The Broken Spatula

Pumpkin Pancakes

2011-10-23T13:36:00.000-04:00

The more time I spend in my graduate program, in classes like "Human-Computer Interaction" and entry-level positions like "Usability Intern," the more it bothers me when people give things inaccurate descriptors. A link farm is not a "Research Guide;" it is a list of "Databases" or "Resources." People looking for databases would not click on "Research Guide," and people intrigued by "Research Guide" would be disappointed to find a static list of general databases.

Outside of professional concerns, misleading or vague descriptors are still a pain in the tuckus. We spent several hours last weekend trying to find a tri-wing screwdriver to dismantle our Wii, because both online and brick 'n mortar retailers waffled between calling it a security screwdriver, a precision screwdriver, or a "Nintendo" screwdriver. Recently, the powers that be at our favored Kroger decided that aluminum foil was no longer a "Baking Need," but a "Paper Product." Have you tried to find a cell phone lately? Not a smartphone, or an iPhone, or whatever fancy gadgets with soaring monthly bills your provider wants you to buy, but a cell phone in the cell phone section? Fun times.

Proceeding down the funnel of nitpickiness, we arrive at the relevant example for today's goodies: calling foods other foods they are not. People love to slap the names of popular foods onto less popular ones to make them sound more appealing. Tomato sauce and mozzerella do not make your standard casserole "Pizza Macaroni"...they make it lasagna with differently shaped pasta. Grilling a portobello mushroom does not make it a "steak" any more than sauteeing rib-eye would turn it into a mushroom. The "pie" misnomer is especially popular with anything involving fruit and sugar. I've probably done it myself in the past; you might find a recipe for "banana cream pie oatmeal" or some silliness in the archives. But that was back when I was too undernourished to think for myself. Bananas and milk in hot cereal is not banana cream pie. Squeezing lime juice into cake batter does not make a batch of "Key Lime Pie Cupcakes." You wouldn't call chopped apple sprinkled with cinnamon a complete apple pie, but stir it into yogurt and you suddenly have "Healthy Apple Pie a la Mode."

And according to Google, there are about 185,000 recipes on the indexed Internet for "Pumpkin Pie Pancakes."

These are not "Pumpkin Pie Pancakes." They do not contain bits of pumpkin pie. They are not prepared in remotely the same fashion as pumpkin pie. They contain the same vegetable and spices as pumpkin pie, and there the similarity ends.

Why do I stick on this point? Why can't I just accept the irrational naming conventions of breakfast foods and move on? Because I do not want my pancakes to be stuck within the constricted definitions of pumpkin pie. There are a lot of downsides to pumpkin pie: it's squishy, it often comes straight out of a frost-bitten box, and it's associated with high-pressured cans of whipped corn syrup and stressful holidays stuck at crowded relatives' houses. Not everyone likes pumpkin pie. And even if they do, calling my dish "Pumpkin Pie Pancakes" makes them sound like they aspire to be pumpkin pie. Like they are a watered-down stand-in for the "real thing" because actual pie is "fattening" or "off-limits" as a breakfast food.

No. My pumpkin pancakes are pumpkin pancakes. They are excellent pumpkin pancakes. Hefty, fluffy, delicately spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg and a trickle of molasses. I don't need to call them "pie" to convince myself they are delicious.

Now, I've written about pumpkin pancakes before on this blog, way back when I relied on boxed mixes because I feared the baking powder. Erase any memories of that pseudo-recipe from your mind (even if I just put them there with the preceding sentence), because these are the real deal.

Pumpkin PancakesMakes 12 large pancakes

1 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup milled flax seed
1/4 cup wheat bran
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tbsp sugar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
2 eggs
1/2 cup pureed pumpkin
1 tsp molasses
1/2 tsp vanilla
2 cups soy milk

Mix the flours through cinnamon and nutmeg in a large bowl. In a smaller bowl, beat the eggs. Mix in the pumpkin, molasses, vanilla and soy milk until uniform. Carefully stir the wet ingredients into the dry, just until combined. Fry up 1/4 cupfuls of batter over medium heat.

These are only lightly sweetened, to leave plenty of room for maple syrup on top. They're best with unobtrusive drinks like black tea or milk; I wouldn't pair them with juices or herbal teas that could wash out the flavor.

As a final disclaimer, I would like to note that I'm not a maniac about naming things accurately.

Sorry, René, but this is a pipe. As a representation of a pipe, we understand it to be a pipe. It is a pipe as much as the picture our brain creates from light reflected off a physical pipe is a pipe. But we don't understand my pancakes to be pie, or a mushroom to be meat in disguise. Just try to communicate clearly, people.

Mini Donut Pan!

2011-10-18T11:01:00.000-04:00

I'm going to reveal something about myself right now that may shock my delicate foodie readers. Fair warning: it may be painful to read. You may feel offended in your very core. If you progress past this sentence, you have acknowledged informed consent and waive any rights to litigation regarding the psychological distress you may endure. Ready? Okay:

I don't like muffins. Or cupcakes.

"Nooo! You lie! The muffin/cupcake is a staple in the food blogger's collection of acceptably posh-looking sugary treats! The world couldn't go on without cute little cupcake stores, cupcake wedding cakes, and homey homemade coworker's birthday cupcakes!"

Sadly, it is true. I don't like any baked goods turned out of a muffin tin. I ate them for years, and even posted old recipes on this blog. But after making them and putting their rosy photos on the web they went straight into the freezer and languished, dry and frost-bitten, until a suitable amount of time had passed to justify throwing them away.

Why am I so full of hate? I admit, the poor muffins never did anything to me. They just annoy me for the same reason triple decker sandwiches, pizza cut into squares, and insufficiently chilled ice cream cones do: they're difficult to eat. You can't get your mouth around the whole thing, so you have to kind of nibble around and into the cakey middle while holding the wrapper gingerly on the other side and hoping the crumbs don't rub into your carpet. In both muffins and cupcakes, the good stuff is usually on top, so after you're done with that bit you just stuff the so-so rest of it into your mouth out of obligation.

I don't have anything against the muffin part of the muffin. I love sweet carby things. There's nothing better than a slice of quickbread with tea in the afternoon. The shape is the issue, and the little bits of paper stuck to the bottom if you use a low-fat recipe. So I was elated when I saw that the black sheep of American baking, the donut, was making a comeback in food blogging circles.

Donuts take a bad rap these days. They're the poster pastry for misguided anti-obesity campaigns. Drawing a cartoon cop without a box of donuts is like drawing a cartoon teacher's pet without glasses or a cartoon black man with normal hair. They top the list with potato chips and Big Macs as the foods we blame for all of our personal problems and the world's ills at large. Its dirty reputation is pretty irrational, given that your standard Krispy Kreme glazed donut has as many calories and fewer grams of sugar than the fashionably "nutritious" Larabar. It's junk food, to be sure, but I'd sooner attribute the skyrocketing diabetes in the Western world to those caramel-infused whipped-cream-topped lattes in the morning than the humble circlet you eat beside them.

All of that was just to build up to this point: I bought a mini donut pan!

(Photo stolen from Amazon, where I bought it)

This donut pan cures all of the problems I have with muffins. Thanks to the hole in the center, they're easy to eat and don't leave crumbs (also, they bake really quickly). The maximized surface area means I can cover the whole thing with "the good stuff." The logistics did take some getting used to, though. The first time I used it I filled the tins too much and ended up with mushroom-shaped mini muffins with holes in the middle.

But that didn't prevent me from messing around with toppings to find the perfect combination.

I tried powdered...

...then added water to my bowl to make a glaze...

...then stirred in melted chocolate chips to make a "ganache"....

...mixed up some cinnamon sugar for kicks...

...then played with coconut flakes.

The winners: cinnamon sugar and powdered. Obviously. They're the easiest to eat, being dry, and have the lightest taste. I focused on these for my second batch, after making some tweaks to the recipe and making a conscientious effort to use less batter per donut.

Isn't that better?

A little spray of oil keeps the sugar on the donut instead of my counter, but I put paper towels under the rack just to be safe. I also took a shortcut to the cinnamon sugar one by putting a standard crumb topping directly on the batter before baking.

I'm still adjusting baking times to get these just right. After I made them the proper size, they came out a little dry. I also need to perfect my storage methods.

My poor powdered donuts turned into sticky glazed when the condensation in the container hit the lid and trickled down again :(

I'll post my go-to recipe when I'm satisfied with it...if I remember and have the time. I haven't been posting lately because the world is out to get me, but that's a rant for another time on another blog.

Autumn Spiced Potato Doughnuts

2011-10-03T11:21:00.000-04:00

My world has been crazy lately. Since I'm at the center of my world, the origin of the craziness is obviously me. I could blame the professors who simultaneously assigned three hair-tearing midterm papers due this week. I could blame the virus that's going around taking all of my group members out. I could also blame the weather, which is wreaking havoc on my lips and skin and makes it difficult to get out from under the cozy covers under the morning.

However, the source is ultimately me. My professors didn't tell me to spend my weekend coding a jQuery & Google Maps API prototype for an app design; we were just supposed to make pretty pictures. (Actually, that's why I did it. "Does the app need to be functional?" a classmate asked. "No," the professor said. "Of course not. Not for this class." That sounds like a challenge to me.) The virus only took down one member in a group of 4, and I have fuzzy pajamas and a new humidifier to combat the effects of the weather. So the problem is really me, for letting the stress pile up irrationally. That, and for spending all afternoon yesterday watching "Community" episodes.

Now, there are two primary ways to fix me, so that I stop whining and things get done. Three, actually, if you split one of them into two variants.

1) Give me money.
OR
2) Give me food.

Obviously, number two is the only viable option right now. The pursuit of the first one is what causes most of my worries in the first place. Hence, even while I'm "supposed" to be reading and writing papers, crafting surveys and designs, or coordinating group meetings and interviews, you will find me on any given day in the kitchen for an extended amount of time. I've made a whole slew of new recipes I've been meaning to post, like these carrot cookies...

...and these blueberry bars...

...or an unpictured batch of pumpkin cookies that appeared on my counter last night around midnight. But given my limited amount of time to devote to things that don't get me a diploma, I could only choose one for today. That one will be these adorable Autumn Spiced Potato Doughnuts.

Aren't they cute? They might be cuter if you had some sense of the scale of them, but I'm not going to take a picture of one in my hand because that would require effort, and I have little effort left to spend.

As per usual, I took someone else's recipe and made it my recipe. The original called for sweet potatoes, but I didn't have any and I don't really like them (the shock!). The original recipe must have been insanely sugary, because after cutting the sugar in half (adding a bit of molasses for flavor) and leaving off the cinnamon topping, they were still pretty darned sweet. I guess to qualify for the name "doughnuts" they have to send your blood insulin levels through the roof, so maybe you should call mine "buns" instead. Buns sounds cuter anyway.

Pro tip: leave your dough really moist for a light and fluffy texture. I usually flour my yeast doughs until they're almost dry to the touch...don't do that. If you leave it just under the threshold of "too sticky" you'll get a lovely, tender little bun, instead of a boring mini bagel. These are perfect if you need to eat breakfast in the car because you couldn't get out from under the cozy covers in the morning, or if, like today, you need something small that would digest in under an hour before you get on the treadmill.

Now, to listen to a Korean rock comedy group while huffing and puffing through two measly miles.

Variations on Pumpernickel

2011-09-10T11:53:00.011-04:00

Indiana doesn't believe in moderation. Either you're a hardcore conservative or a hardcore liberal. Either you're a Hoosier or an outsider (or, in the words of a local paper, you come from a "wholesome" Indiana town with strong values or you snuck in from a rude, superficial state where women wear bronzer and designer jeans). And the worst dichotomy of all: either it's blazing hot or freezing.

"Fall? What 'fall?'" Indiana's local representative of Mother Nature asks. "Spring? Don't make me laugh."

Last Saturday we had a high of 98°. By Monday morning, we were down to 67°. Now we're back in the 70s, but only because it's going to rain. This happens every year, so I'm more or less used to it ("No it doesn't," Sweetie protests. "This weather is unusual. It will be better next year." Uh huh. We've just had "unusual weather" every year since 2006.) Since I take most of my behavioral cues from the environment, every year when the chilly weather returns I feel the overwhelming urge to do one thing: bake. For the past couple of weeks my trusty plastic sweets box has been filled with this:

Or these:

Or any number of other things. Double chocolate cookies. Fudge brownies. Maple-oat scones. Incidentally, I've gained a couple of pounds lately, and I have no idea why.

A few days ago I got it into my head that I wanted donuts. But I didn't really want donuts. Not fried Krispy Kreme things. Not sugar-topped cake things. I just wanted some pastry shaped like a donut, with the yeasty texture of a donut, but not the greasy feeling or sugar-crashing aftereffects. In short, I had no idea what I wanted.

So I looked at recipes. I found a recipe for "chocolate doughnut cupcakes" on The Cupcake Project with the caveat: "they...tasted more like pretzels or chocolate bread than doughnuts." To Stef this was a bad thing. To me, it was just what I was looking for. I went to the original recipe on Coconut & Lime because Stef's reprint got cut off. Then I transferred it to my own site so the amount conversion I programmed would pump out the halved ingredients for me. I hate having to do it in my head; I always forget halfway and end up using the full amount of something.

The results:

Sweet, chocolately, unremarkable. Just what I was going for. The sugar and chocolate are just strong enough that you know they're there. I'm thinking the only difference between "sweet bread" and "doughnuts" are the frosting and other toppings. I left off the toppings, which means I can freeze the lot and top with whatever I feel like later:

Breakfast today: chocolate bread with Tofutti cream cheese and English Breakfast tea. Substantial? No. Delightful? Of course.

As I was trying the finished rolls yesterday, it occurred to me that here was something familiar about the muted cocoa flavor. Pumpernickel. I think that was what I was after all along. So even though I had already baked that day, I dove into another recipe that popped up at the top of the search results for "pumpernickel": black bread from The Smitten Kitchen. Once again I made some modifications and stuck it into my recipe box site for handy-dandy conversion to a single loaf. I left some things out because I am not as adventurous as Deb. No shallots or fennel seeds for me. No espresso powder, either, because I hate coffee. I was pushing it enough already with caraway, chocolate and apple cider vinegar.

I must show my age here when I say: O.M.G. It smells like rye, but is hearty and slightly sweet, as pumpernickel should be. It would have been even better if I actually used molasses. I'm not even sure if I can call it "pumpernickel" or "black bread" without molasses, but plain old sugar was good enough.

My one issue: it didn't rise much. The texture is soft and spot-on, but I like a little more fluff. With all of the roughage in there, the yeast must have had a tough time reacting with the proteins to effectively trap the carbon dioxide bubbles that make bread rise. A tablespoon of wheat gluten would have helped, but gluten is expensive. Next time I'll make my machine do the work and incubate the dough instead of kneading by hand and leaving it out at room temperature. Alternatively, I could shape round artisan-like loaves so I can say it looks like that on purpose; the only reason it looks so sad and flat is because I expect a big sandwich loaf to come out of the pan.

Butterscotch-ish Ice Cream

2011-08-31T10:13:00.008-04:00

I don't eat much out of the standard rotation these days. Pancakes, peanut butter, ramen; scones, pizza, ramen; smoothies, burritos, ramen. Don't dis the ramen; it's where I get half of my vegetables.

But yesterday I deviated from my well-worn path to make a variety of ice cream that is not dark chocolate. As I posted some weeks ago (the last time I touched this blog >.>;), I've made many batches of ice cream, but all chocolate. Frankly, I've been afraid to try any other flavors. It's very difficult to screw up chocolate. If the texture is wrong, it's still chocolate. If it freezes too hard, well, it's still chocolate so I'm willing to wait. If the flavor is too bitter or too sweet, I have a wide range for tolerance...because it's still chocolate.

Vanilla, on the other hand, is a tricky business. You don't have anything to hide behind. Either the sweetness is spot on, or it's blah. If the texture is wrong, the flavor isn't intense enough to make up for it. Still, even I can tire of chocolate. I sought out viable alternatives: Peppermint. Pistachio. Butter Pecan. All of them, unfortunately, would require me to get to the store for special ingredients.

"Salted Caramel" to the rescue! The title sounds hip, and who doesn't like caramel? Just some water and sugar and patience, et voila, right? Not right. After ten minutes watching syrup bubble, I produced nothing but a hard, sticky mess that wasn't anything like the "deep amber color" all the websites said the combination should magically produce. So I poured it down the drain and applied a tenet seared into my brain during my formative years watching the Food Network: "When in doubt, add butter."

Buttescotch-ish Ice Cream
-1/4 cup water
-1 packet unflavored gelatin
-2 1/2 cups soy milk
-2 tbsp butter
-1/2 cup sugar
-vanilla
-1/3 cup egg whites

Soften the gelatin in the water for ten minutes. In the meantime, melt the butter and sugar in a saucepan and stir until bubbly. Turn down the heat and wait for the syrup to burn (3-5 minutes). Heat the soy milk in a large mixing bowl, and dissolve the softened gelatin in it. Pour the "butterscotch" into the milk, mixing vigorously (it will bubble vehemently!) Stir in the vanilla and put the base in the fridge to set up overnight. Break up the gelatinous "pudding" and mix thoroughly if the fats separated to the top. Beat the egg whites with an electric mixer until stiff peaks form. Fold in the pudding, and pour the base into an ice cream maker to freeze.

I don't have photos to share because the quality of my shots would just send you running away, instead of enticing you to try the recipe. I was genuinely shocked that this turned out so well. Sweet, but not ridiculously sugary, with a full body hiding underneath the unassuming vanilla exterior. "Real" butterscotch uses brown sugar, so my lazy granulated substitute made it less complex than it could have been, but I am happy.

Notice: My New Blog

2011-08-14T11:48:00.003-04:00

Hi all,

Since I've been doing such a stellar job writing regularly for this blog (cough cough), I decided to start a new one!

The subject matter is completely different, on reading/writing and related esoteric matters, but the author is the same. I have a unique domain for it, thanks to the efforts of Sweetie to set up the redirects and CPanel magic for it. I didn't use any authoring software, but constructed the site from basic PHP, MySQL, and XML. One day I may port other blogs over to it, but that depends on how easy Google makes it to convert its data structure into mine.

There's only one post so far, but if you're interested you can read it at http://blog.tkmarnell.com/.

Soy Ice Cream Experiments

2011-08-02T14:26:00.007-04:00

So. Our country won't be defaulting on its debts. Yay. It only took months of rancor and mud-slinging to get to the eleventh-hour "decision" that everyone knew was coming.

There's nothing like looming international doom to show you exactly what kind of people you live with. Today I cracked open the local university-centric news sources to read eloquent, barb-studded comments about "socialism for the rich" and the destructive force of those dumb, dirty Tea Partiers. Then I drove a couple miles south to get groceries and listen to my good neighbors explain to the teenage cashier that all the woes of the federal government come courtesy of "Those damn niggers. They lie. And steal."

Bloomington, Indiana: Pick your favorite flavor of intolerance, and we'll deliver.

Speaking of flavors, lets talk about something a little less prone to flaming: ice cream!

Since writing my post about my new ice cream machine, I've made four batches of frozen treats. However, I have no photographic evidence of these treats, because ice cream is horribly un-photogenic. And by the time I set up to take good photos in bad lighting with cheap, ugly bowls, my precious fruits of labor would have gone to waste. So you'll just have to take my word on the descriptions.

But this isn't a look-at-the-pretty-food post, anyway. It's an informational one. A lab report on my little kitchen experiments, so to speak. So let's start off with a nice diagram, shall we?

This is water. Water likes other molecules a lot. Water will hold hands with anyone who has a free one to spare, and sometimes even when they don't. When you make water cold, it feels especially touchy-feely and grabs on tight and doesn't let go.

However.

This is what happens when water is surrounded by a bunch of strangers who don't like it back.

This is water's frienemy, propylene glycol. Water wants to be nice and buddy-buddy, but propylene glycol only sorta kinda pretends to like it back, and would rather keep it away from its friends. In other words, it's non-toxic antifreeze (or a very toxic classmate, whichever way you look at it).

Why do I start out a post on ice cream by anthropomorphizing the hydrogen bonds between cartoonish organic molecules? Because, before you even think about making ice cream, you need to go to your kitchen cupboard and look at the back of your bottle of vanilla. Unless you're a gourmand with a paycheck five times the size of mine, you probably bought imitation vanilla extract. And if you bought imitation vanilla extract, it probably has propylene glycol. This can either be a good or a bad thing, depending on what you want to do with your ice cream. In any case, you should be aware of it first.

Now the Recipes
After a lot of reading and mixing and hacking away at slabs of frozen chocolate, I think I have settled on my go-to thickener/stabilizer for non-dairy ice cream. If you're fortunate enough to be able to digest lactose, you don't really need one, because you can pick up heavy cream at any grocery chain. Soy creamer, however, is outrageously expensive, and it doesn't do the trick anyway. Instead, I have signed a contract with gelatin. Lovely, animal-based, foul-smelling gelatin. Gelatin, sugar, and soy milk form the base of all three of the following recipes...what you do with them depends on your goals and dietary needs.

#1: Straight-Up Gelatinized Soy Ice Cream
-1/4 cup water
-1 packet non-flavored gelatin
-3 cups soy milk
-1/4 cup sugar
-1/4 cup cocoa powder
-vanilla

Sprinkle the gelatin over the water and let it stand for ten minutes. Place the sugar and cocoa powder in a saucepan and slowly whisk in the soy milk over low heat. When steam starts to rise from the mixture, remove it from heat and stir in the gelatin and vanilla. Refrigerate for several hours or overnight. Break up the Jello-pudding-like blob and pour it into your ice cream maker to freeze.

This basic recipe yields an unbelievably full-bodied and creamy ice cream. This is soft-serve-shop quality stuff to a lactose-deprived, dark chocolate-loving young lass. Unfortunately, it doesn't stay that way when you pop the rest in the freezer overnight, and end up with a solid cocoa-flavored cylinder. The only way you can rescue your ice cream is to chop it up and blend it back into its original creamy consistency. It may be possible to avoid this by deliberately using imitation vanilla with propylene glycol, or pouring in another alcohol that would have the same effect. Or, you can try recipes #2 or #3.

#2: Whipped "Pudding" Ice Cream
Follow the same steps as above, through letting the base set in the fridge. Before you freeze it in the ice cream maker, whip it with an electric mixer until it's noticeably larger in volume and full of tiny air pockets. Then freeze in the machine as before.

