I finally updated the Google Analytics code in this blog since the delightful redesign courtesy of Melissa and Robosaur, and found out that my blog got hits for the following three web searches:

1. real twinkie filling recipe
2. multicultural Christmas cookies
3. weird twinkies

I don't think my entry about having a twinkie tasting helped whoever was the first and last searches. But I do wonder what the second searcher thought when it led here.

Today I made a pistachio pie to bring to New Year's Eve tomorrow. I tried to be clever and used the crumbs from the leftover Christmas chocolate chip cookies for the crust, but as I mixed in the warm melted butter and baked it in the oven to brown it I realized I had forgotten a basic characteristic of chocolate: it melts. So it looks kind of funny, but it should taste all right. The cream cheese layer tasted fantastic, and I would know because I used every single one of my fingers to wipe off the implements it was that good. Just cream cheese, powdered sugar, some CoolWhip (which they've reformulated and tastes less plastic), a little vanilla, and a drop of the pistachio flavoring my mom gave me for Christmas. It's good enough that I'm not worried the cream cheese layer is twice as thick as the pistachio pudding layer when it was supposed to be reversed.

What with the color of the pistachio pudding and its various parts I should call it "Frankenpie".

Normally, at Christmas, I describe my baking as whether or not I had a good "showing". This year was definitely a good showing.

Since I was off work I had a lot of time to bake. I started first with what I thought would keep the best: candies. Homemade caramels, almond toffee (like Almond Roca), and the Heath bar/toffee candy/cracker candy my roommates dubbed "fire candy" in college because you only have to light something on fire once before your friends won't let you live it down.

Then I moved on to the longer-lasting cookies shortbread and snowballs, my great-grandmother Mimi's candied orange walnuts, and sweetened condensed milk fudge.

Then I made divinity, the fluffy white confection I resent having called "white fudge", because fudge is much easier to make than divinity. Divinity is like a nougat because you cook a sugar syrup and whip it into egg whites. Growing up, our neighbor Mrs. Barnes, used to make it at Christmas each year, and every year since she passed away my sister has judged my divinity against the high standard of Mrs. Barnes'. Since it's been eight years I'm not sure my sister can remember what Mrs. Barnes' divinity was like anymore, but the texture of this year's was very good, and it's even keeping longer in the tin.

To round off the platters I fulfilled my dad's request for non-chocolate cookies with snickerdoodles, molasses crackles, and macaroons. I don't see the appeal of macaroons. And I made chocolate chip cookies because they're my favorite, and everything else I made was everyone else's favorite.

A pretty good showing.

I also made golden cake to use up the egg yolks left over from the macaroons and divinity, which I'd do again if I use a lot of egg whites. It used orange oil so it was nicely orange-scented and had a good texture. And enough cholesterol to down an elephant, but it's the holidays. Whatever.

Besides the baking, I have not been very productive on my vacation. I have made three pairs of latex-safe underwear. I've almost finished a baby quilt for Project Linus. I have quilted less than one square on the quilt for myself. I have flipped through and discarded five books from the library; stopped reading The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe twenty pages from the end because something in the style was simply off-putting besides the fact that I think Mr. Tumnus is a pedophile; and ignored my usual budget and frugality and spent more money than I like on various things like underwear supplies, filters for my vacuum cleaner, incandescent lightbulbs for my stockpile, and duplicate makeup to simplify packing when I travel.

I also have gone puddle stomping and played on the park across the street.

And essentially, right now I'm stalling before I go do several months of shredding. What might be fun is that I found a can of WD40 my landlady left here when she was repairing my doorknob with screws and woodglue and made it so it didn't really turn. Normally I use Pam on my cheap, Walmart shredder but WD40 might make it work even better. It will also be mind-numbing. Even my DVR'ed Mythbusters might not be enough entertainment.

It's Christmas break! For me at least - I'm taking some of the break I've saved up over the last "challenging" year (in work speak, "challenges" is code for "problems" but it's become so common that we're probably going to euphemize it even more to "opportunities for improvement").

I won't get to separate completely from work. I'm going to the work lunch next Tuesday since I will literally be right around the corner from the restaurant, I have to finish a performance review request I got at the last minute on Friday, and I have to follow up on something else that has been difficult because someone isn't emailing me back.

People not emailing back on a timely basis is a new pet peeve of mine. It joins the list with people twiddling on their phones while they're supposedly talking to you, toilet paper coming from the back rather than the front, drivers who purposely speed up or linger beside you so you can't merge, and charity marathons.


A girl I know from Tech had a wreath making party, so now I have a wreath on my door. Paired with my 3-foot prelit $15 Target tree, this is the most I've ever decorated for Christmas. Laura had pine branches she said she got for free from a Christmas tree lot. Good to know. I saved the white ribbon of a present years ago and finally got to use it. I'm very magpie-like with ribbon. I like keeping pieces of ribbon. I even always want to keep the ribbon that comes on the free toothbrush I get from my dentist, but I normally can convince myself to throw it out since it has his name repeated over the entire length. I'm glad this piece of ribbon finally came in handy. After the branches die I'm going to retrieve the ribbon and ornaments just in case I want to use them again.

I'll probably have to wash them. I sprayed hairspray on the wreath to try and make it live longer. I should have thought more about that before I did it. The wreath smells like Garnier Fructis Sleek & Shine With Natural Bamboo Extract rather than pine. Oh well. I don't sniff my front door too often anyway.

My activities during my vacation are limited for now because I'm not completely mobile until my burn heals more. I also don't want to start my Christmas baking yet because I don't have freezer room and the candies that would last until Christmas require whole pots of boiling sugar and ::cough:: I'm a little hesitant to do that right now, considering. So I'm working on my latest quilt.





This is a quilt I pieced several years ago. It's all built around the center fabric, which is a pattern of narcissus, daffodils, and hyacinths. That fabric is one of only two I have ever been so struck by that I purchased without having a specific project in mind. When I did set out to design a quilt around it, it took a long time to find exactly the right complementing fabrics. The yellow wasn't too hard - it's a very small yellow/white check. The purple came along after I realized a purple would match the hyacinths better than a deep blue. But the green took forever, and I actually had a spotted medium green that I wasn't completely won over by, but which was the best I could do, until I found this dark green.

So I want to do this quilt right, and tonight spent a few hours trying to design an appropriate swirly pattern to quilt into the borders. I'm blogging now because I gave up after I was using Excel to graph a sine wave, thinking that might work (it doesn't). So that'll be a battle for tomorrow.

Feel the Burn

I got burned.

Not in the "my date never showed up" sense. Or the "I thought it was a good idea to invest with a guy named Bernie Madoff" sense. But in the literal, scalded, apricot-sized-blisters sense.

After the Thanksgiving dinner with my dad's side of the family but before the Thanksgiving dinner with my mom's side of the family, I wanted to breath steam from my mom's steam inhaler on the off chance my slight nasal congestion was a cold. But while I was holding it a little water splashed out and burned my left thumb. In the recoil I dropped the entire steamer, and spilled the entire contents of boiling water onto my lap.

Gotta say, I don't think I've ever gotten my pants off that fast. But it wasn't fast enough. My left leg got a swatch of first degree burn and my right leg got a second degree burn larger than my outspread hand. I didn't have the heart to ever measure it with a ruler because I thought that would depress me.

But it's better now. I was hoping the Internet was overestimating the two- to four-week healing time but no, I'm on right on track. Tomorrow I'll be two weeks in and the gooey center is starting to close up. But luckily it has stopped hurting, and only is uncomfortable when the bandage inevitably slips down. Of course, my scale for pain has been completely reset, so "uncomfortable" might not be what I would have called it before.

