Weeknotes 7 or 8

I missed a week last week. Is this week 7 (because it’s the seventh post) or week 8 (because it’s the eighth week of the year)?

I read the book that I said I was going to read. It was comedic but not really that funny, and heavier than I thought it would be – actually quite sad in places. The format is basically snippets from real historical accounts of the death of Lincoln’s son Willie, interwoven with (obviously) fictional dialogue from a kind of spirit/ghost realm. I’d like to re-read along with the audiobook at some point, now that I know what’s going on. Although, I couldn’t help but read Hans Vollman in Nick Offerman’s voice anyway, so maybe I’ve got the full effect already?

I followed up by watching the Steven Spielberg movie Lincoln. It’s 150 minutes long, which isn’t ridiculous but a little bit longer than I normally like to sit down for. Historical epic dramas tend to be corny and sentimental – and this is no exception – but it’s obviously a very good story and a brilliant performance from possibly the greatest living actor – Daniel Day Lewis Boyd Crowder from Justified.

I made some queso blanco for tacos and it turned out pretty good. It’s the easiest possible cheese to make – there’s only three ingredients: milk, acid, salt. Heat the milk up in a pan to 185°F and then put a bit of lemon juice or vinegar in it. Let the curds form for around 10 minutes, then drain them in a cheese cloth, add some salt and press under something heavy. I like to use quite a lot of salt and press for a long time – it makes for a cheese that crumbles like feta but is mild and milky like mozzarella or ricotta. I’d like to make something more adventurous next but most require specialist ingredients like mesophilic culture or citric acid or rennet, and take weeks or months to mature.

The beautiful weather meant I sat in the garden (in a sweatshirt and fleece hat) and went for some “nice” walks down by the river. I’m envious of the people I see on my various feeds in North America hiking. Hiking in North America means forests and mountain ranges and rolling rivers and waterfalls and deserts. I would love to be an hours drive away from that kind of vast wilderness, but there’s nothing particularly vast or wild about England. Beyond the geological differences, it seems like America embraces wilderness and “the wild” with a kind of romance and excitement that is almost totally absent here. In the US it’s all (I imagine) frontier log cabins and transcendentalism, or like Jack Kerouac dropping acid in the Mojave. In the UK it’s your geography teacher in a Peter Storm fleece on the Malvern Hills.