New Shoes and Biscuits

A year or so before the pandemic, I bought a pair of very bright, wide-toed running shoes that I used mostly for walking. During the pandemic, I walked a LOT of miles in them, given that I was walking about 10,000 steps a day. This was in order to deal with my cervical issues. When it first started, I couldn't really do anything without pain other than walk. And I kept up the habit and John joined me during COVID. 

These are those old shoes. I wore through them. Actually ripped the sides of them during a hike on slick rock with water running over the rock, and trying to stabilize myself caused me to rip out both outsides. The soles had already started to wear smooth, so they were really slick on wet surfaces. 

I even wore through the insoles, and only realized it after I wore these through the downpour in New Orleans. I'd had to take the insoles out to let them dry, and realized that I'd actually gone right through them.

They were made by Altra, which is actually made near here, in Boulder. There are quite a few runners that train up here at altitude to improve their blood's ability to carry oxygen. So it makes sense that they would be based here. It felt odd to have to let them go; but I went to Brown's Shoe Fit here in Longmont, and looked around, just in case there were other shoes I wanted; but the big, boxy toe really appealed to me.

I have odd toes. My second toe is actually longer than my big toe, so most shoes smash my poor second toe. It's so bad that my right second toe has about a four or five nail thickness to the nail as it just keeps growing another nail under the main one due to impacts. The big boxy toe seems to mitigate the problem a lot. So I got another pair of Altras and I hope they'll last just as long, if not longer, and this time I got a pair of trail runners just so I'd have some traction if I did take them on a trail again.

I've also been chasing a place called Biscuits @ Mike's. It's a food truck that roams about Longmont, and they have a different stop each day and don't work on Mondays. I go to 911 on Mondays, so it's the only day I know that I'm going to be out in the morning, so I was sad that I couldn't have their biscuits on a Monday. 

Still, I managed, this morning, to get up early with John and we went out in the rain to find the truck and get our biscuits. It was well worth the wait and the rain. 

Mine's on the left, it was the bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit. John's was the sausage, egg, and cheese. They were delicious. The biscuits were really well layered and super tender. The eggs had been cooked in a sheet and folded around the cheese, and my bacon was super crisp. They have a lot of things on their menu that looked intriguing. The lady in front of me ordered the fried chicken and honey biscuit, which sounded like something from the Denver Biscuit Company.

We'll have to try them again.

Sunday we went to walk around a lake in Lafayette and then went to Mono Mono Korean Fried Chicken, and that's a place we probably won't go to again, or at least for another six months to a year. It's new, and the staff was completely new, and the menu felt very Americanized, i.e. aimed at the local community of all-white people who were coming in for a cocktail or a few beers and some fried chicken to go with it. Nearly all the bone-in chicken wasn't sauced and all the boneless chicken was... which is so odd to me. And I thought that all the boneless chicken was white meat. What Asian would eat white meat by choice? The bulgogi plate "appetizer" was actually quite good, the marinade for that was really tasty, but the server (who was very obviously new so I won't rag on him too much) plopped it between us and the whole plate had a single plastic fork.

The meat was, as it should have been, super thinly sliced, but still gristly enough that a knife would have been useful for separating the gristle from the meat. I actually took out my traveling chopsticks (since I had them in my purse) and used that to cut and eat my half of the starter, because there were no other silverware forthcoming. The kimchi was mild but tasty, and the coleslaw at least was fresh. The fried drumsticks we got were completely unseasoned. It was pretty sad because the skin and breading were shatteringly crisp. Marvelous in execution, but it tasted like unseasoned chicken... which is okay? But not what we were looking for. It didn't help that the sauce we'd ordered on the side didn't arrive until we were down to the last drumstick.

We'll give them time and maybe make it back. Especially since the side of sauce that arrived late was really quite good. Just that perfect balance of sweet, HOT, salty, and a zing of vinegar. We had it on our eggs Monday morning, and it was quite good and would have been even better with hot crisp chicken tossed in it. If only the bone-in chicken could be so tossed... but maybe it was the server who was so rigid about bone-in chicken never getting to be sauced unless it was a wing?  I don't know.

Sunday night, the old Rainbow Six squad all met together again to play the game again. The newest season looks to be pretty good, and Ubisoft has said that they're going to crack down on the rampant cheating. You know it's bad when one of the "content creators" for the game does NOTHING but videos showcasing dozens of game play captures about cheaters in the game; and he was able to publish a video every day with dozens of examples of cheaters through the game. It was so depressing. When the most entertaining thing about your game is "find the cheater".

But Jet and I also found another game that we're really loving. It's called Core Keeper. It's of the genre of Stardew Valley, Terraria, and Minecraft. Where you have to go exploring, have to figure out ways to feed yourself, and how to build better tools, armor, and other equipment. It's a lot of fun and can be quite peaceful with farming, fishing, and cooking as well as exciting so far a going out exploring and hunting for resources. Some of the resources are gated behind Big Bosses. We liked what it borrowed from each of the other games, but loved how they all combine in this one. And it's familiar enough to make it easy to explore, but new enough for discoveries right and left. We've been enjoying it a lot with the two of us and with some friends coming in at odd moments while we play.

I'll probably do some screenshots and talk more about that, later. I've finally started to tone down my Hades play, so that my hands might be able to recover. We'll hope. Sadly, my long-time massage therapist, of almost fifteen years, had a slip at home that broke a bone in her shoulder. It may make it so that she can't do massage again... and that's a hard thing for her to have to do involuntarily. So I'm looking for another one with the same physical therapy background.