a tricky week

fall week 1
Originally uploaded by gay.goy.gourmet

Scott has a long day Tuesday and a dinner seminar Thursday. Glee is Wednesday and Guerrilla Gay Bar is Friday. We have a couchsurfer staying wed–fri.

• salad with romaine, carrots, avocado; chipotle-lime dressing


• delicious aai kohlrabi


• whole black lentils with ginger, garlic, and butter (makhani dal) [660]


• smoky turmeric-soaked paneer with cardamom and cream


• szechuan carrot peanut soup, perhaps with some crispy nori


• more pretzels for glee night wednesday!


• ginger orange pickled beets?

• Mafe with chicken, turnips, and mustard greens
• Potato rosemary bread, beet and apple soup
• Macaroni and cheese with squash
• Mashed potatoes; chicken with garlic and parsley

foodlist

end of ‘summer’ csa
Originally uploaded by gay.goy.gourmet

• andouille and tasso smothered cabbage (from this delight of a book lent to me by Zach)
  
• polenta with stewed collard greens and bacon
  
• baked kale chips
  
• steamed bok choy with oyster sauce
  
• saag paneer with collard and turnip greens
  
• the unmade squash spätzle listed before
  
• beet and apple soup in acorn squash bowls

Dear Jstor, your font sucks.

Dear Jstor,

The typeface you have chosen for the citation information on your pdf cover sheets is unforgivably awful. Its roman characters are crudely and thoughtlessly drawn by someone with no evident qualifications or other typographic experience. Though it boasts a wide-ranging character set, I doubt it is the most complete font in existence. I would urge you to consider other fine, even free options from SIL and others, such as those shown below.

The most hideous glyph in your unfortunate font is the capital J, which is used disporportionately often in the texts where you have employed it (most journals name themselves Journal of . Or, Tournal of x. I can’t distinguish them in Code2000. By the way, it is now 2009. Browsers support Unicode. Competent developers all use UTF-8. We can even embed fonts in web pages with css! Why do you torture our eyes with this heinous insult to every type designer living or dead?

The figure below shows what I find the be the most offensive characters in Code2000. Clearly the JT is far and away the most odious. The diddle on the top of the 2 makes no sense, the 9 is horribly awkwardly topheavy, the g is misshapen, and the r and f both suffer gross errors of proportion. The huge flat crossbar of the f for some reason extends beyond the elephantine serif. The ball at the end of the r and f are also apparently mutant spawn of unrelated origins.
Here are several alternatives, all free opentype faces with reasonably complete character sets: Fontin, Gentium, Droid Serif, and venerable Times New Roman.

lots of squash and apples

squash and apples
Originally uploaded by gay.goy.gourmet

• pumpkin red curry and sticky rice
  
• sausage-stuffed baked apples
  
• nutty tart bell peppers with peanuts
  
• chile-spiked moong dal with cauliflower
  
• eggplant with roasted chiles and tomato (again)
  
• slow roasted bell pepper with red lentils (again)
  
• squash spätzle with maple and bacon

csa box + devon groceries = lots of foods

DSC_0004.NEF
Originally uploaded by gay.goy.gourmet

• another apple and pear pie
  
• eggplant and asparagus thai green curry
  
• something indian with okra
  
• polenta with beet greens
  
• stuffed bell peppers with ground pork and raisins
  
• (another week) stuffed spaghetti squash
  
• tindora / ivy gourd with coconut and sambhar masala
  
• fig honey cream galette
  
• kolhapuri stewed eggplant or pan-blistered eggplant with onion and marathi kala masala
  
• collard and radish greens (subbing for taro leaves) with peanuts

useful stuff: non-latex Sweave

from learningR

first squash of fall

first squash of fall
Originally uploaded by gay.goy.gourmet

• beet risotto
  
• fresh pasta with roasted squash and ricotta; salad
  
• palak paneer and rotis
  
• bratwursts and pretzels with mustard; cole slaw
  
• more bagels!
  

Administrative Cost Waste

This is a totally banal tale of waste associated with private insurance schemes. Thankfully I do not have a horror story, dropped coverage, or preëxisting condition, but the inane interactions recounted below relate to the vast waste of “administrative costs” that private insurers generate.

ID and registration

WU switched back to Aetna Chickering health insurance, after a few years ago switching to Cigna through some outfit called Great West. These switches alone are incredibly wasteful, but users are shielded from those costs. Trying to stay on top of things, I wanted to check that I could find a doctor, my ID card if necessary, etc. online, if I needed to. The plan web site promised that the Aetna Navigator could help me with all of these things. It told me to use my WU ID to register, but that didn’t work. When I called customer service, they first asked if I was entering it “with four zeros in front of it.” (The site itself says, “In the field titled "Primary Member's ID Number" enter your 5 or 6 digit WUSTL Student ID #, NOT your Social Security number.”) When that didn’t work, the customer service representative told me to try again in “about 24 hours” and I would be “in the system.” This worked the next day (with the zero-padding; I did not first try without). But, I couldn’t find anything like an ID card to print, or address to update.

I called customer service. This time they claimed that I had been sent an ID card and they asked me to confirm my address. They asked this as if it were a password, so I told them my current address, office address, and, for good measure, address of three years ago. I failed the test: none was the “correct” one according to my new insurer. Customer service was wary now, but in medical-administrator world I had to be legit since I knew my date of birth. What address did they have on file? One Brookings Drive – no campus box, no department: the address for all of Washington University. Well, that explains why I never got an ID card. Like most people, I would prefer my health related correspondence go to my home rather than my office, so I gave them my correct address, which of course is the same one the graduate school has on file as my primary address.