But in good news, today was my last real day of work until January. I accumulated a ton of vacation and extra time off over the last year and I'm finally taking it. I have a scientific writing class for the next two days, and then it'll be sleeping in, watching TV, and baking for Christmas. I also have other goals for my time off like eating more cheese, going to the Round Table Pizza lunch buffet, making spaghetti squash, and backing up my parents' computer for them. I've been meaning to do all those things for a while and I finally get a chance. Yes, I really do have "eat more cheese" on my goal list. It's on the whiteboard above my heater. (It's the whiteboard at work that has my list of cheeses. It took about two months before anyone at work noticed it.)

Another thing I should accomplish during my vacation is finish re-reading the Chronicles of Narnia. I'm trying to see if I can understand any of the Christian symbolism now that I'm older and have read the Bible the whole way through. So far, no. I might know more now but I'm still me and I never get symbolism. Things are what they are.

Plus, I just can't get over my conviction that Mr. Tumnus is a pedophile. I mean, an adult male naked except for a red scarf encounters a small girl alone in a strange place and persuades her to come back to his house where he plies her with food and music so that she falls asleep? Come on!

I can't take James McAvoy serious in any of his roles because of that movie.

I made an upleasant vegetable soup for dinner this week. I even bought vegetables especially for it. Stupid health kick. I mean, it's not that bad, but it's vegetables. Blatantly vegetables. Not even well-hidden, like when I put onions and celery and peas in a couscous pilaf.

The reason I was inspired to eat healthy was because last week I didn't eat healthy. I was in New Orleans for a conference for work, and I ate some good things. A peanut butter burger. Beignets. Cauliflower au gratin. Chocolate cannoli. Baked fettuccine. White chocolate bread pudding. Regular bread pudding. Notice how there aren't a lot of fruits or vegetables in that list. On business trips I can always tell my nutrition is suffering when I start telling myself fruit juice or the lettuce on burgers counts toward the 5-6 servings a day the government suggests for health and wellness.

I did try some regional specialties besides the beignets. The gumbo was all right, I don't see why it's a big deal but it's all right, but the crawfish pasta was the worst thing I've been forced to eat in a long time. I wasn't sure I'd like crawfish since I hate all other shellfish, so I thought crawfish pasta was a good idea since I could eat the pasta if I hated the crawfish.

Crawfish flavor migrates.

And thus my seafood list is still salmon, fish sticks, and tuna fillets out of the envelopes.

Oh, the conference was good too. It was on a lot of topics besides my actual area, which I found interesting. Best parts: when an expert on a panel answered the question "What is your opinion on the field of detecting subvisible particles?" with "I wish we had any ways to detect subvisible particles" and when one guy a few rows behind me in the audience began snoring ludicrously loudly. I also brought home six pens, a t-shirt, four or five reusable bags, a luggage strap, an eyeglass cleaning cloth, two full-size chocolate bars, and one pill within a pill that a company was advertising and I thought was really cool.

I drove around on my way back to the airport to see if there was any Katrina damage still. It took me about half an hour to find an alternate route over one bridge that was still out, so that answer is "yes". Trying to find another bridge led me through a neighborhood that had empty plots, boarded up buildings, and some houses with the spray-painted X's from search and rescue. But oddly, when I got to the lower 9th ward that was supposed to have the worst Katrina damage, most of it was being rebuilt in a different, obviously more hurricane-resistant style, on top of pilings with rooflines diagonal to the river. My cousin told me afterwards that's Brad Pitt's pet project.

I made the best chocolate cake yesterday. A Triple Chocolate Fudge cake mix, four eggs, a cup of sour cream, half a cup of oil, half a cup of water, one and a half cups chocolate chips, in a Bundt pan. Warm out of the oven? Heaven. Oh my gosh that was good chocolate cake.

It redeems me after last week's disaster:




Now I know the pitfalls of a too-soft filling. I ended up bringing it to church on Thursday and my group members made it into a model of Waterloo with Trader Joe's animal crackers.

But at work when I brought in the good cake and mentioned I'd made one the week before that sucked one of the new group members said they would have eaten it anyway, they're equal-opportunity cake-eaters. Good to know!

Though I would still be embarassed to bring in the blue disaster.

The funny smell has been coming from the downstairs neighbors' often enough that I ended up with this collection of candle detritus:


I like the picture, I don't like the smell. Found out from the landlady it's supposedly Chinese herbs. Still, I'm not going to accept feeling nauseated in my own apartment. The next time I smell the smell I'm having a dance party in high heels. Or just getting my hammer out and making my point a little more directly.

But I want to buy my own place, preferably one without shared floors or walls. So, while I was burning more candles the other night, I figured out that if I reduce my retirement savings I might be able to do that in another year. That would be awesome. I just need to find a place that doesn't need too many repairs since I am demonstrably not handy.

Only six weeks of work until I take a month off for Christmas, and one of those I'll be gone at a conference and there's Thanksgiving in there too. Woo hoo! Unfortunately we added an extra experiment on so I'm running around this week, but I'm hopeful I'll be able to churn out the report that's due before the end of the year without much trouble. I did almost a quarter of it today, and that was in between a lot of running around.

And I mean running around literally. I kept having to look for people who sit on the first or third floors and my desk is on the second. So it was up and down stairs over and over. Which are oddly dusty. Our offices got renovated a few months ago and I don't think they've been vacuumed since. The new carpet is darker than the old carpet, so maybe it's just more visible now. But it makes me wish I had a Dustbuster. Though I'd have to go in on the weekend to do it, people would think that was weird. Probably.

Off topic, I am in love with this clip from Glee. I hate the original song - it's so slutty, and it reminds me of pedophilia, plus Katy Perry's falsetto is atrocious. I'll turn it off if it comes on the radio. But an all-male a capella group performing it? ::Swoon:: I've been letting it play on repeat.

I know it's been radio-silence around here for a while, and there's a good reason. I've been in Germany! Work sent me to Munich for almost four weeks to help transfer our process to the site there.

The trip ended up being really great. It was a good cap to an amazingly busy year. My work assignment was straightforward (answer questions from the folks there, help a little in lab), and everyone associated with my normal job was in a completely different time zone, so I had absolutely zero urgent things to deal with.

And, unlike in my regular job, I had weekends free! That let me do things like see the Residenz Museum (at right), the previous downtown residence of the royal family.

And go to Wollmeise and get yarn for my sister that she can't get in the States.

And I saw the Dachau concentration camp memorial - where I ran into someone I knew! My dad runs into people he knows all over the place, with the most impressive one being that he ran into a guy he knew while crossing the White House lawn. But I think running into Kevin, who was in band freshman year, at Dachau when we both happened to be in Munich on business beats that hands-down. Since we were the only Americans we knew in Munich we went sight-seeing together. To Salzburg:




To Schloss Nymphenburg, the royal summer residence that used to be outside the city and now is accessible by all trains.
Where I took this picture I really like of a gazebo on the grounds.

We also toured monuments and fancy churches:


And Schloss Blutenburg, which had a moat!




I was also in Munich during Oktoberfest. While this made hotels difficult to find and expensive, it did mean that work organized a trip to drink beer. Here I am with Thomas from work with the Oktoberfest grounds behind us:



After I finished working I had two days off before I flew back and I saw Rothenburg ob de Tauber, a well-preserved medieval town:




And I visited the royal palaces Linderhof:



And Neuschwanstein, the one that inspired the Disneyland castle:


Neuschwanstein was gorgeous inside (and they allowed no pictures so I can't show it). Unlike all the other palaces I saw, which were rococo and gold leaf everything and swirls and vases, Neuschwanstein was supposed to look like a medieval castle and had a totally different style. More carved wood and murals. Really beautiful.

