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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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










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
















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

Good trip!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, madder with time.

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

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

Twinkies

Sometimes a single Facebook posting can spawn an entire event.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Annoying.

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

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

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

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

Who wants to go to the rodeo?

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

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

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

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