This ice cream isn't quite as creamy as the first, obviously, but it does freeze better. If you set it on the counter for 10-15 minutes, it's somewhat scoopable by the time you're ready for it. However, if you're going to be making a big batch and eating it over time, I would suggest alternative #3 instead:

#3: Meringue-fluffed Soy Ice Cream
Follow the same steps through refrigeration again. Before freezing, whip two pasteurized egg whites (1/3 cup from the carton) until stiff peaks form. Carefully fold in your base, then freeze.

This ice cream was the most successful, in my opinion. First of all, it gives you a huge volume of base to go into the canister. It thaws more quickly and evenly than the whipped version, and it holds its shape even while it's melting in your bowl. However, the flavor is somewhat diluted, and the consistency can't compare to the first version.

Conclusions
Which recipe you use depends what you want to get out of your ice cream. If you're making a big batch for company, stick to the first for the biggest wow factor, and use genuine vanilla to freeze it thoroughly. If you're vegan or egg whites weird you out, go with the second (using kosher gelatin or agar for the vegans, of course). If you're going to be storing it in the freezer and hogging it all for yourself, I vote for #3. It's the recipe I will probably use for myself from now on, using imitation vanilla with propylene glycol to prevent it from freezing solid.

And now, a video of a barking cat:

End.

Nut/Cereal Bars and Chairs

2011-07-24T10:22:00.010-04:00

Sweetie says that since this is ostensibly a "food blog," I should blog more about food. I do so rarely that random visitors apparently get the impression that this is a professional blog, or a travel blog, or your standard confused coming-of-age blog. So look! Chocolate! There.

Sweetie and I have been eating nothing but cereal for breakfast lately. I normally don't like cereal because it's not very filling and I get hungry for snacks in an hour. But with the deadly heat wave, pancakes, oatmeal, etc. do not sound appetizing at all. Sweetie never ate much cereal other than Cocoa Pebbles and Frosted Flakes, but the sugarsugarsugar has an even worse effect on the male blood glucose than it does on the female. He wanted to branch out, but doesn't know other brands and expected me to just pick things off the shelf that he would like. So I have been, with a relatively high success rate. He liked the Cinnamon Life, the Honey Bunches of Oats (which I mix into my bran flakes for flavor), and the Honey Nut Cheerios.

But it isn't a 100% success, because he refuses to touch the Kellog's Corn Flakes. He may not like the taste, or he may just be huffy because I commented that there's so little in them it's like eating air. Either way, I have a box of corn flakes that is not being eaten. They taste bland and salty to me, so I'm not going to dilute my bowls with them. The universal solution: chocolate and peanut butter.

I've made two variants of cereal bars in the past week, experimenting to find my preferred recipe. The first I cobbled together from various recipes on the Interwebs:

PB Cereal Treats
-pat of butter
-1/2 cup crunchy peanut butter
-1 cup miniature marshmallows
-3 cups corn flakes
-dark chocolate chips

I melted the butter and stirred in the peanut butter before adding in the marshmallows and stirring until I made a big sticky mess. Then I used my full upper body strength to crush in the corn flakes and spread the mixture into a greased 8x8 pan. I dotted the top with the chocolate chips, and when they melted from the heat I used a spatula to spread them around for a bittersweet coating. After refrigerating, the result was only slightly crumbly, but nicely sweet and slightly addictive.

The second recipe came from Mama Pea. I made some modifications because I'm poorer than Mama Pea and I was baking Shake 'n Bake drumsticks for Sweetie's dinner simultaneously, so the temperature was all wrong.

Chocolate Cherry-Nut Cereal Bars
-2 tbsp milled flax seed
-1/2 cup maple syrup
-1/2 cup salted peanuts
-1/2 cup cashew halves
-1/2 cup corn flakes
-1/2 cup dried cherries (or raisins, if you can't stomach the 70¢ per ounce, which I couldn't have if I wasn't hungry and impulsive at the time)
-dark chocolate chips

Mix the flax into the maple syrup and set aside. Combine the nuts, cereal, and cherries in a bigger bowl. Pour the maple syrup over the mixture and toss to coat. Bake in a parchment-lined 8x8 pan for 10 minutes at 375°, or for 20 at 325-350° like you're supposed to. Dot the top with chocolate chips and swirl when melted like the first recipe.

Unfortunately, this second one from Mama Pea wasn't as successful as the first. Healthier and more interesting, to be sure, but because I was messing with times and had cheap fake maple-flavored syrup instead of the real stuff, it didn't set properly. The liquid all settled to the bottom and I had to flip them over after cutting to dry out in the fridge overnight. They held together slightly better after that, but I'm not sneaking into the pan like I was for the other bars.

Now back to the non-food content. Today Sweetie is reorganizing all the furniture in the bedroom to get his desk in front of the vent. He moved mine to the air conditioner in the living room while I was sleeping so he could play happily with his dwarves without overheating in the leather chair. Before, we had his set up so that we could sit on the bed to use it. Once it's moved, we'll have to go to Staples and pick out a new chair. Sweetie is very picky about his chairs, and I don't mind spending the money on it because a bad back would be much more expensive. However, we will have to find a way to keep this away from it:

At least if she's up there, like she is at this very moment, she's not scratching the heck out of the arms and kneading her claws into the seat. I don't like this chair anyway. It's made for someone five inches taller and fifty pounds heavier, and in order to get my knees over the edge I have to sit away from the back, which negates the whole point. The next time I get one for me, we'll have to find one designed for Asian people.

What's Your Take on Naps?

2011-07-19T09:00:00.001-04:00

Yesterday my internship ended at 3. I drove home and diddled some before putting on my workout clothes and getting on the treadmill before dinner. I pushed myself to keep jogging for the full two miles, and made it to the last quarter mile before a side ache made me stop to walk. I only stopped once near the start to rescue the cat, who had gotten herself hooked again. She plays with the scratcher until one of her claws gets caught on the threads, and then she hangs there and cries for someone to come and save her.

I felt a bit wobbly as I showered and made pizza for dinner. It had been a long report-writing day and I don't think I had enough calories in me before I went burning them all up. I put on lots of spinach and drank water instead of cola, and watched a low-stress YouTube video of Britons playing Minecraft (Sweetie's on-again-off-again video game obsession). Then, before putting the dishes away, I lay down just for a bit to close my eyes.

And then it was 9pm, and I was on my side of the bed with the covers on and Sweetie beside me. He's such an enabler.

I hate naps. If I were leading the ideal lottery-winning existence, I would love naps. But when you have responsibilities the next day, they're nothing but trouble. For one thing, I always have to take an aspirin afterwards, and my tummy acts up for unknown reasons. For another, I couldn't go to sleep again until 3 in the morning, and had less than five hours before the cat alarm woke me up. No, she wasn't hooked and crying again; Sweetie came in to see if I was awake for my internship and I stumbled out for water, before sneaking back in and collapsing. Then the cat weaseled through the open door and hopped up to try and tunnel under the covers with me. So that was that.

Even though a nap + a night's sleep = a full 8 hours, it sure doesn't feel like it. I had to put in eye drops because they felt so heavy and dry. And I was half an hour late today because I wasn't moving as fluidly as usual. I had to exert all my mental energy to safely follow a truck full of tree limbs all the way to campus, and I barely processed what was playing on the car radio until I was parking and the host was saying something about a rapper going to federal prison for income tax evasion (who is Ja Rule, by the way?).

According to Glamour, Greek researchers say naps will lengthen your life, but it doesn't feel that way. Yes, I just linked to Glamour quoting Yahoo News! quoting no authoritative sources. That's how out of it I am.

Speaking of Glamour, some of the things they've been posting have really bugged me lately. A few days ago they advised ripping restaurants off by asking for a bunch of free lemon wedges and mixing them in your water with sugar packets for a "skinny lemonade...right at your table!" And on all of their positive body image posts, they put this girl:

The file name on their site is "happy_body_image_vg.jpg." Why? Does she look average to you? The only aspect of her gorgeous appearance that even hints at less-than-airbrushed-perfection is the unflattering top and slouching posture, probably meant to disguise the size 0 professional model's body underneath. Of course she has a "happy body image;" she could be a soap star!

Anyway, what do you think of naps? Life-lengthening or stress-inducing? Right now, as I'm preparing to buckle down and stare at the report I wrote yesterday and try to figure out what I was trying to say, it definitely feels like the latter.

Ice Cream Adventures

2011-07-16T11:00:00.012-04:00

Before the Post Really Starts
I feel like I owe my readers an apology. Yesterday, my blog was derailed by a zealot who latched on to a casual comment on one of my posts and devoted his/her (likely 'his') Friday morning and night to skewering my cynical, apathetic ways. If you want to read the soapbox dissertation of a self-proclaimed "professional" with "a career spanning many years" and a fondness for typing five periods in a row, trying to prove that he's smarter than a girl a fraction of his age, you can view the past two posts below.

However, that's where it ends. I know you don't come here for drama. You go to The Real Housewives of New Jersey for drama. You come here for diaries of my little travels and recipes for cheap Americanized stir-fry. You drop by for pictures of Pokéball Cake and to snicker at my pathetic attempts at "running," a.k.a. shuffling along for two measly miles and collapsing on the couch for the next week.

So let's carry on, shall we?

Where the Post Really Starts
For the past month I've been meaning to share the news: I have an ice cream maker! Yay!

When I was in the market for one, I scoured reviews and debated whether it was worth coughing up $50 or more for one with a good reputation. I make $1 more per hour now (BTW I finally sent in my resignation to the library yesterday; I'm 100% ITG starting in September), but it's still a lot. But I did the math, and at $3 for a tiny pint of soy ice cream at the store on sale, I would make it up in about ten batches if I used reasonably-priced ingredients. I closed my eyes and hit the "Checkout" button in Amazon...but the final bill had $20 knocked off the price! Apparently it was some weekly Friday promotion that wasn't advertised. So I ended up paying $30, getting free shipping, and two days later this beautiful box was on my doorstep.

Inside the box were more pretty things.

Kids dig it!

Indulge! Quick and easy!

Get the scoop!

The manufacturers must realize that by the time we see the colorful wrapping dotted with exclamation points, we have already bought and opened the machine. Anyway, after washing and freezing this bowl for a day, I hacked out my first batch of chocolate soy ice cream with marshmallows.

I didn't have a standard recipe, so I just made a batch of pudding and chilled it before freezing in the machine. It was beyond delicious, but didn't freeze too well--there wasn't enough air to make it scoopable and the cornstarch I used to thicken it got gritty over time in the freezer.

For my second attempt, I tried simply mixing pureed strawberries and sugar into a batch of 2% greek yogurt. No thickening agents necessary.

Gorgeous and perfect fresh out of the machine, but like the last batch it froze into a solid block. The next time I try the frozen yogurt approach, I should probably use full-fat.

Since then, I have tried boiling down the milk first, letting the cornstarch steep instead of doing it the custard way, and just pouring sweetened soy milk into the canister directly. I've had varying results, but none of them are quite there yet. I made a successful batch for Sweetie using heavy cream, but soy creamer is terribly expensive and that would defeat the whole point. Other recipes I've seen introduce ice-thwarting fats through egg yolks, but I can't find containers of yolks-only in the grocery store and I'm wary of bacteria in raw eggs. My latest trick was just to throw the block into my Vitamix when it got too hard. But that was a lot more work than I'm willing to put in every time I want a sundae.

In the future I could try working in silken tofu...it seemed to work for the Tofutti folks. I could also try coconut milk or Lactaid or other sources of "alternative dairy." I don't like the idea of coconut milk much, though, because the kinds I've tried from manufacturers had a very powerful under-taste even if they were supposed to flavored with chocolate or green tea.

Do you make ice cream? Have any tips or fool-proof recipes?

Case in Point

2011-07-15T11:41:00.009-04:00

Not an hour after posting this morning, I got fresh material from someone who did exactly what I predicted, verbally lynching me for two sentences on a personal blog. They put so much effort into their sermon hoping that people would read it that I'm going to be nice and put it front and center, with the key points in bold:

"I am appalled at your insensitive comments regarding the Lauren Spierer case. While I understand the points you were making concerning the media, your choice of wording displays some sort of hostility towards this girl and those that miss her (90 pound blond....wasted....tiresome....make her corpse surface faster...) As a parent and a library professional I would suggest you seriously consider some of your career plans that you noted in an earlier posting - you mention becoming a manager someday. Good managers never forget that they are managing people and good library managers never forget they are serving the public who use the institution and not the IT or book collections within the building. Your tone is cynical and your criticism of how people treat you as they interact with you as customers tells me that you should stay away from contact with the public, as you will only give the institution you work for a bad reputation. Humanity as well as technical expertise is needed in the IT/Library world if we are to hope that Libraries will continue on in this century. Otherwise we may find our customers preferring to get their IT fixes at the local Apple/Microsoft/or whatever else there is rather than have to interact with someone like you. I appreciate that you have created this blog and are in no obligation to provide it at all - hey, it's your blog after all - but today it showed up in a simple google search in the first page of results for news on Lauren Spierer and it is probably safe to say that someone who cares about her and her family read it and now wonders about why libraries would employ a person with an attitude like yours. Lose the cruel tone please, it doesn't come over as witty or clever, just plain nasty."

Now, if you know anything about the Lauren Spierer "case," these are the facts: she was approximately 90 pounds. She was a blonde. She was underage and wasted. And after more than a month, I am 99.999% certain that all that is left of her is a corpse. If you read my post, my main point was that the local mobs have careened out of control, and are posting virulent messages against anyone who dares say anything to that effect. As soon as you do, you have your entire character generalized and speared by self-righteous white knights. Funny enough, if I happened to say the exact same thing about 90 pound blondes getting wasted and running around at 4:30 in the morning while she was alive, everyone would applaud my upstanding character. But it got her killed, so, now it's "nasty."

So thank you, Anonymous-person-who-claims-to-be-a-library-professional-but-doesn't-have-the-spine-to-identify-yourself, for proving my point exactly. If you read my post from Tuesday with any attention, which you claim you did, I didn't complain about customers at all--I complained about the lazy people I have to work with. People who, for example, would rather be commenting on blogs at 11:15 in the morning than doing their actual work. If I were a baser person, I would point out how blatantly unprofessional it is to attack random students on websites for their personal opinions. It makes me wonder exactly what kind of "professionals" the libraries are hiring these days, who believe that "the public" only includes select people they agree with.

Media Ethics

2011-07-15T09:00:00.001-04:00

From the events of the world in the past few weeks, it's impossible to conclude that "media ethics" is anything more than an oxymoron.

First, we had British journalists hacking into the phone of a 13-year-old murder victim to get exclusive "scoops." They were inept, of course, and ended up deleting some of her voicemails. The family noticed and thought that their daughter was still alive and accessing her messages. Of course the other newspapers are having a heyday about the paper's downfall, with close-ups of the Murdochs and the News of the World head honchos...but not terribly much about the actual victims (Source/Example).

Then, Stateside, we had the hullaballoo over Casey Anthony. News anchors might has well have been chanting "Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!" months before the trial, publishing reams about how Anthony was a party girl, a bad mother, a druggie blah blah blah. So then, when the prosecution failed to show murder one beyond a reasonable doubt (they didn't even show cause of death, for heaven's sake), a jury of her peers untainted by the media angle acquitted her. Now a sixty-year-old juror has fled the state because mindless mobs are "protesting" outside her house (source/example), and hordes online are posting about how jurors shouldn't be random Florida trash, but better educated rich white people who will return a just Guilty verdict no matter what the evidence. Hooray for the Land of the Free.

Locally, there's been a tiresome frenzy over Lauren Spierer, a 90-pound blonde who disappeared while running around with her friends at 4:30 in the morning. She was so wasted that she forgot her cell phone and her shoes at the bar where she was drinking all night, underage. Her friends were so wasted that none of them remember anything about the day before. Yet the papers are clinging to every false lead, every neighbor who retains a lawyer, every tear that drops from her mother's eyes. It hasn't reached the torches and pitchforks stage (yet), but there are delightful comments online about how the police should be forcing confessions from these kids, that it's a big cover-up and the friends should be raped in retaliation, etc. etc. Anyone who dares to say that she's probably in a ditch somewhere because she made stupid decisions is verbally lynched for "blaming the victim"...if she even was a victim. So far, there's no evidence of any crime committed, but let's waterboard them all just in case, right?

Now, yesterday morning when I was driving to my internship, I was treated to a ten-minute infomercial for weight loss pills. The local radio station for young folks has this deal with a local vendor called "Complete Nutrition," which has very little to do with nutrition and a whole lot to do with potentially dangerous drugs. In the past few weeks I've heard not only traditional commercials voiced by self-proclaimed "doctors," but tidbits from show hosts between songs talking about how they've been on their products for two weeks and have lost, like, fifteen pounds. This morning's infomercial was in the guise of a down-home interview with a local business owner. He and the host chatted casually and earnestly about how great Complete Nutrition is.

The premise of Complete Nutrition? It "mimics ephedrine, but without all the side-effects." The host actually said, "Ephedrine was popular, like you said, in the '90s and early 2000s, but it was taken off the shelves because the side effects were too dangerous. But you've taken the side effects out!"

Here's the thing about ephedrine: its intended effect is the side effect. It's an amphetamine-like stimulant; it hypes up your system. So your heart rate and blood pressure and all those goodies skyrocket. Have you ever had asthma or bronchitis, and they make you breathe through that contraption to clear your lungs out? And then for half an hour afterwards you can't hold your hand still or think clearly? That's ephedrine.

So if a drug is intended to mimic ephedrine, it should do the same thing. Which means the "side effects" are the same, and people could be taking these things and going jogging in 90 degree weather and dropping dead on the sidewalk. By "taking the side effects out," they might mean they decreased the dosage, but there's no magic that would make an inherently dangerous pill safe and sound.

What do all these stories have in common? Money. Newspapers earn money by printing scandalous headlines. TV stations make money by leading lynch mobs that have to tune in every hour to hear an unending loop of anti-Anthony sermons. Printing yet more uninformative interviews with Lauren's emotional roommates/family/tangential acquaintances will not make her corpse surface faster; their only purpose is to keep people paying subscriptions. And the radio station makes money by taking it from the Mom and Pop owners of Complete Nutrition hawking stimulants to impressionable college students.

Now don't get me wrong; I love money. I spend the majority of my waking hours trying to get it. But there are certain things decent human beings don't do. The Britons did not have to hack into voicemails to get a good story that people would read. The radio station did not have to sign on with Complete Nutrition. They could have stuck with Holiday World, local restaurants and Marsh groceries. It's not an equal opportunity issue, because they're a private station. If the KKK rang up with an offer of $100,000 for a prime-time spot, I'm sure they'd tell them to go hang (themselves, of course, in case they get confused). So there's really no legitimate reason for the station to be peddling snake oil at 9am, noon and 5 like a happy, wholesome neighborhood meth house.

There was a time, I'm sure, when journalism was a respectable profession. Now, it seems, they just exist to squeeze out a dime. I'm just waiting for the day that somebody does drop dead from Complete Nutrition, and then all the local newspapers latch on gleefully to the fact that the radio station was pushing it. Then they'll program their mobs to forget about Casey Anthony and Lauren Spierer to flock over to the radio station and throw rotten eggs at the interns just for working there.

5 Things I Hate About Being in IT

2011-07-12T08:00:00.003-04:00

I work in IT for a living. It wasn't supposed to end up that way, but the world decided it would pay web developers a lot more than it would reference assistants or lab techs. I think I'm quite good at it...not to a fully professional standard yet, but close enough for academic settings.

The work pays okay, and a lot of the time it's enjoyable. I like creating things, making things work. Giving people what they need to do a job efficiently. However, there are some aspects of it that really, really annoy me.

1) People Never Talk To You
People will complain to the secretary that something isn't working properly. They'll write lengthy emails to their bosses or coworkers about how absolutely critical it is that a title be changed on a certain page. But they will never talk to you. Usually, the issues blown out of proportion will take two seconds to fix. A single line of code altered, and there you go. No drama, no gossip, no forwarding necessary, if they'd just taken the time to walk back and say "hi."

2) IT People Never Talk To You
I don't know why, but I've only had negative experiences with people who were supposedly on the same side as me. The knee-jerk reaction for any inquiry is, "It can't be done," with no explanation or effort offered whatsoever. I'll ask someone in a different department storing our XML documents for shell access to their servers, and they'll think I'm stupid enough to believe that it's impossible because they're Windows servers. I'll ask someone in my very own information science school for a MySQL account to link to my little section of its server, and they'll think I'm stupid enough to believe that the department can't offer one because, well, just because. It's not like MySQL is open-source or anything. And as soon as I point out a way it can be done, I get dead silence on the other end. Unfortunately, people like this may be the reason no one ever wants to talk to me.

3) People Believe Your Work is Done By Somebody Else
Ah, the Big Black Box of Technologiez. Everyone can rip widgets and apps from everyone else nowadays, so who would believe the new application for editing pages was made by me? I have received the following comments on applications I made from design to release, updating everyone involved every step of the way:

-"The program we're using probably isn't sophisticated enough for this, but..."
-"How do we get to the new system that was installed?"
-"I wonder how they did that?" (Actually said to Sweetie by a new coworker about a feature on the website he had developed the previous year)

This isn't just a pride issue, either. People just will not believe that I can make "The Program" do whatever I want it to (within reasonable limits, of course). If they don't like the way it looks, the way it works, or the way a box opens when they click it, I can change it. They don't have to shrink and then mumble about how inadequate it is behind my back (see #1 yet again).

4) People Are Terrified of IT
Whether they're the people who are vocally gung-ho about Twitter or the ones who think the government will steal all their secrets if they turn on the screen, people are terrified of doing anything substantial with technology. My applications sit on the shelf for months because nobody wants to look at them or talk about them. Then, all of a sudden, they want to have a two-hour meeting and change everything, which I'll do in a day just to let it gather dust for another month. Why? Because it has to be 100% perfect before anyone even hints at showing it to the world. Even if they're tools to make staff members' lives easier, they refuse to touch it. Half a year after giving control of part of the website to someone else in the library, I get weekly emails telling me to click the buttons for him.

5) People Don't Want to Learn
Personally, when I'm terrified of something, I prefer to learn about it so I'm not flailing in the dark. Then it's never as scary as before. But the people I've worked with seem to like being terrified, and want it to stay that way. Every time that staff member sends me an email telling me to click his buttons, I send the exact same response with the link and step-by-step instructions on how to do it himself. He says "Thanks" and doesn't bother to look at it. I'll explain to a supervisor how something works, because I'm not going to be around forever, and she'll just tell me to put it all in documentation so someone else with fancy skillz can understand it later. Never have I given a spiffy online present to someone and seen them actively explore it of their own free will.

