My throat continues to improve. There’s little pain eating and swallowing now, but it is still pretty sore when I move my tongue around too much, and I have developed a hacking cough and it seems impossible to clear all the phlegm from the back of my throat. Well, at least it seems to be improving overall.
Today I dealt with some bathroom cleaning, and also some cleaning up of my wife’s phone. She’s been collecting thousands of photos and video clips that she’s taken over the years, and her phone was just about out of memory, so I decided it was time to bite the bullet and copy it all to our desktop computer, and delete it from her phone. There was stuff on there dating back several years.
I am in the habit of copying across photos from my phone to the computer every day, and keeping the camera roll on my phone empty, but my wife has never developed this habit, despite me reminding er that if she lost her phone she’d lose all of those photos, whereas once they’re on the computer they get backed up regularly so the chances of losing them are virtually zero. Anyway, I spent a few hours going through all the photos and videos and sorting them into suitable folders on the computer. And suddenly she has nearly 100 GB of empty space back on her phone!
The other thing I did was recopy all our music and ebooks back to her phone – it seems at some point the phone rebelled and decided to start deleting music and books. For some reason the books got lost from both our iPads as well. I dunno what it is with Apple’s management of ebooks – it’s just terrible. I’m exploring some alternative ebook reader apps now, thanks to recommendations from friends.
One Friday while shopping I saw that our local supermarket now stocks a wider range of non-alcoholic drinks. (Unlike the USA, supermarkets here do not sell alcohol – you have to go to a specialist liquor store to buy alcohol. It always freaks me out a little when I visit the US and go into a supermarket and see beer and wine on the shelves.) Anyway, along with the small range of alcohol-free wines, they also had some Seedlip non-alcoholic spirits. I’ve been meaning to try these for a while, since I like gin, but you can’t exactly drink it with wild abandon. I’ve heard that Seedlip provides the same sort of herbal/spicy flavour experience of gin, just without the alcohol. But I’ve also been reluctant to try it because it’s so damned expensive. A bottle of Seedlip costs pretty much the same as a nice bottle of gin, even though there’s no alcohol in it (and hence it doesn’t attract the alcohol excise, so they’re actually grossing more of the sale price).
But now the supermarket had it right there, and I figured this is probably about the cheapest place to buy it, so I grabbed a bottle of Seedlip Spice 94. And now I’ve tried it and can make some comments…
Well. I opened the bottle and had a sniff. It’s very subtle. You obviously don’t get that whiff of alcohol carrying the other aromas like when sniffing gin, whisky, wine, or any other alcoholic drink. So it was difficult to smell much of anything, honestly – just a vague spiciness, a bit like a cold cup of herbal tea. I poured some and had a sip neat. Yeah, totally underwhelming. It tasted like someone had put a chai-spice herbal tea bag in cold water for a while. I normally have gin with soda (I like tonic, but I find it too sweet for regular use), so I added some soda and had a swig. Yeah…. okay. I was kind of prepared to be underwhelmed, but I was amazed at how underwhelming this was as a drink.
I’m not passing final judgement yet – I’ll give it a few more chances – since I have a full bottle fo the stuff now that I paid $50 for. I might actually try it in a martini style drink, with some actual vermouth, and see what that’s like.
And in another topic, yesterday while chopping salad ingredients for lunch, I inflicted a small accidental cut on my thumb. I swear, I really like these new knives I bought a while back, but I’ve been cutting myself with them semi-regularly. I’m sure I never cut myself anywhere near this much with my old kitchen knives that had trouble maintaining a sharp edge.
I see it said often that “a sharp knife is safer than a dull one”, but honestly it seems in my experience that’s simply not true. I’m positive I’ve cut myself significantly more frequently with these lovely sharp knives. It’s not like I’m a knife novice either – I cook nearly every night and have been using knives almost daily for decades. I do get the the sharp knives are nicer to use – I really love them, but dang, they love nicking my fingers.
I’ve set up a new Irregular Webcomic! poll question to explore other people’s experience with sharp and dull knives…
New content today:
The supermarket things is very curious. Normally I’d expect the US to be the outlier, as it is in most things, but here in Israel all supermarkets carry alcohol (though there is a law that forbids selling alcohol after 11 pm).
In the US this actually varies by state. In Virginia supermarkets can sell beer and wine but not heavier liquor. In Pennsylvania all alcohol was confined to state stores or restaurants. Some states allow everything to be sold at commercial businesses.