hi, i’m Andy; a fat nerdy anticapitalist zen buddhist library tech guy. like if the 4th Doctor and Chris Farley had a baby. he/him.
living on the ancestral lands of the Weeminuche band of the Ute Mountain Ute people.
slow cooker. i don’t like cooking but i have to feed this meat sack every day so anything that allows for that to be easier. pressure cooker, sure, but i’m a fan of “dump it in the slow cooker on my lunch break and then eat it for dinner” levels of effort.
speaking of effort, i’m an idiot and am in a go-at-your-own-pace degree program, but the semester ends in 16 days and i have… four classes to complete. gonna be a long two weeks.
i’m largely asking because my Buddhism deeply informs my vegan practice. it seems logically consistent that to believe in the morality of not killing, that same morality should be applied as universally as possible, and thus also ought to apply to my diet. that kind of logic was instrumental in my “conversion” to veganism; applying that logic in various situations allowed me to make different choices which have eventually become habits/lifestyle that rejects killing as much as possible.
been just preposterously busy with work as i just got kind of thrust into a new role as a sysadmin for which i am entirely unqualified, lol. but! in order to swim rather than sink i’m now learning Powershell, which will hopefully be useful long-term. we’re also in a season of needing a lot of work on our home; my wife and i just finished rebuilding a fence that blew over in a windstorm, and then as we were preparing for a flooring project we found mold in some drywall that we’ve had to isolate and will need to mitigate, and just this morning we had someone out to do a yearly furnace check and we need a new actuator in the furnace. hopefully by the time this is all done i’ll both know powershell and also be a functional handyman, ha! which is something i never had any interest in before.
outside of work and home repair, i’m trying to start a habit of yoga in addition to my meditation practice, but that’s been tough because the room i usually do yoga in is the room that closed off due to the mold remediation! lol/sob.
also just trying to stay on top of cooking. my wife and i make a giant weekly pot of Nigerian style jollof rice, and that’s been a great relief so we don’t need to figure out lunches for the first few days of the week.
so, boring life stuff but busy. never a dull moment.
my wife and i tried making tofu the other week and that was quite an adventure. we did create an edible product! it was actually tasting but there’s a lot of room for refining in that process.
working on my home’s landscaping. my family abides by solarpunk and permaculture principles conceptually, so we’re trying to put them into action in real life in a couple of different ways. i have lately been putting rain barrels in place to catch what scant rainfall we do receive where i live, and am planning to install drip irrigation lines off of those rain barrels to water a pollinator garden that will be on the burning hot west side of our house this summer. i have no idea if that will be enough to help anything survive, but that’s what i’m thinking about. also finishing the deep mulching of our front yard with woodchips and cardboard. this project has taken forever but is providing a better growth medium than the bare dirt clay soil we had before.