Kampuchea Crossings

Bump to baby on the beaten expat track

Until Covid-19 messaging improves, who do you turn to?

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It’s February tomorrow – a snow day here, yey!! – and over a full year into this pandemic. It’s frustrating that to manage every new situation, the general public still has to scour Twitter for a prevailing consensus. We don’t have better guidance on masks (like what type and where to get them) and managing risky situations like public transportation. I fully agree with this piece in the NYTimes: It’s been ten months, and I still don’t know when to replace my masks!

“Quickly synthesizing emerging evidence and providing practical guidance for the public and communicating it well is what the C.D.C. should be doing, and should have been doing. The new administration seems to have hit the ground running, and I hope that this is what it will be doing going forward.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/opinion/coronavirus-masks.html
Began using these when I started a new project; the NYC subway is packed at rush hour!

So, like many, I often field questions from friends and family (or push unsolicited advice to counter clearly misguided or false information). Since national messaging might take a while to cohere (there’s been active sabotage on our national systems and infrastructures, after all), below is a list of regularly updated and easy-to-understand resources that distill the rapidly changing Covid-19 advice for us lay folks. I’ve been referring folks to these same sites and experts for months cuz they’re who I turn to. Hope it helps!

On Masks, now that the variants are a real threat. Your mask criteria are FIT, BREATHABILITY, and FILTRATION. For example, if your glasses are fogging up then your FIT is off. See the below for great advice:

  • Great mask guidance for these precarious next weeks, in anticipation of the variants–> Friendly Neighborhood Epidemiologist (27 Jan 2021).
  • I’ve tried tens of masks on my family over the past year, e.g., masks from Etsy or retailers in the $5-30 range. I’ve put the others on a ‘backup’ bin and highly recommend these below. Note each one’s specific washing instructions to maintain full efficacy.
    • Livinguard mask – Their 3-layer Safety masks have the best fit and breathability for me and my family. The hygiene technology is based on positive and negative charges to trap and inactivate the microbes’ protein structure (destroying the virus) on contact. Read their FAQ for more info.
    • Rafi Nova – Their 3-layer Performance masks come with toggles to pull either the ear or chin seal tighter. We really love these masks and love the family’s philosophy on giving back to and helping the community. Some of their textiles are sourced from the minority communities in Laos.

Podcasts:

  • In the Bubble is a great podcast from Andy Slavitt, an advisor in the Obama administration and now a senior advisor on Biden’s Covid-19 Team. The conversations between the science, health and medical experts are designed for practical consumption by the general public. The January 18 episode is particularly useful, given the variants’ debuts and threats to impact the US (no new guidance, just double down on what we should already be doing). Slavitt’s Twitter stream is also excellent.
  • Unbiased Science talks about current issues in the sciences, and in the past year the topics have been mostly about Covid-19. But they still occasionally cover other items, like dismantling the myths around organics or helping to understand GMOs, etc.

Twitter streams:

  • Zeynep Tufekci – Turkish sociologist and writer, focusing on ‘the social implications of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence and big data, as well as societal challenges such as the pandemic using complex and systems-based thinking.’
  • Andy Slavitt – tirelessly engaging both professionals and the general public in conversation since this pandemic began, to offer all of us some practical guidance. From his profile: ‘White House Sr Advisor for COVID Response – Let’s Work Together to Defeat COVID-19. Past head of Medicare/Medicaid for Obama/Biden. Personal account.’
  • Michael Mina – Covid-19 diagnostics, like gold standards for testing and thoughts on public health approach. From his profile: ‘Epidemiologist, Immunologist, Physician, Harvard Public Health/Medical School. Discuss vaccines, immunity, infectious diseases, public health, and tests‘
  • Angela Rasmussen, PhD – From the latest studies to the newest guidance, her stream is very useful. From her profile: ‘Excessively direct virologist. Affiliate @georgetown_ghss. Soon @VIDOInterVac. Emerging virus host responses. 1X Jeopardy! loser. Rep: @anniescranton. she/her’
  • Peter Hotez, MD PhD – From his profile: ‘Vaccine Scientist-Pediatrician-Author-Combating Antiscience, Prof Dean @BCM_TropMed @TexasChildrens, Univ Prof @Baylor, Hagler Inst @TAMU, Founding Ed @PLOSNTDs‘
  • Eric Feigl-Ding, PhD – From his profile: ‘Epidemiologist & Health Economist. Senior Fellow, FAS. Fmr 16 yrs @Harvard. Health justice advocate. RoomRater 10/10. COVID19 updates since Jan ’20′

Facebook pages – and they are all women scientists from various fields, US states and backgrounds! They have also consulted each other to coordinate their content and messaging:

Filipino snack

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It’s Friday night, before Monday, 14 December when the electors submit their votes. The Supreme Court just tossed out the Texas lawsuit seeking to reverse the election outcome in four states won handily by Biden, saving the constitutional representative republic we know as the United States of America.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) was clearly trying to obtain a pardon with this pathetic stunt, yet people and the media continue to give these people credibility.

I know I have another bottle of champagne somewhere around here. Hard to keep them in stock when we keep winning all the time. (Where are trump and his seditious GOP followers? 1-57? They are has-beens and losers to the core and we all need to move on.)

In the meantime, I need a good snack to go with a mindless action movie that I still need to find.

Pronounced bago-ong, it is a shrimp paste that serves as a dip.
Here it is baby eggplants and cherry tomatoes.

