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Hi friends! I first want to make sure that you all know that if you were excited by the recent Olympics, we should be keeping the party going by cheering on the Paralympics, also in Paris, starting on August 28th. I think Peacock is going to have the same coverage, which is new. I don’t think viewing the Paralympics has ever been this accessible before. The Paralympics have a bunch of sports that the Olympics have as well as others that many of us may have never seen. I’m really looking forward to cheering on these athletes as well.

This past Sunday, Nicole took me on a multi-hour culinary side-quest. I had asked her to cut back my basil plants, which keep flowering and not producing hearty leaves. In the process, she was able to harvest enough leaves for me to make pesto. I prefer to eat pesto with a long pasta and because of a recent pantry cleanout, we had no long pasta. “We’ll make pasta!” says my wife, as I’m already preparing to make pesto from scratch. While there were many other things I needed to get done, there wasn’t anything so dire that I couldn’t take the time to spend the next five hours in the kitchen, cooking with Nicole. So that’s what we did. We had all the ingredients and kitchen devices we needed and “Getting good at pasta” is actually one of my 2024 goals that I haven’t really dug into yet, so I said, “Devil take the hindmost!” and we made far too much pasta. I regret nothing and I look forward to our next pasta adventure.