And then I flew back! By that time I was very, very tired of German food (which is mostly sausage, pork, and dumplings). But on the flight they announced that in honor of Oktoberfest they were having an Oktoberfest-themed meal! Curses. But the Italian food that I had there was great. I want to try making spaghetti carbonara again, because the stuff I had there was so good. I even had wild boar pappardelle at one point that was beyond delicious.

And since I got back I have had a horrible, horrible cold and have been completely out of it. I'm very glad at whatever foresight made me block off this week as vacation. Well, I'm not sure if it was foresight. It was more that I have an unbelievable amount of vacation and comp time I haven't been able to take, and grabbed the opportunity when it arose. But in any case, it worked out really well because I've just putzed around and watched TV and blew my nose all the time.

Poetry

Found this which I apparently wrote sophomore year at Tech. Sums up a lot.

Maybe if I weren't sober or if I weren't straight
Would I accept the impossible date
From the guy in my math class
Who stalks me all day
From morning till evening
He won't go away

He won't make eye contact
Except when he stares.
He's socially awkward
And hygiene impaired.

To Illustrate

I think graduating college has been good for my appearance.



2004 2010

I'm randomly at my lowest recorded weight since 2003 (the only upside to stress and long hours) so I realized before church this would be the perfect time to wear one of the skirts my mom made that are kind of tight at the waistband. Good choice, turns out at five pounds less they fit great.

Yesterday I went to an ice cream tasting thrown by a couple I know from church. (Balsamic Strawberry - yes. Miso Peach - no.) The husband told me that my Facebook post about salmon-flavored burps made him laugh so hard he wasn't able to post a comment. That makes a couple of people who have told me they like my Facebook posts. It's weird because they just come about because I have friends from every aspect of my life so I can't post about work, I try not to be about church all the time, I don't like doing politics, and that leaves the random little stuff. Like saying that after two years I finally got tired of Frosted Mini Wheats which bizarrely garnered the most replies I've had. It's nice to amuse people though I guess.

This week I've been eating cauliflower with American cheese melted over it. That always reminds me of food coloring.

When I was 13 I wanted to learn how to decorate cakes. The Wilton class at the party store was canceled so I taught myself. But my mom didn't believe in artificial food coloring, so I was limited to coloring frosting with cocoa, spinach juice, or beet juice. While I made some very pretty monochromatic cakes in shades of chocolate the Wilton yearbooks had amazing cakes in a rainbow of colors.

But then there was an incident that made my mom change her mind. One day I wanted to make a cake with pink frosting all over as the base for monochromatic roses and leaves. My mom remembered we'd had beets for dinner earlier that week and instructed me to use the collected juice from the bottom of the jar where the leftovers were stored. So I did.

But when we tasted the cake something was horribly, horribly wrong. What my mom hadn't remembered and I, at 13, didn't think was important, was that my dad had put the beets away in the same container as cauliflower with cheese. So by using the juice in that container for the frosting we had ended up with a cauliflower-, cheese-, and beet-flavored cake.

And after that I was allowed to use fully artificial, fully rainbow food coloring.

Until this week the only camping I had ever done were the yearly trips with my Girl Scout troop in fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. What I remember about these trips are:

1. My troop was clique-y and with an odd number of girls, I was the odd girl out.

2. My troop wasn't that great at camping. One year we never got the propane stove to work and had to ask another troop to heat our taco meat over their charcoal fire.

3. My troop was unprepared. Another girl and I were sent to a craft station to make wind chimes only to find out we were supposed to bring clothes hangers and a variety of metal objects to hang from them. We ended up digging in a fire pit for rusty bolts and suspending them with the provided red yarn from twigs we broke off trees.

In short, not fond memories. But I wanted to try again. I have since college - Ma Tech just never gave us enough free time to actually do it. But I have a ton of vacation at work (the unfortunate result of never getting a chance to take it), and Bonnie, my friend from high school, happened to also want to go camping. Her family camps a lot so not only was she experienced she had all the gear! So this week we took two days and camped at the Samuel P. Taylor park in Marin County in the redwood forest. And it was great! During this trip we did the following:

1. Slept late. Bonnie managed to sleep more than me, I was limited by my bladder capacity.

2. Ate. Turns out you really need a spatula to make pancakes, but we enjoyed lots of snacks and s'mores and meals that were either simply boiled or warmed.

3. Played with fire. I learned the importance of kindling, and also that even if your feet are still cold in your shoes the fire might be hot enough to bubble the entire bottom of your sneakers if you raise them above the rim of the fire pit. Also, of the options of pine cones, dryer lint, and marshmallows, marshmallows are by far the most entertaining thing to throw into the flames.

4. Went on a seven mile walk. Bonnie appeared unaffected. Two days later my legs are still hurting.

5. And for the majority of the time we sat around and read. I finished about a book and a half and two Entertainment Weekly's.

It was great. It was very relaxing, which I needed after this year at work. Everything was simple and basic. I like camping! Good to know.










We were very proud we managed to put up the tent.
















This picture captures the majority of our trip - reading by the fire.

Good trip!

My floor at work moves to another building next week so they can remodel the office space. New carpet, new paint, ceiling tiles that aren't brown from leaks, enough routes to the exits to comply with fire code, lots of nice things. Boxes were delivered yesterday for us to start packing, and now the office is a labyrinth of stacked boxes that I want to build a fort with but unfortunately have to act like an adult. The atmosphere is very like the end of the year in college, when everyone was madly trying to pack and move out while completing final exams.

Am officially an owner of a big flat screen TV now. Melissa came out last Friday and helped me choose one. Actually went with an LED, the newest technology. For someone who didn't own a microwave till 2007 this is quite an accomplishment. Gotta say, I love it. The picture is so clear and so big. I spend more time on the couch and less in my computer chair, which I realized I used more because it was closer to the TV.

I'm very tired. Though work has calmed down from the mondo-project that finished at the end of May it's still been busy, and I keep having to prioritize lab-work over the reports and presentations I also need to do. I need more sleep. Much more sleep.

In other news, successfully replicated a pilaf I liked from one of our lunch meetings. Here goes:

Abby’s Rice and Quinoa Pilaf
1 medium to large onion, chopped
1 pat (~1T) butter
1-2 tsp salt
¾ c quinoa, rinsed
1 pat (~1T) butter
1 ½ c jasmine, basmati, or long grain white rice
1 can chicken broth

Melt butter in nonstick skillet. Add onion and salt heavily. Cook over low to medium-low heat until soft. Meanwhile, rinse quinoa and put into rice cooker. Once onion is soft, add additional butter to skillet. Increase heat to high, add rice, and cook, stirring often, until rice is opaque. Add more salt if you feel like it. Scrape rice into rice cooker. Pour in can of chicken broth. Top with water to the correct marking for 2 ¼ c rice (on my rice cooker this is line “3”). Cook in rice cooker like rice.

Graham emailed me today with his belated analysis of the Lost finale. Since he had long since given up hope of having all his questions answered he was reasonably satisfied. He included some links to websites that summarized the show and/or listed unresolved mysteries. Then he asked if I am getting more satisfied with the conclusion as time goes on.

