Salon post: March 22

[jenett]

Welcome to this week's salon post.

Topic of the week
A friend is taking me out tonight to a nice restaurant as a thank you for cat sitting.

For this week, what's a fun extra-nice outing for you? (Something a little out of your usual routine, for a special occasion.)

What I've been up to
A fun thing I'll talk about when it's public (probably end of April), ritual stuff, prepping for more ritual stuff, and... yeah, that's pretty much my week.


Useful notes
Consider tracking this post to get notifications of new comments. Select the bell icon (or the words 'track this'). More help over here, and more about notifications in general here.

Comments are welcome whenever you get a chance - even if that's hours or days later. Feel free to jump into whatever sub-threads intrigue you. More discussion is the point of the salon posts!

Got a question you're trying to sort out, or a thing you'd like to discuss? Lots of thoughtful interesting people with a wide range of interests show up here! Feel free to ask about things you're thinking about or trying to solve, as well as other kinds of chat.

House rules:
This is a public post, feel free to encourage other people to drop by, just note the 'if posting anonymously, include a name people can call you in responses' rule.

1) Consider this a conversation in my living room, only with a lot more seating. I reserve the right to redirect, screen, and otherwise moderate stuff, but would vastly prefer not to have to. Keeping conversations SFW is appreciated.

2) If you don't have a DW account or want to post anonymously, please include a name we can call you in this particular post. (You can say AnonymousOne or your favourite colour or whatever. Just something to help keep conversations clear.)

3) If you've got a question or concern, feel free to PM me.

Comments

[cjsmith]

I wish I knew.

This is kind of a theme for me: if someone asks me what is fun, I can’t come up with answers. I don’t know why.

[redbird]

In that sense, I'm not sure--I'm still looking for places around here.

In another sense, I'm planning a walk around either Alewife Brook Reservation or Middlesex Fells, to look at birds with my new improved eyes. When we lived in East Arlington we got to the Alewife Brook Reservation fairly often (since it's right off the Minuteman Bikeway, near Alewife T station) but that's now a planned and slightly inconvenient outing. Between winter and the assorted medical stuff I've been dealing with, I haven't been there in months.

[pameladean]

Going to a vegan restaurant with somebody who also likes that kind of food. I'm not even vegan, but all vegan food is safe for me, so at a vegan restaurant I can eat anything on the menu. This never happens anywhere else.

There are two in the Twin Cities that we sometimes go to: J. Selby's in St. Paul, which has a mixture of recreations of traditional diner and fast-food items with faux meats from the Herbivorous Butcher, and standard vegan traditions like rice bowls and so on; and Fig and Farro, a somewhat terrifyingly upscale place that wouldn't dream of using faux anything but makes absolutely amazing flavor combinations. I almost never order dessert --it's not great for me and mostly I can't eat anything on offer anyway -- but at these places I do.

Non-food special occasions would involve a bit of an extra drive to a good park, in season: Nerstrand Big Woods State Park in the spring or fall; St. Croix State Park when the purple-fringed orchids are blooming.

P.

P.

[haptalaon]

Om nom nom. I wish more places did vegan junk food. You become veggie and the rest of your life it's goats cheese nut mushroom falafel cutlets, because restaurants blur the veggie, allergy, healthy, customers into a single organic everything-free option.

There's a place I know that does vegan breakfast muffins: ketchup, cheese, hot sausage, bread, done. Divine!

[(Anonymous)]

I only recently discovered that there's a vegan fast-food place at the Mall of America. (The Mall of America alarms me and gives me agoraphobia and claustrophobia simultaneously, so I don't go there much.) It's called Earthburger. I was meeting a friend who had a long layover in Minneapolis, and it was too rainy to go to a park, so we just went to the mall and ate vegan junk food. Spicy not-chicken sandwiches! Fries, or sweet potato fries if you preferred! The sandwich had that particular mayonnaise-warm-limp-lettuce quality that I recall from going to Steak 'n' Shake when I was a child.

A couple of mixed omnivore, vegetarian, and vegan restaurants around here will do a vegan breakfast sandwich, with tofu, vegan sausage, vegan cheese, and tempeh bacon if you want it.

I hear you about the combination of all possible food restrictions into one or two items; I understand the urge, but it doesn't serve any of us really well. I guess it's better than the trend I noticed a few years ago, in which gluten-free products (which I totally support) were crowding out vegan ones. That was sad.

P.

[jazzyjj]

Something fun for me this week and, perhaps a bit out of the ordinary, was the 2 walks that I took on Tuesday. Not one, but two. First was with my neighbor from across the hall, and then later that day I took a walk with one of my tutors. Both times we just went around the block, but it was good for me to get out.





I recently found out that I've got a speaking engagement in a couple weeks, and am looking forward to it. Actually, I have kinda known about this for a few weeks, but it was only this week that I found out it's official. Some of you might recall a few weeks ago, I mentioned being part of a group pilot-testing a new goal-tracking portal. Well, it is officially going live and I've been asked to present at the launch party. It sounds like it will be a group of tech enthusiasts like myself, plus some area special-education directors. It's taking place at a tech hub in downtown Chicago, which was actually named after the fire of 1871.

[shadaras]

Tonight, my girlfriend is taking me to a jazz concert at the local community college, so that should be pretty great.

More generally, whenever I get to go dancing, or manage watching a movie in theatres.

[author_by_night]

I love exploring lesser-known places. Old small towns with antique shops, suburbs of major cities, the works.

[silveradept]

My go to for something nice as an evening is the ability to take in a baseball game. Preferably with someone who also appreciates the game as a member of the Non-Statistical Division, or someone who is genuinely curious about what is going on and why and doesn't mind explanations.

But mostly, take me out to the ball game.

[cadenzamuse]

So currently having very small people, any non-small person outing is a bit unusual. Spouse and I do a lot less restaurants, board game nights, movies, plays, aimlessly driving around chatting, etc. than we did pre-2017. To the extent that we get pretty stumped when we manage a date night about what to do other than fancy dinner. (Or movie. Timing usually means we can't manage both.)

Extra-nice, though, is something where I feel obligated to dress up. So either fancier restaurant than normal (we have 1-2 of these--go to them each 1-2 times per year) or going to see something live: Wait Wait Don't Tell Me a year ago, The Moth soon, if any of the two theater companies in town ever put on something good one of those.