Shiny Things!

Watching my soprano section shrink in real time the week of a concert due to the germ soup we're all swimming around in out there: augh. (People. This is why most of your section leaders and certain choir elders have decided to continue singing masked, even if we can't make it policy again for the whole choir for various bureaucratic reasons. Seriously, 3M, where are those black N95s we've been politely requesting for four years now?)

Still, glad to be singing with a group whose music is meeting the moment; check program notes, well worth a read for background. Keeping in mind the timelines for performing classical music are scheduled well over a year in advance. A program replete with music from immigrants, combining disparate musical traditions in the best ways.

*

We almost had snow in the Bay Area again last week - well, okay, the actual 2500' peaks like Mount Diablo and Mount Hamilton got snow and it looked pretty, and of course the much higher Sierras to our east got feet of snow and "no you can't fucking travel today" warnings and avalanche deaths - and now we're missing the first real snow in Boston in years, and it's pretty, but I'm okay with that.

*

I dropped my phone awhile back, and while it was still technically functional, the back had enough spiderwebbing and flaking glass revealing the motherboard structure below that I got it replaced. It has literally taken most of the day since it arrived to get things swapped over. Mostly because this also involved a forced upgrade to Liquid Glass, which I'd been ducking, sigh.

*

A few months ago, hyounpark and I were getting on the freeway when a billboard flashed "LOCAL BIRRIA BALLS" at us. For, like, half a second, just long enough for H to read the phrase aloud, and go, "Birria *balls*?"
Me: "That's like, bringing up ancient catchphrases in my brain. Remember 'I wanna dip my balls in it'?"
H: "... I don't want to know, do I."
Me: "MTV in the '90s. For what it's worth, they were golf balls."
H: "I suspect birria balls are going to be quite different, but I'm driving so I can't find out right now."
Me: "I'm on it!"
Me, five minutes later: "Well, I can't find a local option for whatever these are, and Google keeps asking me if I'm looking for 'birria bombs.' But apparently a Mexican food truck in Kentucky says they're meatballs made of birria? With Hot Cheetos dust on the outside for crunch? ... and there's a restaurant in West Virginia that agrees with them."
H: "... I mean, that sounds like uber-American stoner kid food mashup culture, but why aren't there more local search results if there's literally a freeway billboard promoting it?"
Me: "Or we can buy them frozen. From an Italian specialty food shop. In Denmark."
H: "Google, you have utterly lost the plot."

We finally saw that particular billboard again (it's one of those electronic billboards with a rotating stash of ads), and this time, it had a URL attached, so we discovered that the local birria balls are literally just flavor packs, you have to provide your own birria in ball form.