After I get my degrees, I will probably move on to other kinds of work. I'm setting myself up to manage information, not push out code. So right now I'm just blowing hot air. But I do believe that if I enter a management position, my frustrations on the front lines will help my relations with future underlings and other departments. At the very least, I can ease their frustrations a little bit, so they don't end up blogging about how much they hate their lives and scheming ways to escape.

Pokemon National Championships

2011-07-11T11:22:00.005-04:00

Over the weekend I developed a sore throat, so I'm taking it easy at home today. I haven't had a day of no responsibilities for a long time, so this one morning will have to stand in for an entire summer vacation.

Yesterday I drove Sweetie to the National Pokemon Championships at the Indiana Convention Center, so he could see the crazy people who devote their lives to the video game in action. Some of them were seriously scary--and I don't mean like unwashed and barely dressed, but capable of reading minds. I even became a little emotionally invested in the outcome, because we spent the morning watching someone from Jersey win through luck and showman antics. His friends and family were all there shouting non-stop, disparaging his opponents and quacking during matches. Yes, quacking. It's a Mighty Psyduck thing. He didn't seem like a bad guy, really, but we did not want him and his loud fans to win the championship against the more strategy-wise one in a collared shirt who Sweetie immediately picked out as his favorite. Sweetie sympathizes with people in collared shirts because they look like "serious business." And he was indeed serious business; during the final matches he had terrible luck (getting paralyzed, flinching, etc.) against the Mighty Psyduck and still managed to stay in control. He won, of course, because Pokemon plushies and quacking do not a battle win.

For lunch we we walked down the street and found a Steak 'n Shake on the corner. I knew there would be restaurants there because we were in Downtown Indianapolis, and you can't walk two steps in any direction without running into a restaurant or shop. Downtown looks sort of like a proper metropolis, but honestly, Indianapolis is tiny. This is coming from someone who grew up in the suburbs, too. Like, if we walked ten minutes in the opposite direction, we would have been out with the corn fields and factories. The streets are bizarre because they were strung together on the fly, and parking is abysmal because it wasn't designed for a big influx of people. It's certainly not the sort of city you would expect national competitions to be held, and apparently this was an unusual year. But that Steak and Shake was much higher quality than any you would find in Bloomington--both food- and people-wise. Our sever had manners; whodathunk?

Other than a spot of bad traffic fleeing the city in the afternoon, we survived the trip without incident. I spent the morning worried that we would come back to find our car towed, or couldn't get out of the public lot, because the machine ate my $5 and opened the gate without printing a ticket. But thankfully no one made the rounds to check, and the exit gate was motion-sensored. I really, really don't want to have to go back again any time soon, but we did escape in one piece.

When we got home I did laundry and ate canned soup for dinner, because canned soup always calls my name when I'm feeling under the weather. Then when I felt better I jogged on the treadmill (2 miles in 23.5 minutes! Woo!). That was probably a stupid thing to do because it ran my body down even more, though it felt like a good idea at the time. So today I am sitting around, sucking on lozenges and waiting until the microorganisms in my system finish their repairs.

Another Friday Fail

2011-07-01T12:31:00.003-04:00

Radio show on the way to my internship this morning: "Are You Smarter Than An Intern?" People call in and try to answer more questions correctly than the radio station intern for giveaways from local businesses. Until this morning the intern was 5-0, and the businesses got to save their money. Today's caller was "Ann," who had been a contestant once before and was taking another shot at a free pizza.

Host: Are you ready to play "Are You Smarter Than An Intern?"
Ann: Yes.
Host: Alright. Start the timer. First question: Who ran for president with Sarah Palin in 2008?
Ann: Oh, that was...that would be...um...
Host: You can pass if you want.
Ann: Yes. Pass.

At this point, I almost turn off radio in shame of my fellow Americans. Morbid curiosity gets the better of me.

Host: Name the shape that has three sides.
Ann: Triangle.
Host: Name another shape other than number 2.
Ann: Circle.
Host: Alex Trebec is the host of what show?
Ann: Jeopardy.

Blah blah blah, easy pop culture questions. Now it's the intern's turn. Poor Ann, I think, if only you had turned the television on once in 2007 through 2009. Or read any of the bumper stickers around town still screaming "McCain/Palin 2008"!

Host: Who ran for president with Sarah Palin in 2008?
Intern: Um, I don't know. Pass.

Me: Would have smashed head on steering wheel if I wasn't actively driving.

Host: Name the shape that has three sides.
Intern: Triangle.
Host: Name another shape other than number 2.
Intern: Number 2? What? I don't...
Host: Name another shape.
Intern: A shape that isn't "2?" I don't understand the question.
Host: Name a shape! Any shape!
Intern: Oh! You mean a shape other than the one in question 2! Um...rectangle.
Host: Alex Trebec was...
Intern: Jeopardy.
Host: Colonel Sanders...
Intern: KFC.

But oh, ran out of time. Ann got her free pizza. Though I don't think either of them should be allowed out into society until they read, well, anything.

Playing Catch Up

2011-06-28T09:25:00.002-04:00

I keep meaning to get back to posting regularly, but life gets in the way!

First, immediately after we came back from Philadelphia I had a week-long summer course on XML (and DTDs, schema, XSLT, the works). This means that in addition to running around to internships and jobs, and I had class and homework each night. I prefer this intensive format of courses to semester-long wastes of time, but it does take a toll. Especially when you're an incurably eager beaver like me and spend five hours each night adding on to assignments when we were only 'supposed' to scratch the surface of the languages and throw something together in one. I watched nary an Asian drama all week...it was like being a grown up.

Then, over the weekend, Sweetie hauled me to Who's again. It was a short stay, since my class met on Saturday afternoon too, but it was still long enough to drain me of any extra energy I may have had for things like blogging. Who is feeling 100x better than I've ever seen him (according to Sweetie, he's approaching pre-2007 levels of hygiene and high spirits). This is great because he's fun to be around now, but it also means he wants to go out and do things. And us young'uns are going to do them with him whether we like it or not. So on Saturday evening you could find me on his lawn, with a bucket of marigolds in one hand and a trowel in the other. Sweetie got the big shovel for clearing out big chunks of sod for a fresh flower bed. And on Sunday morning, he was up bright and early and ready to take us to a picnic...but that didn't pan out because we had to get back so I could do chores and get in 20 minutes of "me time" before a full work day at Job #2 on Monday.

Oh, and it was our fourth year anniversary last week. Yay. We've already gotten to the point that we stopped paying attention to it, and I come up with excuses like "We celebrated by going to Philadelphia last week," because I don't want to tap into my energy reservoirs to celebrate properly. I never thought I'd be an old married woman by 23. I always thought I'd be, well, hiding in a lab somewhere swearing off men in favor of molecules.

I have backlogged pictures of food, but right now I have to zip to my internship and don't have time to process them. Geeze. Playing blog-catchup is like trying to pay off debts--the interest keeps piling up!

Philadelphia, Part 2

2011-06-21T22:08:00.025-04:00

In the last episode, our hero and heroine were stuffing their faces with $14-a-piece Philly cheese steaks. In the great wisdom of youth, they had then donned swimsuits to splash around in a highly chlorinated, slightly heated pool. What will they do next?

Dadadun! The next morning (Thursday) we woke up at 6:30 to get to this building: Independence Hall. We tried to reserve tickets for the tour the night before, but all the slots were taken for the entire day. We were worried that we would miss the opportunity to see it, so we rushed to get to the Visitor's Center as the doors were opening at 8:30 to secure two of the tickets they hold in reserve for the walk-ups. It turns out we didn't need to stress so much, because despite the line of some hundred people who squeezed in before us, we were able to get two for the 9:15 tour.

Since we had a few minutes before crossing the street, Sweetie leafed through and selected a half dozen maps and brochures from the counter. Guess who got to carry them around aaaall day?

I'm ecstatic to be there.

In case you didn't notice, Independence Hall is under construction. The top part is all 200 year-old wood, and apparently it's been threatening to fall apart for a few years. But according to the tour guide, they tell the kids a different story.

Guide: "Did you see the movie National Treasure?"
Kids: "Yeah."
Guide: "You know the part where Nicolas Cage takes a brick out?"
Kids: "Yeah."
Guide: "Now we have to go in and fix it."

This is the first room we saw after the customary orientation: the main room for the Philadelphia court house, where many a criminal faced down a jury of rich white men.

And this is the aforementioned tour guide in the room, where the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were signed.

He said he moves around a lot, so he ends up in a lot more pictures than he was supposed to be in. But in such a small room, with us on one side of the blockade and him on the other, it's kind of hard to keep him out of the frame. It looks much grander in the movies.

I have to include this picture because Sweetie is so proud of it. It's George Washington's chair...but he really doesn't give a damn whose chair it is. The important point is that he took a clear shot of that rising sun from aaaalll the way on the other side of the room.

After the standard tour, we waited in line to see the west wing as well. Right behind us came a large group of seniors on a cultural outing. So when we sat down in the cushy chairs of the first Congressional Hall, we got a good idea of what the government for the human colony on Antarea might look like.

"The representative from New York respectfully abstains."

Here's the big chair up front, with the original artifacts.

And upstairs, the meeting place of the first Senate.

These pictures are grainy partly because the windows filter out natural light for preservation, and partly because using the clarifying flash on the camera messed up the colors.

See? A lot clearer, but the first one is more accurate. For our obligatory smile-and-wave photos, Sweetie has taken to Photoshopping the in-focus version of us with flash onto the proper photo of the room without.

Yay compromise.

After that, we stepped in to see the working documents of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, which to a librarian-in-training like me is much more interesting than the actual thing. Then we did a short tour of the "Other Buildings," as literally labeled on the directional signs outside: the portrait gallery, the gift shop, Carpenter's Hall, the military museum, etc. For photos, you can see the gallery Sweetie put together here: http://bghq.com/photos/gallery.php?g=40; I'm too lazy to select and format them myself. I will, however, include this statue of a guy drinking the Constitution.

It was made in 1987. Super historical.

Skipping ahead to the good parts, we rounded off the day with a visit to the Liberty Bell. We did have some qualms about seeing it, as humans are not allowed in the building.

We made a beeline straight for the Bell, but on the way we spotted a shot of the Dalai Lama paying is respects:

His Holiness always knows how it should be done.

By the way--the tour guide who said he shows up in more photos than he was originally intended?

Yup. In a totally different building two hours later, too.

After this we walked a few blocks north to see what was at the Constitution Center, but it turned out to be a lame museum with hefty admission fees. So we took photos of us holding things in the gift shop instead.

No one has called me "Tammy" in about four years. And the font makes it look more like "Jammy." But what the hey.

Sweetie and I are weak, weak people, so our legs were already aching by 1pm. We decided not to push it, since we'd already fulfilled our obligations as natural-born citizens, and headed back to the train station. On the way, Sweetie took one last panorama of my behind.

Just because I criticized his behind-photographing habits, of course. I used to do that when my mother gave me disposable cameras on trips...at least modern digital cameras don't waste film when you take excessive pictures of your companions' backsides.

And then a sandwich shop called "Così" pried twenty hard-earned dollars from my hands for flatbreads that tasted pretty much like Subway, only really difficult to chew.

My $20 paid for hip waiters and hipper colors on the walls. And the superfluous grave accent on the letter "i."

For the rest of the day we were dead to the world, having expended the last of our Qi walking the half mile back from the train station to the hotel (I'd decided by our second day there that taking it all the way to the airport just to catch the complimentary shuttle wasted both time and money). On Friday, we undertook the long drive back to Bloomington, and by Saturday were more or less back in the rut. Except I had been paying a lot of money for very little food for an entire week, and it didn't hit me until the weekend that I was starved. So I ate a lot. But otherwise, it's been pretty easy to get back into things. I think we're leveling up as travelers.

As much fun as we had, I don't feel any particular pull to go back to Philadelphia any time soon. Sweetie and I have determined, without a doubt, that we are not city people. They're nice to visit, but we're much more comfortable here in the inconvenient, boring backwoods.

Philadelphia, Part 1

2011-06-20T07:00:00.001-04:00

For the past week, Sweetie and I have been in Philadelphia. I didn't blog about it real-time because we've decided not to announce the apartment will be empty whenever we go out of town from now on...we don't have much to steal right now, but it's good practice.

So what prompted us to drive 700 miles with money scattering out the window again not half a year after New Years in NYC? Officially, the Special Libraries Association annual conference. Unofficially, another UNESCO World Heritage Site for Sweetie to tick off his list: Independence Hall. All in all, the trip was 1/3 official, 1/3 unofficial, and 1/3 travel.

On Sunday morning we loaded up a newly oiled Ellie and drove 700 miles to the City of Brotherly Love.

For lunch we stopped at a Wendy's. A bad Wendy's. A Wendy's with a dirty carpet, a dirtier bathroom, sullen employees and stone-cold fries. I ordered an apple pecan chicken salad, because you can't screw up a plastic box of vegetables, right? Well, the chicken wasn't bad, because all they had to do was microwave it. But (a) it was covered in a cheese-like substance that I'm pretty sure wasn't actual cheese, (b) it had about two slivers of apple total, and (c) the chain went out of its way to ensure that there would be no pecans in my apple pecan salad.

Since there is no rational reason to put lactose on my nuts, I swear, they must have done it on purpose. (Ironic Side Note: The slogan above the giant picture of salads adorning the wall read, "You know when it's real.")

The drive should have taken 12 hours, but just after crossing into Pennsylvania, I was cruising along surrounded by semis when a blown tire came bouncing down the highway and smacked Ellie head-on. We pulled over at the Visitor's Center and found some bits of her waaay lower than they should have been. Fortunately, there was a truck stop not a quarter mile ahead staffed by a very friendly mechanic who could give her a once-over. It turns out the tire ripped apart the plastic cover protecting Ellie's delicate parts from rocks and debris, but there was no major damage otherwise. The mechanic gave us the green light to continue on, and we'll have to look into replacing the cover when we get back to Indiana. Then, after another 5 hours, we discovered that I had written the directions incorrectly because I assumed the Pennsylvania Turnpike would remain I-76, and wrote down the wrong exit number. Thanks to our handy-dandy atlas, we were able to double back through the outskirts of Philadelphia and get back to where we were meant to be, but it added at least another hour of stress to the trip. Finally, we arrived around 11pm. We had just enough time to look around in awe at the cushiness of our pad at Embassy Suites before I crashed to get in enough ZZZ's for a 6:30 wake-up call the next morning.

Note: This hotel has ducks in the lobby. Why? Because they're ducks. In the lobby.

Monday through Wednesday I took the train in to Center City to spend my days at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. My mission: to listen to the talks and watch the walks. Since I'm still a library student, my selected program was all over the place. Some sessions were useful, and some not-so-useful, but I think I accomplished my objectives.

Monday

Biomedical & Life Sciences Division Contributed Papers: I only caught the last one on disaster information in public libraries, and was not terribly impressed.

CSI Philadelphia: Forensic Science Explained: I chose this one because I was interested in data/resource management in the FBI, but the other attendees were more interested in solving murders like they see on TV and monopolized the speaker's time.

Military and Government Unconference: This "unconference" was basically a structured conversation with other attendees about trends in information/library science in government. I took away two things: (1) a lot of librarians are a tad unrealitsic about the Holy Grail that is Twitter, and (2) their perspective doesn't matter much anyway because administrators call all the shots in government entities.

Visualizing Science: I was so tired that I couldn't concentrate during these talks, but they were mostly about existing tools for harvesting and mapping data. It's not really my area of interest.

Tuesday

Military Libraries Division Networking Breakfast: Great. I got some names and some cards, and a ton of tips. If I hadn't already been considering military libraries, the attendees there would have "turned" me.

Health Care Reform--How Is It Affecting Life Science Companies and Consumers?: This speaker, a lawyer who oversees the formation of managed care groups, was scary smart. Most of his talk flew a mile over my head. However, now I can sound mildly intelligent at parties if the subject of health care and/or REMS ever comes up.

Designing a Physical Space in a Digital Age: I had high hopes for this one, but was sorely disappointed. The presenters were invited to describe the fancy new facilities they'd built. There were pretty pictures, but they were speaking from the perspective of having a bottomless pit of money to throw around. How many libraries have plump enough budgets to devote half the basement to giant HD TVs and gaming consoles for the students?

Wednesday

Specify 6: Museums Specimen Database: This was one long advertisement for an open-source software developed by the University of Kansas. An interesting example of the types of boxed software people are developing for resource management, but I doubt I would ever use it.

Data: The Next Generation--Sci-Tech Division Contributed Papers: This session was prompted by the new requirement for NSF grant recipients to provide data management plans. The speakers had conducted studies of their faculties on the library support required to help...it was interesting, but since I don't plan on staying in academia I didn't find it very useful to me personally.

Other Highlights

Coming back to the hotel on Tuesday, I was waiting for the hotel shuttle next to a man who was at the SLA conference as a vendor representative. He was one of those types who can't stand silence, so he was eager to give me tips on how to live it up in Philly, and on life in general. He asked what type of work I was interested in after graduation. When I said that after the networking session, I was leaning towards a career with the military, he said, in all seriousness, "Are you a Nazi?"

While eating lunch outside the Convention Center on Wednesday, a lady asked to sit across from me at my tiny patio table. She said she started out as a medical librarian, but after joining the SLA learned about all the other (better paying) careers available and wanted to get over her librarians-must-be-academics bias. Now she's with a financial company in New York, managing product licenses and contracts.

After each day I made my way back to the hotel, and Sweetie and I spent the evenings lounging with cable. Cable is horrible. Why would people pay $50 every month for the privilege of watching hours of commercials? But we didn't have the Internet, because the hotel charged $10 per day for wireless, and sometimes it's nice to be mindless. Food was harder to come by than one would think, because all of the restaurants around the hotel were pretty terrible. On Monday we tried Popeye's Chicken: lots of grease, but not so bad. On Tuseday we picked up a thin-crust pepperoni pizza from Pizza Hut.

Note the masterful cutting.

This pizza was cold and tough not 15 minutes after picking it up. We found out after the fact that this particular store as a 1.5 star rating on Google Businesses.

And on Wednesday, I was so tired from getting 6 hours of sleep each night and running around in heels all day that we just mustered up enough energy to get downstairs to the hotel restaurant. We were in Philadelphia, so we at least had to have one of these:

Enormous Philly Cheese Steaks. Mine was dinner on Wednesday and Thursday. One half was the size of my head:

We went swimming 20 minutes after eating these. The 100 grams of fat helped us float.

On Thursday we went out into the world. Details tomorrow at 8 (cue commercials).

Daddy's Turn

2011-06-19T11:38:00.004-04:00

It's Father's Day.

Father's Day has always been a little awkward. First, it's only one month after Mother's Day, when people exhaust all of their proclamations of affection and brunch menus for the year. Second, your gift options are necessarily limited to what's culturally accepted as masculine. For the past week, you couldn't turn on any electronic media for two seconds before being blasted with advertisements for Droids and Lowes gift cards. Heaven forbid you have a father who's uninterested in either shiny gadgets or hunks of wood, or who does not wear ties or golf. What's left? An e-card?

One of the advantages of living halfway across the country from your parents is that, come these holidays, you're discouraged from presenting physical gifts. I can't come up with better alternatives to a construction-paper glasses case with a picture of my father in crayon cleaning a fish tank (my fourth-grade accomplishment of the year), but I can write a blog post. There are plenty of things I can write about my dad (and it's free!)

(1) My Dad is a Lawyer
My dad hates being a lawyer. Next to cops, taxi drivers, and restaurant servers, lawyers deal with the worst kinds of people. They get the low-lifes and the pompous jerks. For years he was an insurance lawyer, and drove four hours every day for the privilege of sifting through unscrupulous (or dumb) people's lies. Then he did research for the county courts, rubbing elbows with disgruntled bureaucrats and politicians more concerned with statistics than due process. He did this for decades to pay for the house, my flute lessons, and my brother's game consoles. Recently he's put off a well-deserved retirement for our college educations.

(2) My Dad Spoiled Me
While my mother was the cautious one instilling values, my father was the one who would go all out when the kids wanted something. When I wanted pets, he became a husbandry enthusiast, meticulously caring for giant aquariums and literally building finch aviaries from scratch. When I wanted dance lessons, he constructed a custom wooden floor for me to practice on. My bout in sports was fueled by trips to equipment stores, game days, and a freshly poured and painted concrete basketball court in the backyard.

(3) My Dad Taught Me Things
...Things I didn't necessarily want to know at the time. For example, the other day Sweetie and I flipped on an episode of Cash Cab--a quiz show on the Discovery channel--and one of the questions was to identify the stringed instrument with movable frets popularized by Ravi Shankar. I could one-up Sweetie by yelling "sitar" thanks only to my father's global musical tastes. While my mother was dedicated to establishing my literary baseline, my father took care of the music and movies side so I can hold conversations with both English majors and artsier-than-thou types. Also, like any stereotypically good father, he demonstrated that it's ridiculous to pay someone else to change your oil or tune up your bike. Now I get Sweetie's father to do it instead :D

So Happy Father's Day, Daddy. I'm sure this five-paragraph blog post is sufficient to thank you for 23 years of hard work.

Pulling Out Gracefully

2011-06-09T09:08:00.004-04:00

I'm in that awkward position again--time to leave another job.

Since starting my new position at Sweetie's old workplace (ITG), I've found that they have a lot more for me to do than I originally anticipated. They hired me on the premise that I'd spend the summer on a couple of professor's websites, maybe a little photography...but the projects are much bigger than they thought and miscellaneous jobs pop up every day. In my first couple of days, I sewed up a security hole, made an application for faculty to modify web content, took and put up new photos of conference rooms, and met with a professor to redesign his laboratory website.

I'm happy to be needed, especially after spending the past year and a half begging the staff at Lilly to pretty, pretty please look at your own website. The problem is, I still have my internship and the position at the Lilly, which only leaves two days of the week free to devote to ITG. Not only does that schedule short-change my supervisor at the ITG, who has to schedule meetings for the days I'm there and keep track of the tasks piling up for me, but it's stressful on me, too. There are too many projects crowding the space in my brain, and I haven't had a proper lunch break (or any break, for that matter) since Sweetie and I went out on my first day of work.

The solution is simple: leave the Lilly. My supervisor there has to strain to find things for me to do, anyway; they pay more than a dollar less per hour and have such little interest in their website (and an excess of concern for others' opinions) that applications I completed months ago are still gathering dust in the test environment "pending approval." Sweetie has been urging me to quit for months, and now that I have a more lucrative source of income it's difficult to come up with reasons why I shouldn't. The only thing stopping me is guilt for giving the impression that I'd be around for years during my masters program. Frankly, that's a weak reason too, because there's a plethora of wannabe web monkeys walking around campus who would jump at the chance to put links on pages for a little above minimum wage.

