rinsemiddlebliss
"At the mercy of the geography"
Idli obsession
On a mission to make the deceptively simple South Indian breakfast
by AK Krajewska
Idli are an everyday breakfast food and anytime snack in South Indian cuisine. They're small disks of white fluffy dough, about the size of a person's palm and convex on both sides. The flavor is mild, a little bit tangy like a delicate sourdough bread. They serve a role kind of like bread or... Continue reading (2044 words)
Watercolor botanicals
by AK Krajewska
There's a beautiful hydrangea bush in my back yard, and I've been trying to paint it with watercolors. At first, I tried to use the same kind of wet on wet and layering techniques I learned in the landscape painting class last month. It just looked blurry and ugly, though part of that might have... Continue reading (1089 words)
Herding cats
Clicker training with my cat
by AK Krajewska
Ever since we adopted Shinjuku, I've been wanting to do clicker training with her. It was more of a fun thing than a necessity. She's a very good senior cat who doesn't require behavior modification. She already knew all the important cat stuff, like how to use the litter box and snuggle... Continue reading (1706 words)
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)
