Tuesday evening things

 * I finally got in and got my first dose of the shingles vaccine (my poison ivy has cleared up). It was free to me with my health insurance. I think it just makes good sense for insurers to cover vaccines like this; it would cost them so much more if I were (in the unlikely chance, but still) to develop shingles. 

I don't feel 100% but don't really feel sick. The young pharmacist who gave me the shot (I say young because I presume he has not experienced the vaccine himself yet) told me that people usually feel lousy after BOTH shots, not just the second one (like a lot of people told me). We'll see. I am maybe a little chilled - I turned the AC temperature hotter. And I think I've got some lymph nodes in my abdominal region a little swollen, but that happens with every vaccine I get. And my arm is sore where he jabbed me. The serum did hurt a little going in.

But if I feel crummy tomorrow I don't have to go anywhere; I finished sorting the soil on the current round of samples and going through and counting the invertebrates is easier and can also be done in my office (less messy) rather than in the lab, so even if I don't get to it until classes start I can work on it during office hours. 

* I do hope IF I feel crummy I''m better by Friday, I've planned one last "Run to Denison for shopping when it won't be full of people because it's a weekday" trip to the yarn store and maybe to check out the new digs of the bookstore that USED to be here (yeah, the little used book store moved, which makes me sad, because there's not really any "just pop in to browse" places left other than the quilt shop in town, and they're on the other side of town from work and from my house). I also want to go to Michael's again to look at the comically-wrong Halloween animal skeletons; I hear tell of a centipede one and if they have it, I think I need it to decorate my office at work for Halloween. 

* The other night I used a cookbook I bought and never used - The Anne of Green Gables cookbook by Kate Macdonald, who it turns out is a descendant of Lucy Maud Montgomery (who wrote the original stories)

It's called "Miss Stacey's baked macaroni" and it's a simple mac and cheese that you bake in the oven - a cream sauce with cheese melted in it, and then spooned over the cooked macaroni and a bit more cheese on the top, and then baked to set everything together. It's nice because it makes a manageable amount for one person - I had some Saturday night and some tonight and I've got maybe 3 servings left:

It is plain, like a lot of those older "Anglosphere" foods are (the seasonings are pepper, paprika, and salt, but I left out the salt because I'm really supposed to limit it, and cheese has salt itself.) I used a cheddar blend which did get a little "grainy" or "not-smooth" once melted; if you like Velveeta (and can tolerate its higher salt), it might be a better choice. Next time I might try colby-jack, that's another favorite of mine.for cooking with. 

You could probably add more seasonings, or pimientos, or chopped ham, if you want - mac and cheese is pretty flexible. (I used to like it with cubed ham). 

* I'm still working on the socks; I'm getting close to finishing the second one. I think next up in "small projects" will be a pair of fingerless mitts; I found some yarn in my stash I think I want mitts out of. I printed out several patterns from my Ravelry library and will decide which one I want. 

I'm also knitting on the ribbing for the Moth sweater, but it goes slowly because it's a lot of stitches. 

* I haven't started a new novel but I want to soon; I just want to pick the right one. I admit I've been spending a lot of late-evenings relaxing watching (of all things) videos of small Japanese apartments. There are several channels of these but my favorites are Tokyo Lens (a Canadian who moved to Japan talks about apartments, and the capsule hotels, and some of the shops) and A Micro Apartment Life - a wordless (it has captions) series of short videos where a man named Usui shows first the apartment where he lives (which is VERY small) and how he manages things like laundry and food (spoiler alert: all the food he gets comes from restaurants or konbini marts) but there are also videos of him traveling around Tokyo touring other apartments on offer to try to find the "perfect" one. In some of the videos he carries along a small Spiderman Lego figure, which is kind of cute.

Norm, the guy who does Tokyo Lens is affable and chatty (and he does have some "sponsored" bits in his videos, but they're easy enough to skip past); Usui's videos are quieter, just backed with (usually) gentle soft-jazz music:

I think this is the first of Usui's videos  - his first few are focused on where he lives; later on he branches out to consider other apartments

They're kind of soothing to watch, and the whole "come, tell me how you live" aspect is interesting to me. I wouldn't want an apartment like these: I have too much stuff, I'd want to be able to cook easily (though it WOULD be nice to have a konbini-mart type place a block or two away that had reasonably healthful food - it seems like a lot of the "quick food" in Japan is better nutrition than our fast food- for when I didn't want to)

And here's a Tokyo Lens video. Each of the video makers has a whole channel so you can just watch through the videos if you want. I get the feeling that Usui is just more "here is my life" and the Tokyo Lens guy is more looking for slightly wild things, like this very uncomfortable apartment:

This one seems uncomfortable in many ways. And also, it seems a lot of Japanese apartments, at least the inexpensive ones, are not very accessible! It's just stairs and I wonder what a person would do if they had an injury like the one I had in January and couldn't manage stairs for at least several weeks.