So the question is, how does one pull out gracefully? For one thing, I have to corner my supervisor in person, who even when I was there almost every day was only "cornerable" once a week. For another, we don't have the friendliest relationship. It's not antagonistic, but I do get the impression that I intimidate her. I tend to intimidate a lot of people, which would be great if I was in the position of power, but isn't so great when I'm trying to get them to like and/or trust me. My personality is also good for doing a job, but terrible for dealing with sensitive situations like quitting one. I'm inclined to be honest, which wouldn't be good at all. Example:

"Hi, E. I'm fine, thanks. How was your meeting? [Pleasantries, pleasantries.] So, um, I think it would be best for you to find someone else come fall. Someone with an undeveloped skill set and low expectations. See, when you hired me I was stupid, and I thought all I was capable of was fixing up some text with HTML tags and putting it on the website. But I went out of my way to learn a lot, and now I'm too smart for this. I'm under-appreciated and under-paid. Someone else is going to give me more opportunities AND more moolah. So, sorry, but goodbye."

Imagine the response when a future boss calls for references, eh? But glossing over it leaves a bad taste in my mouth too:

"Hi, E. I'm fine, thanks. How was your meeting? [Pleasantries, pleasantries.] So, um, I think it would be best for you to find someone else come fall. I have this other job now, and I'm taking classes and have a zillion other obligations. I'm just not strong or mature enough to handle it all. And I have these bills, you know, and my poor aging parents are supporting my two brothers through school and won't be able to retire at this rate [*tears up*]. Other people need me. I'll be so sad to leave because the staff is like my family and I love it here, but fate has other plans. Goodbye, my sweet Lilly."

Of course, I could always do what I did when leaving the worst job of my life last summer: send a two-line email.

"Hi, E. Thanks for employing me for the past year, but I won't be coming in after next week. I'm grateful for the opportunities you gave me, but this library isn't the best environment for me anymore. Sorry for being too chicken to look you in the face to say this. Yours, Tamara."

Have you ever had to quit a job nicely? How did you approach your boss?

"Greek" Pasta Salad

2011-06-03T07:48:00.004-04:00

On Wednesday, I started my second (third?) job at Sweetie's old workplace: the Chemistry department. Starting a new position with new people is always awkward, but it's especially so when everyone in the office has seen your vacation photos :o Plus sides: it pays a dollar more per hour than my spot at the Lilly; they actually trust me to do things; and after spending the past few years in libraries with shrinking violets, the staff there are refreshingly (if a tad intimidatingly) extroverted and straight-forward.

At 1, Sweetie came to ~~snoop around his old haunts and cop a free meal~~ "celebrate my first day." I chose The Trojan Horse, half a mile walk away in 90° weather, because if it was easy to get to it wouldn't be special. I blogged about our last visit just around this time last year, which apparently was just after an interview for a job that, if I could comment on my own blog posts to inform my past self, I would tell myself to run away from before I got trapped in a summer of micro-managed hell. But anyway, Sweetie chose the same dish as last time (surprise surprise) and I just ordered the first thing that looked good: a spiral pasta salad with spinach, feta, olives, tomatoes, grilled chicken, and herbed oil on the side.

The salad was amazing. However, they gave me way too much to eat in one sitting, but not enough to bother taking home the leftovers, so I had to abandon some feta cubes and olives. Sadness. But the next day, I set out to the store determined to recreate it for my lunches, now that I'm pretty much employed 9-5 M-F and can't be spending $3 every day on soggy tuna sandwiches at the library cafeteria.

Some of these ingredients are expeeensive, but it's much cheaper than those sandwiches (or the $9 the Trojan Horse wanted for the salad!)

Americanized "Greek" Pasta Salad
(Makes 4 servings)
-1 box spiral pasta for salads (this Rotini Garden Delight with vitamins was on sale for less than the generic!)
-1 tub crumbled feta cheese. Or an honest-to-goodness cube of the real stuff, if you have the $$$ and time for it.
-1/2 a can black olives, or proper green ones if your palate is stronger than mine.
-balsamic vinaigrette
-spinach

After cooking the pasta, I threw it together with everything but the spinach. Done. Much easier than walking half a mile in 90°, no?

Before I leave this morning, I will line a tub with spinach leaves and top it with the salad. The room I'll be working in is freezing because it's where the department servers are stored, so there's no need to refrigerate :x

Now I have to get ready. I'm used to dallying in the mornings because I have the luxury of a car, but the building is on the opposite side of campus from my usual parking spot. And I just paid tons in transportation fees, so I might as well be socially responsible and get my money's worth on the bus.

Guns and Butterflies

2011-05-31T08:53:00.005-04:00

This weekend we went to visit Who for the first time in ages. We've intended to go for the past month because Ellie has been having oil problems since December, but every single weekend has had thunderstorms. (a) It's hard to work on a car when it's raining, or if the ground under it is soggy, and (b) some of those storms were strong enough to make the drive to St. Paul deadly. Columbus had a few floods, and just a few days ago those tornadoes and hailstorms tore up half the of Greensburg.

But since it was Memorial Day weekend, and the sun was starting to peep out, we headed over on Saturday night. Before we left, Sweetie noted that Who sounded the happiest he had since, well, 2006. I took it as a sign that his health was recovering after the hole-in-his-stomach incident, but when we pushed open the door to the trailer it was immediately evident that his psychological health had also increased two-fold. Not only was it spotless, but he had decorated the living room, painted and fixed up the bathroom, and cleared the guest bedroom of the mountain of boxes inhabiting it since he moved in. Also, there was a giant butterfly on the bedspread...I'm not entirely sure why. But butterflies are usually a good indication that someone has bounced over the depression hump.

On Sunday morning, Who woke up at the same time I did: a little before 9 a.m. He went back to nap a little bit later, but you know what that means? He didn't drink. The entire weekend, I only saw him with Coke bottles. And in a car ride to Uncle F and Aunt B's, he ate potato chips. Note the verb in that sentence: ate. He eats things. Willingly. He cleaned his plate at dinner, too, though that isn't very hard to do because Uncle F and Aunt B are fantastic cooks. They buy fresh rolls and candies from Amish markets, and grow their own lettuce, and never overcook the vegetables.

The primary reason we were at F&B's was for the car, since F has memorized the manual for any vehicle you can find in Indiana and "just happens" to have any part Ellie could need. Like the perfect oil filter. The oil problems were, as I had suspected, a result of savagely attacking the wrong-size filter she had in December in attempt to get it off. But there was a secondary reason, too: F&B have a LOT of land. And where there's a lot of land, there's a lesser chance of accidentally killing someone when you're wielding deadly weapons.

Sweetie had wanted me to shoot our rifle (his Christmas present from 2009), because he doesn't want me to be useless if thieves come a-knocking. Or if, sometime in the future, a wild dog (or deer, or turkey) attacks Luna in the yard. So we spent an hour or so tearing holes in a cardboard box with bird shot. Some lessons to take away:

1) Even with muffling headphones, guns are LOUD. I hope I never have to fire one unprotected; it would probably damage my eardrums.

2) The tissue right next to my right shoulder is much more delicate than you would think. But it's also more resilient than you would think, considering that enough force to kill man was being jolted against it. It's tender, but I don't even have a bruise.

3) Human eyesight is wacky. There's an enormous difference between looking at the target normally and aligning your eye with the barrel. The former makes the bullets cut the grass above the cardboard box. The latter tears a scary-looking hole through the target.

Now that I've been properly initiated, Sweetie's talking about finding a local shooting range to practice. I don't mind, but I hope it doesn't get expensive.

For a while after that, we watched the Coca-Cola 600. I was bored out of my mind, and spent most of the time hoping someone would spin out and make things interesting. Fortunately, even the men got bored too, so we left at a reasonable hour. Who didn't want to drive back to the trailer because of his stiff leg, and Sweetie "didn't feel like it", so that left me behind the wheel. I'm not sure when I became the designated driver...probably sometime around summer 2009. The next day I drove back to Bloomington too, after dropping Who off at a Memorial Day lunch for veterans at the American Legion. And then I did what seems like a billion chores, preparing food for the week and trying to get cigarette smoke and mud and sweat out of all our belongings. He may have cut back on drinking, but the nicotine still has a hold.

By the way, it's HOT. And humid. I spent most of the weekend hovering on the edge of heat exhaustion. And today, walking to my internship at 8:40 in the morning, I was already baking in the sun. I've been diligent with the sunscreen and water, but it's still uncomfortable. Why is the temperature always 20 degrees away from the supposed average? It's supposed to be in the 40s in January (ha) and 70s in May (haha). Today will have a high of 93°. This year's weather is unusual, they tell me. Just like they told me last year, and the year before that, and the year before that....

Website Launch: My Recipe Box

2011-05-19T08:09:00.009-04:00

A little while ago, Katie of Making Food and Other Stuff (a newly minted Biology PhD!) posted about a "nerdy" purchase: a piece of software to store and organize her recipes. I commented that Sweetie has been on my case for years to make an application like that for us, and asked if I would get extra nerd points if I coded it myself. The nerd points were duly granted.

But I quickly realized that my bonus nerd points would be revoked if I didn't follow through. So this weekend I bunkered down and actually churned out the code. And while I was at it, I stole ~~some~~ a lot of Sweetie's code for secure user accounts, so everyone else can use it too.

Now. It is my pleasure to introduce to you, the one, the somewhat unique, [drumroll] Recipe Box Website.

Well, it looks more impressive in real life. I swear.

The basic idea is that you can store all your recipes, and organize them by applying labels for easy access later. On the general Browse page you can see all the recipes you've entered and a "tag cloud" of labels you've applied to them. You can also import the recipes of other users, and they will appear in your "box" to be searched and sorted just like the ones you authored (but you can't edit them, because they do belong to someone else).

Above is a screenshot of the basic recipe page. For example, here's a link to the recipe I use for bagels:
http://www.bookwyrms.com/recipebox/recipe.php?r=f. Anyone can view it, even if they don't have an account...you just need one to make a box of your own.

And here's the search page, where you can find recipes by titles or the ingredients used.

This searches your own box by default, but you can search the recipes of all users too if you want to expand your collection. I don't expect most people will want to, though, because by the time they get to the storage stage they've already picked out favorites. And there are much more extensive sources for new recipes, like cooking magazines or blogs.

At the last second I made a little "bonus" too....

You can choose from different color schemes in the "Site Preferences." This blue one is Sweetie's favorite, though he's also bizarrely partial to the pink "Princess" theme.

Not to sell myself short (Sweetie says I should stop being so "female" when it comes to advertising myself), but there are some things the site cannot do: for one, you can't upload pictures of your recipes. Technically, I have the code to do it, but (a) I'd have to store the images, and though we own a piece of a server I don't want to push it when that piece has to accommodate all of our projects, and (b) most people don't need to look at pictures of their own meals. You use blogs or sites like AllRecipes if you want to advertise your creations to other people...you don't attach photos to the index cards in your recipe box (unless they came with the newspaper clipping). You also can't import recipes directly from other sites, because there are just too many possibilities to accommodate. And finally, you can't interface with Facebook or Twitter like every other website on the planet. This is just a personal prejudice of mine...I find it skeevy that Mark Zuckerberg is oozing into every corner of our lives. And I hate that the websites I use are always trying to advertise my every move on my wall, sometimes without asking.

Anyway, in conclusion, "Tadaaa!" Check it out, if you have the time or inclination. It would be nice to see some other user accounts pop up for my creation.

Lucky Cat Bag in 10 Steps

2011-05-13T22:48:00.012-04:00

Since summer began, I've had time in the mornings to pack a real lunch to bring to my internship/work each day. Usually it's just PB&J, a string cheese and some fruit, but it beats paying $5 for a piece of soggy cardboard in the cafeteria. The thing is, I have difficulty carrying my food with me. When I worked sort-of-full-time I had an enormous kitchen practically all to myself to put tons of ingredients in, but now I'm a nomadic intern and have to schlepp my containers wherever I go. My purse is too small for that and I'm certainly not breaking out the backpack from high school, so for the past couple of weeks, I have been walking around dressed my professional best with a plastic grocery bag knocking against my knees.

I did have some alternatives. My mother gave me a posh pack that looks as nice as a purse but holds twice as much...but it's leather so I didn't want to put my wet water bottle and squishable bananas in it. I have some old mesh grocery bags lying around, but I think those only look appropriate in, well, the grocery store. Otherwise you just look like a hippie too hoity-toity for a proper resource-guzzling capitalist handbag. My final resort was a canvas bag I had lying around. Big enough, sturdy enough, and only slightly bag-lady-like.

The problem: the painted pattern on it was ugly. After a couple of months of walking around with the ugly painted side facing my body, I forgot it under the kitchen table, where it became one of Luna's numerous options for bedding. It's been a couple of years since, and I have a brand new sewing machine whose cost needs justification.

Hee.

Step 1: Visit Joanne's Fabrics and pick out some shiny string. While you're there, peruse some pattern books while veteran housewives three times your age peer at you in a mixture of shock and suspicion.

Step 2: Find a pretty picture of a Lucky Cat (a.k.a. "Maneki Neko") online.

Step 3: Copy cat.

I've never been particularly artistically inclined, but I do plagiarize well.

Step 4: Pin cat to fabric matching the color of the bag. Attach to an embroidery hoop.

Step 5: Trace Lucky Cat in highly visible string. If you're smart, you'll do this in the color that will eventually be laid on top of it. If you're not, you'll do this in a color that clashes horribly and which you will then have to pick out fuzz by fuzz for an hour after completion. For example, teal blue on a Lucky Cat that will be gold and red.

Step 6: Embroider the bold lines of Lucky Cat with a zig-zag stitch on the lowest width. Tear embroidery apart and repeat until your lines almost look intentional. Finish the finer lines (nose, kanji, whiskers) by hand. Take slightly blurry photos so your blog readers can't see how messy those lines really are.

Step 7: Pin your Lucky Cat over the ugly old pattern on your bag. At this point, realize three crucial things: 1) You have to take it off again because you forgot the inner ears. 2) You made one of the strokes on the kanji for "good luck" wrong, but there's no way you're going to fix it because that's all one thread. And 3) Your bag is fully assembled. This means to actually get your Lucky Cat onto the bag, you will either have to take it all apart, or take your machine all apart.

Step 8: Take your machine all apart (i.e. slide out the base to expose the free arm, and praise the ingenuity of sewing machine engineers). Straight stitch what you can reach and wrangle your stitches embroidery-style (no pressure foot or feed dogs, just your fingers at the mercy of the fast-moving needle) where you can't. Which is most of it.

Step 9: Thank your lucky stars you kept all your fingers. Relax and admire the result of the past 8 hours.

Step 10: Model.

Perfect? No. A step up from Kroger bags? Definitely. As long as no one who knows Japanese or Chinese sees it and laughs at me for that erroneous stroke, I'm golden. Or at least my Lucky Cat is.

Sewing Machine!

2011-05-11T18:33:00.001-04:00

On Mother's Day, I picked up some knitting that has gone unfinished for two years now. While trying to remember my knits and purls, I pulled up some episodes on HGTV.com. Under this barrage of domesticity, it entered my head that I should get a sewing machine.

This stray thought was bizarre, given my history with sewing machines. When I was a teenager, I tried to make a single quilting square. It took an entire day and only made it halfway finished. Then a few years ago, I tried to give it another shot on a borrowed Singer. That ended in a nightmare of tangled thread and stitches a fraction as orderly as the foot paths on a Family Circus comic.

Yup. That approximates the behavior of both my hemlines and Luna at 6 a.m.

Do not be fooled by the facade of lazy incompetence.

Anyway, I opened the website for Joann's Fabrics despite my dark history with automated needles. And you know what I discovered? A) The world has gone insane, because the first thing that pops up when you search for a sewing machine are crazy computerized things with friggin' Smart Phones built into the side, and B) the horrifying results of my previous attempts were not my fault! The reviews for the simple Singer models complained of the same headaches I'd experienced trying to get that borrowed machine to work for me. So I wasn't hopeless; the machine was a cheap hunk of fussy plastic. The consensus online was to stay away from Singers. Not knowing anything about sewing machine brands, where did that leave me?

Just then, my mother called for her Mother's Day Chat. My mother just so happens to be a veteran sewer. She recommended a Kemore...the same brand as the washing machine Sweetie and I bought last winter and couldn't be happier with. Plus, there were a couple available down the road at the local Sears on sale for almost $50 less than the prices online.

Da-dun! So many fancy options....

With a thick book-sized manual explaining how to do them.

So pretty! You know what else is pretty? Me, in this dress I could finally finish.

Two years ago, this went into the closet with the edges unfinished, the seams barely holding together, and random strings falling out of the skirt. Within hours, thanks to a fully functional machine, it was structurally sound and all trimmed up!

I could even put that little black sash on straight. Initially, I just let the crooked waist hang out there, with bunches making me look 6 months pregnant. But with the sash to mask it, I think I look downright svelte, even at the worst of hip-emphasizing camera angles.

The one downside to the sash was that it would cut straight across the side zipper. I worked around that by stopping the sash short, then embroidering a little flower patch to Velcro on after zipping up.

I did this by hand, since I don't have the control to pull off movements that careful on the machine just yet. Plus, when I tried this morning, I wasted a lot of thread because I didn't know that even if you don't have a foot attached, you still need to put the foot presser down for the tension discs to catch the upper thread. (Don't I sound all technical now? This is thanks to spending the morning wasting an entire spool of green thread. Hence, the bare-bones leaves next to my daisy).

Now I'm thinking up more things to do with my fancy machine. I'm thinking of making a new summer robe, since the one I brought from Temecula five years ago is practically falling apart. I might also embroider some hand towels, since I've bleached them all to high heaven with benzoyl peroxide anyway. But first, that knitting project never did get done....

Spring '11 Grades

2011-05-10T12:36:00.003-04:00

Yay me.

^^That sentence would have an exclamation point at the end, if I hadn't had to rip my mental and physical health to shreds for that GPA. But for the record, an A+ doesn't even exist on the official department rubric; you're only supposed to get an A for anything over 96%. It's only possible if you're a super-genius Übermensch...or the professor didn't read the official department rubric. Let's pretend it's the former, shall we?

Mother's Day

2011-05-08T08:15:00.004-04:00

As I've written before, I never appreciated how good my mother was to me until I grew up and met a bunch of really bad ones. When I was growing up, my assessment of her nurturing skills was limited to comparisons with the seeming perfection of other girls' lives: what fashionable items other girls possessed, what other girls were free to do, or more importantly, what other girls were free to not do. Like study, save their own money, or spend hours rewriting their English papers to a former professor's satisfaction. It didn't occur to me until recently to judge the quality of my childhood not by how cushy and carefree my life was at 16, but by how cushy my life is now after leaving the nest. Those hours spent on English papers don't seem so bad when I can now pump out A-level reports for my masters program with half the effort of my classmates.

The enormous responsibility of being a mother is something a lot of people can't, or shouldn't, take on. I know quite a few who are barely capable of acting like fully-functioning adults, much less parents. For example, I would make a really terrible mother. I don't have the patience, especially if my kid were to to have a personality anything like mine. Rather than a bundle of joy, the stork dropped off a bundle of strong will on that doorstep in San Diego 23 years ago. Here are some things my mother did to turn that bundle into a mostly decent human being:

1. Exposed me to the right influences and kept me away from the bad ones
While my classmates were idolizing supermodels, my mother was pushing me to read books featuring capable women. Instead of letting me mimic the Spice Girls, she put a flute in my hand and made me develop real musical skills. I may not play the flute anymore, but I'm also not running around acting like I'm Posh Spice.

2. Took me places
Every weekend she would drive for hours to get me to orchestral rehearsals, museums, hiking trails, or theater shows. At the time I thought that this was completely normal, and sometimes even resented these outings. I didn't know how lucky I was until I met mothers who weren't willing to drive 40 minutes to an event their kids would have treasured for a lifetime, because their TV shows were more important.

3. Took me to BIGGER places
When my youth orchestra went to Europe in the summer of 2004, my mother hopped on the plane with me and made the trip 100% more interesting (left to my own devices, I would have hung around the touristy shopping centers with the other flutists for two weeks). She drove me and my brothers 16 hours to the Grand Canyon. She flew me to Oregon and the east coast. Not only can I put those push-pins on the Google Map of my travels, but I have memories aplenty. And I'm pretty sure memories of the mountains and waterfalls in Meiringen, Switzerland will stick with me longer than memories of designer jeans would have.

4. Let me screw up
When one of our cats was hit by a car, my mother said it was better that she ran around and enjoyed life before going than if she was confined to the house, perfectly safe and bored for 20 years. She liked this approach to her parenting style, which, if a bit morbid, is not a bad philosophy. Of course I'd rather not be hit by a car, but I did have the freedom to rebel, explore, bring myself to the brink of destruction and find my way back again. Much less dramatically, I could ride my bike all over the place without being traced like a criminal. And dally in different life paths until I found the right one. And move in with a boy I'd known for two months. Result: stability and happiness. I'm certain I'm a much better person than I would have been if I sat like a china doll in a plastic castle being coddled and suppressed for 18 years.

Four items is not the traditional length of lists like these, but I think a lot is wrapped up in them. Bottom line: my mother did well. Happy Mother's Day.

Lazy

2011-05-05T09:12:00.008-04:00

With the sun shining and the number of people in on campus dwindling, an aura of laziness has settled over the city. Some exemplars:

1) Because I had plans to capitalize on the magical Kohl's gift card, I drove to my group meeting on Wednesday. Though a lot of students had already vacated campus for summer, the nearest parking spot was still a ten-minute walk north of the library. It was a sunny, breezy day, so I didn't mind. I got out of my car near a bus stop, where a girl in athletic clothes was waiting. I continued walking past the Sell-Your-Book-mobiles and grand Greek houses, soaking up the sun. Five minutes later a bus pulled up in front of me, and the girl with the athletic clothes I saw up the street got off and sauntered across the road towards the Student Recreation Center for a workout.

2) I arrived for my internship at 9am on Thursday morning. The DLP office is on the fifth floor of the library, and I'd had to sprint to the bus a half hour before, so I enjoyed the luxury of the elevator. One pinged open and I stepped in. I pressed the button for "5". The elevator doors stay open for a while on the ground floor to give people a chance to board, so I waited. A girl in what looked like the clothes she slept in dashed in. She pressed "2". The elevator did not move immediately, so she jammed the "Close Door" button repeatedly while students entered the stairwell five steps across the hall and arrived at her floor before the elevator even started to move.

