways to be helpful In These Trying Times – providing a meal or care package to people having a hard time, donating to charities and GoFundMe campaigns, that sort of thing. And then Betsy was in town again a couple months ago, and folks, we did some more photographs.
I’d like to introduce you to some new inhabitants of the Schlenk home.
I was perusing Sarah Bessey’s 2021 Christmas Gift Guide the other day and came across the Hand-Knit dolls from cuddle+kind. It could be said that the Schlenks are suckers for cute things, and as such I consulted with the other humans in the house and quickly liberated a car payment’s worth of economy points to bring these three home. They arrived quickly and are just as cute in person as they are on the website. We originally planned for them to be Christmas gifts but the thought of them being stuck in their big box for a month didn’t seem fair to us or them, so they’ve already joined the rest of the stuffed cute things in our home and are settling in well.
How’s everyone holding up? Some things I have learned during the past nearly a year of living in a pandemic:
Clearly a lot of time has past since the last post, and if I were a better blogger I would spend at least a moment acknowledging that I have not posted in a long time. But I am not a good blogger.
Instead I write because I have made something. It is not good, but it is something.
I enjoy watching baseball. I’d call myself a casual fan, not because I only watch when they’re good, but because I’m not one of those folks who can tell you all the reasons why they are good or what they should do to get even better. I just like watching baseball. It’s a reliable presence with an even tempo and also there’s a lot of statistics.
As the Twins have been leading their division, league and even all of baseball quite frequently this season, my cousin started tweeting whenever they had the best record in baseball. Of course that got tedious so he inquired about automating it. I thought that sounded like a fun project. And if something is worth doing, it’s worth overdoing, so I made a ruby gem that includes the leader executable that’s useful for determining whether or not your favorite team is leading their division, league or all of baseball. It can also report to you which team is leading baseball, a league, or a division as well as print out a nice leaderboard with sort and filtering options.
Some results:
$ leader is minnesota-twins -l && t update "Today is the 27th of June and the Minnesota Twins have the best record in the American League."
Today, the 27th day of June, 2019:
The Minnesota Twins are the leaders of the AL C division.
The Minnesota Twins are the leaders of the AL.
The Minnesota Twins are not the best team in baseball. They are #2.
Tweet posted by @schlazor.
Run `t delete status 1144439948352692224` to delete.Using it isn’t quite as straightforward as installing an app on your phone, but keep reading and I’ll walk you through it if you’re interested.
A few days ago I started a meaningless Facebook group called Grouper McGroupface because the future is private and/or I wanted to make polls for my friends to fill out. One such poll was about ice cream cones:
A few years ago I bought a pack of ice cream cones at the grocery store on a whim. Seemed like it would be fun to watch Iver shove his face into, probably. But I found that I really liked eating ice cream from a cone at home. There are many benefits! I will list them now:
- No need for a clean bowl or spoon
- No dishes to wash after consumption of the ice cream
- It’s fun to pack the interior of the cone before putting perfect spheres stacked on top
- The ice cream is licked
- The cone tastes good
- That part at the bottom of the cone where all the melted ice cream is
- The cone is crunchy, a nice contrast to the soft ice cream
Probably the biggest difference is the licking. Normally when I eat ice cream with a spoon I put a bit in my mouth and kind of half chew it, and then down it goes. Licking makes the ice cream last longer.
Anyway, all that to say that after making the poll and seeing the results and comments, I realized I had a pretty strong opinion on the matter, despite it being just about the most unimportant aspect of my life. So be warned: this may be the first post in a series of posts detailing hills upon which I would die defending.
Last weekend I was at my parents’ house and happened to find one of those folksy cookbooks that is composed of recipes authored by Area Moms and Grandmas. This one had a cabin theme. I don’t
remember if it was for a fundraiser or what – the others that I’ve come across are put out by churches or schools. Anyway, I took a couple photos of recipes, including this one for a “salad” made with Coke. For some reason I decided that I needed to make this. It doesn’t make any modern culinary sense as we’re no longer impressed with congealed things like folks were 50 years ago, but I’d never cooked with pop before, and it seemed like something I needed to do.
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