Small But Weird

Carnitas? Car-NO-tas!

2012-02-12T19:37:00.001-08:00

Every fiber of my being is refusing to eat the carnitas I made in the slow cooker on Tuesday, so I'm trying to quell the loud, internal voice that's telling me not to waste food and actually throw it out.

The voice sounds like my mom.

I think the extreme aversion I get to leftovers when they're nearing their week of fridge time is actually my body trying to avoid food poisoning, so I've been trying to obey that more.

Today was busy. First church, then work for longer than I expected because a reactor was having trouble so I had to move it to a different control station and didn't want to leave until I knew it was doing okay. Yeah, reactors are like pets a lot of the time. Are they happy? Do they need to be fed? Have they pooped themselves to death?

Yesterday was busy too. Nathan took me to see the Bay Model up in Sausalito, which is how they used to figure out water patterns and stuff for the SF Bay before computers were invented. It was very nerdy and very awesome. While the cement topography is only painted blue for water and tan for land they have signs up for cities and I could identify certain coastal features, like the small jetty near my office and the old and new Benicia bridges. However, my lack of geography skillz meant most of my identifications were in the vein of "The Delta? I guess it is really big...I saw a dead cow there once!"

Then on the way back we visited both the Point Bonita lighthouse in the Marin Headlands and the Sutro Bath ruins in San Francisco, which wasn't the type of bathhouse I was thinking of but more of a swimming pool. The ruins were quite picturesque:

They looked very ruined for only having burned down in 1966 but I guess that's what salt water can do.

Breaking Bread

2012-02-03T21:55:00.001-08:00

I've been helping set up for Communion at church for about two years now, so I know breaking the crackers for Communion has a very specific progression.

I'll break the first matzoh sheet carefully, trying to get uniform squares of equal size. I'll carefully count each one, then estimate based on the number of sheets in a box if we have enough to cover the expected number we'll need.

This comes into play because despite the number of juice cups I'm expected to prepare, it's always one box of matzoh. Two hundred people? One box of matzoh. Four hundred people? One box of matzoh. I feel like it shouldn't work, but it does. So far.

The second sheet of matzoh I stop counting, but I keep trying to make it into squares. Halfway through the second sheet I realize, again, that matzoh doesn't break cleanly down the rows of fork marks.

Third sheet? Anything goes. Lots of triangles, long skinny cracker bits.

There are normally ten sheets in a box.

I'm on the second sheet now.

We'll see how it goes.

Chock Full O' Meat

2012-01-11T20:00:00.000-08:00

Today I might have eaten the best meat of my life.

Of course, in the irony of the universe, it came in the most unexpected form - leftover meeting food.

I went to go heat up the lunch I had brought but I saw that trays were out on the leftovers table. The food was cold, but it was baked potato wedges and bacon-wrapped steaks so I decided to eat that over my soup. There was the usual salad, sliced fruit, and dessert tray, too, that always come with these lunches.

I should note here we simply don't get steaks in these lunch meeting lunches. I would say most often it's chicken breasts baked in some way, but they also run to mystery meat patties (which I actually quite like) and hot dogs (which I also enjoyed the one time we got them), with occasional forays into Indian curries and imitation crab lettuce wraps (which I don't like).

So, steak? Nuh uh. But these were freaking bacon-wrapped filet mignons. The Sharpie on the top of the tray cover said so.

And it was the tenderest, tastiest, most flavorful piece of meat I can remember eating. I thought I wouldn't be able to cut the meat with the plastic knife (based on previous experience) but I probably could have used a spoon. The flavor of the bacon and the mushroom sauce had permeated the entire piece of meat, and the bacon itself was crisp and not at all wibbly. And the flavor of the beef itself shone through like a champ.

See, I've had filet mignon before. I don't know how many times, but I've never been impressed. The texture struck me as slimy. There wasn't a lot of flavor. Until today I had actually settled on sirloin steak as my favorite (which is conveniently always the cheapest on a steakhouse menu).

So I wonder if this was a grade of beef I've never experience before. Grass-fed, or aged, or one of those other adjectives that has never before been attached to my food. It was unbelievable.

I have two theories on what happened. Either:

A) It was a mix-up and we got someone else's food by mistake. Or
B) The caterer somehow had leftover or excess excellent filet mignons she had to get rid of.

Based on the fact that "Bacon-Wrapped Filet Mignon" was written in four-inch letters on the lid of the tray, which the caterer would have seen when delivering the food, I think it must have been B. Also, the admin and I were talking about how good the meat was and she looked up the invoice to double check they only charged the regular amount.

Amazing, amazing meat.

The potato wedges were only okay.

Un-plugged, De-plugged, and Re-plugged

2012-01-04T20:08:00.000-08:00

I am unplugged.

Today the electricians are at the house doing the first step toward re-wiring the whole thing: upgrading the service to 200 amps and installing a new circuit breaker panel. While I’m not sure I need 200 amps (my Google search was inconclusive), the panel had to happen because there wasn’t enough space in the existing panel to re-wire the interior rooms that need grounded outlets. All these things I’m learning. Also, the head electrician said installing a new panel would eliminate the fuse subpanel that the home inspector really didn’t like, so all in all it’s hitting several nails on the head all at once. So that’s worth not having electricity for a while (battery powered devices excluded, obviously).

Being without power today makes me realize how much time I spend watching TV and doodling around on the Internet, which is a little unflattering. So far (and the power’s only been off around four hours) I have written a thank you card to my grandmother for the Christmas money she gave me (“Thank you Grandma, I used it to buy a cordless drill and install lots of things around my house”), I read several pages of Harry Potter in Spanish and congratulated myself on remembering or deducing enough Spanish to understand it, I cut up a box full of memorabilia T-shirts as the first step of making them into one or more quilts, and I got halfway through a novel my sister left at my parents’ house to be donated which features a cantankerous cowboy who loves babies, like they all must do if you believe the romance genre has any basis in real life.

I’ve used my Christmas ice cream maker twice now and the ice cream is freaking delicious. I remember I made tortellini once by hand, which was excruciatingly tedious, and determined that the end result tasted just like store-bought except a little purer and cleaner so just buy the store stuff and put sauce on it and you’re even. But the ice cream, though it tastes like vanilla ice cream like you expect, is purer and cleaner in a delightful way. Enough that you don’t need chocolate sauce, which is a revelation. Normally I buy vanilla ice cream because I’m either A. putting it on something or B. putting something on it – never to eat on its own. The homemade ice cream is worth eating on its own. The little pamphlet that came with the machine has other interesting recipes to try, like coffee butter almond, chocolate mint, pumpkin pie, and raspberry gelato. I’d also like to look up a recipe for Thai Iced Tea Ice Cream because I think that would be delicious, and I finally found the Thai tea in Ranch 99 (segregated from the proper teas, past the coffee even, which explains why I never found it before).

Of course, this making my own ice cream will only likely recur when Costco sells heavy cream for $6 a half gallon. $4 a pint at Safeway is not going to cut it. Plus, I have about two gallons of ice cream in the freezer right now so those have to get worked down. What? I have priorities in life.

Out of curiosity, I wonder how much dust and crumbs has to get into a laptop keyboard before it stops working.

Obviously, blogging freestyle like this turns into the stream-of-consciousness writing my college roommate Catherine was the recipient of when I used to write her letters during down times in a summer internship. Beyond a lengthy diatribe on the audacity of Lifesavers to change the green colored candies from lime to watermelon and describing a (male) chemical engineering classmate as a Canadian ice princess I have no idea what they said, but Catherine said they entertained her whole family and that she would keep them, meaning I can never enter politics in case she unearths them.

This past week I’ve been experimenting with Asian noodle dishes (hence the Ranch 99 visit mentioned above). I was trying to re-create the chow mein I liked at the Zen restaurant I went to with my sister, so I bought dry chow mein noodles, fresh chow mein noodles, and then on a whim also got fresh ramen noodles and yakisoba. The fresh ramen I wouldn’t get again because while the broth was tasty and the noodles had a good texture the noodles didn’t have any flavor themselves, unlike 10 cent ramen in the package. And this cost over ten times as much, so that’s an obvious choice. I do enjoy yakisoba. Yesterday I stir-fried some onions, cabbage, and bean sprouts, and then added tofu I had marinated briefly in grated ginger, garlic, and soy sauce (having learned the tofu has to have something added to it or it’s worthless squishy lumps), and then added the yakisoba noodles and seasoning packet as recommended. I enjoyed it. And the chow mein recipe I tried that used hoisin sauce was very good too – just not like the restaurant. Next I’ll probably try a recipe that uses oyster sauce and honey, but I foresee this going down the road of pad thai where I learn how to make decent versions, just not the one I want to make (and therefore give up, never to try again).