3) This morning Sweetie and I woke up at 11:00 am. We actually woke up several hours before that, but didn't feel like getting out of bed. But come 11, our stomachs decided we couldn't just lie around daydreaming all day. I did not feel like cooking. And it was too far to drive anywhere.

Hot dogs aren't a strange breakfast food--they're just like eating sausage and toast for breakfast! Yes... Besides, my side was healthy. I had the first good batch of grapes of the year.

Fruit is a perfectly acceptable breakfast food. Downright sophisticated, actually. Especially in a three-year-old Pizza Express cup.

Though I can't say anything for Sweetie's Cool Ranch Doritos.

This is not my sweetie. This is Selena Gomez, who popped up surprisingly often in a Google Image search for "Cool Ranch Doritos." This is the person whose body I wished I could inhabit, until this happened:

Ewwwgetoffgetoffgetoff! I don't want it if a tweeny-bopper's hands are all over it! Besides, he's a minor and she's not and, given those making-out-in-bathing-suits pics, I'm pretty sure they've broken the law.

Me Day

2011-05-04T14:32:00.011-04:00

Today was the first "Me Day" I've had in more than a year. My classes are over, my boss is out of town, and it's not raining. I walked around with neither jacket nor umbrella for the first time since October 2010. I woke up at my leisure around 8am (my normal schedule was adjusted upwards because of my internship), walk/jogged a couple of miles to Body of Proof, and had actually had time to blow-dry my hair afterwards! Save for a somewhat ineffectual meeting to tie up loose ends in a group project, my morning was sublime...though it was after the meeting that the real fun started.

See, I've been saving up Karma Points all semester. I worked hard, was nice to my classmates, sent helpful supplemental material to my professors, and have washed the dishes regularly. My floor is clean, my boyfriend is well fed, and the local library has pretty graphs to look at. But like my credit card rewards points and the loose change in my Christmas-tree-shaped jar, I avoided cashing in my Karma Points for as long as possible. They've been quietly accruing interest in the Bodhisattva Vault until today, when I took it all out and bet the lot on one horse.

That horse: Kohls department store. A few days ago they sent me a promotional postcard for $10 off anything in-store, including sale items. There is one piece I have been looking for since my freshman year of college, the need for which has recently increased ten-fold: a professional-looking black blazer. Not just any blazer, but a petite one with sleeves that end at my wrists. One that I can machine wash. And one that will force conference attendees, potential employers, and clients to take me somewhat seriously.

In the entire department store, I found only two women's blazers tucked on a mish-mash rack in the back.

One was a size 4p, and the other a 6p. And the 6p fit.

How much did I pay for this one-piece wonder? Well, I was disappointed when I saw the price tag at first....

Egads. It was on a rack with some other suitings priced 30% off, but $54 was higher than any of the "Was $X...Now $Y" listings on the card. I took it with me anyway on another trip 'round the store, but the only other jackets available were in the Juniors department, and the sleeves ended at my fingertips. I contemplated. I ran over the list: Do the sleeves end where they're supposed to? Check. Is it machine washable? Check check. Does it make me look like a grown-up? Check check check.

I took the plunge.

$27.00 biatches! 50% off! And with my $10-off postcard, I paid a grand total of $18.19. Mwahaha. My accumulated karma, in combination with Kohl's bad karma from treating my mother like a felon when she tried to return some items and set off the theft alarm, gave me a victory not unlike Sabrina the Teenage Witch's magical bikini purchase in 1996.

God she was young. The last time I saw this movie, high school was, like, "adult." And it was normal to pay with cash.

After Kohls I also stopped by Kroger for some necessities. And one not-necessarily-a-necessity.

Lynn Chen says she uses this brand of scrubs to keep her skin movie-star clear. Don't get the wrong idea; I'm not the sort of person who will rush out and buy a product just because a movie star says she uses it. That's obviously a lie. I bought this in the hopes that tomorrow I will wake up four inches taller with long starlet-legs and a sunny apartment in Hollywood.

When's the last time you had a "Me Day"?

The Journalists of the Future

2011-05-03T16:05:00.004-04:00

Yesterday, the White House announced Osama Bin Laden's death. Journalists the world over temporarily forgot about the newlywed Royal Couple, seized this tidbit and ran with it. The editors at my university's paper, however, knew where the real story was.

Beer cans and shockers. Always worthy of the front page.

Stalling Tactics

2011-05-01T13:04:00.005-04:00

I'm running out of excuses to delay writing my paper. They're being knocked off one by one, and I'm getting desperate.

Yesterday morning: I have to take care of AT&T screw-ups. Sweetie and I combined our numbers into a "family" plan, but the store messed up and landed me with two rate plans instead. The billing period ends in seven days, so of course this is more urgent than the paper due in two.

Yesterday afternoon: I was out of soy milk. Cereal is also more important than a paper due in two days...I don't want to get osteoporosis in a few decades, right? While we're at it, we need a squirt gun to discipline the cat. And test the squirt gun that will be used to discipline the cat. Sunny days come few and far between.

Yesterday evening: What do you mean the department cancelled my class? I needed that class. The summer semester starts in one week, so I have to fix this now. And blog about it. The stuff due this semester can wait.

Yesterday night: Sweetie's out of cookies. I should bake some. First, to clean the mixing bowl...That orange stuff coating the bottom of the dish-drying rack is really bugging me. Have to wash all the dishes first to get them out of the sink, and then I'll have room to take it apart to wash. Why is the kitchen floor so dirty?

Late yesterday night: I can't write well when I'm tired. I'll just finish the outline. Ooh, there are back episodes of Body of Proof I haven't seen.

This morning: Yay, Sweetie and I are awake at the same time! I'll make him food. And since he's up, I can use the treadmill. My health is more important than a grade. I can also wash the sheets. And the rest of the laundry. And vacuum the floors, under the bed, inside the couch. Who can sit comfortably on the couch and write a paper knowing there's unidentifiable crumb-like substances under there?

This afternoon: Time for lunch. I shouldn't work and eat at the same time. What's Sweetie up to? Cultivating my relationship is a long-term investment.

Now my environment, social, entertainment, sleep, hunger, and aspiration bars are full. It looks like I have no choice but to write the darned thing. Unless someone out there has a pressing crisis and needs my help immediately. Anyone?

Bummed

2011-04-30T17:14:00.002-04:00

As I was sitting down to write my final paper of the semester, I checked my email and saw this highlighted at the top:

Subject: SUMMER 2011 SECTION CANCELLED BY DEPARTMENT

One or more of your registered classes has been cancelled by the
course department. The Office of the Registrar has made arrangements
to waive the charge associated with dropping this course.

Subject Area: SLIS-S
Catalog Nbr: 603
Class Nbr: 10510

The course number here corresponds to a workshop in usability testing, which was the one class I was looking forward to within the next year. But information science students don't give a damn about usability, so too few people signed up for it.

Now I'm bummed. And mad. Not only was one of my few hopes of learning something useful before graduation shot down, but I'll have to find some other class to make up the credits (and I'm certainly not taking Python, Web Graphics, Podcasting, or any of the other pseudo-programming workshops the department decided to pay for instead). The only plus side is that I'll have some free hours this summer to get back to my personal projects. That, and I have yet another bullet point to my reply when the Alumni Association comes a-calling for donations.

Bulldozing

2011-04-23T15:16:00.005-04:00

It's happened again.

At the beginning of this year, I made some "new semester resolutions" that included making sure I don't let school or work get the better of me. For a while, I stuck to them. I took weekends off, slept on a regular schedule, and had a happy laid-back relationship with my classmates. Then the assignments started, and the readings piled up, and the staff at my workplace got greedy for more and more features. I did manage to keep my exercise schedule tight, but by now I'm eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for at least one meal a day and spending my Saturdays glued to Microsoft Access 2007.

I can attribute my spiral back into workaholism to two insidious words: "Group Projects."

I hate group projects.

I don't hate my group members...most of the time. All but one of them this semester are darling people. But (a) darling does not necessarily mean hard-working, and (b) there's always that one. Last semester it was the president of the SLA student chapter, whose vocabulary did not include the word "compromise." This semester it's a dual masters candidate whose pride is more important to her than the quality of our product. So while I enjoyed working with these groups and think the projects we undertook were valuable (both for our clients and our resumes) these two bullet points boil down to me seizing 90% of the work and refraining from taking credit for it during the evaluations.

This shoots my stress level up in another two bullet points: (a) there's the stress of the actual work, which robs me of my youth, and (b) as a human being, I hate the social ramifications of taking charge. I don't like ignoring a person's feelings and obliterating her work so we can get a decent grade. I don't like eclipsing my group members' contributions, or watching them struggle to preserve the group dynamic and defer to me at the same time.

Sweetie says all this conflict is silly; just do the work and tell the professor you did. In other words, "Stop being such a girl." Apparently, working with people is less complicated if you're male. Men gain social status by boasting their accomplishments; women lose it and can earn a few choice nicknames too. If Sweetie wants to make friends, he lures people into his posse with bold leadership. If I want to keep friends, I have to flaunt my flaws and be as non-threatening as possible. Basically, it's like this:

Next week we will present our final projects and turn in our papers, and then I will begin an internship where most of my work will be solo. I'll have calm months where I won't have to step on many toes. Then it will be back to monopolizing class discussions and eating Pop Chips for dinner as I hack at portions of a paper that were assigned to other people.

The Price of Beauty

2011-04-16T11:18:00.008-04:00

Usually, when people talk about "the price of beauty," they're referring to some physical or psychological toll they're subjecting themselves to in the name of looks. You know, like paying your dues through sit-ups or sticking to the salad at the family barbecue. But I've been thinking lately, ruminating over clips from What Not to Wear or blogs toting the latest magic bullet for perfect skin, and I've come to the conclusion that it is virtually impossible to meet modern standards of beauty if you are not literally wealthy.

First of all, most humans do not wake up in the mornings with a supermodel's hair and face. Washing and regular brushing is usually enough to keep the former at a decent level of attractiveness, but if you want to look gorgeous it takes regular trips to the salon. And not just Great Clips...a good salon. This means $20-$60 every few months, or weeks if you have a short, trendy, or artificially colored coif. Then there's all the products you're supposed to use when you're at home: gels, sprays, serums, deep conditioners, and different kinds of brushes and irons. While they're at it, women also shell out enough on manicures, pedicures, or body hair removal to equal the cost of an exotic vacation each year.

There are also very few people who can wake up with a supermodel's skin. I doubt even supermodels wake up with a supermodel's skin. If you have a basically clear complexion, it's $7-$8 for a bottle of cleanser to keep it that way. If you have a problematic complexion (like me), it's more cash down the drain for benzoyl peroxide creams, salicylic acid wipes, moisturizers, clay/sulfer masks, and oil-free sunblock. Lately I've seen $200 electronics on Amazon with brushes on the end that spin very fast to exfoliate your skin...basically, they're like rotary buffers for your face. The women (and men) in the comments for these products insist it changed their skin textures forever, and they couldn't live two weeks without this costly gadget in their lives. Because you normally walk around letting everyone you interact with touch your face.

Though it's silly to spend so much just to make your face feel baby-soft, it is generally expected that it look smooth and healthy. Yesterday I went to CVS with a $5-off coupon in hand, with the intention to pick up some essentials and replace my diminishing supply of powder. A little bottle of Cover Girl foundation caught my eye that had reviews approximating the "raving" level of the aforementioned face-Zamboni. It was lacking a price sticker, but it was extremely small and all the bottles around it were 5-8 dollars, so I figured it would be reasonable. I brought it to the checkout register and watched it ring up at $15. Yikes. I walked out with a $6 stick of eyeliner instead, which at least will last for a year. But with that kind of foundation, blushes and bronzers, eye shadows, concealers, lip glosses and mascaras, I estimate the collective cost of 'stuff' on the faces of the girls walking around my university's campus totals more than $1,000 per day.

Say you think all that is a waste of money, or you were descended from Greek gods and don't need it. You still need to wear clothes, if you want to retain the label of a law-abiding citizen. If you want to land a job or earn the respect of those around you, they have to be good clothes. And unless you want to spend many hours trying to apply your latent fashion genius extracting a single well-constructed item from the racks at Goodwill, the most practical way to obtain good clothes is to pay up. $20 is baseline for a decent adult woman's blouse, unless you're lucky enough to be a size that appears regularly on clearance racks (which I am not). Jeans that aren't from the Juniors section will be at least $25; $60 if you want them to fit well without altering. Or you could just go to Walmart and choose between two basic styles: frump or streetwalker.

Granted, for all my complaining, I do not spend this much on any of the above categories. I usually just put my hair in a ponytail, apply face powder and lip stick on the bus, and wear the same clothes I did in college. Hence, when I told a classmate it was my 23rd birthday last month, she exclaimed, "You're so old!" in the shock of trying to reconcile my looks with my age. But when I show up to the SLA conference in June, I'd rather people recognize me as a participant, and not a student volunteer or a "real" attendee's tag-along. This will cost money. Lots of it.

How much do you spend on cosmetics? Does it feel like too much?

Good Girls Don't

2011-04-12T09:09:00.006-04:00

Monday I wrote about how nobody wants to hear me whine, but today I feel like whining. I've been thinking of switching jobs come fall, not because I'm dissatisfied with my current one, but because I have nothing to do. I was hired to do your basic code-monkey fare...tagging up HTML mostly...but with regular expressions on my side that only took up a fraction of the hours I was assigned each week. So I've literally been making projects up as I go along: "Hey, wouldn't a custom search feature be nice for the manuscripts?" "This system is awful. I'm going to make it modular." "Integrated application for all the databases! Who's with me?"

My boss is happy that she's getting all of my pet projects for $7.90 an hour, but I'm running out of ideas and the amount of content waiting in the wings for staff approval is starting to overflow (can you say "feature creep"?) So I've been looking at my options for when my internship ends in August. Yesterday I received an email advertising a reference position for SLIS students...$8.55 an hour. More than half a dollar more per hour to coddle confused undergraduates than I get busting out fancy-looking code.

So today, I whine. I whine about how difficult it is for skilled goody-two-shoes like me to find work in pre-professional life.

Whine #1: Psychologists Don't Want "Normal"
When students are strapped for cash, they traditionally head to the blood banks or the psych labs for pocket change. There are advertisements all over the place offering $20 a pop to sit at a table and do arithmetic...if you're a heroin addict. The labs are not looking for nice girls who don't drink or smoke and have high GPAs. They want to know if compulsive gamblers can tell when a problem is futile or if heavy drinkers have lowered inhibitory mechanisms. "Normal" controls they can get aplenty from the captive undergrads enrolled in Psych 101.

Whine #2: Supervisors Want Dumb Drones
You know how the job ads always say they want someone with initiative who can self-direct? Bull. They want someone who does what they expect them to and doesn't make waves. As someone training to be a future manager, I can understand why--I wouldn't like it if I built my little library-sized empire and some uppity student came along saying, "I want to change this, this, and that, upend your workflow and leave in a year to do something else." Still, it leaves the future-managers like me, who want to do more than shelve books and edit some links on a content-managed page, out in the cold.

Whine #3: You Have to Be a Mean Girl Sometimes
I very rarely have to be a bitch. As far as I remember, I've only done it twice this year...three if you count wrangling innocent students into the life-draining project I wanted instead of the easy online survey all the other groups were doing. In the working world, being perfectly nice to everyone is like sticking up fliers with your home address and the dates of your pending vacation to telephone poles in the ghetto. There are simply times when you have to step on some toes before someone else breaks yours. I'm competent at being a bitch, but I'm not very practiced at it and there's lots of hand-wringing in the background. I would need a slightly lower conscience and larger arsenal of conniving schemes to survive in some of the offices around campus.

Have you ever made trouble for yourself by being too good?

Psych

2011-04-11T10:22:00.004-04:00

During my undergraduate years, I went through at least one major per department. At first I was a Biology major. I added German because I tested well enough to skip a ton of classes and it seemed like a waste not to take advantage. Then I dallied in the Math department. That lasted as far as Linear Algebra, from which I barely escaped with my sanity. Anthropology, Comparative Literature, and Chemistry similarly gave way back to Biology as my desire to get a degree and get out of there took precedence over personal enrichment.

But for one full year, I was a dedicated Psychology major. I spent a semester each in a lab with rats, a lab with toddlers, and a lab with kids who were old enough to vote, but in most other respects resembled the toddlers. I still retain enough tidbits to make my armchair diagnoses of other people sound convincing. For example, I know from Developmental Psychology how to get kids under six all riled up: sit them at a table and form a line of cookies in front of them. Then take the same number of cookies and line them up in front of you, with double the space between each cookie. Then ask them who has more cookies. Mwahaha.

A more useful tidbit, though, is the following: most people think they're more important than they really are. In studies where people are asked to anticipate their impact on other people, they almost always assume everyone is paying more attention to them than they are to everyone else. Obviously, the math doesn't add up, which means most people are walking around thinking of themselves as the main character surrounded by NPCs.

There is one minority group, whoever, who can accurately predict how much they mean to other people: those with a history of depression or low self esteem. Whether something about depression makes them hyper-sensitive to others, or whether a natural sensitivity makes them prone to depression, is up in the air. When I say "them," I include "me," because I do have a short history of clinical depression, and a lifelong history of low self esteem (until the last year or two, that is).

This means that I know full well that to people who do not have a vested interest in my success (e.g. my relatives and significant other) most of my ramblings are inconsequential. To me and my Sweetie, the content of this blog is meaningful. To visitors, it is for information or ephemeral entertainment only. Nobody wants to read pages of me whining about how busy I am, how irrelevant my coursework is, or how I don't feel pretty. I know because I've read some whiny blogs too, and I don't give a damn about how betrayed they feel or how many cookies they ate last night.

What is of interest to other people, though, are posts that may have relevance in their own lives. For example, descriptions of my trip to Japan allow people to dream of what they could do in Kyoto, or new recipes plant ideas for a new meal or dessert to shake things up next week. Today, I will attempt to provide relevant content with an entry type I usually avoid: product reviews.

Recently, I can't stop spending money. Every paycheck I get goes straight to some car trip or doohickey. I drink overpriced juice bottles from the cafeteria at least once a week and a few days ago, I bought bread. Earth-shattering, I know. You know what else I bought? Organic things. If I have one opinion that hasn't changed since I started this blog, it is that "organic" is a marketing ploy, pure and simple. But sometimes, I end up getting them for other reasons. Exhibit A:

Dried Fruits: These were sitting directly in front of the spinach, deliberately placed in the path of health-loving people. There were dried kiwis. I saw dried kiwis for the first time on another blog a few days before, and was dying to try them. They do not sell dried kiwis in the "regular" section, because only organics-loving health types will eat them. Farewell 45 minutes' worth of pay.

Exhibit B:

Soy Ice Cream: thanks to genetically inherited lactose intolerance, I cannot eat regular ice cream. The one kind I can is Breyer's Lactose Free, which only comes in vanilla and is $5 per 1.5 quarts. This little number was on sale for $2.50 for a pint, which is about the same price but with actual taste to it. The consistency is denser and less creamy than the "real" stuff, but the brownie bits more than make up for it.

Exhibit C:

Barbecue Potato Chips: There is no justifiable reason to buy the more expensive Kettle chips over Lays most of the time. However, the only potato chips I like are barbecue flavored, and Lays barbecue flavoring is lame. The chips taste like barbecue for about two seconds before they're just plain potato and salt. Kettle chips, on the other hand, are coated with a thick layer of seasoning and have a substantial, definitive crunch to them. Three hours after snacking you can still detect the smoky kick on the back of your tongue. Plus, they don't get stuck in your teeth.

Do you ever bend your principles in the name of yummy snacks?

Essays

2011-04-09T21:54:00.006-04:00

Tonight I must write an essay. Not an essay for a real grade, or one to win me $$$, but one that should have been written a year ago. Namely, the essay for my admission to the dual MLS/MIS degree program I have been taking classes in but am not actually signed up for.

When I entered graduate school, I was admitted as an MLS-only student. In order to sign up for the dual degree program, I have to submit a new "personal goals statement" of 500+ words on my "academic and career objectives." What is written in the essay is basically moot. I am literally signing up to give the school more money. So even if I wrote the essay in Pig Latin, Rhonda in Administration would add me to the list and send me on my merry way. This does not give me the best incentive to take my writing seriously. So I opened up Word to a blank document, tabbed the blinking cursor over to start a new paragraph, and looked at Sweetie expectantly to dictate my 500 words of greatness.

A smattering of his theses:

I was a silly person for enrolling in the library science program, for it is my dream to have a career that will not be obsolete in five years.

I dream of owning an onsen. In order to open this onsen, I have to make money. Librarians don’t make money. Systems Analysts do.

The End.

Libraries just aren’t enough of a challenge. I need to manage something bigger. Like programmers’ egos.

Most of my peers in the library science program say they entered the profession because they “love books” and “want to help people.” I hate books. I hate people more.

Obviously, this approach needs some tweaking.

And I have now written almost as much as is required in the actual essay.

Luck Magnet

2011-04-06T22:19:00.005-04:00

I have a backlog of recipes I've made in the past few weeks, but don't have the energy to post them. Remembering references, detailing procedures, and cropping those photos so you can't see the dirty dishtowel off to the side is hard work. So instead, tonight I'm going to post about how lucky I am.

Remember when I won $30 in Amazon gift certificates by playing that game with the jumping cow car daily? And when I scored a free hat at Times Square on New Years? Well, I like to push that luck by entering a ton of sweepstakes whenever I get the chance (conversely, that's possibly the reason I seem to be so lucky, but let's not quibble). So whenever the companies who make my favorite products let me sign up for something, I do, and game the system by answering "no" to all of their subscription offers.

All of my makeup is by Covergirl, except for the mascara (which I only use when I haven't gotten enough sleep anyway). This isn't because I have a particular brand loyalty, but because it's the cheapest stuff on the market that isn't iffy. In February I made some silly candy heart thing on Facebook because they said they might send me a free product for doing so...then hid the heart thing on my profile and disabled the app. Well, on my birthday I received this message:

Tamara Marnell,

We're happy to let you know that you're a winner in the My COVERGIRL Promotion! You've won a COVERGIRL makeup product, which has an approximate retail value of up to $13.00. Congratulations!

There's nothing you need to do except look for your prize within 8-10 weeks. If we happen to need additional information from you, we will contact you at this email address.

Woohoo! Presents! And I'd only have to wait 8-10 weeks! I had an inkling that was an error, and have been stalking the mailbox ever since. I was torn between hoping it would be a new compact or lipstick, because I'm running out of powder in the former and the two I have of the latter I've been using since my second year of college (sounds sanitary, no?) Finally, today my little box from Proctor & Gamble arrived, thoroughly beaten up in transit. After cracking open the mangled lid and sifting through blindingly-shiny gold paper, I found my prize.

