by Quentin Lewis

Quentin's Weeknotes 7/6/21-7/12/21

weeknotes travel family books museum food

This week:

  • We took an impromptu vacation to Gilbert Lake State Park in Laurens, NY. We rented a cabin which was both gorgeous and comfortable, and relaxed in the forest trails, around a campfire, and on the beach. I was delighted to discover the cabins and park buildings were built by the CCC crews that created the park in the 1930s. So we had a great vacation due in part to one of the US’s few halting attempts at eco-socialism.
  • I finished reading the Verso Book of Dissent, a collection of short radical writings or excerpts, from around 2000 BCE to 2014, and spanning the globe. Each quote was accompanied by a short contextual paragraph and I learned a lot about political struggles in far-away places and far-off times.
  • I finished reading Ilan Pappe’s “Ten Myths about Israel” which is a short, polemical, and historicizing introduction to a conflict that often seems eternal and unchangeable.
  • I finished and submitted my annual employee performance review.
  • I worked on organizing the upcoming mask exhibit, deciding on some display areas and writing some interpretive material on mask-making, and an pre-contact Mexican mask traditions.
  • I tried out a couple of new recipes:
    • Sticky Sesame Chicken. The verdict from the fam was that it tasted great but was far too sweet (which isn’t exactly a surprise given the amount of sugar, honey, ketchup, and other things in it). We might try the chicken part again, but maybe with a different sauce.
    • Meditteranean Lentils–even with onions mixed in, and some lemon juice, these tasted pretty flavorless. I was going to cook them in stock and realized I didn’t have any, but in water they were blah.