It is a mystery

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There’s a little bakery near our house in Buffalo, maybe a mile away. They have bagels.

I’m gonna tell a long pointless meandery story about bagels behind the cut, and you get a photo at the end, and most of this is because I got a new phone yesterday and I won’t tell that saga but it’s supposed to have a better camera so I’m curious to see how that actually looks. So.

Hold up I’m gonna zoom out. Bagel shops. Good bagels. I live in New York State and so you’d think good bagels would be a given but no. No! New York City is absolutely historically drowning in good bagels for obvious reasons, and I’ve spent time there so I have managed to calibrate my bagel-ometer. My native city of Troy is upriver from New York City, quite a distance (~150 miles), but the chain Bruegger’s was originally founded there, because the water in Troy (which comes! from a reservoir! in the actual tiny town where I actually grew up, whose name’s pronunciation actually cannot be guessed from the letters used to spell it and so you just have to ask someone how to say it) is apparently ideally suited to the production of bagels.

But nobody currently operating in Troy has a proper bagel oven. The original Brueggers location underwent a prolonged half-life as an on-campus restaurant for Russel Sage, but eventually was shuttered despite promises to the contrary. And then there was a wonderful deli called Psychedelicatessen, but they went out of business a few years ago. Another local baker, Placid Baker, recently explained to BIL that he’s pretty sure it was the cost and upkeep of their bagel oven that did them in; it’s $90,000, and then it broke. He makes decent bagels, at Placid Baker, but it’s a labor-intensive process using a normal oven and manually adding steam, so he charges an arm and a leg and they’re still not. Quite. the thing. So there are no proper bagels east of the Hudson for quite a distance. It’s tragic and we eat a lot of medicore frozen grocery store bagels. :(

Now, Buffalo is a big city, even farther away from New York City but you know, NYC isn’t actually the epicenter of cuisine. And so for years Buffalo had a wonderful chain called Bagel Brothers. But they were bought out, and then rebranded, and were, for yet more decades, Bagel Jay’s. And that was fine. But one location shut down and reopened as a Manhattan Bagel. Eugh. And then the last Bagel Jay’s shut down and reopened as… a Bruegger’s.

Anyway. This little bakery like a mile from my house has bagels. There’s also a really cool bakery co-op called BreadHive that makes all kinds of baked goods, and we can get them at the co-op on Hertel but they only deliver like twice a week so you gotta go on Fridays if you actually want the bagels. They’re decent, kind of big and doughy but that’s not all bad.

As it happens, I’m not actually that big a bagel aficionado. I just know, if you get a roll with a hole in the middle and it doesn’t have the skin, it’s not really a bagel, and that’s still an okay thing to eat toasted with a schmear but it’s not the same thing, you know? god, I remember as a kid the Bruegger’s bagels you could peel the skin off with your teeth, I would eat the skin and the middle separately. It was really something. It’s a long time since I had a bagel like that.

But now the actual point of my story. So this little bakery. Dude woke up on Saturday morning with a Hankering, so he got himself together and went. And realized the bakery opens at 8, he was 2 minutes early, and there was a line of people really inefficiently straggling across the parking lot. (He sent a photo, of this random straggle of humanity, and said “[Specific village where bakery is located] has found the least efficient way possible to form a line”.)

It was of course busy in there. But he got us each a toasted bagel with a schmear, which was the stated objective, and then also, as is his wont, purchased a pair of pastries for us to have Sunday morning (today). One of them was a raspberry snail, and the other– well, he said. There was a special seasonal pastry. I asked the woman behind the counter what it was, she didn’t know, so she asked someone else, and came back and told me, but too quietly for me to hear.

So it’s a mystery pastry.

It’s a kind of braided thing seasoned with cardamom and sprinkled with sugar and it’s incredible. But we have no idea what such a thing would be called. So here is a photo.

[image ID: a pastry, cut in half, on a Blue Willow plate, with big sugar crystals on top.]