I'm going to have to write back that as time goes on I get more ticked off! Their "Light"/purgatory ending was hooey. Why were the Numbers important in WWII before many of the "candidates" were born, since the wall o' candidates indicated there were plenty of others throughout time? Why couldn't women on the island have kids? What was with Desmond? Seriously, how did each character redeem himself enough to get to go their their secular Heaven? Back when Lost first started it was such an amazing story, but being a truly amazing story requires a completely storyline, and sorry Lost, you got 80% of the way there and then went to the-"oh crap, we can't possible tie all this up, let's make up some magical light/life-force explanation and tack it on the end"-place.

Yeah, madder with time.

Through cajoling and machinations got three days off of work in a row. This would have been easier if my boss hadn't decided to take vacation overlapping mine, because as of Monday I was counting on her taking care of the lab work on Friday, but now it'll be taken care of by her boss, who is the one who trained me so I trust her to do it right. As long as the reactors get fed while I'm gone it'll be okay. The little buggers are eating a whole ton this time, too. This point of this experiment is to actually decrease the number of times we have to feed them, and then we happened to get a new type of cell that eats even more! Cleaning the reactors will be interesting this time - they grew so much there's swaths of thick yellow residue clinging to the exposed glass of the reactors, which is worse than I've ever seen.

New blog design comes courtesy of Melissa, who made some shots of Robosaurus into a banner that perfectly illustrates the title "Small but Weird."

Twinkies

Sometimes a single Facebook posting can spawn an entire event.

This time it was a friend from church who posted a link to a website called Instructables that gave (shocker) instructions for how to make fake Twinkies. He posted it because I've made fake Twinkies a few times in my "cream canoe" pan and brought them to church. Church people are quite taken with my Twinkies - I can make the exact same cake and filling in both Twinkie and cupcake form and the Twinkies go tons faster.

Inspired by that I decided to hold a Twinkie Tasting last Monday. I invited tons of people from church and made five types of Twinkies:

1. "Al" - the pound cake mix-based official copycat recipe from the Instructables, but filled with the cooked filling from the cream canoe pan's instructions, which I thought was quite similar to the real Twinkie filling

2. "Billy Bob" - a butter yellow cake mix filled with whipped cream

3. "Cletus" - the King Arthur Flour snack cake recipe, which had a very eggy cake and another cooked filling

4. "Dusty" - the organic vegan cake recipe from the Instructables paired with the Instructables gluten-free filling (which was just frosting), except the cake wasn't actually organic because Abby don't do that crap, though I did use real soy milk and maple syrup.

Here's a picture taken by the friend who originally posted the Instructables, Francis:




Cletus is the main focus and then Dusty is in the foreground. Cletus won on similarity to real Twinkies, which I had available for comparison, and Dusty tied with Cletus for taste. With all its weird ingredients Dusty had more actual taste. I would make that recipe again but probably try to substitute real milk for the soy milk and work out some ratio of brown sugar and water for the maple syrup because that stuff's expensive!

I thought it was very interesting that many of the guests had never had real Twinkies before, and also how much everyone disliked them, especially in comparison to the homemade ones. I was also surprised how much people liked the tater tot casserole I served beforehand. Since I had scheduled the tasting for 7 I thought I should provide dinner, but it needed to be easy since five batches of homemade Twinkies is a lot of work. And I was very taken with the Too Easy Hotdish recipe given in the most recent Hannah Swensen mystery novel that I listened to on book-on-tape on the way back from Oceanside after my work trip. A layer of ground meat, a layer of cream-of-something soup, a layer of tater tots, a scattering of cheese and bake till bubbling. Even though I automatically browned the meat and turns out you don't need to, it turned out very good.

Strangely, one of the guys at the party tasted it and asked, "Is this ground beef 80/20? 90/10? No, 80/20?" Even though it was browned he could identify the fat content! I was also forced to admit I bought the cheap stuff at Safeway but that was all right.

Talked to Bonnie this weekend about our camping trip in a few weeks. I haven't gone camping since middle school Girl Scouts so I wasn't sure what exactly you do when you camp, besides hike. Bonnie says she normally brings a big pile of magazines and sits around and reads.

Man that sounds fantastic. I'm looking forward to that more than ever. Also, I just found out you can check out magazines from the library. Only for a week, but I plan to make that work. Magazines ahoy!

In Abby news I finally finished the Lost finale. It took me a week. First I had to get caught up on the back episodes, which took a while because if they're not on the DVR I forget I need to watch them. Then the finale itself was two and a half hours long, which is quite a commitment.

Two and a half hours, and they still didn't tie everything up. Now, I'm a sucker for a happy ending. Movies don't have to have a happy ending, they just have to be satisfactory and conclusive and the bad guy has to be brought to justice and it just has to make sense. But I'll give a movie a lot of leeway for stupidity if it has a very happy ending. That's why I can still enjoy the absolute wrecks of romantic comedies Hollywood has been turning out lately.

But the ending of Lost was not satisfactory OR happy. It was fake happy. Manipulatively pretending to be happy.

Annoying.

In other news, my project at work that has been so hard officially ended last Sunday. Hurray! Beyond one final update email tomorrow all that's left is writing various reports and submitting some samples different places. It's so nice knowing that there isn't something going on that could have massive problems I would have to deal with. I wasn't even upset when I got woken up at 6:45 this morning by a call from the pilot plant (it was my fault, I hadn't told them something yesterday that they needed to know).

Another recent development is that my friend Bonnie and decided to go camping. I haven't gone camping since the trip with Girl Scouts when I was 11. I've been wanting to try again for a while, and Bonnie wanted to go too. I already have plans, which I'll need to run by Bonnie. Since this is me, the plans are all about food. I want to make pancakes in the morning, because if you buy a boxed mix that's really easy, and they're delicious. And I also want to make Angels on Horseback, which were described as bacon cooked around a square of cheese and eaten on a roll in "Sal Fisher at Girl Scout Camp", a book I loved in fifth grade. We're going to go a campground in Marin County the week after the Fourth of July. Bonnie sent me a list of places she knew of and I picked that one because it had redwoods. I'm a sucker for redwoods. Hate the beach, love redwoods. Well, take-or-leave the beach. I'm not a sunbather. Though my neighbor thinks I am - last Sunday when I left my apartment in a skirt and heels, carrying a sweatshirt jacket and a Bible the same neighbor whose Mercedes got smashed by the tree branch said "Oh, going sunbathing?" So weird.

I'm currently in week two of a decision not to buy any more food except milk and just eat from what I have in the cupboards and freezer. This week was refried beans and taco-flavored brown rice on wholegrain corn tortillas, in a tasty but weirdly fiber-filled combination. Next I think will be assorted small servings of leftovers I froze. I was going to do this for three weeks but I've barely touched my cupboards at all so I think I'm going to keep going. I'll have to buy some food for Twinkie night (I invited people from church over to try several recipes of replica Twinkies), but that doesn't count. Essentially I've got a lot of pasta I should work my way through. I could make pasta e ceci again, and maybe that cupboard staple and nutritionally deficient pasta with garlic and olive oil the books tout so much. I could have basic spaghetti too. And I've got beans out the wazoo too, I do love me some beans. I tried a vegetarian chili recipe from America's Test Kitchen that was good but not perfect, I could try changing it to suit my taste. Maybe by adding meat, let's face it, God made animals delicious.

This whole adventure might be gated by when I run out frozen and canned fruits and vegetables because even if I would be perfectly happy eating pasta and beans continually scurvy really doesn't sound fun.

Who wants to go to the rodeo?