(Picture from Target.com, because my desk is way too messy to be taking real-life shots).

I couldn't figure out how to open it at first, because it has this weird colored square base which gives the illusion that it's the part with the pigment in it. But Sweetie managed, and I was relieved to see that the color will not clash horribly with my skin! Getting free makeup is a risky business, because you never know exactly what they'll send you. Fortunately, this "Soulmate" hue is pinkish, not too dark, and shimmery. I'm 23, so I like shimmery.

If I were a responsible blogger, I would post a picture of myself wearing my new lipstick. But it's 10:45 at night and I'm not putting on a lipstick that's supposed to last all day to point a camera at my face. So this is the best you get:

For the record, I am not Drew Barrymore. I will never look anything like Drew Barrymore. If I were ever to wear as much makeup as Drew Barrymore is in this photo, it would be because the funeral parlor hired a new girl to prep my corpse for an open-casket service. But she's advertising the product that is now in my bathroom (in a much more innocent shade, of course), so there you go.

In conclusion, yay me for winning things. Now, if only Lindt would cough up those "one of over 100 prizes!"

$1000 Poorer

2011-04-04T17:51:00.005-04:00

This morning I went into the kitchen, and Sweetie informed me that there was no point checking my email. "It's all junk," he said, attempting divert my attention to a topic more worthy of it. Now, when a significant other goes out of their way to tell you not to see something, there are two possible reasons: 1) It's something you really don't want to see, which would ruin your day, and he doesn't want to be fending off the dark clouds for the rest of the morning. Or 2) It's something that you really do want to see and would promptly buy tickets for, and he doesn't want to get dragged along for the ride.

"Visit our blog for information on the SLA annual conference in Philadelphia."

Ka-ching ka-ching. That's the sound of the credit card companies rolling in transaction fees. It's also a sound that signifies that Sweetie wishes he had deleted those emails.

So for four days in June I'll be in Philadelphia. Three of those days will be spent at the conference, but one is a free day to see the sights. And by "the sights" I mean Independence Hall, because Sweetie's desire to travel goes as far as he can tick off items on the list of UNESCO cultural heritage sites. $200 of my money went to the Special Libraries Association for student membership and conference fees, but the rest went to hotels. Hotels that guarantee a microwave and a mini fridge in the rooms. We've learned from past experience that paying $130 for a room with a kitchenette is more cost effective (and pleasant) than paying $100 for a room and eating out twice a day, and/or subsisting on stale granola bars and lukewarm drinks when we want to stay in. Bad memories.

The problem with Sweetie and me is that we got used to the standards in Japan, where hotels actually care about customer service. They always had a fridge, electric water heater, bathrobes, and Internet for no extra charge. There was nary a speck of dust anywhere past the entrance doors. And unless you were staying at a super-fancy Western-style manor, the rates were the equivalent of $110 USD or less...in the heart of Tokyo. When we planned for New York, I took a lot of these qualities for granted, and didn't bother to investigate whether "Wifi Available" meant "Wifi Available" or "Wifi Could Be Available if You Have The Cash For It." So now that I'm more travel-savvy, I was careful to choose a hotel that would make this sojourn into a foreign city to ~~sell myself~~, I mean "network," not much more stressful than it already will be.

Any suggestions for the City of Brotherly Love? Restaurants? Attractions? Things for lone males to do while their girlfriends are yucking it up in a convention center?

WTF Moment of the Week

2011-04-03T02:51:00.004-04:00

40mph winds? Large hail and thunderstorms? Pshah. It's April in the Midwest. But no, not the sun! It burns!

Yesterday was April 1st, Today it is April 2nd, and April 3rd Comes Afterwards

2011-04-02T13:00:00.002-04:00

An official notice: I am not pregnant. I stopped being pregnant at midnight last night. Apparently, the hospital switched up the charts, and not only am I not pregnant, it turns out I never even went in for an ultrasound. I'm thinking of suing.

Now, to calm anyone who might have had a heart attack yesterday, here's a video of a cat.

Surprise!

2011-04-01T11:01:00.002-04:00

I've been keeping something under wraps lately. You may have wondered why I haven't been posting much (well, besides those things called "school" and "work" I'm constantly whining about). But there's something a little more long-term...

It's a girl! Well, that's what the OB-GYN says. I can't tell whether she's a human or a rabbit from this...all animals basically look the same at this point. Heck, she may still have gills. We just found out last week, so I haven't had time to feel out what this parasite latched on to my uterus really is. All I associate my bundle of joy with right now is the return of my acid reflux.

I wonder about the error rate for sex determination this early, because I was really hoping for a boy. I like little girls better than little boys (you know, sugar & spice vs. snakes & snails and all that) but come adolescence? All genders get into some sort of trouble as teenagers, but boys are obvious about it. They advertise their screw-ups. Teenage girls, on the other hand, are sly. They don't just rebel--the rebel and feel shame about it. So they hold secrets, think thoughts not even they know they're thinking. I know because I once was one. Hence, how I ended up with a rabbit/alien hybrid floating around in there.

I have no idea how we're going to pull this off. She's due around September 3rd (happy birthday, Dad!) but I was supposed to be starting my second year of grad school then. I don't want to raise a baby on government loans! We barely have enough to feed the cat! And to think, I stopped birth control to save money each month. Well, this is a good excuse to stop with just the MLS and not have to take any more classes with people like she-who-should-not-be-trusted-to-code-security-for-bank-accounts. I really need to come up with a shorter nick-name for that professor. But if I just truncate it to she-who-should-not-be-trusted she sounds much more sinister than she is. It would be more accurate to call her she-who-thinks-SQL-is-"actual code" or she-who-thinks-graduate-students-are-still-in-high-school. Grr.

Speaking of names, we have to come up with one of those, too. Sweetie's always been fond of "Rebecca," but that name makes me think of mentally unstable, superstitious wives covering up for their cradle-robbing, murderous husbands. Since she kind of looks like a rabbit, what do you think of "Usagi"? We've always been Sailor Moon fans. By the way, Radio Nintendo announced today that from now on they're shifting focus from video game music to Sailor Moon 24/7. Yay! Of course, the kid'd start hating us the first day of Kindergarten, when the teacher spends five minutes trying to pronounce her name and the other kids resent the attention. We'll use it as a middle name, then. Traditionally, my family gives the first-born a middle name from one of the grandparents, but both biological grandmothers have two-word first names and that could get awkward.

Anyway, we have five months to think about that. Since that's plenty of time, I think I'll put the baby on the back burner for now. Sure, I'll take those little vitamins and, like, save some cash for a crib, but women have been giving birth for centuries without all this excessive doctoring during pregnancy. A 20% infant mortality rate wasn't that bad. So I'll be taking a leaf from Sweetie's book for a few months at least. He's already forgotten about the baby. He's eating cup ramen and drinking Mountain Dew in his boxers while listening to Sailor Moon radio as I type. I too have more pressing concerns, like churning out a paper by noon Sunday and ~~social drinking~~ "networking" with ALA members at the bar tonight. I think I'll haul around some heavy furniture, too.

We're going to be the best parents ever.

Spring Snow

2011-03-30T11:20:00.003-04:00

March 30, 2011, 11:15 am.

I pull myself away from schoolwork and get up for my morning "training" (a.k.a. "pathetic huff 'n puff sessions").

Grab my running clothes.

Look out the window.

It's snowing.

I whine.

"What is it?" Sweetie calls.

I whine. "It's snowing."

"Bullshit."

"It's not just snowing. It's really, really snowing."

Sweetie comes to window. Looks out window.

"Bullshit."

"Uh huh. There must be someone on the roof with a snow machine. That's really just confetti."

"Yes." Sweetie returns to his work.

I watch Castle on the treadmill.

Pretty Pastel Marshmallows

2011-03-27T14:06:00.013-04:00

After Sweetie's birthday two weeks ago, I restocked on powdered sugar. As far as I knew at the time, I'd be making a second cake for my own birthday and would need it for frosting. Then Mo Diva interfered and planted the idea of pie in my head instead. Which left me with a brand new electric mixer and a big bag of powdered sugar that I had no solid intention of using for another year.

Enter the marketing staff at Kroger, who have been busy switching out the hearts and shamrocks for everything pastel-colored and egg-shaped. I have no need to enter the Seasonal aisle and cough up $6 for jelly beans made "special" by the adornment of a cartoon bunny on the plastic bag, but they make sure I don't have to to be exposed to the peppy post-Lent sugar rush. In one aisle, I ran across gigantic pastel marshmallows. By "gigantic" I do not mean those wimpy campfire things for s'mores. I mean marshmallows of the "I woke up and my pillow was gone" variety...marshmallows a grade-school child would need two hands to hold and eat. IMO, children should not be eating candies that require two hands to hold. But there are apparently parents out there who would buy them and companies who are happy to sell them.

My mother bought me one of these at Disneyland when I was 7. I think it took me a week to eat it. I'm sure by day 3 it was just as sanitary as it was in the wrapper >.>

Anyway, all the solidified sugar stacked around me got me thinking about the sugar that was sitting at home. And then I remembered that Mo Diva also made homemade marshmallows a few weeks ago. So I spun on my heel and found a packet of unflavored gelatin and went on my merry way. Unfortunately, the recipe Mo Diva used needed a lot more than gelatin, like egg whites and corn syrup. Which I was not going to buy, because I would have no use for them other than the immediate project at hand. But after a little Googling, I found a Martha Stewart recipe that required nothing but sugar, water, and gelatin.

-1 packet unflavored gelatin (2 1/2 teaspoons)
-1/3 cup cold water for gelatin, plus 1/4 cup for syrup
-1 cup sugar

In the bowl of an electric mixer, sprinkle gelatin over 1/3 cup cold water. Allow gelatin to soften, about 5 minutes.

In a small saucepan, combine 1/4 cup water and sugar, and stir over medium-high heat until sugar is dissolved. Stop stirring, and place a candy thermometer into sugar water; wipe sides of pan with a wet brush if sugar crystals have splattered up. Boil sugar until temperature reaches the soft-ball stage (238 degrees). Remove syrup from heat; add to softened gelatin. Using the whisk attachment of an electric mixer, hand-stir the mixture a few minutes to cool; place bowl on the mixer stand. Beat on medium high with the whisk attachment until soft peaks form and the marshmallow mixture holds shape, 8 to 10 minutes.

Transfer marshmallow mixture to a large (14-inch) pastry bag fitted with a 1/2 inch (No. 11 Ateco) tip, and use immediately.

This marshmallow substance was meant to be thicker and faster-drying than others for piping cute animal shapes. If I was going to make homemade marshmallows, why not go all the way and try some fancy Peeps?

This is why. When you're only working with a cup of sugar syrup, it is very difficult to get it to just the right stage before taking it off the heat. I was supposed to get it to soft-ball stage, but in the space of some 30 seconds it jumped straight from stringy-not-there-yet to the hard-ball stage. This made whipping it into marshmallow very difficult, and whipping it into a marshmallow fluffy enough to withstand shaping basically impossible. The "peeps" were unceremoniously dismantled and mottled into a big multi-colored block instead (what can I say...I like to keep all of my bottles of food coloring even).

It didn't look like much smooshed into a pan and doused with powdered sugar, but it was pretty enough turned out.

Yay me. Of course, I couldn't just leave the blocks of marshmallow like this. For one thing, I should have used a mixture of powdered sugar and cornstarch instead of straight-up sugar, because that crust that formed on the outside from the moisture isn't visually appealing. For another, this tastes like nothing but congealed sugar, because it is nothing but congealed sugar. I whipped in a little vanilla near the end, but it didn't help much. Simple sweets like these need a little kick.

That's better. They would be even better if I used a more distinctive flavor than vanilla in the marshmallow. A few combinations to keep in mind if I want to try again: peppermint extract and semi-sweet chocolate (pepperming patties!); orange juice and dark chocolate; cherry or strawberry extract and white chocolate. One thing I want to work on is getting that chocolate to give way a little and not crack when bitten into. Any tips?

PB&J Pie

2011-03-25T12:34:00.006-04:00

Last week, The Food Snob made a peanut butter pie for her coworker's birthday. Her coworker's birthday just happened to be four days before my birthday, and I just happened to be looking for a birthday cake alternative. I love cake, but five days of pokeball cake wears down even the most cocoaphilic of taste buds.

Mo Diva modified her recipe from the one on a jar of Smucker's fudge topping to use a homemade crust, real cream and Reeses candies. I had to un-modify my version back to using store-bought whipped topping to keep it lactose-free, and used a store-bought crust because, well, I'm lazy. And it was my birthday, so I was allowed to be. It was bad enough to spend my birthday morning with she-who-should-not-be-trusted-to-code-security, but I digress.

I located the original recipe, replete with product promotions galore, here on the Smucker's site. It had quite a bit of chocolate (and sugar) in it, of which I had my fill, so I devised a strawberry topping instead to turn it into a PB&J pie. For the record, fruit makes it healthy.

For the pie
-1 cup creamy peanut butter
-1 (8 oz.) container Tofutti Better-than-Cream-Cheese
-1/4 cup sugar
-3/4 container of dairy-free whipped topping
-1 prepared graham cracker crust

For the topping
-16 oz. fresh or frozen strawberries
-1/4 cup sugar

I was supposed to use my new electric mixer to make the pie filling, but I didn't feel like taking it out and cleaning it afterwards. Fortunately, Tofutti is really easy to cream by hand. I mixed together the peanut butter, "cream cheese", and sugar, then folded in the whipped topping to make a fluffy, sticky mass. I heaped it in the crust and stuck it in the fridge to set up.

For the topping, I put the strawberries and sugar in a small pot and boiled it down into a slightly chunky sauce.

There was a minor crisis when the sauce boiled over and burned instantly on the range...apparently one should never leave cooking fruits unattended. I put the topping in a jar in the fridge while waiting for the pie to finish (I didn't pour it directly over the filling, because it would make cutting even messier than usual).

After many hours, I wrangled the first slice out of the pan and topped it with the refrigerated topping.

After a full 24 hours, it cuts a lot cleaner than it looks here. The peanut butter flavor mellows out with time, so I've become much more conservative with the strawberry topping. The crust I bought from the store is really crumbly, but it's just a vehicle for the filling anyway. I am seriously considering making this filling with a little more cream cheese and a little less Cool Whip to put on bagels instead of in pies...then I don't need a special occasion to eat it :D

Birthday Hijinks

2011-03-23T10:07:00.010-04:00

I'm 23! The world looks a lot different from when I was 22. For one thing, everyone around me looks younger. For another, I can almost wear bright lipstick without feeling like the 14-year-old Francie putting her hair up to get work illegally in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

I almost look grown-up, don't I?

I was wearing the aforementioned lipstick because Sweetie and I were heading out for a dual-celebration dinner. Ever since we came back from Japan last year, we've been lamenting the lack of decent restaurants in Indiana. It's all fried or mass-produced, and you can either choose to spend way too much for twice as much food as the average human should consume in one sitting or settle for fast food. But last week Sweetie discovered the existence of an actual, honest-to-goodness Korean BBQ restaurant in Bloomington! We thought nobody would take on the risk of American patrons setting themselves on fire, but thank fate for the high number of East Asian international students.

The place is called Mama's Restaurant, and according to Yelpers it's somewhere everyone should go before they die, right after "gaining carnal knowledge of a woman" and "getting a driver's license," in that order. I have never done the former, but I have the latter, so I guess you can say I skipped a grade. Anyway, the restaurant is right on 10th and the Bypass, next door to Sweetie's dentist, in a nook I used to drive right by on my way to work. It's nothing impressive on the outside, but it's clean and spacious on the inside. We requested seating in the BBQ area, which 10 minutes after opening was already occupied by rowdy groups of students speaking Chinese.

I knew it would be costly before going in, so I brought along the cash gift my grandmother sent for my birthday. My grandmother enabled us to go to Japan last year courtesy of my graduation gift, and she enabled us to eat well in New York over New Years too. Essentially, my grandmother is the sole reason we ever leave the apartment :p Thanks to her, I didn't have to sweat over the prices on the menu when we selected a plate of bulgogi and a plate of spicy marinated chicken for about $16 each. I'd be doing plenty of sweating over the grill soon enough anyway.

The restaurant we visited in Kyoto had gas-operated grills, so I was surprised when a man came out carting a tub of flaming charcoal. Really flaming. I was also surprised that they didn't give us lard to grease the grill, but come to think of it leaping flames + grease + patrons downing copious amounts of soju = a lawyer's worst nightmare. Instead, they changed the plate whenever it started looking like this:

I'm not a big fan of my meats being covered in ash, and it was sometimes frustrating to scrape it off of those pans. The taste was great, and I wish I had the recipe for some of those marinades and side dishes, but I can only give the restaurant 4 out of 5 stars because of the sticky non-greased grills. I'd be happy to go back again and sit in the non-BBQ section, where they can serve me my yummy meats pre-cooked and we can leave without smelling like chain-smokers. But I would only recommend the BBQ section if you've never experienced table-top cooking before and have limited options.

After Mama's we stopped at Best Buy because they were out of Pokemon White when we went last week, and Sweetie is due his birthday present. They were still out of stock, so we spent some time trying the demos around the store. We played with the 3DS, which is neat but not impressive enough to buy (it's not "3D" like you'd expect in Imax theaters, but more like the difference between watching a cartoon and live-action on a flat screen). And then Sweetie did something one should never, ever do: touch the Wii-mote on display with your bare hands. I have never seen such a thick, white substance on an electronic before, or such interesting expressions cross Sweetie's face. So instead of going straight home, we walked next door to Barnes 'n Noble to use their restroom, and he spent 10 minutes scalding the skin off his palms. Then we looked at some board games and language learning programs, but didn't buy anything because $45 for dinner already puts us close to mental-breakdown territory.

I finished my celebratory day with a slice of PB&J Pie.

Recipe to come tomorrow, because I have to run and read some papers before class right now. Bis morgen.

Weak

2011-03-21T09:51:00.010-04:00

Yesterday was the first day of spring, and hence (a) the occasion for a new blog color scheme and (b) the first day of the year with run-worthy weather. In late afternoon, I donned my running clothes and tripped over to the park to scuttle around in circles.

Circa 4:45pm, my respiratory and circulatory systems would be represented by a cake that looks like this:

And about 10 minutes later, that cake would have looked like this:

For a more graphic analogy, imagine that my tiny out-of-shape heart is one of these:

And the dirt track around that park is one of these:

Aww, I'm sure Minnie and Mr. Squiggles will be the best of friends.

Basically, I made it to about half a mile before my internal organs collapsed in on themselves. I don't remember having that hard of a time exercising since the timed miles in sixth grade. After that, I joined the middle school track team and started jogging by myself through high school, so I forgot exactly what anaerobic respiration flooding my system with lactic acid feels like.

I didn't think I was in too terrible shape, either. Sure, I spent the last week playing video games and eating through a giant pokeball cake, but I've been walking my miles on the treadmill and lifting my 5-pound free-weights. Apparently, 40 leisurely minutes to the latest episode of Bones doesn't keep one in cross-country shape.

To be fair, when I'm running outside I naturally speed up. It doesn't feel shameful to bring the treadmill down to 5mph if 6 is too strenuous, but it makes me feel silly to shuffle slowly along beside the ridiculously fit college boys and elderly Korean ladies appraising me from head to toe while power-walking. Not to mention the need to put on a show of strength for those large dogs straining their leashes to nip at me. So while I would usually feel the teensiest twinge and hop off to stretch out, in public I pushed to cover distances that were reasonably respectable.

Obviously, I need to work on my stamina. But not today, because that lactic acid is still pooling on my muscles. Today I have to write a group paper that we weren't told was due on Wednesday until midnight last night. That instructor is my favorite person on the planet right now -.-

An Immodest Proposal

2011-03-19T08:00:00.000-04:00

Earlier this month, a columnist for the student newspaper at my university wrote a piece about how much more harm the FDA does than it prevents. All that boggling bureaucracy, he asserted, kills people. Drugs that could save lives take too long to reach the populace. The pharmaceutical companies lose billions to those inane regulations. If only the government took its fingers out of the food and drug pies, health care would be affordable to all, the quality of patient care would skyrocket, and unicorns would dance with the leprechauns at the end of the free market rainbow.

I may sound like I'm being sarcastic, but actually I agree with this columnist 100%. As a biology major and sometimes self-appointed science expert, I have always been a staunch adherent to the principles of natural selection. Dismantling the FDA would ultimately lead to a stronger, smarter, and more resilient human species.

Here's how it works. The FDA currently forces all those pesky tests and standards on the packaged food and pharmaceutical companies. If we take quality assurance out at the knees, the factories could churn out more foods and medicines more quickly. Those products will probably have higher levels of contaminants. Now, people with weak immune systems have had their lives artificially lengthened by modern medicine. When they eat those uninspected fruit snacks, the pathogens will test their mettle. If they survive, they will be deemed worthy of producing the next generation of humans. If not, their genes were worthless anyway.

Also, when new products enter the market, they won't have to go through all those levels of research, modeling, animal testing, clinical trials, blah blah blah. Cancer patients won't have to wait years for an experimental drug to be approved, but can just jump head-first into a vat of magic potions if someone has the inkling it will make their ailments disappear.

Chances are, that magic potion is a bunch of baloney and will kill them faster. Now, you soft-hearted types might think this is a bad thing. But honestly, cancer is just the natural order of things. It is what people in less enlightened eras deemed "death by old age"...you live, your telomeres deteriorate, you mutate, and you die. A lot of cancers have some component of genetic predisposition--hence why the life insurance ~~reapers~~ salesman make you indicate your family history on those forms. Imagine if all those people who contracted cancers just died straightaway. We wouldn't have to waste billions in NSF grants trying to find cures. Families wouldn't have to give hospitals their life savings for treatments. All that money could go towards extending the reach of human excellence...like founding colonies on Mars and building more gadgets that can make phone calls AND play music. Plus, all those little kids with leukemia wouldn't live to pass on their diseased heritage to future generations.

The same concept applies to old people. They can't work or reproduce, which makes them societal dead-weight. Younger people can Google up the risks of certain drugs or stories of people who became ill after eating imported spinach. But old people don't have Internet access. Their decreased mental capacity and tiny bank accounts will lead them to just purchase the cheapest product on the market. Without the FDA, these products will most likely be the most dangerous, and will pick off the dead-weight for us. It's like antelope leaving the old sick ones behind while they flee from lions. Old people buy medicine more often, so they would die first and let the rest of us know which bottles to avoid.

