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Wasabi no wabisabi

Wabisabi: a Japanese "aesthetic centered on the acceptance of transience."

Wasabi: "a member of the Brassicaceae family, which includes cabbages, horseradish and mustard."

Oz loves wasabi. When we go out for sushi, I have to make sure to get all the wasabi I want from the communal plug right away before Oz snakes the whole thing, him being a "dab of soy sauce in the wasabi" person, rather than the other way around, like a sane person. The sushi is secondary. What he really likes is the sinus hit and the feeling that the top of his head is about to shoot off.

Some years ago I'd heard, though I forget where, that most of the wasabi you get in this country is not wasabi at all, but a concoction of powdered horseradish and green food coloring. We probably haven’t had real wasabi since we went to Japan back in 2000, and even that may not have been the real deal.

I started to wonder, "What does wasabi actually taste like?"

When one has questions, one turns to Google. (Wow, their next April fool's joke should be a 404. The collective shriek would shatter plexiglass.) And so one boring evening a month or so ago, I did a little research and ended up ordering some genuine wasabi as a surprise for Oz.

I bought from Pacific Farms, but there are other sellers out there. (One place sold plants, so you could grow your own. Intriguing! But now I can't find them.) The price of the wasabi isn't so bad, but they kill you on shipping since it has to be overnighted in a cooler.

I had thought that the minimum order of six tubes was kind of excessive, until we went out for sushi this weekend and Oz consumed half a tube. Hah. "Serving size: one teaspoon, number of servings: nine." Right. More like: "Number of servings: two." That's not quite accurate, however, since he'd been taking little hits off the tube already.

So. What does wasabi taste like? Not like anything else, and not really like the reconstituted powdered kind you usually get. Wasabi is hotter and has a flavor, green, vegetal, and rather sweet. Good.

Eat, memory. The flavor reached right into my cerebral cortex and pulled up a complete set of images, tastes, and sounds from a (fabulous) meal at a sushi bar in Tenjin-cho in 1987.

Oz didn't have quite that experience, but he did start asking about the "grow your own" option.

Rain all day

I'm back in Alexandria after a nice long weekend down in Richmond. I could use more time at home. We're all snuggle deprived, Oz, the cats, and me. Weekends are not enough.

I'm still employed. Oz asked me, "Do the other trainees all talk about the day they get fired?"

"Not out loud."

The place I'm working at has pretty high turnover. It's pretty much a coin toss whether any of us will be here in a year. But everyone in my training group has made it through training and next week we're getting thrown to the wolves. We can hardly wait. I'm kind of bummed about moving out of our current office. We have a panoramic view of a landscaped park-like area and the office is toasty warm (or "hot" as the boys call it). The building we're moving to is rumored to be icy cold and we'll be put in offices on interior corridors. No windows. Just greenish fluorescent light, piles of work, and cold feet.

A recent milestone: my first bifocal prescription. Yeah. You'd think that what with the lupus I could be spared the old age stuff, but no. I get all the regular decrepitude in addition to the special decrepitude. Bonus! After hearing about buying glasses online, I'm thinking I'll try it. If the cheap online glasses don't work out, I've got vision insurance to help pay (in theory) for full price glasses. I don't mind skimping on glasses. I wear contact lenses most of the time, so I only wear glasses for about an hour a day. I've been using the same frames since 1991. I think it's time to get some new ones.

Other optics, however, are irresistible. I got a new lens, 20 glorious millimeters of wide angle fun:

Spring is busting out all over. Alexandria, being an extra hundred miles north, seems to be on a two week time lag from Richmond. Which means, I guess, that the pollen isn't going to hit till mid-May. Though I get to experience the pollen twice, I also get to enjoy the cherry blossoms and red buds for twice as long.

Sakura

Spring is here, and that means cherry blossoms!

Peak day, down on the Mall

I've lived most of my life within 100 miles of the Tidal Basin and the cherry trees, but I've never been to see the cherry blossoms. Till this year! I had the wrong date for the festival, but Oz came up and it turned out to be the perfect weekend to see the cherry blossoms. So pink, clouds and clouds of pink. Look how pretty.

29 March was also the day of the kite festival. I didn't know about that either till we heard it on the radio that morning. Kiteless, we went to the Mall and walked among the kite-flyers from the Smithsonian station down to the Washington Monument and the Tidal Basin. Oz had to be satisfied with helping a guy get his kite aloft and giggling at the little kids running around shouting, "A kite! A kite!"

The crowds were immense, but not dense, and very mellow. There must be something about kites and pink flowers …

April fool

When I left for work this morning, a cold dark rain started up as I walked to the bus stop, but tapered off to drizzle on the walk from the bus to my office.

My lunchtime walk around the block was warm and windy. I had to go around the windward side of the fountain by the courthouse or be splashed.

