I love baked ziti. Growing up in Connecticut every event called for a baked ziti. It is the east coast equivalent of the midwestern hot dish. Your neighbors invited you to a backyard barbecue? You can count on a tinfoil tray of ziti next to the burgers. Going to a pot-luck with your coworkers? Phil from accounting got that zeet.¹ Italian-American food is my comfort food and ziti is, among them, uniquely nostalgic for me. It is simple to make and beloved by almost everyone.

Over the past few weeks my partner has been making lasagnas for Lasagna Love, a program where folks volunteer to (as you might imagine) make a lasagna for a neighbor in need. Consequently, I’ve spent a lot of time hovering around the kitchen as she makes delicious found I can’t have. This sparked a conversation about our shared love for baked ziti. Meaghan grew up on Long Island immersed in the same cultural ziti-geist in her childhood.

Driven by nostalgia we decided to make each other a baked ziti, inspired by our experiences back home. She made hers last week and it was fantastic, just what I’d expect from a chef’s daughter. As I write this, my own ziti is baking in the oven. I tried to recreate it the way that my mom made her’s when I was growing up. She was a single parent with limited income and two boys who ate staggering amounts of food, so cheap and simple meals that made a large quantity were a staple in house.

My mom’s approach didn’t have a recipe from grandma or begin with hours prepping a sauce from scratch. Most of the time it started with a jarred sauce she’d zhuzh up with ground beef (or whatever was on sale), pinches of dried spices from the cabinet, and some sautéd garlic & onions. A typical Sunday meant cooking up a huge pot of sauce, and rolling meatballs, eventually assembling a baked ziti and a pile of spaghetti that my brother and I would eat for the rest of the week.²

Sometimes it’s nice to have a taste of the past.

Next week my partner and I start our roadtrip. For the last three years now, at the end of the summer we pack up my old Japanese van and make our way south down to the Sierras. We camp, backpack and stop wherever calls to us and it’s one of my favorite trips each year.

I’d never thought much about the Sierras. A few years back my partner had read The High Sierra: A Love Story by Kim Stanley Robinson.³ She was immediately enamored with the author’s experiences hiking and backpacking through it. So much so she planned our first trip out there just a few months later. After that trip I felt much the same.

This time we’ll begin our trip with a stop in Coos Bay on the Oregon coast to attend In A Landscape. In A Landscape is a traveling music series that features pianist (and creator) Hunter Noack performing on a temporary stage surrounded by the natural world. Attendees are given a pair of headphones, connected to a powerful broadcasting antenna, that enables the audience to wander afar and encouraged to experience nature accompanied by his music. Noack has been staging In A Landscape for a few years combining classical piano performances with the awe inspiring natural environments of the pacific northwest. I’ve been lucky to attend one before and I couldn’t think of a better way to kick off our trip.

Afterwards, we’ll head south to Lassen Volcanic National Park. During our first road trip we had the opportunity to stop at this less frequented National Park for a night and fell in love. This year we’re excited to be able to return and spend more time in the park.

On the next leg we’ll continue south making stops in to visit Lake Tahoe and then backpack near Rush Creek in the Inyo National Forest. Before heading back up north we’ll spend a few days near Mono Lake with day trips to nearby Mammoth Lake, Yosemite or whatever calls to us.

Our final stop takes us back up to Oregon where we’ll stay at Diamond Lake Resort, a stones throw from Crater Lake National Park. Our original plan had us meeting friends here to join Ride the Rim, an annual cycling event that allows folks to bike around the lake’s rim roads. Unfortunately the event was cancelled this year but a few of us (mostly those of us who had already made a non-refundable reservation at the anachronistic resort) are still planning to get together for a few days. It is rare for us, even though we make our home in Portland, to find ourselves out that way and I’m happy for the excuse nonetheless.

Things I Liked

From Terence Eden, On Civic Hygiene

Terence takes the title of this piece from a quote by Bruce Schneier and expands upon it. Written in 2013 I find it prescient now more than ever.

It's bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state. - Bruce Schneier

But it won’t be me.

We have to be careful that the apparatus we build cannot easily be misused for evil purposes. Sure, even an innocuous toaster can be weaponised if someone is willing enough, but we should not fall into the trap of making systems which can easily be turned against the people.

Folks living in the US might be more afraid of their government now than ever, but remember that Terence was living in a different world in 2013. But the world of today is built on the foundations of the decisions made then. We’d all be wise to reflect on his foresight.

Civic hygiene isn’t about saying we distrust our current government - it’s about not trusting the next government.

From the BBC, Why travellers are obsessed with foreign supermarkets

Monuments reveal how a country remembers its past, but a supermarket shows how it lives today.

Every time I visit a country I stop at a grocery store. I do this primarily because cooking a few meals while you’re on a long trip helps save some money, but also because I really do enjoy the experience.

I am fascinated about the mundane differences in day to day lives of folks abroad. I am particularly interested in grab-and-go or ready-to-eat meal sections. They’re a peek into what is familiar or comforting to the people there.

From Mastodon, the Simple Sabotage Manual bot

The Simple Sabotage Field Manual is a document written by the US Office of Strategic Services in 1944. The manual was declassified by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2008. The manual was distributed to OSS officers in foreign countries in order to help them train "citizen-saboteurs" in German-occupied Europe.Wikipedia

From Jim Mitchell, The IndieWeb is Punk

A blog is a zine with better uptime.

During college in the 2010s I was fascinated with the zines of the 90s. I felt a sadness that I had missed out on a such a raw art that connected people but had fallen out of the cultural zeitgeist. I was, of course, totally wrong.

First, because print zines are a thriving art that continued then and to this day. And also because I was participating then and now in a descendant of that same ethos online, even if I didn’t know it. Whether it’s an online garden that collects the minutia of their niche hobby or a blog that guides folks on how to create resilient connections online, the IndieWeb has the power to communicate ideas and make me feel the same way those old zines did back then.⁴