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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A pretty good showing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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





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

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

Feel the Burn

I got burned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crawfish flavor migrates.

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

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

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

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

It redeems me after last week's disaster:




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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

We also toured monuments and fancy churches:


And Schloss Blutenburg, which had a moat!




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



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




And I visited the royal palaces Linderhof:



And Neuschwanstein, the one that inspired the Disneyland castle:


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

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

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