The American public has been brainwashed into believing that the FDA exists for the common good. Fools. The FDA is an outmoded institution that stands in the way of human progress. Evolution only occurs if the unfit die early. If we want to survive the Zombie Apocalypse, we need to pare down the number of individuals who would be susceptible to the Zombie virus. We need to make sure the majority are people who do not need medicine, who can digest everything, and who have the smarts to build and operate Zombie-warding technologies. The first step is to abolish the FDA. Then we can tackle the hospital system, emergency services, and law enforcement. Eventually, it will just be us against the wolves, and the future of humanity will be decided by the survival of the fittest.

The Piece of Paper

2011-03-18T13:11:00.002-04:00

Spring Break is almost at an end, and my stress levels are the same as they were before the "staycation." Judging from the condition of my skin, they could be even higher. Why? Because my break has been sapped by the things that will happen after the break: midterm papers due, new busy-work assignments from she-who-should-not-be-trusted-to-code-security-for-bank-accounts, ironing out course schedules for future semesters, and the prospect of going back to work on Monday and building a passable search feature from databases so badly formed that its creators must have been trying to make retrieval impossible.

When I'm feeling tired and grumpy, as is often the case, I question whether that Piece of Paper with the two masters on it is worth it. We've already established that what the paper represents is worth practically nil, since 90% of my mandatory courses just exercise my existing smarts and don't develop new ones. There are some gems, of course, but mostly I'm just treading water in Microsoft Access or the same lectures on elementary statistics I heard as a college freshman. I read the outdated, content-flimsy assignments so that I can earn the good opinion of the professors, on which my grades are based. And I go through the motions of paper-writing, pretending that the words in them have even the slightest bit of relevance to my future activities as a professional.

The thing is, I knew what I was getting into when I signed up for the program. I'd spoken to enough graduates to know that you could sleep-walk through your year and come out with a certificate just as shiny as the gung-ho Type-As'. My highest expectation was that they would allow me enough free time to develop a useful skill set outside of the classroom.

Unfortunately, this places a lot of pressure on me to do just that. I don't have an advisor to keep me on track or even a solid idea of what I have do to make sure I'll be able to pay off my federal loans. Around every corner people tell me the job market is impossible to break into and I have to do a lot more than just take classes to survive...but no one can tell me for certain what that "lot" is. Working part-time? Maybe. Internships? Depends. I can't even articulate what my job title will be. It could be anything from Head of Collections to Systems Analyst. Frankly, it might not even exist yet.

All this is putting my stability-loving personality under high duress. Sometimes I'm tempted to mentally time-warp back to the 1950s and let Sweetie take care of everything while I sweep the floors and bake cupcakes. But we're not in the 1950s, and with all the liberties and rights I get for living in the 21st century comes a certain level of responsibility to take care of myself. Besides, Sweetie has been bouncing around the intention to join either law enforcement or the military after getting his degree. If something happened to him, where would that leave me? Throwing myself at other rich men for support? Heck no. My bra size isn't big enough to pull it off.

When you get down to it, I'm just venting. I will get that Piece of Paper, and I will make sure that Piece of Paper earns me a job that can get me my little cottage and a Kitchen Aid standing mixer. And then I will have future Spring Breaks on other continents, where self-important professors and basic-principle-breaking databases can't touch me.

Light Bulb Blather

2011-03-16T11:06:00.003-04:00

In case you've been living under a rock, which as far as I know only I do, you know that the 100 watt incandescent light bulb will be phased out over the next year. The biggest tangible casualty of the new regulations is the Easy Bake oven, which will have to be redesigned with a *gasp* actual heating coil instead of running off of the byproduct of something that was originally intended to produce light.

Now, if you're a sane person, you would read this and say, "So what?" and move on with life. But apparently, most of the country is not sane. The illegalization of 100 watt bulbs has thrown the United States as it is represented electronically into an indignant tizzy. People say they're going straight to the store and stocking up so they can deliberately waste their money and the earth's resources as they please. How dare the government take away their freedom to burn their fingers off trying to change a bulb! It's communism! It's fascism! It's whatever else means "bad," because I can't tell the difference between political ideologies!

This is the sort of reaction people generally save for things that actually matter. But it seems we have a lot of pent up rage doesn't have anywhere to go now that the economy is stabilizing and there are no juicy stories about the president shaking hands with the leaders of other countries instead of leaping on them in a red-white-and-blue frenzy and gobbling them up whole. Either people are emotionally dependent on the brand of their light bulbs, or they have cabin fever from being shut up all winter and need some dire threat to freedoms to funnel it towards.

Consider what life would be like if the media focused coverage on every product that went off the market due to new trends and regulations. I haven't seen too many lead-based paints, books printed on high-acid paper, or candies dyed with Red No. 2 on the shelves lately. I also don't see screaming headlines about the death of the 6-DD-battery-powered boom-box. Just switch on the television to HGTV or some cop show and listen to all the ways they can identify when a building was constructed or what model the car must have been based on new codes implemented in such-and-such year. But lightbulbs, well, that's just going too far!

To all those who vehemently oppose the move to less inefficient lighting: it is indeed your freedom of choice to pour your own cash down the drain. Men in black coats will not come to take your bulbs from you. If you want to put on a really strong and united front, you can go into your kitchen and rip out the dangerously government-supported fluorescent fixtures, replace your Energy Star refrigerator with one from the 1960s, and heat your dinner in a fire-wood stove to stamp your carbon footprint firmly into the ground.

Pokeball Cake

2011-03-16T00:57:00.007-04:00

You wouldn't know it from my activity level, but it's spring break! Unfortunately, the only thing "break"-like about it is the break-neck speed with which it is passing while I get no rest. I spent the weekend worrying over school projects, most of yesterday at work failing to manipulate DOM elements, and tomorrow I'll be conducting surveys at the public library.

And today, well, today my soul was temporarily signed over to someone else. Someone who, for a period of one week, will be the same age as me, and who takes his "birthday hours" very seriously. The average individual's birthday starts at 12am on the calendar day of the anniversary of their birth. This individual's birthday starts after I wake up, after I eat breakfast, and after I design a poster for the aforementioned surveys tomorrow. His birthday does not begin until I am both physically and mentally accounted for, and he retains the right to pause it at any time. In sum, this means his birthday began at 1:30pm Tuesday and will end sometime on Thursday.

Activities that DO count as Sweetie's birthday:
-Playing Donkey Kong Country
-Watching the original Dragonball series
-Eating cake

Activities that do NOT count as Sweetie's birthday:
-Showering
-Calling maintenance about a broken garbage disposal and a door falling off its hinges
-Fixing his birthday lunch and birthday dinner
-Baking and decorating that cake
-Taking naps

Well, on the bright side his birthday needs to last for a while, because it will take us that long to finish the cake featured in both of the above lists.

This is a pokeball cake. It is the only cake I have ever baked completely from scratch that resembles a cake in every dimension. It looks like a cake, tastes like a cake, and even sits like a rock in the pit of your stomach like a cake (as I type, Sweetie is trying to sleep off a sugar-induced tummy-ache...high praise indeed from someone who usually takes two bites of my baked goods and says, "It tastes like flour.")

The cake itself is chocolate, following Ina Garten's recipe from the Food Network. I couldn't resist making it a teensy bit more healthy by using half white whole wheat flour and decreasing the sugar by a half cup, but it is still decidedly a cake. I baked it on Monday night and froze it because I read that would help minimize crumbs in the icing, but in hind sight, the author of that tip did not guarantee that it would make up for a complete lack of skill with a butter knife.

For the frosting, I sacrificed $25 at Target for a real-life electric mixer and made an impromptu buttercream icing of 1 stick margarine, half a bag of powdered sugar, a dribble of lemon juice and enough soy milk to form a creamy tooth-decaying mixture. I scooped out a bit and flavored it with cocoa powder for the filling, and tinted the rest with gels for the outside. The black band came from a pre-packaged tube, because I didn't want to empty the entire box of food coloring to make it.

Because my frosting had a lot less butter than most recipes (that amount of sugar is usually mixed with at least 2 sticks), it dried out nicely even as the cake under it thawed. The cake itself was a bit dry, partially because of the whole wheat flour and partially because I baked it in 9" rounds instead of 8". But the flavor was nice and rich without being cloyingly sweet, which left room for the super-sugariness of the frosting.

But Sweetie doesn't care about the content of any of the above paragraphs, because when you get right down to it it's a pokeball cake. I could have made it from a mix and a can of Coke and he probably wouldn't have noticed. His primary concern is the fact that someone made him a pokeball cake, he ate a pokeball cake, and he has the photographs to prove it. Well, that and whether he'll be able to fix that lamp his father built, after the pokeball cake's contents caused me to bounce off the walls and knock into it. In the interest of keeping our things intact, perhaps I should consider a nice cheese platter for my own birthday celebration next week.

Trains!

2011-03-09T09:36:00.002-05:00

I don't watch Mad Men, but if it's anything like this commercial for my beloved high speed rail, I might some day.

Mad Men On Trains from Rich Sommer

Anpan

2011-02-27T16:36:00.011-05:00

This weekend I took another break from work and school and lazed around watching Korean and Japanese television shows on the Internet. Watching Korean and Japanese television shows is a dangerous endeavor, because the characters on screen are always eating. 60% of the scenes are of someone answering a call or text on their cell phone. 80% of the scenes are of people having elaborate meals with family, meeting in coffee shops, or drinking in street stalls or clubs. And 40% of the scenes are of people answering cell phones while having meals or drinks (and lying dramatically about who is calling or why).

I have never once seen an episode of an Asian drama that did not try to give me the urge to get to the kitchen and cook something. But on Saturday night, I was especially stupid and clicked on a video of a show called The King of Baking: Kim Tak Gu. Take a wild guess what 80% of those scenes focus on. Half an hour into it, this anpan recipe from The Delectable Hodgepodge was in my bookmarks. Here it is Tamara-ized:

Dough
-1 cup bread flour
-1 cup white whole wheat flour
-1 small egg
-1/3 cup soy milk
-1 tablespoon butter
-1 heaping tablespoon sugar
-pinch salt
-1/2 teaspoon active dry yeast

Filling
-anko

On Sunday morning I drove all over town searching for anko, the sweet red bean paste that would turn an otherwise boring bun into a special stand-alone snack. I found some in Sahara Mart between the canned mangos and bags of MSG. By 11am I was staring through the window of the bread machine, wishing it would go faster.

Since the dough used milk, eggs, and butter instead of plain water and oil like my other bread recipes, it came out a lot smoother and denser than usual. Since I had halved the recipe, I made 7 balls and left them to rest for 15 minutes.

Then I cracked open my $3.49 can of sweetness.

Like the dough, this was a lot denser than I expected. It took quite a bit of muscle power to stir it up. But the consistency made it very convenient to fold into buns...no leaking or falling apart everywhere.

After rising for another hour, my beauties were brushed with egg and went into the oven.

And emerged as soft, shiny butterflies.

Pursuing that metaphor would take me down the path of eating butterflies, so I stop it here.

The finished product was not as sweet or squishy as the ones I ate in Japan, but I did that on purpose. Sugar does not hold me over until dinner, and squishy does not fare well in a purse. They taste better after cooling down a bit and giving the bean paste flavor some time to come out. Overall, I'm satisfied enough to call myself The Queen of Baking: Marnell Tamara Kim.

Kodo

2011-02-26T11:46:00.009-05:00

Last night, Sweetie and I gussied up and went to the university auditorium for a performance by Kodo, a taiko drumming group. We weren't supposed to take photos, so here are some promo shots from other sites:

Let's put it this way. All you health-fanatic bloggers training for half-marathons and attending strength-training classes each morning: you're wusses. Lunge low to the side for half an hour while throwing your entire body weight against a canvas without missing a beat or collapsing, and you will have my respect.

Unfortunately, we didn't have as good a time at the show as we could have, because this was not a show suited to American audiences.

1) American audiences do not show up on time. They will trail in for 20 minutes after the start of the performance, walking right in front of people who were enjoying the show.

2) American audiences don't know the meaning of "dramatic pause." Give them two seconds of silence and they will clap.

3) American audiences are used to clapping and cheering when the singer hits the high note during the national anthem. They apply this habit when drummers are doing something that requires the utmost concentration for them to perform and for other people to hear.

4) American audiences have limited awareness of their impact on other people. They will show up to a performance with pneumonia and cough the entire way through sensitive, quiet numbers.

5) American parents believe their 7-year-old children can come to a performance that starts at 7:30 and watch men bang drums for two hours without getting bored. And they believe that when children are bored and tired, it's enough to command, "Sit down and be quiet," and they will listen.

Still, I'm glad we went to the live performance. You can't feel the bass through YouTube. Or pick up on the reverberations through the building on a CD. If you get the chance to see this group, which you will in a few weeks if you're on the East Coast, I highly recommend it.

25 Things You Don't Care To Know About Me

2011-02-21T10:01:00.010-05:00

Yesterday on Carrot's 'n Cake, Tina pulled a US Weekly and revealed 25 things about herself that strangers on the internet probably did not know. Well. I have no legitimate blog material and I don't feel like doing the dishes, so I'm copy-catting the copy-cat.

I have no delusions that items on this list mean squat to any of you. But one of the great things about Web 2.0 is that I get to put as much worthless content on Google's servers as I want. Without further ado, here's 25 Things You Don't Care To Know About Me, But I'm Telling You Anyway:

1. When I was 7, I was officially the fourth best baton twirler in the United States.

2. When I was 16, I was officially the best teenage flute player south of Riverside County, California.

3. Over the years I've also played the piano, guitar, violin, oboe, and recorder. But I don't do brass.

4. Absolutely none of the skills listed above carried over into adulthood.

5. If it wasn't frowned upon by the medical community, I could happily eat breakfast foods for every meal.

6. I belong to no political party and never will.

7. I'm 100% atheist, but I was voted "Best Christian" by my college dorm in freshman year.

8. I'm inexplicably drawn to sparkly pink nail polish, but don't care for any other colors.

9. I'm vain enough that if I could choose between having perfect skin or not eating chocolate for a year, I would choose perfect skin. Perfect hair would probably lose out to Lindt though.

10. I dislike reading modern works of fiction almost as much as I hate reading outdated works of nonfiction.

11. When I interact with strangers, my eyes widen, my voice rises an octave, and I assume the demeanor of a 12-year-old girl. I don't do it on purpose; it's an intuitive defense strategy.

12. If I could pull off any hair color, I would want it to be auburn. This is thanks to the childhood idolization of Anne Shirley and Judy Garland.

13. My Myers-Briggs personality type is INTJ. Sweetie's is too.

14. The Opinion section of the newspaper makes me feel angry and depressed. Statistics make me feel safe. For the reason, see #13.

15. I will feel that I have "made it" in life when I have a dishwasher.

16. I can do almost anything in the kitchen, except break open an egg with one hand.

17. I have a complex about my flat nose. But I know enough about the dangers of rhinoplasty that I wouldn't go near a plastic surgeon if you paid me to have it remolded.

18. My right thumb is double-jointed.

19. Though I bitch and moan about snow, I actually prefer it to rain.

20. I'm pure nouveau riche. I don't give a Tinker's dam whether my jewelry is "real" or not, as long as it's sparkly. My wedding ring will come from a pawn shop.

21. If I won a million dollars, I would use it to pay off loans and the rest would go straight to the bank. I'd carry on as if it didn't exist, and then I could retire comfortably in a few decades without worries.

22. Rainbow Brite still makes me feel fuzzy inside.

23. I'm afraid of large animals and roller coasters. Roller coasters named after animals are the worst.

24. My profession will be related to IT, but I don't "do" emerging technologies. No smartphones, no tweeting, and absolutely no social bookmarking.

25. It was really difficult for me to come up with 25 tidbits about myself. I'm me almost all of the time, so I've gotten used to myself and find it hard to describe my idiosyncracies.

Musings, Rakes and Chatham's Tap

2011-02-21T09:00:00.000-05:00

I think I'm spreading myself too thin. You know how I know? Because there's a bag of Wheat Thin crisps right next to my computer that is rapidly decreasing in weight. It supplanted a former bag of cookies, which was chasing a banana smoothie. I'm not binging; I'm trying to fill my stomach so it doesn't feel like it's falling apart at the seams. The acid reflux is back in full force, and I obviously need to address my coping mechanisms. But first a recap of the life that is leading my digestive juices to churn:

Lately I've been up to the gills in schoolwork. If my only purpose in life was to melt my body and soul into academia, like it used to be, this would not be a problem. Several big projects, weekly homework and hours of reading each night? Psh. That's like, high school. But all that plus work, my aspirations on the side and familial obligations, and you've got yourself an ulcer cocktail. I, of course, made my life even more fun by deciding to set up internships and follow up on the "extras." For example, heading straight to the public library and picking up a 300 page book just because my professor mentioned it in an email. Or chasing down instructions for specifying one-to-one relationships between tables in Microsoft Access because another one said it wasn't possible. I have to instate a new daily ritual: stand in front of the mirror and repeat the phrase, "I just need the piece of paper" until my resting heart rate goes down to the normal range.

Usually on weekends I try to pretend I'm still a minor and Mommy and Daddy will support me forever. But I couldn't do that this weekend, because Sweetie and I needed to visit Who while the ground was still clear from this bizarre heat wave. Who has been getting better recently--sort of--so with the advantage of two young bodies under his control, he was eager to finish lots of chores. Over this weekend there seemed to be one of three items in my hand at all times: a steering wheel, a rake, or a spatula.

Saturday was primarily the rake, and Sunday was almost entirely the steering wheel. In the morning I packed up and pushed Sweetie out the door as quickly as I could, because we were headed to Indianapolis for an event put on by Nintendo to promote the release of a new Pokemon game, Black & White. I'd used the gift card my mother sent back in November to print out a complimentary $10 off from Restaurant.com at a restaurant in Fishers: Chatham Tap. So we headed there first for lunch.

Supposedly an English pub, Chatham Tap is more like a casual date-night restaurant than an upscale bar. Fishers in general is like taking suburban Temecula, CA and smashing it face-first into rural/industrial Columbus, IN, then plopping it north of Indianapolis where all the affluent commuters like to hide from the rest of the state. This restaurant has that kind of flavor: built to look home-grown, but with a comfortable blanket of modern artificiality.

Because we had the coupon (which specified a $20 minimum purchase anyway), I complied with Sweetie's impulsive request for an appetizer: Portebello Mushroom Fries.

Sweetie was in lurve, and I was impressed. Mushrooms do not strike me as an easy vegetable to bread and deep-fry. They came with a spicy sauce for dipping, which Sweetie also lurved and almost panicked when the server tried to take it away.

For our entrees, Sweetie made the questionable decision to order a dish called "The Heartstopper."

I assumed they called it that because eating foods like this regularly will eventually clog your arteries, but apparently it has the ability to stop a fully grown male's heart during the meal. Sweetie, a once bottomless pit, barely survived the encounter, and he requested after leaving that I drive to Lowe's and find a nice wheelbarrow to cart him around the Pokemon event.

I chose the milder Veggie Black Bean burger.

It had a nice layer of guacamole on the bottom, and the bun was crisp on the outside and soft on the inside. I chose apples and pears for the side, because I didn't want anything fried after those mushrooms. Even with the "light" choices, I couldn't finish my meal either. For one thing, the patty was spicy. It was the kind of spice that creeps up on you, so I didn't notice that my mouth was on fire until halfway in. For another, those plates are a lot bigger than they look on camera. That burger was roughly two of the kind I would make at home.

However, I did not have any difficulties walking back to the car after that. Nor did we have any difficulties finding Castleton Mall, where the event was being held. We were surprised at the lack of confusion and wrong turns that usually accompany our trips out into the world, but Sweetie hypothesizes that we "leveled up" as travelers. We originally expected to just go into the mall, get Sweetie's Celebi and a few plush toys for our collection, and get out. But they made the event into a big activity, with demonstrations and free movie showings and whatnot. We didn't go to either of those, because the lines were long and the children were loud, but we did learn upon entering about a "scavenger hunt" of sorts. Booths handed out pamphlets with empty spaces for stamps, and if you went around collecting all of the stamps you could spin a wheel to win a prize. And when do we ever miss an opportunity for free things?

So we went through the mall collecting our stamps. Or rather, I went around collecting his stamps, because after being declared a pedophile by an employee at a local game shop, Sweetie doesn't like to advertise to people that he's into Pokemon (by the way, if you're ever in Bloomington, IN, please do not give your money to the Game Preserve on Kirkwood Avenue). After collecting the stamps, we waited in a surprisingly long line to spin the wheel. 6 of the 8 potential prizes were pencils with figures where the eraser should be, which was really lame. But Sweetie has a high Luck stat and managed to land on one of the other two, which earned us a free plushie!

This is Smugleaf. His name is not actually Smugleaf, but that's what Sweetie and his other pedophile friends called it before the official name was released by Nintendo. So when the people manning the booth asked which plushie he would like, he happily declared, "Smugleaf!" and earned confused stares from the both of them. He quickly tried to correct himself by saying its real name...in Japanese. Fortunately, only one of the three options looks remotely leaf-related, so they handed us the right one. And I saved $10!

After driving home I did laundry, cut Sweetie's hair (Who was supposed to do it, but he gave him a ridiculous bowl-cut), finished the readings for one class and tried to go through my weekly beauty-preserving routine. It isn't terribly effective because of the aforementioned high levels of stress. Eating ice cream and brownies for dinner probably doesn't help. I can't wait until my next real weekend when I can slow down and address all the things that are making me eat from that bag of Wheat Thins.

Barn Bombings

2011-02-20T19:41:00.005-05:00

Last week, Japan cancelled its annual whale hunt thanks to the selfless and heroic acts of the Sea Shepherds, a group of activists that harasses and endangers impoverished fishermen for the amusement of Animal Planet audiences everywhere on Whale Wars. The Shepherds, self-proclaimed "pirates," throw ropes into propellers, toss flash bombs onto decks, and ram into other ships while sobbing into the camera about how much they lurve the whales.

When the cancellation was announced, the Australian government cheered and thousands of American donors to the Sea Shepherds' "cause" patted themselves on the back. Apparently, the Western world collectively appreciates Shamu's life more than those of the heartless humans eeking out a living with the permission of the International Whaling Commission (kinda like those indigenous communities in our own Alaska do...but hush and shush).

Well. Reading all the positive press about the Sea Shepherds has given me a smashing idea for a new show. Here's a rough draft of my pitch to the Discovery network, just so y'all have a heads up for what to watch on dull Tuesday nights next fall.

From the producers of Whale Wars comes the next big bleeding-heart hit to the small screen: Barn Bombings. Just like The Japanese are primitive, backwards people throwing harpoons at hapless creatures of the deep, The Average American is a Coke-guzzling fatty with the IQ of a sponge chowing down his happy way to a coronary bypass. Barn Bombings follows a courageous group of Hindus as they stand up for the rights of the bovine victims of America's national obsession with the Extra Value Meal.