No, that's not an expression. The charity guy on the phone just sounded so sad. Pathetically sad. And it was only $40 for tickets for five people to the rodeo in SF in October on some random Wednesday at 7:30. I don't care too much about the San Mateo County police's after-school programs for kids but the guy sounded so sad. And it should count as a charitable contribution, I think (I'll have to check with my dad). And it was only $40. And it's a rodeo, which I think my sister might want to go to. And the guy sounded so sad.

Sigh. I'm going to be on those call lists forever now. I am such a sucker.

In other news, I discovered Overstock.com via Allison, and now bought two pairs of earrings! I know I know, I shouldn't go crazy. One pair of cubic zirconia square studs to replace my old Claire's cheapy ones that are peeling and uncomfortable, and one pair of pink round studs that inexplicably appealed to me. I'm not a pink person, even though I got a pink hoody a while ago and decided I should wear more pink. Because it looked good, and I should be more girly. Speaking of which, last week I discovered what "topcoat" was for, and it makes a difference! Turns out it's not interchangeable with clear nail polish. At least not the Wet and Wild clear nail polish I have.

"Living in America is not a right just because you can walk across the border. Being an American is a responsibility and it comes by respecting and upholding the Constitution the law of our land which says what you must do to be a citizen of this country. Freedom is not free."

I've been back from Oceanside for two weeks now. Work has been busy because I have to go back to working multiple projects rather than just the one big one, but there have been fewer hours. Eight hour days? Weekends? Wow, this is what a normal life feels like? No wonder people like it!

While I was in Oceanside and didn't have any real daylight hours for extracurricular activities or my usual hobbies to occupy myself I got used to exercising every day. And I've almost kept it up! Since it's spring and the sun's out so much longer that helps with the "I just want to be gone" feeling I get at the end of the day that prevents me from going to the work gym. I've also been jogging around the neighborhood which I can do now because the Egoscue book the orthopedist recommended fixed me so I won't injure my knee every time I try to run.

And today I noticed a strange effect from all this exercise. I was trying on cardigans at Target (found one, by the way, it's super cute), turned to the side, and noticed my butt isn't where it used to be. It moved. Vertically. And maybe outward. I measured myself after I came back, my hip measurement is the same as always (it correlates with my weight, I have the graph to prove it). It just...rearranged. How weird!

So about the cardigan, I've shunned cardigans previously because they tend to make my upper arms look like sausages but I went there on the recommendation of my sister and found one! Not the ones she actually told me about but a similar one. And it looks good! And of course it was the only one in the entire freaking store and isn't on the website so I can't get it in every single color like I want to. Frustrating!

Tomorrow my friend Yael from work is coming over to cook dinner together. She's "kosher-itarian" so I was trying to find vegetarian recipes when she happened to mention she does eat fish. I picked out a baked tilapia recipe we'll try. We'll see if tilapia can be added to my short acceptable fish list of 1. salmon 2. tuna fillets in envelopes 3. swordfish at the fancy smancy restaurant in Lafayette 4. fish of fish and chips and 5. fish of fish sticks.

And in other news I got a dishwasher! The hotel I stayed at in Oceanside had a dishwasher and I enjoyed it. Then coming back, and having to do dishes upon dishes just frustrated me. So I started looking around for how much portable dishwashers were both new and on Craigslist. Nicer ones on Craigslist were still $300-$400, and most were black. My whole kitchen is white so that would look horrible. But then Saturday someone put up a new posting for a white dishwasher only $120. I called and it hadn't been sold yet so I said I wanted it. It ended up working out perfectly. It was a married couple who had only used it for a year, then moved to a place that had a built-in so this dishwasher took up space in the garage for five years. The wife seemed to really want it gone - they delivered it to my apartment to get rid of it! I had to go to the hardware store to put a special attachment on my faucet in place of the aerator and then I could hook it up fine. I ran it once empty to clean it, then accumulated two days of dishes and ran it last night. It's so fantastic! A machine washed my dishes for me. A machine washed my dishes FOR me. And it cleaned them better than I do! Really awesome.

He's Generous - Just With Other People's Money

I donated a higher percentage of my income to charity last year than the President of the United States.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36563288/ns/politics-white_house/

The Nobel Prize doesn't count as income, since he didn't earn it. Or, you know, deserve it.

Round Trip

Drove round trip from SoCal to home this weekend for Jason's birthday. I like road trips so I enjoyed it. This boggles the minds of most people at work. But compared to flying when I'd have to drive to the airport parking, take a shuttle to the airport, wait for a plane, fly on the plane, take a cab or public transportation home, driving only takes two more hours and three to four fewer vehicles. And when I drive I get to do things like use the bathroom whenever I want and stop at vista points, like this one on I-5:



It's nice that it's the time of year when things are still green. Though the Central Valley was very dusty in sections, with signs villifying Congress for artificially creating the second Dust Bowl and sacrificing so many people's livelihoods in order to save some piddly fish.

Jason's party was a lot of fun. Dinner was pizza and we've wisely gone the extreme non-environmentally-friendly route with plastic cups, silverware, and plates so there was minimal cleanup. The cousins got to gabbing in the back room which led my uncle Allan to tell my dad, the two of whom had been blocked into the corner unable to follow our pop-culture/technology conversation to say "Generation gap? Try generation canyon!" My mom also took the opportunity to pretend she had knocked my cousin Amanda's iPhone off the cabinet and shattered into pieces which completely freaked her out. My cousin Alex refused to let us put on 2012 to look for the parts he did the special effects for, but he did tell us about the new movie he's working on, which sounds hilariously awesome.

Now I'm back at work, and it might have calmed down. Today there was only one crisis and it was immediately resolved. Mostly what I've been doing while I'm here is taking pictures like this:



Thrilling, huh?

This morning I actually ran two miles on the treadmill, which might be the most I've ever jogged. I was distracted initially because a guy came into the workout room and talked to me. He asked me where I was from so I said "San Francisco". I mean, close enough. But he immediately asked "Are you gay?" Seriously? How in the world do you think that's clever, funny, or acceptable? Great impression.

A Few Hours Off Work

No one can say I didn't try to go to church this Easter.

Since the thing at work I needed to be at while I'm on this business trip was supposed to start at one I looked for a church with an early morning service and chose one with a service at nine. However, when I went to silence my phone before driving there I saw that in the few minutes I'd left my phone unattended to get breakfast I'd gotten a message from the plant that they'd changed the time to nine. Drat. I shucked off my skirt and heels, threw on jeans and tennis shoes, swiped off my make-up (you can't wear make-up in the plant), and got there in fifteen minutes, only five minutes after nine. I finished all my work around one, but there went all the morning services.

So I looked up a church that had an evening service. One did, the Six Flags Over Jesus I'd seen on my trips around town whose website heavily featured their creepily mustachioed pastor. So I got dressed up again and headed out. Big church, empty parking lot. Seriously, not a single car. They had a sign near the entrance touting their Easter egg hunt, so my initial thought that they were a cult that had been bankrupted or run out of town must have been false, but it also just mentioned a 10 am service, no 6 pm. So I guess they cancelled their evening service for Easter and didn't put it on the website.

At that point I figured I had done the best I could, came back, read the Easter story in Mark, and went to work out.

Besides work, working out, and trying to go to church, my other activity today was napping. I thought I'd sleep for just a little bit during a 48 Hours Mystery about an Alaskan stripper who had three fiances, one of which was shot to death, and sure enough I woke up while it was still on. But it turned out to be later than I thought because for some reason the channel ran repeats back to back.

