rinsemiddlebliss
"At the mercy of the geography"
Red Cat Ramen
ラーメン赤猫 (Ramen Aka Neko)
by AK Krajewska
Red Cat Ramen is a gentle workplace comedy about a ramen shop run by cats and one human. Her job is to brush the cats. It's even cuter than it sounds. Because it's set in a workplace, they use mostly polite Japanese. It's about food and cats, two subjects where my Japanese vocabulary is best. Continue reading (956 words)
Curfews are stupid
The night belongs to everyone
by AK Krajewska
The stupidest rule San Francisco enacted in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 epidemic was a curfew. Many rules enacted then are silly in retrospect which at least made sense at the time based the available knowledge. But a curfew was idiotic. Like, what, do viruses wait until it's dark out to... Continue reading (1192 words)
Imaginary lands and seas
by AK Krajewska
Last weekend, I took a watercolor class at Case for Making. I waffled a bit if I should sign up for the class after I had already spent so much money on upgraded supplies, but ultimately decided that a 3-hour in-person class focused on the landscapes I keep trying to paint would be worth it. It... Continue reading (979 words)
Watercolor upgrade
by AK Krajewska
I took up watercolor painting last April when I bought a little travel box of Sakura Koi watercolors. It came with a water brush and a removable palette that stacked inside. At the same time I bought some paper. I took the little box with me wherever I could and tried to paint what I saw, or at... Continue reading (875 words)
Cursed wedding ideas
by AK Krajewska
When I was looking for a secular reading for my wedding, I found a lot of the suggested items were excerpts from literature taken rather out of context. And these excerpts, when taken in their full context, were not what I'd consider auspicious for a wedding. For example take this bit from Hamlet... Continue reading (1120 words)
Haunted manuals lightning talk
by AK Krajewska
Last week, I presented a lightning talk at Write the Docs based on my haunted manuals series. A recording of the talk is now available on YouTube. While I've been thinking about haunted manuals for a long time, the 5-minute lightning talk was something of a last-minute decision. I didn't practice... Continue reading (680 words)
Reset button
by AK Krajewska
It happened again: scope creep. When I re-started regularly blogging here in 2023, I specifically said I would avoid the trap of only writing serious and thoughtful posts, because as we all know from that anecdote about the pottery class, the way you get good work is not by trying to produce good work but by producing a lot... Continue reading (1644 words)
A perennial garden post
by AK Krajewska
I spent most of this weekend in the garden. What I meant to do was to anchor some shelves to the walls so they don't fall down in case of an earthquake, and to do that I had to go to the local big box hardware store, which in these parts is Lowe's, to buy some specialty screws and attachmenty... Continue reading (678 words)
Fort McDowell on Angel Island
Sea, sun, and plants reclaim a former military outpost
by AK Krajewska
The remnants of Angel Island's military base buildings have been partly preserved, and partly allowed to gracefully decay. Slowly, water and plants wear them down. Clearly, some kind of work is being put in to keep the structures from becoming so unsafe that they'd need to be completely fenced... Continue reading (941 words)
Acorn woodpeckers of Angel Island
by AK Krajewska
Angel Island is a park and nature sanctuary in the middle of the San Francisco Bay. It used to be an immigration and quarantine station and a military base, and now it's a park with interesting historical features. You can only get there by ferry, and while you can camp there, the only people who... Continue reading (730 words)
