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My previous recipe results in a Panera style soup (with carrots and onions) and also leaned harder on the quality of the dairy and stock than was suitable for the quality of those ingredients I usually keep around. Recently I had occasion to make it for someone who avoids onion, which was a chance to rethink and simplify the recipe and also move it more towards the Au Bon Pain experience that inspired me to make this soup in the first place.

Make a roux with 1/4c each butter and flour.
Add in 1T of Better than Bouillon chicken base. Cook for a bit to brown the roux a little.
Slowly add in 3c milk, stirring to keep the roux from sticking to the pot. About half way through, the soup will start behaving like a Newtonian fluid again.
Add 8oz chopped broccoli and simmer for 20-25 minutes.
At the end, add 4oz shredded cheese. This can be all cheddar if it's a mild cheddar, but if it's a sharp cheddar then like 1/3 of it should be something else (I used a Petit Basque which is a Manchego style and that worked nicely).

Boil half an ounce of dried hibiscus flowers in 5 oz of water, covered, for 45 minutes. This will seem like way too long but it's not.

Strain, yielding about 4 oz of infused water.

Mix with 1/2 cup sugar and chill.

Resulting syrup is amazing in yogurt or margaritas or in savory recipes that call for plum sauce. Or probably other uses I haven't thought of yet.

Nine or ten years ago, I had a conversation with Mikki Kendall about what was keeping people of color away from Arisia. There was a lot of speculation, and some important thoughts about tracking our progress, but only one concrete suggestion: that our badges were too small.

That sounds kind of absurd on the face of it. On one level the explanation is simple: Black teens -- and by this I mean specific Black teens -- felt unsafe in a hotel whose security staff didn't think they belonged at the convention. Bigger badges would more clearly identify them as part of the community and cut down on the harassment they got for being there. But of course this barrier is just one of thousands. The point isn't to fix it (though that's also important). The point is to turn Arisia into the kind of organization that notices subtle things like this and fixes them, or better yet is capable of predicting micro-impacts before they happen and can, to switch metaphors, build a playing field that's actually level instead of being full of potholes.

I had the idea that having Jodie as conchair would help with this. We certainly got a lesson in cultural assumptions from having him on board, but of course Jodie was a person and not some kind of magic talisman so there are still plenty of things that need fixing, and also we'll need to come to understand the way in which the changes he made addressed this problem because, well, they're often subtle.

One of those is just becoming clear to me, and I thought I'd share it because I know I would never have thought of it myself. When writing the most recent budget, Jodie aimed high on all of the small admin line items. This put a couple of thousand dollars of expenses in the budget that weren't likely to be used, but our income numbers were uncertain enough that this seemed like a reasonable idea, and it's not like we had the volunteers available to pull off some of the things that fell out of the budget because of it. I didn't really think more of it until the con was over and it was time to close the books.

At which point I realized that we had a whole raft of cultural assumptions about budgeting. The biggest is that Arisia's event isn't a fundraiser with the goal of raising as much money for our charitable purpose as possible. The event *is* our charitable purpose and there are places where we're limited in our purpose by the amount of money available. We have some policies that let us reallocate money between line items as needed, so that money that we don't manage to use for our charitable purpose in one place can be used for it in another. We're bad at communicating which those places are, or encouraging people to ask for more money if they can use it effectively. Most people think we're in a more normal budget regime where spending less money is the goal and going over your budget is bad.

In other words, we have set up an asshole filter.

And maybe we even kind of knew that we'd done that, and figured that we could sort of make up for it by encouraging people to be, as siderea mostly calls it in that post, transgressive. But something I certainly didn't connect, and don't see in siderea's post, is that POC have a lot less freedom to be transgressive in American society. The good news is that this year we had enough POC volunteers to be able to observe the effect. The bad news, of course, is that it's absolutely there. Not every line was budgeted so high that it wound up actually being extra, and it was POC who wound up not asking for reimbursement for things they decided to spend anyway (since the charitable purpose was quite visible).

So going forward, we'll find ways to build a budget that make it clear where people should spend additional money if they have the opportunity to do so, without having to budget as if everyone will in fact do that.

And along with finally having larger badges, that will be two steps forward, out of thousands. Not for lack of willingness, but for lack of understanding.

I'm always looking for more understanding. But I think the only way I'm really going to get these tools to disassemble injustice is to hand them to someone else.

