lee.ourand.me

The Americans who voted for this will continue to be astounded by any suggestion that these actions are—in any way—cruel or bear any resemblance to any historically bad actors.

• Marc Marquez is undisputedly back! Unfortunately, that probably means a boring 2025 MotoGP season awaits us. But what an incredible comeback story this could be.
• Foolishly played a couple hours of Pickle Ball on Thursday in my old beat up Vans Authentic shoes, resulting in some gnarly foot blisters. Oops. Lesson learned there! Proper footwear: important.
• While we’re on the topic of pickle ball, I acquired my very own set of pickle ball racquets paddles. Sad to report, I still absolutely suck. But I did win two games (of probably 30) this week. So you could say things are improving.
• National Pancake Day: the second round.
• Some days, it feels like learning Mandarin to a useful degree is just unrealistic. Other days, it really feels like things are clicking. Yesterday—after finally understanding how to use 了—felt like the latter. 真在我學中文很好.
• Remade the same eggplant dish I made a couple weeks back, but cut out all the funny business: no pre-salting, no deep frying. About a bajillion times easier, and it came out every bit as good.
• Migrated our onion sets out to the raised bed garden. Fingers cross’t for no more frost. 🤞

• Feels like approximately the 3rd most cliché activity to pick up, but I started playing pickleball this week. Out of the roughly 72 games I’ve played, I’ve won one (playing doubles where I may or may not have been carried). Fun little goofy game, though. I’m enjoyin’ it.
• In our last installment, I incorrectly stated the date of National Pancake Day. It’s actually this Tuesday. Oops!
• This week I learned the Chinese word for “movie” is 電影(diànyǐng), which literally means “electric shadow”. I don’t know about you, but I think that is one badass way to describe a movie.
• I put my long-neglected bicycle to use this week, and went on a nice (slow) ride up to Bryan Park and around the Bellevue neighborhood.
• I have no idea what I’ve done wrong, but the huge majority of my plant babies are struuuuuuuuggling. I think only maybe like 5% of them are going to make it. Arugula: rough. Jalapenos: rough. Tomatoes: rough. Bell peppers… lookin’ good!
• First MotoGP race of the season! Haven’t seen the race as of writing this, but thus far, Marquez looks like he’s back to his old completely-destroy-everyone-else ways. Usually I’m an underdog fan, but after all the shit this dude’s been through the past 6 years, I couldn’t be happier to see him back to his winning ways.
• Trying to avoid too much political commentary here, but I can’t believe how embarrassed I feel after seeing how those clowns spoke to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Slava Ukraini 🇺🇦

Merlin Mann has a way with words. He somehow makes this piece of advice I’ve heard a thousand times actually feel compelling. Challenge accepted, Merlin.

Dan Sinker writes about the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, their immense power in Indiana, and the man, George Dale, who relentlessly fought to bring ‘em down.

It is destructive and it is awful and not everyone lives to see the other side, but it always, always fails. It takes work. It takes fighting back. It takes throwing punches. It takes doing whatever it takes to beat it back, to protect those that are most vulnerable from its many attacks. And through it all, it feels impossible that we will win.

But we will.

• I’ve gotten a bit spoiled already, and pretty much can’t stand going anywhere during peak hours when John Q. Public is off work. I forgot Monday was a federal holiday, and went to a local cafe to get a little afternoon coffee with Cynthia until we saw the crowd. We noped out of there, and I made some fancy coffees at home instead. <insert some pithy line about voters’ economic anxiety>
• I migrated the bell pepper seeds to sit on top of the refrigerator, thinking some heat may help ‘em sprout. It worked! Looks like we’ll be swimming in bell peppers by the summer as planned.
• Went to a freshly constructed library near us just to get out of the house. I tinkered around with Loco for a bit while there.
• More snow! I’m really just over it, man.
• I’ve been using *nix systems of some type or another since the aughts. And I just learned that you can do string substitution in parameter expansion. I used this the other day to rename a bunch of files. It looks like this:

  for file in some*.files
  do
    mv $file ${file//replace_me/with_this}
  done
  

  Very handy!

• My relationship with the HelloChinese app has reached the state where it’s comfortable straight lying to me:
• Important reminder: 🗓️Pancake Day is Tuesday. Don’t forget to… well, you know the drill 🥞
• Finally paid my dues for Jess’s 2024 MotoGP Video Game championship dinner + drinks deal. He doesn’t read this blog, so I can be honest: he whipped my ass this year. If you are reading this, Jess: fuck you.
• Not sure if you’ve noticed, but there have been an upsetting number of sieg heils flying about lately…

• Duolingo’s out. Hello Chinese is in. Duolingo is fine. But after trying out the free version of Hello Chinese for a bit, it’s very clearly a superior product. They have actual audio (and video) of native speakers as opposed to the standard robot Duolingo voices. They support Traditional Hanzi, Duolingo doesn’t. They have a lot more explanations (e.g., Chinese speakers don’t actually say 你好嗎 (Nǐ hǎo ma / roughly “how are you?”), which is a phrase Duolingo generically teaches). And Hello Chinese quickly gets you reading stories / testing your comprehension, which has been cool. I’m reading like preschool-level “Peter likes coffee. Susan doesn’t like coffee. Peter doesn’t like bread. Susan likes fruit juice.” stories, but at least it’s something!
• The veggie seeds have sprouted! Well, most of ‘em. The bell peppers are pretty stubborn. Everything else is off to the races.
• Cooked up this eggplant parm recipe for Valentines Day din din. The salt / dehydration step along with deep frying made it 7/10 on the pain-in-hindquarters scale, but I’d be lying if I said those ‘plants didn’t come out real tasty. Made tiramisu for dessert. Cynthia’s an honorary Italian—those are her fav foods. Which, for what it’s worth, ‘Italian’ is one of the approximately 14 Mandarin words I can speak with any confidence. 她是義大利人!
• Week of crappy weather… I guess it got to me. Slow week. Not much else to report.