Looks like a laminated dough braided into a knot? there’s not really filling, the gap in the middle is just how it baked, that’s a layer of the knotted dough. It’s real good. I didn’t get a pic of it whole because I forgot about it until Dude had already run it through the toaster and cut it in half.

Anyway. There’s my Sunday mystery. Bonus pic: Loretta helps me trial the new camera.

[image ID: closeup of the face of a black and white cat with green eyes, looking sort of haunted because she was doing her Sit On Arm Of Chair And Writhe Viciously routine and I interrupted her.]

I took both of these in Portrait mode because that zooms in and automatically adds a background blur, which mimics the look of a wide-aperture prime lens like real photographers use for portraiture. I should find out what controls that and do it on purpose but you know.

Of interest perhaps is in this photo you can see the fucked-up spot on Loretta’s left cornea. It’s just a little cloudy spot on the surface, but if you look at her eye from side-on the pupil/iris is distorted toward the surface, and so her pupils look totally normal from front on but from the side that one is fucked up. It changes size normally and she can clearly see very well so it’s mostly just a weird little cosmetic issue, but I wonder if it affects her vision. The vet said there’s nothing to worry about, at least.

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batgirlsarepokemon:

fractally:

Listen, I know we all want to hate on the Ottawa plan but like realistically Ilya wanted Canadian citizenship and so even if you discount Shane, what, is he going to go to Calgary? Fucking Edmonton? No. His choices were to go to Toronto whose captain was a rapist, the fucking Canucks, or Ottawa. Out of these,

Oh I literally was about to hit post and realized I forgot about Winnipeg. Well that should tell you everything you need to know

And even if Ilya WANTED American citizenship (he’d prefer Canadian, he says that it’s difficult for Russians in the US), his ONLY path to citizenship is marrying Svetlana which neither he nor Shane want.

I think people forget that foreign-born athletes in the US are on work visas and do not normally have easy pathways to citizenship. Hockey is also not as big a sport in the US, and getting your P-1 visa (which most IRL foreign-born hockey players have) switched to a visa (EB-1 for ex) that has a pathway to citizenship is difficult and would take a LONG time especially for a Russian.

It’s even harder for Ilya because he’s 26 when they come up with the Ottawa plan. He’s already at the peak of his career and athleticism and maintaining the level of elite play to qualify for a visa that would give him a green card would be difficult. He’s getting old in Hockey Years.

Also, staying in the US means that at any time throughout the visa transfer process it could be undone. He gets an injury? Good-bye eligibility for EB-1. And even if he does qualify and get it, Ilya doesn’t have an Olympic medal so he’d need to meet at least 3/10 of the EB-1 requirements. And can take anywhere from a few months to over a year to get a green card. Even after getting a green card, he’d have to wait 5 years to get citizenship so he’d still have to travel back to Russia to make sure his travel documents are up-to date (a green card is NOT citizenship and he still can’t be out).

Importantly, Shane and Ilya come up with the Ottawa plan in summer of 2017. The US briefly suspended non-immigrant visas for Russians to the US (which is what Ilya most likely had if his only option was marrying Svetlana) that same summer. Watching in 2025/2026, in a time where the US is led by someone who is very close with Putin, it’s easy to forget that in 2017 relations WERE BAD!!

And also also, the books make it clear that Boston had a similar locker room environment to Montreal so Ilya would not have the same support post-outing, despite fandom claiming otherwise. Ottawa was always the best option bc Canada relaxed its requirements for citizenship eligibility in 2017!! There’s also ways for athletes of Ilya’s caliber to go to Canada and qualify for a PR card pretty quickly and not be dependent on a work visa. In the TLG, no one is worried about his visa status so it’s probably what happened.

Once he marries Shane, Shane can sponsor Ilya and he’d probably get a citizenship relatively quickly considering he’s already been in Canada for more than 3 years by that point in TLG. (You have to have been a permanent resident and physically in Canada for 1,095 days to qualify for citizenship).

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