Bok l’hong (a photo recipe of papaya salad)

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Khmer spicy green papaya salad. I miss so many things from Southeast Asia, and this is one of them. In Khmer it’s pronounced ɓok lhoŋ: បុកល្ហុង. You can order sôm tām, or ส้มตำ, in a Thai restaurant. In Laos it is tam maak hoong, or ຕໍາ ຫມາກ ຫຸ່ງ. And I didn’t realize they also have it in Vietnam, gỏi đu đủ (pronounced guy dodo). The premise is the same but each has its own distinct flavor.

Thankfully the ingredients are locally available. Here we visit a Khmer friend who just whips everything out of her pantry like it’s the simplest thing, and in 5 minutes she has some on a plate for me.

Besides the ingredients we used, you can add others: yardlong beans (cut in small pieces), grated carrots, crab meat, finely chopped lemongrass, palm sugar. If you add bean sprouts don’t smash it too much – add it at the end.

Garlic cloves, Thai chillies, sliced cherry tomatoes, baby eggplant, grated green papaya , sugar, prahok, fish sauce
You can get a bottle of prahok in any Thai grocery store (Chinese stores likely won’t have it)
She’s adding fish sauce.

Pandemic winter activities

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It’s the holly jolly season year 2020 and we’re looking for things we can do safely, outside the house.

In NYS/NYC we’re thankfully not seeing the catastrophic surge that the rest of the country is now reeling from. But we’re seeing spikes across indicators (indoor activities will be restricted in NYC in a few days). And the vaccine rollout seems to agitate everyone into increasingly careless behavior. It’s like we’re in limbo – help’s on the way, but there are so many caveats and really we’re still in the throes of incompetence until that stupid buffoon is dragged kicking and screaming out of the White House. With all the mediocre-white-guy stupidity within the GOP my diet has often been reduced to late night popcorn and bubbly.

So sad but our exit strategy has been blocked all year 😭:

It hasn’t been too cold yet, thankfully, so we’ve been able to do outdoorsy stuff and aren’t cooped up as much as the spring.

With the newly-bald fauna, birds are all about the handouts. You literally only have to find some bramble anywhere in the city and put some feed out, and you’ll be the happening spot for warblers, titmouse, cardinals, chickadees, etc.

Tufted titmouse (Baeolophus bicolor)
Black-capped chickadee (Poecile atricapillus)

And why waste an opportunity to keep these kids out and tire them out? We brought the grill and had a picnic while they scrambled around Central Park’s geological quirks. Did you know that vast sheets of ice age glaciers once plowed across Manhattan, dragging and dropping a trail of rocks, today known as glacial erratics? You can see a lot in Central Park. (I took a fascinating tour once through the iconic park with Sidney Horenstein, a geologist from the American Museum of Natural History. RIP.)

Making Kombucha is surprisingly minimalist

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Someone in my neighborhood posts regular SCOBY giveaways, and so one day I decided to pick one up out of curiosity. Never did this before, and I’m not even a big fan of kombucha (they give cans of them away at street festivals and events, but I don’t recall being impressed). But hey, with kids there are always projects you can add to the curriculum.

So the little girl and I went to pick it up and the gal handed it over in a plastic container with barely any liquid. Scoby is short for Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast, by the way. It’s the living home for bacteria and yeast, which turns sweet tea into tangy, fizzy kombucha. The scoby grows to cover the liquid’s surface area, sealing the fermenting kombucha from the air. Kitchn.com says to think of the scoby as “the coral reef of the bacteria and yeast world. It’s a rubbery raft that floats on the surface of the kombucha.” (It’s a great lesson plan for young kids!)

I didn’t actually have time to see what entailed this whole kombucha-making operation before picking it up, and we didn’t have a glass jug to put it in. So I schlepped over to a thrift shop across the street and found this Bellco glass spinner flask. This piece of lab equipment sells for ~$279 and it was sitting under a pile of dust in that thrift shop with a $4 tag.

The SCOBY promptly sank to the bottom of the vessel.

There’s no shortage online of Kombucha-making advice, and the directions I followed are here. I threw black tea and sugar into a pot of boiling water (NYC tap). Then, since the first fermentation needs a cup or two of “starter” liquid I had to hunt down some unpasteurized, unflavored commercially sold Kombucha. Every bodega and grocery and cafe person I asked in El Barrio looked at me with a side eye (“kambu-whaaa?”), pointing to the guava juice instead. Thanks, dude, random “healthy” beverages won’t do. After 20 blocks I finally found an Upper East Side health food shop that carries not one but five different brands of it.

We placed the scoby in the flask (the little girl says it’s feels like a wet gummy), then mixed the tea with starter Kombucha and poured it in. We plugged up the arms with champagne corks, covered the top with a cotton square, and stuck the whole thing in a corner where it requires you leave it alone for 3-7 days. Totally forgot about it til we did laundry next and when I looked – voilà!, mama had a baby scoby! It’s quite exciting to make something grow, no?

After the 2nd fermentation the kombucha was taken out of the flask, mixed with sweetener, and put into fermentation bottles (I only had one) for 3-10 days. The whole process is surprisingly idiot-proof – though I will update this post after we test the end result in a few days. Reminds me of another fermented probiotic beverage we made last year, Finnish lemonade, which was a hit with the kids and was super simple to make.

If any of you happen to be nearby, I’m happy to send a bottle home with you. Hey, there might even be a scoby in your Christmas basket this year, or scoby dog treats, or….! (I hear scoby hotels grow out of control!)

After a few days mama scoby floated slowly to the top. After about seven days there was a baby scoby.
Here’s a better view of mama scoby and her baby.

Technology fun

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I love technology, and wish I had more of it in my background. Check out how this guy makes iridescent tempered chocolates with a 3D printer, in the first tweet below. He provided all instructions free on his twitter feed. And imagine how much less painful organic chemistry is, if learned this way, second tweet below. The learning possibilities are endless for homeschooling curriculums.

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