Now, later, I can say that I had an eventful evening. Since the electricians packed up and left around five I have had them come back and had PG&E out too! Separate issues. One of the light switches the electricians installed didn't actually switch off the light fixture, so the owner of the company came back and fixed it, which I appreciate (he gets a good Yelp review from me). I don't blame them for not getting it right since the power was off, it was dark in that bathroom, and there are two light fixtures going to one switch so it would have been easy to miss a wire. The other thing was that while I was checking out the new circuit panel I realized I smelled a little gas coming out of my meter. When I called PG&E they didn't just reassure me that that is normal, which I wanted them to do, but they did send someone out within an hour who did detect a small leak (unfortunately reinforcing my worrywart tendencies) and fixed it. He also checked all my gas appliances for gas leaks and said they look good, which I did appreciate.

So now I'm going to have some ice cream, watch the Work It pilot because a guy from church whose mother I know is a writer on it so I'll give it a chance despite it being a blatant Bosom Buddies rip-off, and go to bed early.

I like this electrician. He's always calm and never gives me the impression my wiring is going to burst into flames and kill me in my sleep.

That's what Google is for.

House

2012-01-01T21:11:00.000-08:00

A month after the move and the house is finally presentable (meaning I stopped using the third bedroom solely as a place to throw empty plastic bags).

Here is the living room:

The dining room, with today's Ikea addition in the background:

My bedroom:

The smallest bedroom, now the craft room:

The third bedroom:

And the piece de resistance, the kitchen:

Which my sister aply described as "It's as if Ronald McDonald barfed in here."

I spent my vacation days before Christmas doing my Christmas baking, which went more quickly and smoothly than I remember it ever going, yielding (clockwise from top) peanut brittle, chocolate chip cookies, divinity, snowballs, "fire candy" cracker toffee, from-scratch brownies, almond toffee, and candied walnuts in about eight hours of total work.

This year my sister finally declared my divinity the equal of Mrs. Barnes', our next door neighbor who passed away when I graduated high school (the exact day of my graduation, so that was memorable). The secret was to use artificial vanilla flavoring rather than natural, and to only use half the amount in the recipe.

And since the holidays it's been projects all around the house. Not major ones, since the stove (a generous housewarming gift from my parents) was delivered midway through the Christmas baking and the electrical service/new circuit panel work happens next week. But a lot of little ones. One was the living and dining room curtains, which I found for a steal at Ross but the blue dining room curtains had to be hemmed and the gray living room curtains had to be lined because they were unexpectedly transparent.

For the curtains I also had to mount a new curtain rod in the living room, which was not, in theory hard, but the instructions said that if the rod would be over 48 inches it should have support brackets placed around 30 inches in between. It came with four support brackets so I put two on the ends and two evenly spaced in the middle. When I went to hang the curtains I then realized the brackets keep you from pulling the curtains closed! I had to remove the two inner brackets and put up a single bracket in the center so the curtains would close. It's obvious now.

Another lesson I learned (which is the acceptable corporate euphemism for "another mistake I made") was with the blinds in my bedroom. The blinds that came with the house wouldn't open or shut, and they would fall down if you tried to raise or lower them, so I found a set for under $11 at Home Depot I could put up. I carefully and tediously installed the mounting hardware, then put in the blinds, then went to put the caps on the hardware that actually keep the blinds in, and at that moment realized that the hardware was on 90 degrees wrong. That had to be re-done.

I also re-caulked the tub in the big bathroom, re-cleaned the other shower so I could use it while the main tub was drying, and fixed my toilet twice. It had been making funny noises before Christmas but it stopped filling completely, so Nathan diagnosed it as needing a flapper and a fill valve. I did that, but while flushing the Fluidmaster fill valve as it says in its directions, the water supply valve beneath the toilet started to leak. Panicked, I found instructions online on how to replace that too, so after another trip to the hardware store I changed that as well. Of course, when I talked to Nathan that night he said that's totally normal and it takes care of itself, cementing that I should call him before worrying about things. But after that the fill valve kept leaking water in sporadic, audible dribbles. I gave up and bought another valve at Home Depot and replaced it again. Luckily that eliminated the problem entirely! Plus, the Korky valve was tons easier to install than the Fluidmaster valve so I recommend it. Not only was it easier to adjust it to the right height for the water line, they had helpful drawings for the right placement in the tank and useful information at the end about it being normal to see water coming out of several locations of the valve. If the Fluidmaster had had the same instructions I might not have worried about it and replaced it. Boo Fluidmaster.

My thumbs still kind of hurt from installing the water supply valve on the toilet since that required some heavy wrench tightening. I think that's more man territory. Or I need better wrenches.

Unpacking, You're a Wiley Devil

2011-12-18T21:56:00.000-08:00

Okay. It might be a month later but "moved in" still means "my possessions are technically inside the house". The furniture is roughly in place since the carpets have been installed, which was the hold-up, but there are still unpacked boxes in every room. I did find which one had my pencil cups a few days ago, so I can stop using the single pen I had in my purse.

I'm surprised at how indecisive I am about furniture placement. Not so much in the dining room (which is incredibly straightforward) or the bedroom (which only holds a bed and a dresser and therefore has few options). But the living room is too full of both possibilities and constraints. What ended up winning out is that there is only a single grounded outlet in the room so all the electrical equipment has to be near that, plus my TV isn't big enough to have the couch all the way across the room. So it's a bit odd, with the couch floating in the room and two bookcases behind. But then, I think it might look better without boxes and odd tables around, too. And the pink curtains...

Yesterday Nathan and I went to the Christmas in the Park in San Jose and went ice skating for the first time. I got the hang of it after a few times around the rink and then promptly fell flat on my back as punishment for my overconfidence. I am developing an excellent deep blue bruise on my butt from that. I'm hoping I'll be able to sleep on my right side again in a few days.

Christmas really snuck up this year. Hopefully it goes well and puts a good cap on the year 2011: The Scourge of Grandpas and House Buying. I copped out and did all my shopping online but I haven't started any baking yet. That will be accomplished the two days before Christmas, which I took off of work. I have said I won't do my normal tray of 10+ candies and cookies, but I've said that before. We'll see what happens.

Move

2011-11-28T21:34:00.000-08:00

I am moved in.

Moving is stressful. While I'm good at organizing things ("detail oriented", they keep telling me at work) this has been quite the feat. But on Saturday friends from church, my parents, my cousin Justin, and my boyfriend Nathan (who I don't believe has been mentioned before) loaded up all my stuff and hauled it over. I had been hauling over small loads since the house closed but there's only so much a Corolla can do. I need to find my cards somewhere in all these boxes and write thank you notes.

Or I could buy cards. That's much more likely to be successful.

Right now I'm living with everything arranged temporarily because I'm getting new carpet next week and don't want to put too much furniture or stuff on the floors that would only have to be moved again. The new carpets are required because the ones here are very, very strange. Whenever they installed the current rugs they decided that it would be a good idea to use a four-inch thick carpet pad, with the result that the floor tapers down toward the wall like a trapezoid. And I think they smell weird: I keep getting a whiff of something off but it's not the bathrooms or the heater and it gets stronger if I get closer to the floor. I haven't wanted to really shove my face into it for obvious reasons.

Now off to sleep on the floor!

Mortgage Ahoy

2011-11-07T21:45:00.000-08:00

I'm getting the house.

I'm about 60% freaked out, 35% worried about the amount of work required before the end of the month to paint, get the electrical fixed, and move, and about 5% excited.

The Other, Other Superpower

2011-08-30T20:37:00.000-07:00

After a casual perusal of the Wikipedia article, I think I'm a supertaster. I Wikipedia-spiraled there at work (starting on Tissue Factor, which was relevant to a meeting), and was surprised at how many foods I don't like that supertasters don't like.

The list is:

Alcohol
Brussels sprouts
Cabbage
Kale
Coffee
Grapefruit juice
Green tea
Spinach
Soy products
Carbonation

I dislike most alcohol unless it's sufficiently masked with fruit or ice cream. I can't drink straight coffee either - it has to be severely moderated by milk and sugar or flavored creamer. I absolutely hate brussels sprouts, kale, grapefruit juice, green tea, and spinach. Soymilk is weird but tofu and a lot of the fake-meat products are fine. So that's most of the things on the list.

I wish I had known this when I was little and could say I wasn't picky, I was just a supertaster. But I doubt either explanation would have kept my mom from making me eat the things I didn't like. One just sounds better.

Wisdom of Our Elders

2011-08-14T21:30:00.000-07:00

Since the most recent grandfather passed away in May (really, it's been that kind of year), I've wanted to try and make more of an effort to visity my grandmother, so this weekend I stopped out on my way to the East Bay. Grandma was making peach jam with my aunt when I arrived, so I got to take a jar home though it involved hoteling in two different refrigerators and my dad having to pick it up once from my sister's house because I forgot it.

