We had the second seder at our house, with upwards of 20 aunts, uncles and cousins swarming over the place. Our cousins Janet and Barry even brought their dog; Mom couldn’t stand dogs but she made an exception for Dusty.

Dusty is still one of my alltime favorite dogs, although I believe Janet and Barry prefer Custer, their next dog. And now that I think of it, Custer is a weird name for a dog.

Jimmy Fallon said in an interview once that when he was growing up, his parents didn’t have friends. They had brothers and sisters and cousins. Says I to myself on hearing that: Holy crap. I thought that was just us. My parents socialized frequently, but it was almost always with people genetically related. Though my Dad did have one or two old friends he grew up with, whom he saw once or twice a year.

Mom was usually not a great cook, but she did a great job with the seder, working for days and putting on the full spread. Mom and Dad seldom drank, but they had a little wine with dinner – Manischewitz and Mogen David, of course! – and laughed a lot. My uncle Nat and Aunt Harriet were the only real drinkers in the family; my parents kept a bottle of vodka in the house for when they came to visit. We told the same jokes every year and never got tired of them.

To this day I am only a social drinker. I like beer and wine and Jameson’s and I went on a martini kick for a few years. But I don’t drink when I’m at home and I can go for weeks and months without having alcohol, and I do not miss it. 🌕

We kept kosher for Passover for the full eight days. The rest of the year we were lax. I like to say that we were pizza-and-chinese-food-on-paper-plates kosher – the foods we kept in the house were kosher, and we kept the proper two sets of plates, one for meat and one for dairy. But we brought in pizza and Chinese food regularly, and when we did, we ate it on paper plates. When I was an adult, it took me some time to get used to eating pizza on regular dishes.

I loved matzoh during Passover, and gobbled it up plain, or with margarine, rendered chicken fat or cream cheese. I never got tired of matzoh during Passover, but I stopped eating it and switched back to bread the moment I could, and never had matzoh, or wanted it, the rest of the year.

For several months, my daily breakfast has been about a pint of a thick “nutritionally complete” liquid, called Huel.

Huel is a powder you mix with water to make a milky liquid, like a thin milkshake. You can add more water to make it thinner, or less to make it thicker. You can use vegetable milk, or mix it with fruit or peanut butter for added flavor. The powder itself can be unflavored, or vanilla, chocolate or berry flavored. I’ve tried all three, and settled on the vanilla as my favorite.

I used to eat a real breakfast every day, fruit and cottage cheese, but when I started Huel in November I needed to get a running start in the morning and keep running all morning.

At that time, I was working with an international workgroup. I’m based in San Diego, which means I got into work when everybody else around the US had already been working for hours and colleagues in the UK were already into late afternoon. I didn’t want to take time out to eat breakfast, even though my body demands it.

When I read about Huel in this article by Nicole Dieker, I said sure, why not. And I liked it and stuck with it.

And I feel fine. I no longer have that morning scheduling pressure but I’ve stuck with Huel. It takes some of the complexity out of the day. And I like it.

Some people, including Nicole Dieker, above, take Huel for two meals a day, but that’s too many for me, because I like to eat. Just not as often as my body seems to need me to eat.

Some people take all their meals with Huel, but that’s not a good idea, because you risk nutritionally deficiencies. Human beings are evolved to consume a variety of foods to get a broad range of nutrients; it’s why your dog and cat are happy eating kibble every day but you’d go nuts if you always ate exactly the same thing every meal.

Huel is one of several “meal replacement” liquids that have come on the market in the past few years. They all have pretty much the same marketing pitch: Eating three meals a day, plus snacks, is a hassle. Meal replacements are designed to replace the fast-food burger you consume at your desk, not the meals you enjoy with family and friends.

Meal replacements are particularly touted for people looking to get off a junk food diet.

Soylent is the most famous of these meal replacements. I’ve tried Soylent and like it fine, but I went with Huel this time around on a whim, because of that article.

Also, Soylent is made with chemicals but Huel is made with real ingredients: Oats, tapioca, flaxseed, sunflower, coconut, peas, rice, etc.

(Yes, I know that those so-called “real ingredients” are ALSO chemicals. You know what the fuck I mean, piglet..)

As Huel notes on its website: A liquid meal made from a powder sounds weird and dystopian, but it’s actually an old idea: Flour is an example of a powder that becomes food, and soup is an example of a liquid meal. Both have been around for thousands of years. Many people have smoothies for breakfast. Huel is just a variation on that. 🌕

Listening to the Monday microcast with @macgenie and @manton yesterday, I learned that you can use filters on micro.blog to search for text in a post you write, and automatically include that post in a category.

So you can automate micro.blog to search for any post containing the word “beer,” or the beer emoji 🍺, and put that in a “beer” category. Instructions are here.

Additionally, micro.blog uses emoji in lieu of hashtags, which I like. Because emoji are awesome and hashtags are ugly.

Later, in the evening, I set up an automated, filtered category for “best of,” using the full-moon emoji 🌕 for a filter. I chose that emoji for no other reason than that it is a nice emoji, and won’t get in the way of people reading the post.

So now I have a blog category for my best posts, to distinguish them from the daily flow of ephemera.

I’m also thinking of using emoji with IFTTT or Zapier to control cross-posting to Twitter and Tumblr.

One of the things I love about micro.blog is that it manages to be both simple and powerful, which is a rare combination.

And now because this post contains that full moon emoji, it should automatically appear in the best-of category, without my having to do anything about it.

Privileged person problem: When I go to the supermarket, I keep the shopping list on my iPhone. When I’m wearing a mask, Face ID doesn’t recognize me. I have to open my iPhone by entering the passcode a dozen times or more.

I heard about a feature called “Setup Alternate Appearance” for situations where you have an “appearance that can look vastly different.”

I tried it with my mask on this morning. Nope, didn’t work. It said I had something obscuring my face and I should try again.

Joanna Stern has more on the whys and wherefores at the Wall Street Journal. The iPhone needs to see your eyes, nose and mouth. It’ll work for many sunglasses but not all. It supposedly works when men grow and shave off facial hair, and when women wear or don’t wear makeup.

There’s apparently a workaround to the mask problem: masks printed with images of the lower parts of faces on them!

Doctors who’ve been living with this problem for years offer suggestions: Just use pen and paper, bunch up your interactions with the iPhone in batches all at once, tell someone you trust to unlock the phone for you, ir continue typing in your passcode like a savage.

Stern notes, and I can confirm, that you can punch in your passcode and otherwise use your iPhone while wearing thin nitrile gloves on with trivial additional inconvenience. 🌕

I think we’ll be cautious and not rush out to any restaurants or crowded social gatherings.

But I think I’ll absolutely take the dog to the park, Lake Murray, where we used to walk every day. Stop and talk to people. Let Minnie sniff out some other dogs. That sounds lovely. With Julie of course if she wants to come. 🌕