Instructions Are For Sissies

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

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

...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

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

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

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

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

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.