Grandma was in a reminiscing mood so I got to hear interesting tidbits about her and Grandpa's early married life. They moved around more than I knew about, and post-WWII San Francisco had more shortages than I'd ever heard about. She described how, when my uncle was born, diapers were in short supply such that even with relatives signing up on the secret lists to get diapers months in advance she only had three dozen diapers to start out with. She also told me about searching the city for a colander and after she finally found one, one of Grandpa's friends saw her using it and insisted on knowing where she found it whereupon he leapt out of his chair and rushed off to get one for his household. "Can you imagine that?" my grandmother said. "A man knowing what a colander is?" Interesting glimpse into her life with Grandpa from that vignette.

I also almost talked her into watching "My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding", which hopefully she does. That came up when she got on the subject of "Say Yes to the Dress" with the opinion that none of the women on the show should be wearing white to begin with.

That night my sister and I treated my mom to dinner at our new favorite Chinese restaurant. While it doesn't have the dry cooked string beans (double fried! Salty pork detritus to mix with the rice!) that our dearly departed China King had, their garlic string beans are very good and their fried rice also fits the bill. And the chicken is actually breast meat rather than the assorted parts even China King ran to. We tipped extra because the waiters weren't at all phased when my sister tipped her entire glass of ice water toward me across the table. I hope we're even now for the time I tipped my glass of water on her on a plane to Wisconsin but probably not since it was January and she had to get out in the freezing weather while wet.

This week I started taking iron pills for my recently-diagnosed anemia. What the doctor doesn't know because my diagnosis was virtual but I've decided for myself is that the real reason I'm anemic is I gave blood too many times this year and need to stop. But I don't eat much red meat anyway and do think the iron pills are a good idea since they're cheaper and easier than the sheer amount of beef I think would be required otherwise. And I saw my lab results--if the normal range for iron is 15-22 and I'm a 4, I'll take the iron pills. Astonishly they don't irritate my stomach too much. I had very low hopes considering multivitamins that aren't shaped like cartoon characters are unbearable. And that time I took a multivitamin and a magnesium supplement at the same time still haunts me (it was summer 2006, in Harrisonburg Virginia. It was a dark and stormy night, and I used up half a roll of toilet paper).

Putting It In Boxes

2011-07-28T21:33:00.000-07:00

One of my numerous hobbies is painting little boxes. Lately I've been thinking of selling some on Etsy. Partly for a little extra money, mostly to induce my sister to start her own Etsy shop out of competitiveness because she is much craftier than I am, and could sell her jewelry for a much higher price than I could ever sell my boxes.

This box I made by painting some address labels I mis-printed at work and then sticking them on a cardboard box. I like how it looks, but it was so easy and cheap I can't imagine anyone actually paying money for it.

This was an experiment last night, where I painted a wooden picture frame white and then decoupaged on some tissue paper.

This little box I painted a while ago, it just needs the 6-18 layers of gloss I like to coat them with. A cheery little bird. I would like it better if the background were blue rather than yellow. Now I know.

This little box had several different attempts at a design on top. First was a rubber stamp of a black and white cat in red high heels. Then was a rendering of that famous Impressionist painting of people in a park, but it was very bad, and, ultimately, upside-down. I tried sanding it off but gave up and covered it in more labels.

It's hard because I'm kind of a perfectionist and don't think anything is good enough to sell. But I probably only need to have a few saps buy stuff before I'm convinced otherwise.

Another Food Ruined

2011-07-25T21:48:00.001-07:00

Among the odd skills you gain in cell culture are being able to open jars one-handed and being able to mouth-breathe for long periods of time to avoid bad smells.

I'm prouder of the jar opening, but the mouth-breathing is possibly more useful. Today I used it because I helped clean out the cold rooms. This wasn't too bad because since they've instituted regular cold room cleanouts we don't have the months- or years-old media that has festered or fermented into syrupy morasses the likes of which normal people can't imagine. Have you ever scraped your fingernail down the crease beside your nose after a long day when your face is oily, and then looked at the gray, unctuous material that collected under your fingernail? Imagine that but by the liter. That's what cells can get like when they're really old. But today we were tossing some pretty normal, uncontaminated stuff.

I still didn't want to smell it. I mean, get real. As we were dumping gallons of the stuff I was carefully mouth-breathing. And then the cleanout leader chirps, "It smells like poppy seed bagels!"

Thanks. Thanks. There's another food I'm not going to be able to eat again.

I started working on painting little boxes again tonight. If I can get up some stock maybe I'll start an Etsy shop. It'd be nice to have a little spending money. No, writing that just feels weird. I'm so uptight about my money matters I would designate any extra income into savings. Whatever, it might still be fun to have an Etsy shop.

Fractions of Work

2011-06-23T19:45:00.000-07:00

For a small portion of today, instead of doing work, I figured out how much work I do. Because I do a lot. And I wanted numbers.

Over the past two years, I was on call for our pilot plant or manufacturing 50% of the time. That meant for half of the time, anytime, I could get called about an issue I would have to deal with.

Over the past two years, I worked around 40% of the weekends, at least one day.

Added up, only 13% of my time over the past two years has been completely free - not on call, not in the office or lab. Someone else at my company who wasn't on call or working weekends would be free 37% of the time. If you only got weekends off - no vacation or holidays - you'd be free 28% of the time. And that 13% includes the entire month I took off last December, to make up for all the overtime I had worked up to that point.

Yeahhhhhhh.

Low Standards

2011-06-22T21:01:00.000-07:00

As I contemplate my home search, I realize I have low standards.

I know this because I watch a lot of HGTV.

On HGTV, buyers walk through potential homes complaining about the size of the bedrooms, the placement of the bathrooms in relation to other rooms, whether there are double sinks, the size of the master bath, if the metal trim or light fixtures are gold instead of silver, if the stove is electric instead of silver, that the countertops aren't granite, and more.

I have preferences, too, of course. I prefer vanities over pedestal sinks (more storage). I prefer gas over electric. And who doesn't like an updated kitchen?

The thing is I can't afford that much. Well, I understand that banks will lend me more than I feel comfortable with, but that's because we disagree on what "afford" means. And since Bay Area prices are crazy ridiculous (and Peninsula prices even more crazy ridiculous than the Bay Area at large), at my price range I just don't get to be picky.

HGTV buyers care about the size of the bedrooms? I care that there are bedrooms, period.

They care about the placement of the bathrooms? I care about the existence and working state of the single bathroom. More than one bathroom? What's that?

HGTV buyers want gas stoves over electric stoves? I want there to be a stove. Or at least a hookup for a stove, either gas or electric. You'd think the existence of a stove would be a given but it isn't.

So what I'm looking for is simple. A sound foundation, a roof that will last at least a few years, two bedrooms, everything else in working order. And if it was really great, it would have a range hood and a bathroom fan. Which you would think are normal appliances but not out here.

I don't even dare aspire to a dishwasher or air conditioning.

California. It's wack.

In the Blood

2011-06-21T17:32:00.000-07:00

I'm gathering I shouldn't keep donating blood.

I donated blood earlier this spring right when I was starting to come down with a cold. Surprisingly, they let you donate blood when you're coming down with a cold. I mean, I told them. I guess that if you need a blood transfusion you have bigger problems.

Anyway, that cold sucked. It took me forever to get over it (a few weeks), and it was worse than the other colds I've had. At the time I thought donating blood made it worse, since I didn't have the same amount of white blood cells as before.

Then I donated blood again last Friday, and I've been tired ever since. I've been having trouble sleeping in the heat but that can't accont for all of it.

See, the thing is that I only ever barely pass on iron anyway. My cholesterol (which they test when you donate) tends to look bad because I have to stuff myself with meatloaf the week beforehand in order to have enough iron. And I've never had above 12.5 g/dL hemoglobin on the times I have had enough hemoglobin to qualify. The cutoff is 12.5 exactly, too.

I've always tried to donate blood because I figured other people needed my blood. I don't have any diseases and I'm not afraid of needles, which makes me a good candidate. But with the low iron, the latex allergy (which the technicians sometimes seem to resent me telling them about), and the fact that this happened the first time I tried to donate:

I guess I need my blood too.

In Which I Explain The Economy

2011-06-15T17:43:00.000-07:00

I've had a breakthrough lately I'm going to share.

I work in cell culture, which involves forcing Chinese hamster ovary cells to make proteins they don't want to make, which someone else then purifies out of the soupy, smelly morass and our company uses in clinical trials or sells on the market.

My job is to try and make as much drug as possible. Our manufacturing facilities are a certain size, so how much drug comes out of each reactor is ultimately a function of only two things: how many cells there are, and how much drug each cell makes. There are a lot of factors that change how many cells there are, and a few things that affect how much drug each cell makes, but when it comes right down to it that's all you've got.

There are a lot of options to get more cells. Higher temperature, more food, sometimes less food, better food, special food, etc. How much drug each cell makes is mostly genetic and I don't understand a lot of it. It's harder to change, so we talk about it more. It even gets its own name: "Specific productivity".

The realization I've had is that our economy works the same way. I've been confused by different explanations of the economy. Some people say government spending grows the economy, some say it doesn't, etc. Because how does an economy grow?

Like cells!

