This is how you know I'm Texan...

...we were measuring windows for soundproofing curtains earlier today. As I was noting the measurements in my phone's notes app, it kept autocorrecting "tall" to "y'all."

The soundproof curtains are our antepenultimate step in soundproofing the bedroom. The back of the house is up against a street that wasn't that busy a decade ago, but during the past years several subdivisions, a megachurch* and now a shopping center means that the traffic has picked up. During the day it's not all that noticeable, but it's juuust loud enough at night and especially once the construction traffic starts at about 5AM, that it wakes us up. We currently have a white-noise generator, but I think it's working with one of my meds to make my ears ring all the time.

So we're going for a set of sound-blocking curtains that reduce noise a big chunk (nothing works 100%). If that doesn't work well enough to allow for uninterrupted sleep, the next step is a second set of sound-blocking curtains--some of the blackout curtains block some noise as well as light--to dampen a bit more. The final step is sound-blocking windows. Again, they don't reduce noise 100%, but if we end up with all three of those things, I expect that we'll be able to sleep.

Hopefully we'll be able to sleep before we need to drop the $$$ on the windows, but given the proximity of the house to the road, I think that's a home improvement that will actually add value to the house when we ultimately decide to sell.


* One of its parishioners is in our HOA. She kept insisting it wasn't a megachurch because it didn't have giant services. Instead of one service for 600+, it limits its 3+ services on Sunday to 200 people each. So we don't get a huge crush of traffic at one time on Sunday, we get a lot of traffic all day Sunday.

I figure when the name of your church is a URL, it's a sign that you're maybe a bit more secular than is traditional.

If you need to use up your CSA box...

myrialux and I have been eating way too much fast food, mostly because we want to get out of the house at lunchtime, so we drive through various places and sit in the car while eating and listening to audiobooks.*

We're planning to try to refocus lunch onto things we can make and easily take with us and eat in the car while we park somewhere nearby and listen to audiobooks in the car.** Which means...bento! Made to be transported and eaten at room temperature.

All of this (the stuff above, the footnotes below) is all to explain why I purchased this book (affiliate link), although you probably didn't care. It's Bento Power, and I would say it's Japanese- and Asian-inspired rather than pure Japanese--good, given that I don't want to eat Japanese food every day for lunch.

It's more on the order of trendy health food and is mostly vegan with a few vegetarian elements (and a lot of gluten-free stuff if you're avoiding gluten). But the author doesn't appear to be afraid of flavor the way so many health food enthusiasts seem to be.

So far I've only made one recipe from the book, and that was for lunch today, topped with leftovers from a meal earlier this week. It's pretty simple: throw rice in the rice cooker with a handful of another grain (quinoa, because that's what we had) and a piece of kombu or shiitake mushroom to oomph up the umami. (We had both. I used both.)

I know I said she wasn't afraid of flavor and that's a bit on the bland side, but it served as a base for a couple of Chinese dishes we had that were loaded with garlic and ginger and a bit of chile, so it was Just Fine.

Anyway, the primary reason I'm mentioning it here is that the ebook is, at the moment, $1.99 and it's absolutely worth $1.99. The sample is unfortunately so loaded down with personal memoir and pantry stuff that it stops before it gets to actual recipes. Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Alibris if you want to get a used paper copy, though the one-star review on Amazon mentions that the text in the hardback is really small.

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* Currently Harrow the Ninth. I pre-ordered the ebook and smashed through it the day it dropped, and am now enjoying a more leisurely re-read with the audiobook. It's a book that you really have to read twice, because a lot of clues to the revelations in the last 25% or so are fed throughout the first part, but you won't get a lot of them, and a lot of secondary meanings, until the second read-through.

I love books like this, but then again Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sunis in my top 10 favorite books for a reason.

** Walk to a park? This is Texas. It's hotter'n'hell outside and the cityscape is built around cars. Which means that we do have a park within walking distance...it has no tables, one bench on the end close to us that's a reasonable walking distance, and no shade over that bench. Plus, we couldn't listen to the audiobook there. :)