I've been chasing a "white whale" bacon / egg / cheddar on grilled Texas toast sandwich I made 20-ish years ago that I've never been able to replicate. I didn't keep track of the particular bacon or cheddar I used, and I don't recall if the eggs were the farm co-op eggs we used to get or plain old grocery eggs. I should have taken notes but didn't.

It's probably a silly thing to do, but I keep fairly meticulous notes about food I make now (including weighing-out ingredients on a kitchen scale). I don't want to have another experience like my mythical sandwich.

My wife has a good point about my quest: I can't replicate my hunger level that day. That got me paying attention to how hunger effects food enjoyment. I now make a point of planning my eating ahead of special meals to maximize enjoyment. It's shocking, to me, how much a little hunger makes food better.

Brands matter. See if you can match the brands that your mother used; especially the mayonnaise. Bacon will be harder to match.

In 1969, my family would have made its own mayonnaise, so try that, too.

If I want a flashback to my childhood, it's peanut butter and jelly. But it has to be Skippy peanut butter on Wonder bread with Smuckers jelly, and freezing cold whole milk. Anything deviation doesn't trigger the same brain cells.

I remember one of my own "best steak ever" moments. It just never hit the same, even though I've had steaks 4x the price since then. I've also had a "best baguette ever" moment and I'm pretty sure it was just a regular baguette but my brain released an incredible amount of dopamine.

I was just going to show them the launch, but they all demanded to stay up late, told me to stop fast forwarding, and then had to sit and watch it again with each set of grandparents.

Another thing you can do is make sure critical parts of the Artemis streams (takeoff, approach to the moon, and landing) are on when you have children around. I texted the links to everyone I know.

> There's an expression on Wall Street, often attributed to Warren Buffett, which goes, "They don't ring a bell at the top." There's tremendous wisdom in that adage, because while in retrospect it's easy to pinpoint the day that the market (or even a specific stock) reached an all-time high that looks unlikely to ever be attained again in the foreseeable future, at the moment it happened it was impossible to recognize. That's because, unlike market bottoms, which usually have a crescendo feeling to them accompanied by investor panic, a market top generally passes without fanfare, indistinguishable from the series of tops that preceded it.

> You know when else they don't ring a bell? For parents, they don't ring a bell the last time you read Goodnight Moon. They don't do it the last time you watch Sleeping Beauty and they don't do it the last time you help your daughter put on the same article of clothing she's wanted to wear every day as a toddler. Instead, a couple years after the fact, you find the book on a shelf, the DVD in a box, and the tights with the pink ballerinas on them in the back of a drawer. You can't for the life of you remember the last time you read the book, danced to "Once Upon a Dream" with your daughter on your feet, or helped put those tights on. But you do know that now she reads to herself at bedtime, she dances, alone, to Taylor Swift, and the tights—well, the tights wouldn't even make it over her knees.

Some of the days have been very, very long. The weeks, months, and years have been so short.

we were desiged to want more it impossible to override that design.

"Crisp-roasted maitake mushrooms with garlicky labneh, fresh local raab, warm Middle Eastern Spices and Mama Lil's spicy pickled peppers on a toasted Ciabatta roll."

The raab and the mushrooms (sliced into sheets) were seared crisp. I substituted harissa mixed with mayo or greek yogurt for the sauce.

- Tradition Coffee Roasters, Kailua, HI

- Offset Coffee, LA, CA

- Igam Coffee, Brooklyn, NY

- City League, Brooklyn, NY

- Ozo Coffee, Boulder, CO

- Odyssey Coffee, Ocean Grove, NJ