(FYI, I know I'm a nerd, no one needs to point this out.)

Economies grow. Obviously. Otherwise we'd still be living in wood-heated houses without electricity or access to dental care. Like Europe outside the major cities which no one seems to acknowledge. Cough. Obviously TVs get cheaper from year to year. Obviously every person has more stuff than before. More food, more cars, more technology, larger homes, more clothes, more cable channels, etc. So where does it come from?

Just like cell culture, there are only two ways: more people who make stuff, or each person making more stuff.

If there are more people who are producing things, be it services or actual physical things like cars or breakfast cereal or knit caps to sell on Etsy, there is a net increase in things. This would be population growth. It could either be more people actually existing (more immigration, more births) or more people working (like when women started entering the work force). Conversely, the productive population decreases with unemployment, when people leave the work force (voluntarily or not).

Just like cells, specific productivity is harder. Each person has to make more things. And that sounds hard, but it happens all the time. The first time you knit a cap it takes forever and is ugly. By the tenth hat you're whipping them out three a day and can do patterns and stripes. Every time you implement a computer system that saves time off of doing something, that increases specific productivity. Every time you automate an activity, freeing up a person to work at something else, you're increasing specific productivity. For instance, a bank with five workers could only handle so many customers a day. But with ATMs that can handle the mundane withdrawals and deposits, those workers can handle more complex transactions, sell mortgages, etc.

And with that concept, everything is starting to make sense to me. For instance, how could our economy grow during this recession? Well, for one, I think they're fudging all the numbers, but even so, the economy can grow if the increase in specific productivity is larger than the decrease in productive population. Unemployment has risen, but companies are doing the same work with fewer workers or workers are putting in longer hours, both of which would increase specific productivity.

It also explains why bounce-backs from recessions can be pronounced. If the workforce increases its specific productivity during recessions because they had to make do with fewer workers, when the population grows again the total production will increase at a faster rate than if the old specific productivity had been maintained. It's as if recessions are opportunities to learn - to winnow the chaff - to get rid of the dead weight - to make things more efficient.

And it helps me understand why the current recession has gone on so long. Mostly, the government's intervention has messed with both ends of the scale. Extended unemployment insurance keeps the population down, because people have financial incentive to stay unemployed (let's face it, we're all lazy and wouldn't work if someone is actually paying us to sit on our butts and watch TV). Stimulus funds to governments and companies to prevent layoffs means they don't have to learn out of necessity and don't increase their specific productivity. It may have prevented additional population decrease, but not enough.

This way makes much more sense to me than anyone who describes the economy as a pie.

Big Hands, Small Hands

2011-06-14T20:44:00.000-07:00

I used to have a children's book that was a compilation of fantasy and possibly science fiction stories. It had a blue cover, and my name was written on the endpaper because I loaned it to my friend Jen in middle school. I don't remember the name (this will become a theme). I don't remember most of the stories, though it did have a portion of The Silver Chair which was my first introduction to not liking C. S. Lewis.

But one story I remember because it disturbed me. It was about fat little hippopotamus-like creatures that lived underground in burrows like hedgehogs. They drank tea, too, so it was obviously by a British author. I forget the name of their species (see, a theme), but it was cutesy and full of consonants, like Snuffaleupagus only not Snuffaleupagus because that's the character on Sesame Street and he's adorable. Anyway, they were plump and white and you knew this because the short story had several illustrations.

The plot of the story was that this one fat hippopotamus-creature's home was invaded by a thin, black, spider-like creature and I am at this very moment wondering if there were racial themes that went completely over my twelve-year-old head. Anyway, the freaky, spindly creature scared the bejeebers out of the fat thing and after some cloying adventures they became friends.

In any case, I don't know why but the story, or rather the pictures, stuck with me. The bloated white animal contrasting with the spindly black creature. Sometimes the pictures would float into my mind when I was in bed, and they would keep me from going to sleep. It had something to do with the contrast between the fat and the thin gave me a feeling of too much size that confused my brain.

Anyway, all of this is prelude to a weird thing that happened to me today. I was in a meeting with my boss's boss before she goes to China for a few weeks, and all of a sudden the white and black creatures popped into my mind and my hands felt gigantic! I felt as if my hands were suddenly twice their normal size and weight. They felt heavy in my lap, as if my shoulders were being pulled down.

I tried moving them to different positions, but each time they were stationary the sensation came back. My mind kept replaying the comparison that my hands were the explodingly fat white hippo-creatures.

By the end of the meeting the feeling had abated. The meeting went well so I don't think it was a stress response. But it was very strange! I hope I masked it well, though I suspect I was a little less communicative than normal since there was a running dialogue in my head "What the heck--Maybe if I move like this it will--Stupid white guys--my hands aren't like the fat white things--etc".

The front of the book had a dragon on it. Still don't remember the name.

On the Art of Conversation

2011-06-13T19:51:00.001-07:00

Back in the olden days, higher-class women were judged on their accomplishments:

Painting
Drawing
Embroidery
Hemming
Fancy-work
Designing furniture
Playing the harp
Playing the pianoforte
Singing
Speaking Italian
Speaking French

and many other things I'm sure I don't know about because they haven't featured in Jane Austen novels. But one of the important ones was the art of conversation. The young ladies in society were expected to be able to support wide and varied conversation with anyone who came their way in society.

Speaking personally, I'm not very adept, socially. I've come a long way from how I was in high school or even college. Being part of a big church and working at a big company have a lot to do with that. But new situations make me anxious. I'm exquisitely conscious of saying the wrong thing, which I do frequently. I hear all my own mistakes. So when social interactions go badly, I assume they're my fault.

But I'm beginning to think maybe it isn't my fault all the time. Because I've realized the art of conversation boils down to interaction. It's about one person saying one thing, and the other person saying something related to that thing or asking a question about that thing, then the other person saying something else related to what the second person just said, etc.

I think that's why in the past I've noticed there are some people I can just talk to. With whom conversation is easy and effortless. People who come to mind include my sister, friends from high school, the guy from my heat transfer project sophomore year at Tech whose Facebook profile was him passed out drunk in a mini-fridge, and the ChemE I designated NewGraham to differentiate him from the Graham I already knew from band. When you say something and someone responds based on what you said, and you have a chance to respond to what they said? That's conversation!

The opposite, which is what I'm recognizing now, is monopoly. Where one person doesn't hold up their end of the bargain on responding based on what the other person said. I've noticed a few different flavors:

1. Classic Monologue-ing. This variety includes one person talking only about themselves, their activities, and their interests. They will answer questions but will not ask any. They will not respond based on a comment the second person makes, but will instead continue their initial topic.

2. Monopoly Through Silence. This variety, often masquerading as shyness, is one person's refusal to "reply in kind". They also will answer questions but will not ask any. They will also not respond based on a comment the second person makes, but instead stays silent or makes at most a minimal response like, "Mm," or "Interesting". This forces the second person to continually ask questions to draw the first person out. This might occasionally be legitimate shyness, but can also be laziness or passive-aggression.

3. Disconnected/Superficiality. This specialized variety at first bears the appearance of a real conversation because there appear to be related responses. However the responses don't follow the same vein as the original topic, derailing the conversation the second person wanted to have. For instance, "I had a rough week. My grandfather died on Tuesday. We were really close." "I had a rough week too. I'm supposed to alphabetize a whole drawer of files and I really don't want to." A symptom of this is when one person drops conversational breadcrumbs, but the other person won't follow the trail. "I forgot to buy pears at the store today. I've been very distracted. Work was busy, and also I'm looking for realtors because I've decided to buy a house." Here, a conversational response would be "You're looking for a house? How exciting! What type of house are you looking for?" or "My aunt is a realtor. Would you be interested in working with her? She's a fantastic businesswoman." A disconnected response would be, "Pears are awesome" or "I'm so glad I bought my house four years ago and am done with it. It was a horrible process." Thus, in order to continue the conversation, the second person has to abandon their topic and switch to the first person's topic.

And I'm also realizing how exhausting it is to deal with monopolizers. With type 1, you never get to talk. Less effort, but unless you're intensely interested in every single thing that person has to say, you're going to be bored silly the entire time. With type 2, you talk a lot, but it's only questions. Type 2 is energy-sapping. Type 3 is emotionally exhausting because you never get to say what you want to say.

I tried to make Excel graphs illustrating these but it didn't work.

The Fourth R

2011-05-27T21:55:00.000-07:00

When I was in college, the band put on an elaborate city-wide scavenger hunt once a year. I only did it once my junior year. Through a variety of circumstances I ended up on a team with several younger trombones and we hurtled around Atlanta in an old minivan finding and deciphering clues.

