Amethyst's Shiny Pebbles

For the record, I got injection #2 of the Pfizer vaccine against Covid-19 today. It's been a long, strange year and a quarter or so. We're incredibly lucky - we live in a beautiful place, nobody in our family has gotten sick, and our employment situation is fine. But it's hard for me to express just how much I'm looking forward to doing normal things like going into a store and browsing, or going to the library, or getting a meal from a restaurant. (I'm more than happy to wear a mask to do so, for the record.)

I figured I should post. (I should have posted about lots of things, but haven't. Someday I'll try to catch up, really...)

Before I go any farther, let me reassure anyone reading this that we are safe and the cats are fine!

Late Sunday August 16, a tremendous electrical storm moved through California. It was a dry storm, and set a huge number of wildfires. One of these was the CZU Complex fire, one of the several large fires that's been making national headlines. The southern part of the fire was/is not hugely far from our home in Scotts Valley, CA, and we elected to evacuate Wednesday August 19, about a day before evacuation orders were issued for our area. (The evacuation orders were primarily to get citizens out of the way so that the firefighters could move around and do their job. While it was initially feared that parts of Scotts Valley could burn, the consensus seems to be that it'll most likely be unharmed.)

We're living with P's family over in Portola Valley, which we're very grateful for. We don't know when we'll be allowed back, but I'll keep you posted.

Work's been pretty crazy recently. (At some point I may post about the specific craziness which was this week, but not now.) Anyway! I took today off to help myself recover from things a little. I:

- went and had a deep-tissue massage (and concluded that yes, I really need to commit to having one once a month if not more often)
- took myself for a sushi lunch afterwards
- acquired a chocolate croissant
- did necessary grocery shopping
- landed at home, where I watched an episode of Dark Matter and ate the croissant, and watched the rest of an episode of Your Lie in April
- went for a walk while the sun was out
- came back, considered sewing, decided I was physically tired and so sat and watched the rest of an episode of Lucifer with Luna Cat on my lap
- considered sewing again, decided I was tired, and lay down on the futon for close to an hour without disturbing Luna at all
- got up and sewed some

It's been SO nice. I desperately needed to take care of myself, and I did a lot of that today.

I walked out of work yesterday evening, and saw this:


(click image to embiggen)

It was sort of worrisome to behold. I figured anything that had left that crazy a smoke trail can't have had a good ending!
Fortunately the consensus is that this was a noctilucent cloud left behind by a meteor/meteorite. It must have been quite high up - it was seen in Sacramento and Lake Tahoe.

I saw a post on copperbadge's tumblr about an exploded pressure cooker, which prompted me to write up a memory from my youth.

My grandmother had a big house down on Cape Cod where she lived during the summer, and my family would generally go down a couple of times a summer. This particular time, I’d invited my best friend E along as well.


One evening, my grandmother decided to make pot roast for dinner. (You can see where this is going, right?)

I should say in my own defense that I know essentially nothing about how to cook large hunks of meat. At home such things were roasted, either in the oven or on my dad’s kettle grill (aka the best way). It may in fact be possible to cook large hunks of meat in a pressure cooker and not have it end up inedible. I just don’t know. 


My grandmother stuck the pot roast and some water into the pressure cooker, closed it, stuck it on a burner, and turned the heat on.

And walked away.

Most of us were sitting out on the back porch watching the sunset. At some point we noticed that in addition to the salt smell of the water below, there was a rather different smell coming from the house. The pressure cooker had gone completely dry - maybe it hadn’t been sealed correctly - and the object within was burned black.

I have no idea whether it ever occurred to my grandmother that not serving the pot roast was an option. In any event, served it was. I think we must have gotten the smoke out of the house by the time dinner was served, because I have no memory of smelling smoke during dinner. Or maybe there was still smoke in the air, but my sensory memory of that meal was entirely and completely overshadowed by the bite or two of dry, gritty, burned material boldly masquerading as pot roast. My mother told me later that my friend E gave her a look and whispered, “Do I have to eat it?” to which my mother (a reasonable person) whispered “No!” in response. My father, dutiful son that he was, ate his entire portion.

I think my grandmother must have gone to bed early, because once she was out of the picture the rest of us piled into the car and salved our poor taste buds with the sweetness of ice cream. 


And according to my mother, when she and my father woke up the next morning, the first words out of his mouth (before he said “Good morning” or “I love you” or anything) were, “That was, without a doubt, the very worst meal I have ever eaten.”