And how I woke up was unusual. My thought process was something like "WhatisthatisthatsomeonebouncingonthefloorabovemeoristhatanohI'mgoingunderthekitchentablejustincase", so in the span of about two seconds I dove under the kitchen table, dragging the blanket from my nap with me. I watched out the window as the palm tree across the parking lot swayed heavily back and forth. Yup, earthquake. I waited about half a minute till it stopped (it felt like it kept going and going), then emerged to grab my cell phone and computer. The computer to check if the earthquake was reported or if I was insane. Luckily USGS had it up quickly, and a high school classmate who ended up in San Diego posted on Facebook right away so it wasn't just me. Later on a guy from work texted me that the plant was fine, which I had worried about and thought maybe I should go in to check but then realized I would have no idea A. what to look for and B. how to fix anything so I didn't.

Surprisingly, yesterday I did have a few hours off of work. I worked in the morning till about 2 pm, and then decided to do something more constructive than watch TV (my first inclination), and visited La Jolla Cove, which an SSF coworked who used to live in San Diego recommended. The actual cove was smaller than I'd thought, but it was very pretty.



It made me think of the Masterharper's cove in the Pern books. I had thought because spring just started it wouldn't be too crowded but I was wrong. Despite all the people I got around pretty well and took lots of pictures. Adjacent to the cove were additional beaches, including this neat rocky one.



Afterward I went further into San Diego to eat at a Roadfood place, El Indio. It was fantastic. I got a combo with a pork tamale, beef enchilada, and a fish taco because that's what Roadfood recommends and I trust them, even though I'm severely against fish tacos. Why would you eat fish in a taco if there was any legged creature available to make into a taco? And considering that we live in America where fish is usually more expensive than legged animals, seriously why would you do it? In any case, I'm a little more adventurous with my food choices when I'm traveling for business, so I got it. Here's my plate, along with the Orange Bang drink:



Gotta say, the Orange Bang was delicious. It was a fountain drink that said it was a "whipped drink", and it tasted like melted orange sherbet. I'd get that again. The enchilada was fantastic, the shredded beef filling was spicy and tasty and the sauce was thicker and more flavorful than usual. I can actually understand why people like enchiladas now, before I just considered them Mexican restaurant menu filler. The tamale was also very good, the shredded pork filling was tasty and the masa was soft. I'm a stickler for masa. The rice and beans were typical and I love me some rice and beans so that's good. The chips, made from their homemade tortillas were too thick for my taste.

As for the fish taco - for something that had a mayonnaise-based condiment sauce on top AND was a fish taco, it was pretty dang good. I wouldn't say I liked it, and I wouldn't eat it again, but I ate most of it, and could appreciate why people would like it - which compared to the other fish tacos I've tried which have been entirely vomitastic, is high high praise. It was a big stick of fried fish inside two corn tortillas with shredded cabbage and that pink tartar sauce. And it wasn't bad. I should mention that the homemade corn tortillas were a revelation, they were amazing. I bought a package of their flour tortillas to take home to eat with my can of Dennison's chili beans, but I did that before I tried the corn tortillas, they were great.

The other meals I've tried while I was down here was chicken parmesan from an Italian place (pretty good, nothing to write home about), a Mexican place highly rated on Yelp that paled compared to El Indio, and coconut lemongrass soup, pad thai, and red curry green bean chicken from a Thai place (very good, got four meals out of one dinner order). I've also tried some freezer skillet items because out of the last week three out of five weekdays I worked 11-12 hours, and at 7 or 8 at night I somehow can't handle having to find a restaurant, put in an order, and pick it up. I'd rather stop at the grocery store and then quickly fix something here.

Next week I may branch out from the "let's try the local restaurants Yelp recommends" to "ooh, I've never tried this big box chain restaurant before" and go to places like Romano's Macaroni Grill.

That was a good weekend.

I took Friday as a vacation day, which meant that I worked on my presentations at home rather than at the office but I got to sleep in so that counts. Friday night I went and played Bingo at Christy's grandmother's Elks lodge which is a lot of fun even if I don't win anything (and I usually don't).

Then Christy came to my place and we had a sleepover. Quite a traditional sleepover, with late-night chatting, sleeping in, and then pancakes. I made the triple ginger pancakes from the King Arthur whole grain cookbook and they were really good. I thought they'd be overwhelmingly gingery what with the powdered ginger, fresh ginger, and crystallized ginger but no. They were just pancakes with a delightful ginger flavor. And whole grain!

Then Christy and I rented Precious from a Redbox ripoff at the grocery store, which was very convenient and I completely understand why Blockbuster is screwed. The movie was good. Not uplifting but not as depressing as I'd predicted. We watched a little Eddie Izzard afterward to get the taste out of our minds. "They conquered the world through the cunning use of flags!"

Today was back to the grind. I really feel as if I have a regular job plus labwork, because I have to edge the labwork into odd little pieces of my day. A little bit of cell culture work in the morning, some arranging samples after that, meetings, desk work, going back to lab to sample, desk work again, running back to collect the samples, etc. I was walking all over so I didn't feel too bad I didn't make it to the gym (had to leave later than I wanted to, and was very hungry, all add up to not making it to the gym). Though I did boogie out to The Secret Handshake for twenty minutes at home, which should also count as exercise.

Thursday at the church group they're having groups from all over come to hear some big speaker guy. Christy and I admitted to each other we're excited about the prospect of meeting new guys besides the ones at our own church. I'll be covering the food table for a girl who can't be there, and I plan to bake something too. I'll have to think carefully about what would be the best thing to bring...

I can name 31 types of cheese.

I learned that in my training session today. Also some stuff about change control, new product introduction, process catalog. But mostly that now I can list 31 types of cheese. I forgot a few--Stilton, Edam.

Work has been busy. I have two important presentations in the next two weeks and I'm not prepared yet. So much other stuff has come up. I'm not even really sure what I do each day but these presentations, the major things I have do, don't get done. I did have a really great breakthrough yesterday. There was going to have to be meetings and discussion about how many decimal places we kept in this series of documents because when you imported values from Excel to Word, Word Word kept changing all these numbers to either look like "1. " instead of "1.00" or "0.249999999999" instead of "0.25". But I was trying it myself, and I realized if you put the number in to Excel with a single quote ahead of it before you imported it to Word, to designate it as text rather than a number, it came out perfectly. I let the tech writer know and she was incredibly happy. A single punctuation mark can save having to coordinate significant figure agreement across several departments! Thank goodness.

Sigh. Time to go to bed already. That two hours of non-work time went fast.

Spent three days in Oceanside this week for work. Meetings and meetings and giving a training. Our group leader (my original boss) always insists I enjoy myself on trips for work, go to the beach, etc.

Those are kind of mutually exclusive for me. What do you do on a beach? Swim, I guess. I'm not into swimming. Sunbathe, but you know, the cancer, plus it's a work trip so I'm in the office during daylight hours. Scuba or surf but I'm allergic to wetsuits. Build sandcastles, I'd actually like that, but I A. never remember, B. never have the relevant equipment and C. would look stark raving crazy doing it on my own as an adult. And that leaves walking on the beach, which I did do.

The truth is I'd worked out at the hotel gym that morning so my legs starting hurting after I'd walked about 20 minutes, so I took some time to walk very slowly and then very quickly through a flock of seagulls, which was actually quite entertaining and juvenile, and then went back to the car.

That night I got the best pad thai I've ever had from a place called Thai One On. My sister and I have tried pad thai at a number of places by now and I never saw why people liked it. But this place's pad thai, simply delicious. Interestingly flavored noodles, little bit of crunch from peanuts, just great. I'd get it again. I also got a fish dish because I thought fish would be healthy but it turned out to be fried and wasn't fantastic.