Since it was the band, there were shenanigans. The instructions said to bring, among other things, water guns and towels. One of the trombones I was with brought his Super Soaker, and once when we encountered another team at a clue site he shot it at their car and almost got them. We definitely weren't near first place but we were progressing decently until the evening when things started getting weird. We reached a clue site where the clue for our team was defaced. We called in to the command center and the person on the phone said they were calling us cheaters and jerks who didn't deserve to go further in the competition. Because the guy shot a Super Soaker! It was confusing that they were so mad when they said to bring water guns, and since he didn't get anybody wet (much). They claimed he almost got a laptop inside the car wet. But still that didn't have anything to do with us cheating at the clues. In any case we ended up stopping a clue later or so.

But the disturbing part was afterward. The competition had a website that listed the teams, and after the competition, the winners. A few days after the competition I noticed on the website that they had posted on the website that our team were disqualified for being cheaters and jerks! I forget the exact phrasing they used, but something along those lines. Our entire team's real names listed with defamatory comments. You found the website when you searched for our real names.

I was MAD. One guy shoots a Super Soaker and our whole team gets vilified on the Internet? Whiny, over-share blog aside, I'm very conscious of my "internet presence" and don't want false, negative comments about me online. So I tracked down the event organizers and called.

The thing was, each year the scavenger hunt is organized by the previous year's winners. And alumni can play, so with their advanced age and additional resources they tend to win. The organizers that year was a group in their 30s who had long since graduated and supposedly moved on.

So I, a 20-year-old college student, called and argued with the lead organizer guy, a married engineer in his mid-30s about why it was inappropriate for his team to defame innocent parties for a stupid water gun. He was so irrational and so unreasonable (though they did finally take it down), I had this thought over and over: "I shouldn't have to be the adult in this situation."

I've been feeling like that lately. I'm an adult. And a defining characteristic of being an adult is being reliable.

Being reliable is returning emails and phone calls promptly.
Being reliable is showing up prepared and on one time.
Being reliable is keeping plans and not changing them unnecessarily.
Being reliable is doing your job.

I'm really tired of being reliable when very few other people are.

I'm tired of being the adult.

Admit It

2011-05-16T21:02:00.000-07:00

So, I'm pretty sure my asparagus fern has bit the dust.

Fluffy has been a good plant. I bought him sophomore year of college from Kroger. Karen bought a plant at the same time, and named hers "Penny" because she was annoyed when I paid for mine in coins (and the self-service kiosk stopped accepting quarters so I had to use smaller denominations). He survived the indoor heat wave of Spring Break '04, and a summer with Karen in which she decided he wouldn't fit in her car so she trimmed him an inch above the dirt. He survived all that.

So I guess I kept expecting him to come back from turning entirely brown this winter, but no dice.

Now I'll have to find something else to plant in the giant pot I bought him.

I completely zoned out at work today around 4 pm. I was working on a journal paper I've been supposed to be writing for nigh on two years. I know I just need to knuckle down and do it, but I find writing a journal paper very intimidating. The style of writing in journal papers is completely different than how I write.

I write so you can understand it.

4 pm really is my desired quitting time. After 4, I just don't want to be there. Not that I can't be totally productive after 4. Not that I haven't spent 12, 13-hour days at work. I've seen the south side of midnight more often than I'm comfortable with. It's just that that's the time of day where I don't want to be doing anything related to work. Though normally doing something interesting, like data analysis, keeps my mind off my desired quitting time.

And turns out writing a paper isn't consuming enough, so I felt the 4 pm very strongly today. And then, in looking for something else in my email, I saw my boss's boss said she wanted the paper by the end of June, not by June. So I went home.

Tomorrow will also be a short day at work. I'm taking time off to go on a homes tour with a real estate broker because I've decided to buy a place of my own this year for the following reasons:

1. Real estate prices are down, so now is a good time to buy.
2. Interest rates are currently down but likely to go up, so I want to get in before that.
3. I anticipate heavy inflation coming down the pike, which benefits debt-holders, so it's good to buy now before prices inflate.
4. I have saved enough of a down payment to avoid an FHA loan.
5. I want to be able to paint walls.
6. I want more outdoor space for plants besides three feet of walkway outside my door.

Of course, with what I think is a responsible monthly payment, the only places I can afford are next to the railroad tracks or the highway, are being sold "as is", or are in an area of Redwood City in which all business advertise only in Spanish. The houses my real estate broker thinks I can afford are nicer, so we're going to disagree. Though the prices I told him were 10% below what I'm actually willing to pay so we might be able to find a middle ground.

We'll have to see. I'm fine with ugly but I want structurally sound.

All About Me

2011-05-14T21:58:00.000-07:00

I was going through Picasa today and realized that in four years of primarily only having photos of myself that I took on my own, I have chanced across some instances of honest, true portraits of realistic expressions on my face.

Since I'm feeling maudlin and unimportant lately, I'm going to indulge myself by posting some.

Honest happiness when showing off the quilt I made Karen for her wedding.

Ditto for a quilt for Project Linus.

Pensive in Virginia the summer I interned in the middle of nowhere.

Slightly suspicious smile in current living room.

Calm, ordinary smile.

Tired outside a pizza parlor in San Diego.

Lonely in Rothenburg ob der Tauber , Germany.

Speaking At Full Speed

2011-05-10T17:39:00.000-07:00

At work, there used to be a guy who was very outgoing. If I hadn't already nicknamed a guy in college Overly Enthusiastic Mark, this guy would have gotten that appellation. He liked talking to people; his frequent laugh would echo raucously over the cubicle forest; he seemed happy.

That changed.

Over time, he gradually got quieter. His laugh didn't echo around the office area. His hands didn't gesture as widely when he talked. And then he left for another job.

The other day I happened across an AIM conversation I had three years ago and which I didn't remember. More importantly, I didn't recognize my own writing. It was witty, pithy, insightful. The me from back then greatly entertained the me from now. But I don't talk like that now. With that certainty, confidence, intelligence.

What the hell happened?

Part of the reason might be that with that particular friend I decided initially to hold nothing back. To immediately shoot down his stupid ideas, not even bother to entertain them. To give my opinion unabashedly, defend my position. "No, you can't wear red shoes with your interview suit, you'll look like Ronald McDonald." "Giving your girlfriend a RockBand action figure as a gift, while fun, says 'we're not serious!' exclamation point included."

But more, I worry I've changed. Have the constant pressures of being polite and PC at work and church repressed me? Is this the price I pay for the improved social skills I've gained from those environments - a loss of myself? That the socially acceptable me isn't really me?

When I was a senior in high school I was frustrated with writing a PC, smarmy, self-aggrandizing college essay and drafted what would be an honest, accurate description of myself.

I'm a weird little nerd who plays trombone, actually has a moral compass, is too mature for her age and her friends, enjoys spending time alone and playing on the computer, sews, knits, cooks, and bakes because she's fifty years behind today's modern woman, who no one understands because I use big words and say what I think.

I think I'm just revisiting that last clause. I want to speak at full speed again.

Unusual Productivity

2011-04-10T21:10:00.000-07:00

I am surprised at how much I did this Sunday.

First, I had to get up early and go to church to set up the Communion juice and crackers. Normally I just distribute the juice into the cups, so I went a lot earlier because I'd have to set out the cups and also crack the matzoh into little pieces. Breaking the crackers took longer than I thought I would and I made a big mess. I mostly cleaned it up. Mostly.

But I still ended an hour before church, so I buzzed off to work and sampled my one reactor quickly. Turns out it was doing fine and didn't need any interventions, which is good. I like the quick weekend visits I've been making lately. I don't even take my purse off--I just wear it under my lab coat. Only fifteen minutes today!

I whipped back to church and got there fifteen minutes before service started, so I went to Payless Shoes around the corner, just to browse. But they had a good pair of peeptoe black pumps, which I've been looking for, so I bought them. Third thing done of the day and it wasn't even 11.

Then church, then my friend Christy came over for Excel lessons. I love Excel so when she asked if I could show it to her I was awkwardly enthusiastic. It's unlikely she'll need to know the heavy-duty mathematic calculations I use Excel for, so I showed her how to input data, how to sort it, and how to make charts.

To make up for it, today I did nothing of note. I guess I made some chocolate scotcheroos from the corn syrup cookbook I randomly own, and diddled around on my keyboard trying to re-learn Pachelbel's Canon, which I used to have memorized.

Mostly this week is focused on Wednesday because that's the start of my sister's and my trip to Disneyland. My sister wanted to go, and I haven't gone since high school (which was with the marching band and is colored with memories of the cool kids sneaking booze in their shampoo bottles and the drum major drinking peppermint schnapps in Coke which even at the time I thought was a weird combination), so we're going this week. We carefully planned it to not coincide with any UC's spring break, and not to be the week before or after Easter in order to avoid elementary school spring breaks. Wednesday I drive out to my parents' for dinner and to see them, then I'll stay with my sister so we can get a ludicrously early start down to LA. Ludicrous because it will break my "no getting up before 6 am" rule. But I'm game. I'd much rather get up that early for Disneyland than for a meeting, which I've also done.

