I just this minute realised that I could use Pacemaker to track my book reading time, without having some sort of "five pages a day or else" strict rule! So if I spend a few hours reading on a lazy Sunday afternoon, then that could cover me for the week! I guess it would need to be minutes not pages, in order to cover audiobooks
I love this! Agree re: minutes though, if you want to include audiobooks... I do feel like Pacemaker is perfect for word-count tracking but you have to kind of finagle it to make it work with anything else.
Pacemaker is a really cool tracker, but now the free version is only for 60 days, so it's more like a trial version than free. And I can't see paying $60/year for a standalone tracker. I already have Ticktick. I can track in Excel if I have to. I think they would be better off charging a one-time flat fee for it.
Oh, that's a bummer! I didn't realize the free version had been downgraded to a trial. I guess they're pitching that at people who just want it for NaNoWriMo or something, but still.
I was going to comment about my own experiences with NaNoWriMo, but your pork and cabbage essay was too good a coincidence to pass up. I just commented elsewhere a few days ago about how my mother, one gen removed from immigration, used to slow-cook cheap pork chops in sauerkraut, how the meat juices tempered the kraut’s bite as the dispirited chops took on a savory flavor. Served with boiled potatoes.
This was one of my mother’s regular dishes. I don’t recall that my family had any New Year’s meal tradition. That I’ve only come into in recent years where we’ve gone pretty much the full brisket and cabbage route.
There’s no Irish in my lineage, and probably the closest any of my ancestors ever got to Ireland was when they were steaming out of Bremerhaven on their way to the New World, but I think the salty brisket combo with fresh cooked cabbage, potatoes, carrots and onions, is pretty much unbeatable, with a side of black-eyed peas, which for luck goes back to Babylonian times.
(At various times, cabbage and lettuce have been slang terms for money, since our American money (the cash variety) is green, so green certainly ought to be associated with good luck in the U.S. Not sure about other countries or their currency. In German, Kohle (coal) is a money slang term, whereas Kohl (cabbage) is not. The “Kraut” in sauerkraut normally means herb, which makes me think that it was often made kimchi style with various herbs, rather than just from cabbage and salt as it is today. Other good money synonyms can be found in Dana Gioia’s delightful poem, “Money”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBiW4IWwRgc )
I just this minute realised that I could use Pacemaker to track my book reading time, without having some sort of "five pages a day or else" strict rule! So if I spend a few hours reading on a lazy Sunday afternoon, then that could cover me for the week! I guess it would need to be minutes not pages, in order to cover audiobooks
I love this! Agree re: minutes though, if you want to include audiobooks... I do feel like Pacemaker is perfect for word-count tracking but you have to kind of finagle it to make it work with anything else.
Pacemaker is a really cool tracker, but now the free version is only for 60 days, so it's more like a trial version than free. And I can't see paying $60/year for a standalone tracker. I already have Ticktick. I can track in Excel if I have to. I think they would be better off charging a one-time flat fee for it.
Oh, that's a bummer! I didn't realize the free version had been downgraded to a trial. I guess they're pitching that at people who just want it for NaNoWriMo or something, but still.
I was going to comment about my own experiences with NaNoWriMo, but your pork and cabbage essay was too good a coincidence to pass up. I just commented elsewhere a few days ago about how my mother, one gen removed from immigration, used to slow-cook cheap pork chops in sauerkraut, how the meat juices tempered the kraut’s bite as the dispirited chops took on a savory flavor. Served with boiled potatoes.
This was one of my mother’s regular dishes. I don’t recall that my family had any New Year’s meal tradition. That I’ve only come into in recent years where we’ve gone pretty much the full brisket and cabbage route.
There’s no Irish in my lineage, and probably the closest any of my ancestors ever got to Ireland was when they were steaming out of Bremerhaven on their way to the New World, but I think the salty brisket combo with fresh cooked cabbage, potatoes, carrots and onions, is pretty much unbeatable, with a side of black-eyed peas, which for luck goes back to Babylonian times.
(At various times, cabbage and lettuce have been slang terms for money, since our American money (the cash variety) is green, so green certainly ought to be associated with good luck in the U.S. Not sure about other countries or their currency. In German, Kohle (coal) is a money slang term, whereas Kohl (cabbage) is not. The “Kraut” in sauerkraut normally means herb, which makes me think that it was often made kimchi style with various herbs, rather than just from cabbage and salt as it is today. Other good money synonyms can be found in Dana Gioia’s delightful poem, “Money”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBiW4IWwRgc )
Ah, yes, slow-cooked pork chops and sauerkraut! Another fine example of how there's so many ways to cook it!
(And I agree with you re: salty brisket with potatoes and carrots.)