There was another food find, too. A place called The Petite Madeline Bakery, highly rated on Yelp. They had a pastry that was croissant dough rolled up with cinnamon sugar like a cinnamon roll but coated on all sides, not just inside, and then baked in a muffin tin. They called them the All-Day Buns, and they were heavenly. I went twice. The first time I also got a chocolate croissant and the second time I also got a "meltaway cookie" that had the most amazing delicate texture and a raspberry walnut scone that was the best scone I've ever had with a simultaneous moist and tender crumb and a vein of raspberry jam on top. On my first visit I got a vanilla latte which was about as good as Starbucks (i.e. nothing to write home about), but on the second visit I tried one of their teas because it had freesias in it. I love freesias as a flower because they smell great, but I'd never eaten them before. And the tea was very good. The only tea that I've never needed sugar in. It seemed naturally sweet. I've looked for something similar online I could purchase and can't find it.

I'm afraid my expense report for this trip is going to look really odd. The first night when I was driving from the airport to the hotel, I didn't know anywhere to stop for dinner so about halfway there I got off the highway and planned to use my GPS to search for restaurants (the most useful feature of the fancy-smancy GPS I bought, moreso than the traffic alerts that were the reason I got that model). But the first safe-looking place to pull over had an El Pollo Loco. I was curious about El Pollo Loco, having only tried it once before in high school I think, so I ate there. Turns out I shouldn't have, but now I know. The next night I couldn't pick anywhere I specifically wanted to go to dinner, rendered indecisive by everything's large relative distance from the hotel and that at the time I didn't feel like Thai which was the most recommended on Yelp, until I saw that a grocery store was nearby and I honestly gasped out loud and thought "I could buy a Lunchable!" I swear, I've got to be the only adult in the Four Seasons who thinks that. And I got a Lunchable, and a bag of salad, and a tangerine thing that rattled around in its rind but was good. And a pint of Ben and Jerry's. And I really enjoyed it! We're allotted over $50 for dinner and I had a Lunchable. And then the next day, there was a Taco Bell within walking distance of the plant, and I'd been seeing commercials for their new 5-layer burrito with nacho sauce between two tortillas around beans, meat, and cheese. It sounded great. I like tortillas (and pasta and noodles and bread and rice and everything white, refined, and anti-Atkins), and nacho cheese, and overall it just sounded great. But by this point, past the bakery the previous morning, a pint of Ben and Jerry's, and everything else I felt I should only get one Taco Bell item. So I just got the 5-layer burrito. It cost 97 cents. I am going to expense-report 97 for lunch. Plus, the next night I got kind of lost trying to find a restaurant near the airport before I returned the rental car, didn't have time to go to a sit-down restaurant, and ended up at a Dell Taco because there were several fast food joints and I'd never eaten at a Dell Taco before. Like Taco Bell, but it serves hamburgers and fries in addition to tacos. I decided I like Taco Bell better.

Anyway, it's going to be a really weird expense report. The whole time I was there I kept thinking what was my boss going to think when she had to review the expense report. It's an odd assortment of food. I think a lot of it was that the hotel was really far away from everything, like 20 minutes. It was hard to coordinate getting dinner after work when I wasn't necessarily hungry right at five. When I'm down there for longer at the end of the month I'll stay in a hotel that's closer to the plant, to restaurants, and that will have a kitchen. Just having a fridge will make things easier, this time I kept shoving salad in the little mini bar.

Schools of Thought

According to Mythbusters, there are two schools of thought when it comes to dog training. One is to reward good behavior and punish bad behavior. The other is to reward good behavior and simply ignore bad behavior.

I would like to be treated in the second way.

That's something I have come to realize about myself. I like praise. If I'm told I did something well I'll continue to try to do it the same way, or improve. I don't like criticism. I accept that criticism is necessary, but I don't like it. Because I normally always know if I did something wrong so I'm not going to not try and avoid doing it again. I will work harder and more consistently to earn praise than to avoid censure.

But if there's no reward at all for good behavior, only punishment for bad behavior...Why try?

It would be like getting these comments after you threw a dinner party:

"The chicken was delicious. You have a knack with chicken."

"The chicken was so delicious it made up for the green beans tasting like feet."

"The green beans tasted like feet."

The first guest you share your recipe with and invite again. The second guest you'll hesitate before inviting again. And the third guest you show the door. You'll try a different green bean recipe the next time the first guest comes over, maybe go to the effort of testing different recipes beforehand, because you want to make food she'll enjoy. You'll make a different vegetable altogether when (and if) the second guest comes again because you don't want to be told it tastes like feet. And you'll avoid the third guest entirely because you don't like being insulted.

The annoying this is that even though I recognize this about myself now I haven't found a way to better deal with second and third guests.

Weekend Adventures

I wanted to go hiking yesterday but everyone was either busy or observant enough to realize the weather report was calling for rain so instead I walked to the drugstore that's further away from my house in order to get exercise. It did rain, so it was cold and my hair went absolutely insane but it was still enjoyable. I also got lost when I was coming back, which was kind of stupid. I mean, I was about a mile and a half north of my apartment between El Camino Real on the west (to the right) and California Ave on the east (to the left). I kept going straight (south) or right (what I thought was west), but ended up on California Ave, to the east! Strangely, I think I've done that before, too.

Besides the apricot scrub I'd gone for (finally realizing I don't have to bemoan my peeling face, they make products for that) I saw they had Helene's Mint Julep Mask. I remember Catherine using that at Tech. Because this is relatively memorable:



But that stuff worked! Afterward my skin felt great, really smooth. I'm going to keep using it.

That was my biggest activity for the weekend, since Friday, which was the book club with work people, wasn't technically the weekend. That was fun, though. The book was The White Tiger, a very unflattering look at India. Only about half the people there had read the book so we didn't get too deep into it. Sonali, the organizer, had also ordered Indian pizza which I'd never heard of before. Apparently that's what happens when Indian people buy a pizza place in the Mission District.

I also had cooking adventures. Yesterday I made baked bean soup, which I normally enjoy, but the hot dogs I had in the freezer were Safeway brand and they were awful. So bad I couldn't make myself eat the soup and threw it away. Luckily I'd used homemade vegetable stock so in reality I was only out about 88 cents of baked beans. Since I was horrified by the taste of the soup I needed something comforting so I made Kraft mac and cheese and artichokes. Artichokes might count as a vegetable but I've always thought of them as having more entertainment value than nutritional value. Plus there's so little actual edible on them I don't know how they could be good for you.

Then today I made really good pancakes. I used the recipe from the America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook and added some of the sweet dough emulsion my mom got me for Christmas. I think it added a subtle background that made the pancakes a little beyond the ordinary. Plus, I was really hungry by the time they were done which makes anything taste better. And I had Mrs. Butterworth syrup. I grew up with pure maple syrup and now I just love me some butter- and maple-flavored artificial corn syrup.

Today I also realized that I need to post on Facebook when I do social activities because for the past two weeks or more I have only commented about food.

Coastline

Rather than just laze around (though I seriously considered it) I went for a walk along the Bay Trail today. I started at one of the bayside parks in San Mateo that I found out about when I tried to get home from Target on surface streets.

I think it was around two and a half miles round trip, so it counts as my exercise. I also took my camera and took pictures. I'd gotten some photography books out of the library, so these are me trying harder than usual to take good pictures. I think they're a step up from my usual.