I hope the freesias are blooming at my parents' house. There aren't many around here for me to smell. They're definitely my favorite flower. They smell so good. So far this year I've only gotten a few stealth smells in when I can find some at the edge of someone's front lawn. My mom tends to have a lot so I can get good smells in. Last year she let me take a big bouquet back with me to Oceanside after my one weekend visit, and they perfumed my whole hotel room.

Pretty, see:

Argh. Have to go to bed. I want to try and jog before work tomorrow. I have been lax about it, though I've been running around for experiments at work so much my pants are loose anyway. Probably doesn't count, though.

Cage Fight

2011-04-06T20:41:00.000-07:00

Associate director: "They're going to lock us into a room until we make a decision."

Co-worker: "Like jury duty."

Me: "Like a cage fight."

I guess we all have different frames of reference.

Since I'm not involved in the cage fight, work has been going very well lately. I'm less stressed than I have been in a long time. Probably since July or August 2009. Even less stressed than during my whole December off, since that was complicated by my giant burn and it didn't end well. Very nice. I've been wondering if some source of stress up the management chain has been relieved. Sometimes I know what's going on that makes people worry but sometimes I have no idea. Maybe now is a good time for everyone.

Whatever. I hope it sticks for a while.

Not that I haven't been working hard. I've had back-to-back experiments and haven't had a day off since March 6. I kind of did it to myself so I can't be too mad. I accidentally got scheduled for ten reactors instead of six and thought, "Hey, more data!" and ran them all. I'm a sucker for more data. Idiot. But it went okay, and I did get more data. It doesn't tell me much, but it's more data.

I tried a new way to cook chicken tonight. I was making a meal for a woman from church who can't leave her house. I've cooked for her twice before and knows she prefers healthier selections because she's injured and can't work out. So what's healthier than baked chicken? I put a half-breast in the fridge to thaw on Monday and figured I'd bake it with the excellent spice rub "Pappy's Seasoning" that's fantastic on chicken. But then today after I got home from work I suddenly remembered the last time I cooked for her I made her Pappy's chicken! Obviously I had the same great idea twice. (Just like how when my friend Yael comes over here for dinner I've twice had the great idea to make couscous with chickpeas and vegetables since she's kosher-itarian). I have standards about this, so I had to make something else.

So I remembered how my friend Allison does great looking roast chickens, and dotted it with smashed garlic cloves and rosemary leaves instead of the Pappy's. But there was nowhere inconspicuous to take a taste, so I have no idea how it turned out. It looks pretty good but I have no idea. I'll have to try it again at a time when I can eat it.

I'm also going to try something new tomorrow night. We're having a potluck for my church group and I'm not going to have much time to cook anything what with work and making this meal tonight. I've been very intrigued by the recipe in Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook where you layer hominy, frozen corn, roasted chilis, and cheese in a slow cooker.

I have hominy. I have frozen corn. I have green chilis in a can which is close enough - I'm not going to the effort of roasting chilis for a slow cooker recipe. I have cheese especially because there was an extra package of Mexican blend after our last potluck.

But I don't have 4 hours of slow cooker time so I'm going to bake it like a casserole because I don't see why you really have to make it in a slow cooker. And I'm going to add layers of ground beef because I don't have two cans of hominy, and that should make it heartier. So we'll see. It could be horrible. But there will be boys there. They eat anything. One eats hot sauces as entertainment. Yeah, beef in the hominy should go over fine.

I anticipate having to explain what hominy is at least four times over the course of the evening.

Instructions Are For Sissies

2011-03-28T21:37:00.000-07:00

Yes, obviously, the first thing you're supposed to do with a new recipe is read it all the way through. And I did. ...Enough to get all the right ingredients.

I was making a strata for Bonnie and Allison, who came over on Sunday for a book-less book club--which is bookless because our foray into classics with Lolita was particularly disastrous. Stratas are easy. You layer bread with some other ingredients--here, sausage and Granny Smith apples--and pour over eggs. The perfect make-ahead casserole.

Except the catch. You don't pour over just eggs. It's eggs mixed with milk. I got to that stage of the recipe and thought it was weird the eggs only covered the filling junk halfway. Yeahhhhh, totally forgot the two cups of milk. I ended up dumping out the entire casserole into my biggest bowl and mixing in the two cups of milk. And some extra eggs just in case. So much for the layers the strata is named after.

Then the next day I realized I forgot to put in the sage I paid $5 for at the grocery store.

At that stage, it stayed sage-less. In the end it turned out pretty well. I think the dumping and stirring incorporated the bread bits nicely, so it was a uniform texture throughout the egg portion. Bonnie brought fresh pineapple and berries for a luxurious fruit salad and Allison brought great scones (Ina Garten). We do food good.

Today I was at 99 Ranch and had a devil of a time finding tamarind paste. At least, I think what I got was tamarind paste. But then, I was never sure what I got last time was tamarind paste either. That stuff was a sticky block called "Tamarind Seedless" which nonetheless had tons of crap in it. Today I found a jar labeled "Concentrate Cooking Tamarind". We'll see. Tomorrow I'm making pad thai again, returning to the America's Test Kitchen recipe I first tried but this time without the dried shrimp that made it taste like death.

Half the battle of cooking Asian recipes is getting the right ingredients. When I bought the dried shimp I couldn't find it either because it wasn't in the aisle labeled "Dried Seafood". Perplexing. I should probably just go to the other Asian store that's organized by country. But it smells worse.

Addendum

2011-03-25T15:38:00.000-07:00

Another linguistic annoyance. "Love on" in substitution for "show love to".

For instance, "We're gonna go love on some homeless dudes in the park."

Though maybe I'm the only person who thinks that sounds wrong.

I've seen the viral video of the kid in Australia who body-slammed his bully. It's only to be expected that the "experts" say the kid should have walked away or told an adult; that there should have been a non-violent solution. When I was in middle school, the administration enacted "Zero Tolerance" where anyone got caught fighting--even if in self-protection--would get suspended. One of the best parenting moves my parents ever did was to tell me to completely ignore that. My dad said that if anyone hit me, I was supposed to hit back as hard as I could--and my parents would deal with the consequences. He knew that as a good kid, I would follow the rules, not hit back, and die. The school wanted me to be a dependent wimp. My parents gave me permission to protect myself and implied that they thought I was capable of it. It's a world of difference.

Google Star

2011-03-23T21:15:00.000-07:00

...My entry about my cousin's hilariously offensive Mexican and Chinese gingerbread men is the number one result when you Google search "multicultural cookies".

Oh dude. Janelle, forgive me.

Mandatory Parties

2011-03-23T20:31:00.001-07:00

Today was one of our mandatory--or rather, "strongly encouraged"--work parties. While four years of a full-time job has greatly improved my ability to partake in small talk, these still are slightly intimidating.

Once I got stuck at a table where there was a full-blown politics discussion.

But today was pretty entertaining. We talked about TV shows, how those of us in real scientific fields get frustrated at the horrible science on TV, and I found out there's no need for me to ever watch the V reboot ever again.

Also, we found out a new member of our group used to be an EMT in Oakland and she had storrrrriiieees. Apparently there's a street drug cocktail that mixes Viagra and cocaine. She stopped herself while describing something and said, "Oh, that's not a story that's appropriate for work." Which means it's a great story. Luckily she caved to very little prompting. And it lived up to all the anticipation that "a street cocktail that mixes Viagra and cocaine" conjures up. Horrible, of course, but fascinating.

This week's dinner has been pasta primavera. I had asparagus, cream, mushrooms, and a newly minted Costco block of real-stuff Parmesan, so it was a foregone conclusion. I used whole wheat pasta too and the sauce sufficiently covers the taste, which is a bonus. However, it made eight servings so I am going to get so tired of it by the end of the week. Though even after excessive amounts of servings, I can repeat pasta primavera much more quickly than other dishes. That one time I accidentally made 32 servings of lasagna junior year at Tech? Yeah, I haven't had lasagna since. That really did me in.

This week my dad called and said that if I can come out to my parents' house the day before Easter he would go into the garage alcove and bring down the pots, pans, and dishes that constitute my sister's and my hope chests. I'm 26 and these were bought before I can remember. This is the closest I've ever come to even seeing what my parents have been talking about my whole life. Even though my kitchen is filled to bursting with enough pots and pans and dishes for every purpose, I'm very excited. A whole life's anticipation might come to fruition.

Strange Places

2011-03-21T21:38:00.000-07:00

It's no secret that I hate CFLs. They don't last as long as advertised, which doesn't make them cost-effective; they don't work in some of my lamps; and you have to treat them as hazardous waste which I get enough of at work thank-you-very-much.

Hence, the stockpile.

I finally broke into the stockpile this weekend. I have a hard time going to sleep anywhere near my appointed bedtime (10 pm), and I wondered whether the fluorescent glow of the darned CFLs wasn't partly to blame. So I switched out all the CFLs in the living room. It's only been one night so far, and I got sucked into Heaven Is For Real because when you get to the last 40 pages of a book you have to just keep going, right? At least I do. Books are another big reason I get less sleep than I'd like.