When I left work, a balmy breeze tried to get me to sweating under my raincoat (mind over matter) and I had to wear sunglasses. The sky was sky blue and festooned with high clouds. The young cherry trees in the neighborhood line the streets with lower, pinker clouds. How grand will they be in one hundred years?

My back door and all my windows are open. I ate cold pizza and drank my beer while watching the sun slant through the trees, through the grass, and across the head of the pink flamingo peering in at me.

Today at work we had cake and ice cream. We took a practice test and our pass rate was 100%, much higher than the team next door, to our trainer's delight. In the actual job part of the day, my research took me to the exactly what I was looking for. I read along in the file through the afternoon, ticking off my requirements as I found them, reaching the last one just when it was time to pick up my stuff and head for the bus.

Is this a joke?

It's all a plot, really

My musing on the Reesey cup issue did not end with the last post. Oh, no, Reader. All language comes from somewhere and inquiring minds want to know exactly where that is.

So I bought a bag of mini Reesey cups and put them up by the white board at work. On the board I drew a little table of different pronunciations and started filling it in with my sample set. I got a few more data points, but everyone was too weirded out to fill in their data (though that didn't stop them getting into the candy). At some point during the day our trainer erased the chart and that was it for my linguistics survey.

The non-statistically significant results have the "Reesey cup" pronunciation in the southeast and the "Reese's" pronunciation in Michigan and the northeast.

Today our trainer asked, "Who brought in the Reese's?" We explained the nature of the experiment. He just looked at me and said, "Reesey cups, of course. What else would you call them?" But then, he's from Virginia.

One of the infants (about a third of the people in my group are fresh out of college) prairie-dogged up from his cubicle and made an interesting point. "But what about Reese's Pieces? Going by that, then you'd assume the other candy is called 'Reese's cups'."

The trainer and I both said, "Ugh. Reese's Pieces are nasty."

Then I realized, all these bright young things have never known a world without Reese's Pieces. No one born before 1980 would ever regard Reese's Pieces as the starting point. Perhaps there is an age divide as well as a geographical divide.

I need more data.

Naturally and artificially flavored

I got some new Chucks for spring. So cute! So red! Oz said, "Maybe too red for work." But if I'm going to violate the No Sneakers rule, I might as well do it in style. My work also has a No Pajamas rule. I love that they had to make a rule for that, because it means that people were actually wearing pajamas at work. I haven't violated that rule. Yet.

We're having a nippy Easter, but yesterday was lovely as you can see. Warm enough to drive around with the windows down, anyway. I picked up some Reese's fudge peanut butter eggs when we were out on our errands and ended up licking one off the wrapper as I sat on the back porch and surveyed my winter-ravaged garden. I would have thought the artificial ingredients and stabilizers were more than capable of standing up to the weak March sunshine, but I guess not.

If I were motivated, I'd install a polling plug-in and run a poll to find out what proportion of people say "Reesey cup" verses "Reese's cup". Not that I'd get a statistically significant result, but it would probably be better than just asking around or pouncing on people to extract information. (How do you say it? Where are you from? Where are your parents from? Do you think there's a regional variation? Would you ever say "Reesey Pieces"?)

Oz has driven me out of the kitchen, where he's Doing Things to peppers, tomatoes, and beans. I suppose I should go out and Do Things with my camera, or maybe Clean Things around the house, but I've only got a couple hours of weekend left before I have to get on the train back to Alexandria.

"D" is for doughnut

Way back at the rehearsal dinner for the Princess's wedding, we met the Goddess, a friend of hers from high school. The Princess and the Goddess used to work at a bakery together in St. Paul, Minnesota. The Goddess had been at the bakery for some time before the Princess came to work there. The Princess was mystified at how all these people would come into the bakery and ask for the Goddess specifically to handle their order. When the Minnesota Twins placed their doughnut orders, they would request that the Goddess, and only the Goddess, pack the doughnuts.

The Princess was like, "It's not rocket science. It's doughnuts. You put them in a box. Gah!"

The Goddess said, "Well, the Princess didn't really like that job so much."

We sort of agreed with the Princess. Then yesterday we got doughnuts from our regular place, but the regular lady didn't pack them. And when I opened the box and saw how the non-frosted doughnuts were stuck to the frosted doughnuts, I said, "Man! The regular lady is a much better doughnut packer!"

In other news, "O" is for orchid

Oz came up to Northern Virginia a couple weeks ago and we went to the orchid show at the US Botanical Gardens: An Alphabet Garden of Orchids. Lots of pretty orchids! Lots of color! Like a preview of spring and summer, so delightful to eyes accustomed to bare trees and gray skies.

Will it ever get warm?

March is so cruel. How much longer till I can turn off the furnace and fling aside the heavy overcoat?