In one of those "duh" moments I was marveling at how much more blue the water seemed than usual before I realized the sky was blue for the first time in a long time and that the two are undoubtedly correlated. Idiot.

After I came home I tried making a yellow cake with the Princess Cake Emulsion flavoring my mom had gotten me for Christmas. The Sweet Dough Emulsion was good in some rolls I made, but I can't tell if the Princess Cake one was because the recipe I used for the cake was too eggy. Bleh. It will be a donation to the magical "table off which food disappears" at work.

My parents came out yesterday for a nice visit. My mom brought me zombies, which are better than my usual zombies because she has a deft touch with bread dough that I do not have. They also brought with them my latest Amazon order, which includes a book the orthopedist recommended, "The Egoscue Method of Health Through Motion," which is very interesting. I already had a packet of stretches and exercises the orthopedist gave me that are geared toward runners, but this book has extra exercises geared toward three different posture problems. Mine is "Condition III", because I tend to stand with my hands in front rather than at my sides. Hopefully the exercises will help me stop hurting myself so often when I exercise. Just the other week I strained a groin muscle on the elliptical.

Today was a pretty relaxing today for having to go work. I woke up strangely early around eight thirty so I got to work before eleven. I only had to do one media hold, which should be quick because you just pump media into a reactor, but the whole process takes closer to two hours because you have to wait around forty minutes for the media to heat up before you sample. With this experiment I have to put up a media hold each day for ten straight days so I'm very familiar with how long it takes. The other day I amused myself by calculating that the media warms up at .757 deg C/min.

Anyway, after work I bought See's candy with our company discount. One pound for Catherine because she's in grad school and it's stressing her out, so I wanted to send it to her with the Smart Shade foundation and blush I was intrigued by but found out really, really doesn't work on me, which she's willing to try. I'll try to think of something else to put in the package to try and cheer her up too. And then a pound of See's for me too because I love chocolate, and I've finally realized I'll eat less of higher quality chocolate because it's more satisfying. Plus, it's just so freaking delicious.

Then I wanted to stop at the used office furniture store I pass by on my way home sometimes, called Repo Depot, because I think the desk chair I inherited from my childhood bedroom isn't cutting it anymore. I can sit in my desk chair at work all day and not have a problem but in the one at home I end up in all kinds of crazy positions with the most frequent one probably being sitting with my right foot on the chair legs and my left leg on top of the desk. I've noticed my shoulder hurts most in the evenings when I'm at my desk and I think there's a connection, so I've decided to get a new chair. Anyway, there was a big "OPEN" sign outside the store so I turned into the parking lot to find it closed. Then I realized the sign says "Open to the Public" rather than just "Open." Slightly misleading. Plus, I could see the chairs in the window and not only were they outdated (understandably) they were very expensive (not understandably). Like one was $999. For a chair! For a used chair! That chair better make me breakfast for that price, I mean holy cow.

Since I was there and obviously wasn't spending time at the store I crossed the street to the public waterfront. I've walked on the bay trail at other points, more to the south nearer to my apartment and more north, at work, but this particular spot was new. I walked a little distance and it was nice and calm. Not quite waterfront, more like mudflats, and the main view is the airport, but still nice.

But what made my day most relaxing was that when I came home I didn't turn on the computer or TV and just read. That was just perfect. I did do a week's worth of dishes (yes, I'm disgusting sometimes) and put away last week's laundry (yeah, work was busy this week), and also started broth with vegetable scraps. And I salted zucchini to make for dinner, which improves them so much. And I made curry green beans, too.

So all in all it was relaxing AND productive. That's doing quite well.

Hair

Tomorrow I get my hair cut.

That's normally noteable, I only mention it this time because I haven't had it cut in four months. This was partially trying to grow it out and partially my usual stylist going on maternity leave, coupled with devout inertia. My hair is now the longest it has been since I grew it out sophomore year of high school, so I documented it this morning before work:




















Obviously should have done this before I turned all the lights off but frankly I'm not at my best at 7 am. That time I put the milk away right next to the cereal, on top of the refrigerator, is additional proof.

I'm hoping to tell the substitute stylist I want layers such that when my hair inevitably curls away from my head in the humidity that it looks like it was on purpose. Well, I should say I plan to tell her that, what I'm hoping is that she doesn't laugh at me. But I guess I've never had a stylist actually laugh at me. The worst was that one who nodded sadly when I described the haircut I wanted her to fix as "slightly mullet-y".

Fluffy Ain't So Fluffy

Sophomore year in college Karen and I bought plants at Kroger because they were on sale. She purchased a broad-leafed yellow-green pathos-like plant and I got a bushy ivy-like plant and a small, unlabeled mysteriously fluffy little one. We bought them at the self-checkout and I tried to use up my excess change but the machine was full of quarters. Frustrated at how long I took to pay my bill in the smaller denominations Karen named her plant "Penny". And I named the unlabeled plant "Fluffy".

The ivy-like plant did not last long. Our deluxe Georgia Tech dorm accommodations that year ran to leaking windows and uncontrolled indoor climate. The powers that be had turned air conditioning on before spring break but turned heat back on while we were gone. Most of our plants didn't like being baked alive, without water, for a full week, but Penny and Fluffy survived.

I don't remember where Fluffy spent that summer, but the next year we found out he was a climbing plant. From the little ball of fluff he sent out long tendrils that we wound up our dorm wall nearly to the ceiling. He spent the next summer with Catherine and enjoyed the Georgia heat and humidity on her parents' porch.

The next summer was not as good. I left him with Karen because Karen had plants of her own. But with the plants of her own she didn't have room in her car for Fluffy at the time. So she decided to cut the entire plant off an inch from the ground.

And he came back! That year in the dorm he grew back from his shorn state and climbed again. He didn't like being shoved behind a couch but that was the way the furniture had to be arranged.

After that he got to travel across the country to California, and has been draped around my living room ever since, taped to the walls or strung with yarn across the window.

And somehow, sedate living was the worst thing to ever happen to him. For the past few months he's been turning brown and shedding like crazy. Fluffy-detritus gathered on the windowsills and in my sewing kit. I'd vacuum every once in a while, and fertilized him, but he confusingly kept both dying and sending out new sprouts.

So this weekend I took drastic measures.

I repotted him.

This probably sounds minor to other people with houseplants, but there's an important point I haven't mentioned about this plant.

Holy cow it's got thorns. Tons of freaking thorns. Thorns that can gouge huge holes in your bare flesh. As I know, from copious experience.

That's probably why it's been four or five years since he was repotted.

So this, the first completely free Saturday I've had in a long, long time, I sucked it up and did it.

I went to Osh to get more soil and a huge pot (to delay a repeat of this for as long as possible). Then I cut Fluffy out of the blinds, cut off a lot of brown parts, and then dragged him outside my front door so I could vacuum. I climbed over him to get outside and snagged my jeans up and down the legs on his thorns! Stupid thorns. I'm glad it was my third best set of jeans. So I went back inside to get one of my numerous pairs of Target $1 cotton gloves to wear while I repotted him. But those weren't enough, and now I have little cuts over all my knuckles. But I did it.

Now Fluffy is in a big giant pot, trailed again over the window, and it stings when I wash my hands. He looks a lot better at the moment because I cut off the brown, so it remains to be seen whether this will actually halt the death process.

In other news, I am very curious about the new Domino's pizza. It's a bold move for them to advertise that their previous pizza sucked and they've improved it. But since the fact is that their previous pizza really did suck, it might be worth seeing if they're right about the improvement part as well.