March 2026

Renata 399 SR927W Batteries

When I was a kid, it always felt like the older women in my life were trying to get me to wear jewelry and other accessories for some reason. My great aunt bought me a gold ring with my initials on it for my bar mitzvah. My grandmother bought me a watch that felt very fancy to me at the time. There were a couple of necklaces along the way. Other stuff I’m forgetting.

I tried to wear these things, but I couldn’t hack it. My whole life, I go through these swings where I think something will be fun to wear, wear it, feel like I’m drawing attention to myself, and stop wearing the thing forever. Tried and failed to be a watch guy, a ring guy, a gold chain guy.

During the one semester I spent in California in college, I briefly became a bandana guy. It didn’t last. In recent years, trying desperately to find cool ways of keeping the sun off my bald head, I tried for an incredibly short period of time to be a cowboy hat guy. I don’t think I ever made it out of the house.

What I ultimately want for my physical self, I think, is to be ignored. I appreciate the body’s capacity for unique kinds of joy, but I don’t really want anyone looking at it or thinking about it. I don’t want to be ignored as a person; as a person I want to shine, to be seen as unique and special, to stand out. I imagine we all exist on some sort of spectrum in this regard.

But why I’m writing this is recently I found the old watch my grandmother gave me. It’s a Citizen C480, and she must have purchased it in 1995.

I remember thinking, well, this is classier than what I’m used to, but it’s cool because it still has a stopwatch. I loved having a stopwatch because when we were kids for some reason we thought it was fun to compete to see who could start and stop a stopwatch the fastest. But this watch sucked for that game. The stopwatch feature seemed to be tacked on; it wasn’t, like, the point of the device.

When I found the watch recently, I wanted to make it work again. I don’t wear a watch, but this felt important to me nevertheless. So I bought the batteries you see pictured at the top of this post. They worked, and I wholeheartedly recommend them.

Finding Purchase

Tamicon Tamarind Paste

Do you know about this cookbook, Heartland Masala? It’s great. I’ve been having a lot of fun going through the recipes. At the same time, I’ve been a little troubled to realize that I’m not a very good cook. When I wing it, things come out okay, but they don’t come out good.

But that’s a realization about myself, not about the book. The book has been full of wonderful little tricks and tips and encouragements for which I’m grateful. For example, I’ve been making ghee. It’s so easy! Why was I not doing this for my whole adult life?

When one of the recipes called for tamarind, I ignored the very good advice in the book, which was to just buy Tamicon Tamarind Paste. Instead, I bought this huge block of tamarind that felt like a block of concrete, and then realized I had to boil it and spend the rest of my life trying to strain the resulting goo through a mesh strainer. I spent, like, a whole afternoon working on that, and then gave up and ordered some Tamicon, and the result was a truly delicious ghugni.

There is no lesson to be learned here. Sometimes it’s a good idea to just buy the already produced thing. Sometimes it’s a good idea to do something a little more from scratch. You’ll never know, honestly. We’re just fumbling around down here. Tamicon, though, is really a good product.

Finding Purchase

Airthings Corentium Home Radon Detector

There are infinite things in life that are beyond my control. There are also infinite things, I guess, that are within my control. Anyway, control is a big deal. This summer, I’ll become a dad for the first time, and increasingly I seem to be overtaken by the urge to control something.

My partner’s parents moved into a new condo a while back, and when we stayed there recently they told us about some sort of radon mitigation that was going on in their basement. A seed was planted. Days later, when we got home, I started thinking, “What about my basement? What’s the radon situation down there?”

Actually, first I thought: “What’s radon?” I learned that it is a gas with a pretty terrifying collection of adjectives surrounding it. Colorless, odorless, radioactive, and—possibly most awful—naturally occurring. I learned that it’s pretty easy to test for, too. You put a test kit in your basement for a set amount of time, send it off to a lab, and there you have it.

I was about to buy one of these test kits when an important question popped into my mind: Do radon levels change a lot, or do they stay pretty stable? Turns out, this was a good question. Radon levels can fluctuate a lot, so there are short term tests and long term tests. Information derived from both kinds of tests can be meaningful, blah, blah, blah.

What I realized is: I’m going to want to be testing for radon a lot. In fact, if I get a high reading, I’m going to want to test again right away, and I’m not going to want to wait around for lab results. And if I end up buying a bunch of tests, I’m going to end up spending some money.

Hence, the Airthings Corentium Home, which is good for a bunch of reasons. First, it just does one thing: monitor radon levels. Second, it monitors both short term and long term levels simultaneously. Third, it is battery-operated, which is important, because these things are supposed to go, like, in the middle of your basement, away from walls and stuff.

There are cheaper radon monitors, but they either needed to be plugged in or seemed shaky where reliability and accuracy were concerned. You can also spend a lot more on an air monitor like the Airthings 2960 View Plus that monitors radon as well as stuff like CO2 and VOCs, but it occurred to me that I don’t really care that much about the CO2 reading in my basement, where I want to be checking the radon levels.

So far (it’s been about a month), the Corentium Home has been great. What I mean by that is, it’s done exactly what it was supposed to do. The long term radon level in our home so far is just above ideal, but below the level where the powers that be would be required to mitigate it in any way. Basically, it’s okay for now. And I’m glad to know that. I think.

Finding Purchase