But I notice the light in the living room is more peaceful without the CFLs. They must flicker at a frequency I can't see but can indeed sense.

Upshot is I need a bigger stockpile.

Despite the fact that I'll work 26 days in a row this month, work has been pretty peaceful. I'm running experiments and haven't had any major disasters. One of my oxygen lines was disconnected last week when someone came in during the middle of the night to steal something (yeah) but the cells survived very well.

I'm also taking a half day on Friday to bake cookies for church. I signed up for a service project to make care packages for foster kids at a college in the City, and the organizer asked for homemade cookies. Now, if there's something I can handle, it's cookie baking. Through some recent circumstances I have become the owner of six full tray baking sheets, so I can make six dozen chocolate cookies without even cycling a pan. Being from a large extended family means I'm very used to making large amounts of food. In college for the trombones' Turkey Fry each year I would make around fifty pounds of mashed potatoes. You get used to it.

Maybe that's partly why I'm also used to eating leftovers. I was talking with someone this week about how I only cook once or twice a week and eat leftovers the rest of the time. I do have one limit, though. I don't like eating the same thing for lunch and dinner repeatedly, so if I've cooked two different meals I alternate which one I take for lunch at work. But I gather that other people my age really don't cook as much as I do. Based on how many restaurants my friends from church are familiar with I'm definitely the odd one out. I've gone to various restaurants around here for work lunches, four Thai places with my sister, and the ramen place with my mom and my sister (separately). I guess I get my fill of eating in restaurants alone on work trips.

More than my fill of eating in restaurants alone.

Plus I'm cheap. I admit it. Or "frugal". I heard someone say frugal is when saving money only affects you but cheap affects other people. So I think I'm frugal. My sister would undoubtedly argue that.

Though I'd kind of rather be cheap than frugal because frugal reminds me of the Frugal Gourmet and how he was accused of molesting those kids.

That might be a leap, but I also dislike using the term "unpack" in reference to a concept rather than luggage ("Let's unpack that idea a little more for the next few minutes") because it sounds like the reverse of this exchange from the Simpsons:

Krusty: Try my new Krusty Ribwich. Mmmm. I don't mind the taste.
Marge: Oooh, a new hamburger sandwich.
Homer Simpson: Wow, I can't wait to pack that into my colon!

My brain is a strange, strange place.

Music All Around

2011-03-14T21:48:00.000-07:00

Nine hours of lab work today alleviated only by a half hour meeting. I don't know why it took me so long because I didn't have that much to do. I guess I'd have estimated the amount of work I had at six and a half hours. I guess part of it was that when I got in, the autoclave (the cheeky thing) decided to give me a "Low plant steam pressure: Cycle was aborted" error. Yesterday when I loaded my items into it, I had waited long enough to see that it got to the right temperature so it must have decided to mess up after I left.

It's obviously out to get me.

Wheeling the cart all the way over to the autoclave in the other building and back did take up additional time. To get there is complicated. Because of California OSHA or something, every ramp on our sidewalks have to have yellow bumpy metal strips so blind people don't wander into the road (according to the safety rep). Only the strips get slippy when they're wet, and you can't push a cart over them because everything will bounce off. All us seeing folk who have to push carts between buildings end up either in the street or taking a winding complicated path through the four interconnected buildings. Which we're not supposed to do because we're passing food areas with our lab stuff. But anyway, that's what I did today so to get to the autoclave I had to go up an elevator, over a bridge, through a building, over another bridge, through the building to the autoclave, and then back. Twice.

The safety rep did say if someone gets hit by a car we might be able to get the yellow bumpy stuff removed. It's awful that I'm just waiting for that to happen.

I have an experiment going so I was in at work both days this weekend, and will be for the next two as well. That's the way the cookie crumbles. Sunday I fit work in between the early church service (which a lot of people arrived late to, I noticed - Daylight Savings strikes?) and going to a concert of Mendelssohn's Elijah at a Lutheran church in Palo Alto. I haven't been to a classical music concert since 2005 or 2006, probably (basing my timeline on the fact that it would have been our former roommate Laura's concert for the symphonic band in college). I spent most of the time watching either the tall tenor in the middle, who had a wonderfully expressive face and was obviously in love with the piece, or the principal second violin, who managed to look bored out of his skull while playing complicated passages. The music was amazing. It made me want to get out my trombone and play. I should at least practice more often to keep the GT fight songs memorized.

Though I'm not sure it's possible to forget those. I think Ramblin' Wreck became a muscle memory halfway through my RAT season.

Phone Calls

2011-03-09T20:26:00.000-08:00

Figured something out just now.

When everyone had landlines, if you called someone at home and they answered, and it wasn't dinnertime, you were cleared for a nice phone conversation.

With cell phones, people answer when they're busy, when they're in the car, when they're just about to enter a movie theatre, what have you. You never know if it's a good time to have a nice chat. You have to awkwardly establish whether now is a good time, whether the person deems you important enough to spend time talking to rather than whatever activity you interrupted.

I think that's why I don't call people except my parents, who have a landline and therefore if they answer, and it's not dinnertime, we can have a conversation; or my sister, who has no qualms about stating that she's in the middle of Walmart and we'll talk later.

Is that the way it is for other people? Have cell phones killed the meaningful phone conversation? It seems like everyone else is forever and annoyingly glued to their cell phones so some conversations have to be going on. But how do you know when to call? Do people pre-arrange times that the other person will be free to talk?

Man I hate cell phones. I don't want to be available at all times. I want to be available at the office and at home, both times I can talk (though at the office, only for short, important personal matters and of course, work things). I don't want to be available 24/7 for work. I don't want to be bothered in the car. Shopping time is shopping time. I remember when I was shopping for my Dad's birthday present and I forgot my cell phone. I hadn't done that in forever, and it was so freeing. There was nothing that could disturb me. What I was doing was what I was doing.

I only grant cell phones their usefulness for emergencies and the "I can't find you, we were supposed to meet in front of the theatre, oh, you're at the other entrance" type of call.

Plus, I want to smack the phone out of the hands of anyone who is texting while talking to me in person. Every. Single. Time.

This and my survivalist bent makes me think I would be well-suited to living in a cabin in the woods.

You know.

Like the Unabomber.

Revisiting the Past's Music and Food

2011-03-03T17:42:00.001-08:00

My horoscope today was "It's not fun being bossed around by someone who isn't as efficient or smart as you are, and today you're not willing to do all the work while someone else gets the credit. Fortunately, there is no need to do anything drastic to draw attention to yourself. If you continue to pursue your goals and follow your work ethic, others will eventually appreciate your unique contribution." I found it funny.

I didn't actually get bossed around by anyone today. First, I got to work seven minutes before eight which should have been just enough time to look up which conference room my eight o'clock meeting was in, make a latte, and get there.

That only works if the conference room is in one of the six surrounding buildings.

It was on the other side of campus entirely.

Luckily, my boss's boss was supposed to go the meeting too and I ran into her on the stairs, so we drove over and were late together.

But it was a hectic start to the morning.

After a two-hour videoconference I spent all day in lab building inanimate things and keeping some alive things alive. The lab I'm working in this week doesn't have a computer hooked up to speakers, so it's the CD player or silence. I dug out some CDs I burned two years ago when a similar thing happened (before we got speakers for the computers - now they're just lost because of the lab renovation). Turns out I made two CDs of Rasmus and Travis, and then loaded up the back-end with Weird Al. I don't know why I thought it was a good idea. I do know at the time I was having to come in at midnight a lot and wouldn't have cared what the graveyard shift janitor thought of my music selections. But I've been the only one in lab so it doesn't matter.

Today is my Friday because I'm taking tomorrow off. It's been a month since I didn't have to work on the weekend, so I blocked off the first possible day for vacation. On my calendar, 8 am through 7 pm tomorrow is labeled "Abby needs a weekend".

I keep my gCal private, don't worry.

My associate director doesn't keep his private.

My friend Yael came over yesterday for us to cook dinner together. I learned that just because you think you have such a great idea of a vegetarian dish to make doesn't mean you didn't have that same thought the last time. Luckily Yael said she had liked the Moroccan Couscous with Vegetables and Chickpeas, but I need to research more recipes. I don't have many vegetarian dishes I make besides that and the tortilla and bean soup. I guess there is a whole Internet out there at my fingertips I could utilize. Somehow I rarely think of that for recipes.

Addressing the item on my to-do list, "Eat more cheese", this week I tried Iberico (from Trader Joe's). Yum! Smooth and a little peppery.

Cheese is so awesome.

The Uncanny Likeness of Food

2011-02-28T20:56:00.000-08:00

I work in cell culture, which means that we grow immortalized cell lines in specialized media that has everything in it the cells need to survive. It's a scientific-sounding soup with amino acids, vitamins, sugars, salts, and some other things that sound really appetizing like "putrescine". All of which are nice, well-behaved powders on their own.