When grocery logistics suddenly got hard in March of 2020 I considered it to be a kind of giant Sudoku. Besides coping with the usual supply chain issues and the new grocery needs from my sudden switch to cooking instead of eating out, I also resolved to minimize my overall COVID impact and not just outsource all my risk via Instacart. Baldor's pivot from restaurant supply to home delivery helped a lot, as did the new curbside-only grocery in my neighborhood.

The new grocery approaches came with limited selections, but also access to new foods and new food sources. Each store was good at some things and bad at others. I compared different sources for quality and came to have strong preferences among them -- and also came to care more about the quality of the food I was eating and cooking with. And so now that supply chains are mostly back to normal and I could simplify my shopping, I'm still solving the sudoku every time.

I'm entering a low-contact phase in prep for a trip to visit nosebeepbear and so Sunday was a day to stock up on groceries. I did these in priority order -- the places I most want to shop for ethical and quality reasons tend also to be the ones with the spottiest selection.

So this meant a walk to Neighborhood Produce where I filled one grocery bag and was rewarded for leaving the other empty by finding something very useful put out for free on the curb on the way home; a bike ride to Market Basket where I filled my panniers; and finally a walk to When Pigs Fly and then to BFresh in Davis Square. This nicely filled up my fridge with all of the things that are hard to get delivered from SayWeee or Baldor. And now it's time to go put some orders together for those, so that I don't have to go into a store again before my trip.

Berlin isn't at the top of a lot of lists of places to spend New Years in Europe, but it's *on* every single list, and the fireworks are why.

In Berlin you don't go to the fireworks. The fireworks come to you. And they're amazing.

Imagine the Somerville 4th of July fireworks, only instead of all happening at Trum Field the launchers are spread across Somerville. Parks, street corners, balconies, whatever. Every second or so a firework goes off somewhere in a 4 square mile area. Got that?

That's how it was when I got here, at 3:00 in the afternoon on the 28th.

It has only escalated from there.

The finale, as it were, really came to a crescendo at about a quarter to midnight and started to taper off around half past. It's still going as I write this, at around 1:00. There still weren't any fireworks that are any bigger than what Somerville has. But there were fireworks going off in the street outside the house, and every block or so on Karl-Marx-Strasse, and in each of the little parks, and who knows where else. It's like a front row seat at Trum Field. Or maybe like what being *on* Trum Field would be like, because you're surrounded by fireworks, in every direction, and some of them are definitely closer than you can get in Somerville.

None of this is coordinated or government funded. Just people setting off fireworks whenever and wherever they want. Which is pretty much constantly and everywhere.

I have two, now!

My first cousin once removed, Lorna Courtney, is the star in the current Broadway production of &Juliet.

There's some great press (and some negative press from people who don't like jukebox musicals, of course). The latest is in the Washington Post. HMU if you need a gift link to that article, I get ten per month as part of my subscription.

Now to figure out when I can get down there and see it.

I made my own garam masala for the first time. I knew this day was inevitable two years ago when i started writing Indian food recipes, but also writing a garam masala recipe is an ... ambitious undertaking. I have figured out what some of the questions are. I have no idea what any of the answers are. The initial result isn't better than store bought, but it does avoid an allergen for a near future guest.

Someone shared the viral "superman" bike descending video with me, which made me go look for an example of the one-armed supertuck I was fond of back when I was racing in the 1980s. I couldn't find one, nor much evidence of supertucks' existence then, though I did eventually find a text description of someone doing something like it during the Race Across America at about that time.

Then I went and read my feed and, speaking of the 1980s, discovered that I had also anticipated yesterday's XKCD by about 35 years.

In neither case was this a particularly good idea.

There aren't so many contested primaries this year as there sometimes are, and two good candidates (Sonia Chang-Diaz and Quentin Palfrey) have dropped out of the ones there are. But there are still some. So:

- For Lieutenant Governor, Tami Gouveia. This is a close call, as Eric Lesser would also be good, but I like her list of endorsements better than his.

- For Attorney General, I will be voting for Andrea Campbell, but it's an even closer call and Shannon Liss-Riordan would also be excellent.

- For Secretary of State, Tanisha Sullivan. Galvin is a machine politician who had to be dragged into the 20th century. Sullivan has been running the local chapter of the NAACP. The choice is clear.

- For Auditor, Christopher Dempsey. An even clearer choice; he's a progressive (and also helped shoot down the Boston Olympics bid.) His opponent is a pro-cop "moderate" who votes with the Republicans a lot.

- For State Representative, Erika Uyterhoeven. The only one of these that I've put up a campaign sign for. Though I don't really think her challenger has much of a chance.