Vision

I decided next to tackle an eye exam – I’m out of contacts and it is nice to have a current prescription. My plan advertises that although it does not include vision coverage, it does offer a considerable discount. The web site explaining the discount program was vague, so I called customer service to ask what I needed to do to get the discount. “Just give them your member ID that starts with a W.” ”I can find that online through the navigator thing?” “Yes.” I logged on to the ‘Navigator’ but the only temporary card and ID listed is the dental one which does start with a W but is not the same.

When I called to make the appointment (and one was available within two days, which is nice) he asked for my ID number and Group number. I didn’t have a group number since I never got an ID card and couldn’t print one. So I gave him the customer service number from the page about the vision discount, and he said he would verify my coverage. He called back later and said they got an error when using my number. I apologized for their wasting his time, and gave him another customer service number. He called back, successful this time, and confirmed my appointment.

Dental

No dental coverage was offered the past two years, so this year, presented the option of paying $114 for a plan that includes at least two cleanings, I enrolled. (It is worth noting that Scott’s plan has always included dental at no extra charge and ours never has. A few years ago, last with Aetna, we had the option to pay $40 to join the negotiated discount program Vital Savings, now included by default, but no option for actual dental coverage.)

Annoyingly before I could pay for insurance I had to select a dentist from their list. So I picked the first one and figured I would change it after I actually did some research and perhaps even made an appointment with one. Of course, the dentist I had picked from the top of the list received some horrible feedback via the internets, so I wanted to change to another one.

Also, I can’t make an appointment until the office receives the ‘roster’ from Aetna, which they explain happens around the beginning of the month, so call again in October. I looked into it later that day, and when I called to change it, I was told I was not yet “in the system” and to try again the next day, or easier still, that I could do that online too. Indeed there is a button to make changes on the list page but when you click it, it warns, “Important: This feature should NOT be used for requesting a change in your primary care physician (PCP) or dentist (PCD). If you wish to change your current PCP/PCD, please use the Change PCP link located on the Details page for each provider.” (Said link opens the same page with the same warning.) I called customer service, explained the situation, and requested the change.

The next day, I got an email confirming my “change” of primary care dentist, but now it warned, “If you chose your dentist after the fifteenth of the month, your selection will be effective on the first of the second month following your selection. For example, if you sent us your selection on August 20, you can begin seeing your dentist on October 1.” Well, that’s unacceptable. While I’m ok with waiting for the “roster” system in October, two months is absurd, and I would have been more careful in making my first choice if there had been any indication at all that changing could even possibly delay my coverage by two months. They confirmed that I will in fact be on the roster in October, so hopefully I’ll get an appointment then.

nearing the end of summer food

end of summer
Originally uploaded by gay.goy.gourmet

• mouhamara and pitas
  
• carrot greens in
  
• cantaloupe-basil sorbet
  
• saffron panna cotta
  
• bagels
  
• kale peanut stew
  
• jerk burgers on pretzel rolls, grilled corn
  
• hamad, iraqi braised lamb with beets and tomatoes
  
• jeweled rice
  

the bag was very full: and we’re gone half the week

the bag was very full
Originally uploaded by gay.goy.gourmet

• pepper jelly
  
• tomato sauce for the freezer
  
• blueberries for the freezer
  
• vanilla plum galette
  
• rotis with a potato curry; green goddess sauce
  
• ciabatta with sautéed beet greens
  
• quiche / tart of some kind with squash, kale, bacon
  
• some lunch dal
  

A very tasty week indeed

Summery Goodness
Originally uploaded by gay.goy.gourmet

• Brussery, and mustard greens with sweet corn [660] (a picture and adaptation of the former is in order)
  
• Eggplant biryani, salad
  
• Lecsó, bread, cucumber salad
  
• Frittata with potato and zucchini
  
• Hyderabadi black-eyed peas with wilted mustard greens [660]
  
• Sweet corn cupcakes with brown butter honey frosting
  
• Upside-down sweet cherry cake
  

Colorful and delicious

Colorful and delicious
Originally uploaded by gay.goy.gourmet

• Caramel peach grunt
  
• zucchini cake/muffin type thing
  
• calzones with peppers, onions, rocket, and tomato
  
• cauliflower gratin
  
• texmex salad with corn, tomatoes, sourcream lime dressing
  
• brussery, some dal
  
• hummus
  

my counter is full of summer

my counter is full of summer
Originally uploaded by gay.goy.gourmet

• Zucchini risotto, salad with fennel, blueberry, and sungold tomatoes.
• jerk lamb-beef burgers, grilled corn, tzatziki
• peppers stuffed with my favorite tamal filling (plus rice)
• cabbage and potato with fennel and chiles [660]
• pesto with all the basil (most or all to freeze)
• chinese noodle with cabbage and scallion, black bean sauce
• peach frozen yogurt
• apple dessert? (apple-black currant brown betty; maple-apple cake)
• lunch: gujarati-style black and yellow chickpeas [660] (also has black lentils and kidney beans and tomato)

Fedex Kinko’s is now Fedex Office

But nothing about it has really changed. I had to go there to print my Polmeth poster (ugh) and figured I might as well have a batch of cards my name & email on them. I dropped my files on a CD, biked up to the nearest friendly Fedex Office where I had the following exchange.

Me: (holding CD) I have two files on this CD I need printed — one is business cards that I need a few of on cardstock and cut; the other is a large format, 24×36.

Kara: Where are the files?

Me: On this CD.

Kara inserts the CD on her computer and clicks several times. I assume she has a file-browser window open and is viewing the contents of the CD.

Kara: Which one is the business cards?

Me: The one named Malecki-cards-10up-color.pdf

Kara: Is it color or black and white?

Me: Color.

Kara: OK. What is your last name?

Me: Malecki.

Kara: (still looking at her computer) How do you spell that?