Then you put the cells in, wait two weeks, and in the end it smells like crap.

Well, not exactly like crap, if you know what I mean. But not good. It's even worse when you have a bacterial contamination and they're putting their own smell in there.

And when you work in cell culture, you have to deal with the smell all the time. Every time you finish a culture you have to pour out the junk and clean the container. Recently there was an episode where one of my project teams was waiting outside a conference room and a cart full of used glassware went by. Everyone else gagged at the smell but I didn't react. The project lead commented on it, and I had to reply that I think I must breathe through my mouth automatically at times like that. I've had long training.

But as blase as I am about the smells, there's one thing I won't do. I won't compare them to food.

Sure, one type of media looks like fruit punch. Another looks like apple juice. But I won't compare the smells to food. I keep catching myself halfway through a thought - like "Hmm, this smells like--no no no stop there".

And today's lunch meeting was the perfect example why. The lunch meeting food was ribs, corn, beans, and cornbread. I took a bite of cornbread, thought it tasted kind of unpleasant, but also really familiar. And then it struck me. It tasted like cell culture.

And that was it. I didn't eat any more lunch.

The thought still horrifies me.

Projects

2011-02-06T20:22:00.000-08:00

The latest thing my latex allergy has reduced me to is making my own underwear.

I used to have a supplier, but though their website is still active the style I buy has been out of stock for about two years, so I've given up hope.

With the demise of that supplier, I'm left with three options. Buy the hippie, all-cotton, we-sell-yoga-supplies-too underwear that I've bought before and know doesn't fit; pay $9 a pair for the Barely There style I've also bought before and know is too thin; or make my own.

Frugality, practicality, and distaste for hippies led me to Option 3.

So I've been making a lot of underwear. Each type of elastic works differently, so I've been trying to get the lengths just right. To that end I spent around four hours this weekend ripping elastic off garments to put it back on again. So far I've made pairs too big, too small, and a few that are just right. Hopefully I can soon hit the Goldilocks every time.

But since that's what I've been doing, it's made it uncomfortable to answer all those "So what are you doing on your weekend?" questions. You want to watch the Super Bowl? No, I want to go home and make underwear.

Yes, the most annoying part of my latex allergy is the social awkwardness.

2010-12-30T20:28:00.001-08:00

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".

2010-12-29T21:24:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-12-12T21:34:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-08T21:24:00.001-08:00

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.

2010-11-22T19:45:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-11-08T19:53:00.001-08:00

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.

2010-10-08T13:44:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-01T21:25:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-22T13:51:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-08-16T20:09:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-07-09T22:40:00.000-07:00

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!

2010-07-01T21:19:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-06-24T21:17:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-21T21:17:00.000-07:00

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!

2010-06-03T21:40:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-05-25T21:43:00.001-07:00

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.

2010-05-09T20:58:00.000-07:00

"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."

2010-05-03T21:38:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-15T22:05:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-12T22:25:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-04T21:10:00.000-07:00

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, so 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.

2010-03-15T21:01:00.000-07:00

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...

2010-03-09T21:33:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-03-05T23:40:00.000-08:00

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.

To prove it, I took pictures.

Look, my head is on the beach:

Look, my toes are in the Pacific:

And here's a shot down the coastline:

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

2010-02-23T21:07:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-21T20:24:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-15T21:05:00.000-08:00

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 interested. 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.

2010-02-06T21:24:00.001-08:00

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

2010-02-02T20:41:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-31T20:41:00.000-08:00

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.

Lightbulb

2010-01-13T17:53:00.000-08:00

I finally figured it out. The government values its citizens only so far as they provide its members with their salary or their office through taxes or votes.

This explains why the new government health care shafts the elderly - who contribute less income tax. Similarly with the sick, and handicapped. It values minorities and unions who can provide votes, and campaign contributions.

It is also short-sighted. National security or improving education doesn't increase tax revenues or votes. Abortions, since babies don't generate revenue or vote for several years, are also explained.

All my previous confusion and doubts were due to thinking the government actually might value the lives of its citizens but that simply can't be true. It only values what its citizen can do for the government. Taxes and votes.

It makes sense. And I hate it.

SoCal

2010-01-11T20:01:00.000-08:00

I don't think I've been in Southern California since high school. Whereas then I was here for a marching band competition the main purpose of which was to get to go to Disneyland. Now the main purpose is two different meetings for work at our plant near San Diego.

I flew in last night with my boss. Though we're on the same flights we have separate rental cars and are staying in different hotels. Our company switched travel agencies at the beginning of the year, and either the new one isn't good or they need some time to get used to us. We've had a plant down here for at least three years, and people from all kinds of departments come here all the time. I know for a fact that there's a Four Seasons here we're supposed to stay at because the company has some "minimum occupancy" agreement with them such that when we all got an email saying no one can stay in four star hotels except the Four Seasons in San Diego. I was excited about the idea of staying at a four star hotel. Brad in my group stayed there once and said they actually put a mint on your pillow, it was so fancy.

So when I called the travel agency and asked what hotel I was supposed to stay at in San Diego I expected them to say "The Four Seasons" to which I would happily agree. I wasn't expecting them to say, "We don't have any recommended hotels for San Diego." Uh, seriously? I clicked on the list on our website and it had a whole list, one of which was the Residence Inn (Four Seasons was not on that list for some reason). So they signed me up for Residence Inn. But then when my boss called two days later for reservations they wouldn't let her sign up for the Residence Inn! She got put in a hotel 20 minutes away, hence the separate cars.

So despite the disappointment over the Four Seasons gotta say this Residence Inn is super nice. I didn't understand the concept of "residence", so I wasn't expecting a full suite with separate living room, bedroom, and full kitchen. If we have an engineering run for my project when it goes to manufacturing I'd totally stay down here for two weeks to watch over it if I got to stay here.

Today was a six hour meeting and then two hours of trying vainly to do work on the work laptop which doesn't like pulling up files from the shared drive over wireless and didn't have Adobe Acrobat to do the other things I needed to do. Then I got takeout from a Yelp-recommended Italian restaurant - penne milano (ziti with sun-dried tomatoes and chicken in a cream sauce) and broccoli and watched Fox News and read Georgette Heyer.

Haven't seen any of San Diego in daylight. I have been using my GPS to get places and see the same street names over and over again but couldn't get home without the automated voice giving me directions.

Now my microwavable lava cake is calling me.

Orchid

2010-01-04T22:07:00.000-08:00

I am testing my picture-uploading skillz with a picture of my orchid from this summer.

This orchid, from Trader Joe's, is the first that I've ever had bloom for a second time. My first orchid, from Kroger I think, died when I asked Karen to take care of it over the summer. Her orchid didn't make it either. The asparagus fern she cut an inch off the ground, surprisingly, did make it. But I digress. My second orchid, from Ikea, grew very well and split into two plants when I repotted it. One of the two died after a few months as if it didn't have the strength to go on. The other started growing a flower spike about a year later but gave up the ghost. I think I shouldn't have let it split into two.

But this one, from Trader Joe's, I have kept alive for over two years. I bought it shortly after I started working at this current job because I had a window by my desk and kept it there. I brought it home when I moved to the windowless but unshared cubicle. I bought four houseplants I kept on my desk instead until it turned out we're not allowed to have plants in the building. At home, the orchid not only rebloomed, it bloomed in two spikes! It had a very good display for several weeks. I had to wait until daylight to take a picture of it because this was around the time my camera's flash broke. It's been around six months since then but it's already growing what I think might be another flower spike. It also has a ton of roots coming out of the pot. I'm reluctant to repot it given my previous experiences. This plant also has a bunch of keiki because I overfertilized it when it was at my desk. They're little "clones" that shoot off from the motherplant. I wonder if they're giving it strength to produce so many flowers. The Internet says you can cut them off and get more orchids, but after my previous experiences I'm not messing with what's working.

Multicultural Cookies

2010-01-04T21:54:00.000-08:00

My cousin Janelle made the most hilarious "multicultural" cookies for Christmas. Not only was the Mexican wearing a Mexican-flag T-shirt and have thick eyebrows the Chinese one was pure yellow, with sprinkle eyes.

They were too awesome to eat.

Abby in a Bag

2009-09-06T16:10:00.000-07:00

To test posting pictures in Blogger I'm sharing photographic evidence from my freshman year in college that yes, my maroon duffle bag is large enough to hold a body.

$39 That Will Haunt Me Forever

2009-09-06T15:45:00.000-07:00

Today I was a good financially responsible adult and downloaded my credit report. I forgot that I'd done it in March, too, so I'm actually doing pretty well on that "you're supposed to spread your three free reports throughout the year, so do it every four months" thing.

All of the accounts make sense, which is good identity theft-wise. But it shows all the individual student loans that I consolidated when I graduated, about seven of them.

Including the one $39 I was given my junior year. Why $39, I don't know. That's not even a textbook.

And it's going to show on my credit report until 2017.

$39 that won't die.