Our sari-wearing heroes will circle the barren roads of the Midwest, doing Whatever It Takes to protect the sacred cow from the grasp of evil farmers. Hiding behind ski masks, they will throw bottles of rotten butter at silos. Tangle the gears of tractors with ropes. Ram their dilapidated Jeep into the sides of the barns holding their mammalian friends captive, with Jolly Roger unfurled. When Farmer Joe tries to throw them off his land, they will pretend to be mortally wounded and tell the media that the irascible demon came out with shotguns a-blazing.

After a year or so of candid coverage, representatives of foreign countries will formally condemn the United States for its inhumane treatment of animals. The Department of Agriculture will declare an end to the slaughter of livestock, and fast food chains will be no more. The people will raise their glasses in praise of the ~~idiot teenagers~~ activists who were willing to ~~terrorize~~ take a stand against those ~~hard-up family farmers~~ burger-downing psychos.

And the world will be reminded, just in time for a nice bath before bed, that justice will prevail.

Soy Scalloped Potatoes

2011-02-15T08:00:00.005-05:00

Did everyone have a nice Valentine's Day? Mine was okay, but I woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.

1) My class at 9am is taught by Ms. Deliberate Busywork. I am not happy with Ms. Busywork. After I submitted my assignment on Sunday, she emailed saying I had to redo it because "the instructions state" that I format the documents differently. The instructions state no such thing, and I had to reiterate her own inane assignment to her (nicely, humbly, and as non-threateningly as possible). Obviously, I shouldn't trust her to code security for my bank accounts.

2) Sugar hangover. Must consume oatmeal to stabilize hormones.

3) "That time of month" just happened to start the morning of Valentine's Day. This was bad, because I felt like a weak, puffy water balloon all day while spreading love and cheer. But it is also kind of fortuitous, because there's plenty of discount chocolate on the shelves for me just when I want it the most.

As for Valentine's Day itself, Sweetie and I didn't go out or anything. We lump Valentine's Day in with St. Patrick's Day, graduation day, and Little 5 weekend as "days one should not step foot in town if one wishes to keep all of one's limbs." Instead, I made a semi-elaborate, wallet-loving dinner at home of maple mustard chicken and scalloped potatoes for two.

-2 small potatoes (russet or red), sliced thin
-1 tablespoon butter
-quarter of an onion, chopped fine (or a shallot)
-1 teaspoon minced garlic
-1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
-1 cup plain soy milk (or real milk if all your enzymes are normal)
-shredded cheddar cheese
-salt and pepper to taste

Microwave the potato slices in a plastic baggie with water until tender, about 7 minutes (optionally boil, but I don't like draining nutrients away). Melt the butter in a small saucepan and saute the onion and garlic; add the flour. Whisk in the milk a bit at a time and simmer until thickened. Remove from heat and stir in a handful of shredded cheddar cheese. Season the cooked potato with salt and pepper and place on the bottom of an oiled baking dish. Pour the cheese sauce over the top, and top with a little extra shredded cheese.

Bake at 350° for 20 minutes, until slightly browned and bubbling.

Sweetie, of course, is one of those people who prefers the kind that comes from a box. If you're making it for those people, use more salt than you would for healthy blogger types.

Tension Taming

2011-02-13T14:56:00.006-05:00

Today at the grocery store I was looking for a new herbal tea. I always have my Twinings English Breakfast in the mornings, but at night I like to switch it up.

Kroger stocks herbal teas by three primary companies: Stash, Bigalow, and Celestial Seasonings. Stash is always a good bet, but the selection is limited to the basics: chamomile, peppermint, rooibos etc. Bigalow is to "tea" as Taco Bell is to "meat." So I mosied over to the Celestial Seasonings section and found this pretty package:

If my vibes aren't making it through the tubes of the Internet intact, I have a lot of tension. Tension that needs taming with the calming aura of fire-breathing sharp-clawed dragons.

This afternoon I opened it up for snack time. What a nice scent! I wonder what's in it? I turned the box over to check. Looks like some peppermint, some ginger, some licorice, some...what the?

Apparently, catnip has a numbing effect on humans. But if Luna gets a whiff of this, I doubt my tension will be anything like tamed.

Not-so-fun Saturday

2011-02-12T09:48:00.002-05:00

I will spend 50% of today working on an assignment due tomorrow afternoon. Not just any assignment, though...one specifically designed to drain the life energy of hapless students. A tedium to crown all tediums. A desert wasteland of busy work and pointless rules stretching the length of Nevada with no sign of purpose or real learning in sight.

And the best part of this? The fact that the professor made it a waste of time on purpose. I kid you not. She proudly stood in front of the class and told us, point blank, that she's giving us inane regulations because, "If you can't follow written directions, how can I trust you to code security for my bank accounts?" Which seems like a perfectly valid argument, until you look at its essence.

"How can I trust you to write code with valid syntax if you speak with prepositions at the end of your sentences?"

"How can I trust you to organize my databases if your desk is messy?"

"How can I trust you to follow procedure if you can't even tie a perfect Windsor knot?"

In essence, equating this cognitively deficient, purposeless puzzle to securing a website is like telling a samurai he must not be very good with a sword because he can't cut an apple into perfect fifths. Unlike a samurai, though, my method of proving otherwise would not be nearly as satisfying.

Friday Fails III

2011-02-11T08:57:00.008-05:00

I have neglected assignments and personal projects practically pushing open my mental closet door, but I've also been neglecting this blog and I think it's about time for a few Friday Fails.

Fail #1
Yesterday, I was stuck on campus waiting until the last second to walk out to the cold, cold bus stop. My stomach was growling and I didn't want to be in a bad mood when I got home (because my relationship points with Sweetie usually take significant damage that way), so I bought a package of these:

No, the fail was not my obvious error in judgement in trusting an elf waving a sign advertising the amount of fat in his crackers. The fail was on the back of the package:

Please direct your attention to the final item on the list: "Natural flavor with other natural flavors." It's a super-flavor. Like chocolate with chocolate flavoring or rose-scented roses (which reminds me, Valentine's Day is coming up. Note to self: spread the love-with-other-loves). Plus, this means the crackers are good for me, because it must also be super-natural.

Fail #2
In the same vein, it's officially official: the school board is not going to use the referendum money to do anything they said they would. Oh wait, they didn't "say" they were going to do anything, as I pointed out in my post expressing disappointment that the referendum passed.

This week the board came out to say that the money will not be used to rehire all the teachers who lost their jobs, restore cut extracurricular programs, or reduce class sizes. And, one explicitly pointed out, they never promised that they would. See, they just pointed out some existing problems on websites, newspapers, and to impressionable young children. All they said was that there was a crisis and teachers aren't paid enough and the children will suffer suffer suffer if we don't give them our taxes. The voters just assumed that the money would be used to solve those problems. So if they want to use 50% of those taxes to start new literacy and cost-saving programs instead of restoring those boring old ones like having orchestras and teachers, well, that's their business.

Of course, certain people are a little put off. "Their tactics were disingenuous," they say. "That's not fair!" they say. Well, yeah. But if a jittery guy with dilated pupils comes up to you on the street and says Wall Street took his job and his kids are starving at home, you can't complain if he turns around to give that $20 to the heroin dealer behind him. This particular board has proven time and time again that they're manipulative SOBs. They pulled the plug on media specialists, then back-peddled to short-shaft the teachers leading extracurriculars instead without telling anyone first, just to get people riled up. They had their own teachers campaigning to their Kindergarten students to tell Mommy and Daddy to pass this referendum. They can't keep a single superintendent for more than one year, and are currently planning to put these new programs in motion under a temporary one until they can unearth a that golden executive-leader-in-the-rough who's tucked away somewhere.

The best thing to do when faced with such a stellar track record? Give them tons of money without getting a business plan in writing beforehand, of course. Like when your brother-in-law comes to you and says he wants to start up a new business with charitable overtones. Well, you know most of his business experience comes from getting fired from Burger King and scamming the neighbors out of money he says he'll use to repair that fence. But he has an honest face and it's for a "good cause," so the only thing you have to consider is whether there's enough in your checking account, right?

Lady Luck

2011-02-09T08:51:00.006-05:00

A few days ago as I was coming home, I opened my mailbox and had won the lottery: new customer-specific Kroger coupons! I thought I'd used my luck quota for the day, until I reached my porch and found a little package wedged behind the screen door. The address said "4 Times Square, New York NY." I thought maybe we had dropped something with my name on it during New Years and some kind soul was returning it to me. But when I came inside and opened it:

Fabulous prizes! But it was too small to be a leg lamp....

Shiny.

Shinier.

Shiniest!

I didn't know anything about the product, and even if it came with a congratulatory note from the magazine, I don't automatically trust any cosmetics that land on my doorstep. So I looked it up online, and I have won a $34 tube of lipstick. $34! That's like...$30 more than I would usually spend on, well, anything.

I haven't tried it yet, because (a) I'm afraid of it, because expensive things are inherently frightening to me, and (b) it's a really bright coral color usually seen on fashionistas. And though I enter sweepstakes on the Glamour website, I don't exactly have a fashionista style. But I'm certainly not going to say "no" to free stuff.

It seems I've been having quite the lucky streak lately. First I won $30 worth of Amazon gift cards by answering trivia questions about cows, and now I'm getting free make-up. Now. Fingers crossed for the million dollar house I'm putting my name in the box for every morning.

My Little Pony, Where's Waldo, and Cinnamon Squiggle Cake

2011-02-07T09:56:00.014-05:00

Yesterday I had my first happily productive day in a looong time. The catalyst was the weather, which crept above freezing just enough to let us escape the apartment complex. And when I can buy food and get rid of the full-to-bursting trash bags, my happiness meter rises from the red to glowing green.

Deliberately taking two days off from working and reading to watch silly dramas helped too. Novel idea: I think everyone should try not working for two days every week >.>

Anyway, the first order of business was to get Sweetie to GameStop, because he needed to pick up the latest My Little Pony release.

This is Blueberry Pie. He frolics in the flowers...I mean, "races across the land. It is said that north winds will somehow blow whenever it appears." In other words, Blueberry Pie is solely responsible for my worst winter ever.

After harvesting his pony, err, "legendary beast," Sweetie accompanied me to the pet shop and the library, where we entered the children's picture book section and pretended that we were picking something up for his niece. Who lives in Texas. See, Sweetie spends a lot of his free time putting together the missing pieces of a childhood he didn't get. And one of those missing pieces was Waldo, the infamous drawing who's always losing his stuff in crowds of people. After finding Waldo the first time in a badly arranged library section, he started finding him more specifically on every page. And after seeing those pages, I question what it was doing in the children's section at all.

A) Naked people.
B) British words that publishers take great care to extract from their American releases nowadays.
C) Mayhem and destruction everywhere.
And D) Naked people.

Apparently, the British have no qualms about showing their children topless sunbathers and scenes of gratuitous violence. People were maiming themselves left and right on the ski slopes, streakers where thumbing their noses at coppers chasing them on the race track, and shady men were smuggling stolen watches through airport security. Oh, the censors did their best to cover up some of the nudity with bikinis and Speedos, but they didn't get them all.

Now enough about the nonsense, let's get back to the contents. Four words: Cinnamon Swirl Tea Bread.

I stole this recipe from Marie of The English Kitchen. What can I say, Waldo had me itching to put the kettle on.

This recipe is going straight to my When-I-Run-A-B&B-folder. A cross between fresh French toast and pound cake, it's the closest I have ever come to baking something that smells and tastes like it came straight out of a Sarah Lee box. My swirling skills are lacking, but that's what makes it look handmade and special (yes, thank you, I will just keep telling myself that).

Cinnamon ~~Swirl~~ Squiggle Cake
-1/3 cup canola oil
-2 medium eggs
-6oz strained yogurt (I used 2% Fage...yes, that container that expired last month)
-splash of plain soy milk, or two more ounces of yogurt
-2 tsp vanilla extract
-heaping half cup sugar
-1 cup white whole wheat flour
-1 cup all-purpose flour
-1/2 tsp baking soda
-1 tsp baking powder
-pinch salt
-more sugar and cinnamon for swirling

Mix the wets (oil through sugar), and fold in the dries (flours through salt). Spread half the batter in an oiled loaf pan, and sprinkle sugar and cinnamon on top. Add the second half and repeat the sprinkling. Use a butter knife to make swirls in the batter. Bake at 350° for 55-60 minutes, or if you're me and have an outdated too-hot oven, 325° for 45-50 minutes, until it passes the toothpick test. Cool in the pan for ten minutes before turning out onto a cooling rack.

Marie advises storing the loaf wrapped tightly in plastic, but that's assuming you have guests/coworkers/neighbors to devour it. Being a selfish carb-hoarder, I cut it all up for myself and froze it with parchment paper between the slices. As you can see above, one of those slices made me very happy this morning with a mug of Twining's English Breakfast. It won't hold you for long, but who says you always have to eat oatmeal and spinach omelets?

What's My Name?

2011-02-06T11:15:00.004-05:00

For giggles, Sweetie searched for my name in Google images yesterday. After a few profile avatars featuring the actual me, there were pictures of famous people who are not me. Unless I've unknowingly joined a boy band while sleepwalking. Then, starting on page 4, food. Lots of food. Food from my blog. Food from blogs I've commented on. Food in pots, in packages and cooling racks. Food I posted just last week and food I haven't made for months. Thanks to this blog, my name is automatically associated with soup, muffins, and lots of cake.

That, and some very happy statues, Victorian corsets, and a burning book. Mom and Dad must be so proud.

The collection of food pictures tied to my reputation is a little off-balance. There are very few savory dishes and a lot of baked goods and cakes, thanks in part to my laziness in taking pictures of my everyday meals and in part to my copious comments on Cake Wrecks. Today I'm going to edge that ratio one notch towards 1:1.

This, my dear readers, is Cheater's Nikujaga. Real nikujaga takes time to cook: you have to simmer that meat and veggies for a long time to get it to the perfect tenderness. Cheater's Nikujaga, on the other hand, combines the superpowers of the stove and the microwave to have it finished in 15. Just start simmering some noodles, microwave some 'taters until soft, and sautee some onion and carrot. Add the potatoes to the skillet, brown some ground beef in the same pan, cover with a cup of water and an indeterminate amount of mirin and soy sauce and simmer down to let the flavors seep in. When the noodles are done, pop them in a bowl, top with the meat and veggies, and you're done.

Now. I'm off to attempt to get my car out of the parking lot. I have no more spinach, and the world will stop turning if I don't buy more.

More Hatred for Winter

2011-02-04T13:17:00.002-05:00

I'm having horrible luck this winter. First there was the blizzard during our trip to New York, and then I got a cold. And then there were the ice storms a few days ago, and now I have another cold! At least I can tell that this one will be much shorter than the two-week-long one in January. I couldn't swallow yesterday, but I've skipped straight to the chest congestion phase today.

I may have mentioned this before, but when other people get sick, they lose their appetites. When I get sick, I eat. Mostly junk. In fact, I can usually tell when I'm getting sick if I'm eating more than usual. It's my instinct to put energy into my body if I'm feeling weak. So Sweetie, being a horrible significant other, doesn't mind too much when I'm feeling ill, because I make lots of yummy food.

To you, this looks like a regular homemade pizza (betcha can't tell which part is mine :p). Actually, it's my first super-thin-crust New Jersey-style pizza. Instead of making it from bread dough as I used to, I made it from the same foccaccia-style dough I use to make pizza sticks. With minimal sauce and a higher oven temperature than usual, I'm this close to achieving the perfect crunch. The outer edges were especially crispy, but the middle could use some work. Also, if I'm going to turn up the temperature in the future, I should stick to regular pepperonis rather than turkey ones on Sweetie's portion; you can tell that I ran out of the former and had to use the other on that bottom section!

I hope other people are having a better winter than I am. I think I'm just going to hide in a box until someone tells me it's April.

Ice Day

2011-02-02T10:23:00.003-05:00

Yesterday afternoon, the entire state shut down. Everyone fled the schools, the businesses, the streets for the safety of their homes. Everyone, that is, except for my university.

IU prides it self on never, ever closing for any reason. Ice and winter storm warnings across the country? Imminent danger to student life? Pshah. Put on an extra jacket, you yeller bellies. But yesterday, they broke character just a teensy weensy bit and cancelled classes. "But campus is still open!" they emphasized.

This morning I received an official email saying classes should resume as of 1pm today. "Everyone is encouraged to dress appropriately for winter weather and to exercise caution when walking across campus." My class is at precisely 1pm. So...I am to put on a hat and "cautiously" battle my way through a solid sheet of ice and roaring winds to get to campus, where I will be promptly struck by a car spinning out uncontrollably. Ha. Ha ha. Absolutely not.

Fortunately, my teacher agrees with me that discussing questionnaire design is less important than staying alive. So I'm eating my pancakes, sipping my tea, and not budging from the confines of this apartment until I can step onto my porch and not land back in the entryway on my rear.

By the way:

I think Punxsutawney Phil has lost a bit of his game.

I Missed the Memo

2011-02-01T09:16:00.003-05:00

I knew it. I knew it I knew it I knew it. I knew the sunny weekend was too good to be true.

This morning I had an early class, so I decided to skip my usual Internet-checking routine before walking to the bus. Scratch that verb and replace it with sliding, skating, and at one point, crawling. But I was okay, because I knew the sun would come out soon and melt it all by the time I came home.

Got to school with my limbs barely intact. Found a computer to diddle away time before class. The Midwestern bloggers are talking about snow days and "storms of the century." Say what?

Weather.com says, "Fuck you."

I hope I can get home okay. It isn't currently raining, but I assume I will be pelted with ice in just a few hours. Dognabbit. I hate being a good girl.

Food!

2011-01-31T10:18:00.006-05:00

It's almost February...and the weather is like it's almost February! I'm hesitant to believe it. I just know Punxsutawney Phil is going to pop his head up on Wednesday and say, "It's spring! Wait, back up...I missed a key item I need to get that special game ending, so we're restarting January now."

In the meantime, I hold on to the tiniest sliver of hope that the temperature will stay more than 20 degrees below average. This weekend Sweetie and I could poke our heads out from our own hidey holes for the first time in a looong while. The recyclables are finally off the kitchen floor, local businesses have received our economic stimulation and we're eating FOOD. Not instant ramen, not haphazard wraps five times a week, but food.

Exhibit A:

On the way home from an outing yesterday, I pulled Sweetie into Sahara Mart for some discount Fage yogurts. He's a little wary at the sight of the "Sell by Jan 12" stamp on the container, but how else am I supposed to get them for 80¢ a piece? Besides, it's yogurt. It's alive and fermenting, like cheese and wine. There's a little leeway on the expiree date.

Anyway, I don't have a problem with depreciated goods, but I'm a stereotypically sweet-toothed American and I don't like the yogurt plain. But I also don't like them pre-flavored...the Chobani fruit-on-the-bottom ones beloved the blog-world over taste like watery syrup to me. Enter my favorite fruit-based concoction: blueberry honey sauce. Two cups frozen blueberries, a fourth cup local wildflower honey, a sprinkling of lemon juice and cornstarch, ten minutes on the stove. Amazing on pancakes, oatmeal, with peanut butter or cream cheese on bagels. One scoop into the yogurt, and I'm acting like some model on a Jell-O Pudding commercial enjoying that spoon just a liiitle too much.

Exhibit B:

Okay, it isn't really "food." But it is special, because I shouldn't be able to buy this in the United States. A few months ago I discovered Sweetie has had a secret emotionally-fueled longing for Toblerones ever since elementary school, when his sister would bring them home to sell for fundraisers and he wasn't allowed to have any. I fulfilled his dream with a buck at Target. But as with most nostalgia-induced attachments, he is not particularly generous with his toffee-filled treats. So if I want a Toblerone, I have to get my own. And one week I decided my own should be special, i.e. not plain Jane milk chocolate, and I started craving a white chocolate Toblerone. I knew they existed because I saw them in Switzerland on a trip to Europe with my mom in the 10th grade. But looking online, it appears they only exist in countries like Switzerland, unless you go to a fancy imports store. You can buy them imported on Amazon, but I don't trust re-sold edibles.

So I gave up and decided to wait patiently until we have enough money to fly ourselves to Europe and buy some in person. But what do you know, Sahara Mart is closer to a fancy import store than we thought. Now I have my own special bar that no one else can touch.

Exhibit C, however, I let Sweetie dip into:

I can't point you to a recipe or even give a name for this, because I made it up. It's stewed beef, only without the stew. I took a little over half a pound of meat, dredged it in flour and browned it in a little butter. I poured in about a cup of beef broth and enough water to cover the meat and let it simmer for an hour and a half. Then I put in one chopped carrot and boiled down for another 20 minutes, until the carrot slices were soft and the "stew" resembled gravy. For the side I mashed two small potatoes with soy milk and shredded cheddar cheese. Doesn't it look fancy? Or like a frozen TV dinner, if you're the sour cynical type. Trust me, it didn't taste like one. I'm turning into quite the carnivore.

Is the weather decent where you are? Or are you stuck on the East Coast with 20 inches of snow blocking the path from your doorway to the car?

Peddling Anti-Diet Advice

2011-01-25T09:17:00.007-05:00

I don't know why anyone would be interested in someone else's weight. If you are, stop it. The comparison game is a lose-lose for all. But this is my blog, so I get to talk about me. And today I'm going to talk about how pretty and smart I am, and how I beat the system.

As of today, I am officially at the same weight I was before I started dieting again. 130 pounds...only five more than before we set off for Japan last spring. (Yes, Sweetie did threaten to smash the scale with a hammer, but he didn't follow through). Now, the magazines will tell me those five pounds are a matter of life and death...or at least bliss and misery. But you know how I got down to 130? By not reading those magazines. And now that I've slipped into the intuitive eating groove, if I happen to see those food-is-your-enemy articles floating around the Internets, they look absolutely insane.

For example, take a look at a headline that made the rounds last week, summarized by a professional blogger for Glamour magazine:

Weight Loss News: Beware of This Kind of Breakfast

"Breakfast is healthy, right? Of course it is! But, be careful--researchers warn that if you approach your breakfast this way, you may have trouble losing weight and keeping it off...

We've all heard the news that breakfast eaters are more likely to lose weight and keep it off than non-breakfast eaters. But, that doesn't mean to go crazy on portion sizes in the morning, say researchers in Germany. A big breakfast may backfire.

They found that people who ate larger breakfasts didn't experience any greater energy level or a so-called hunger-blunting affect throughout the day compared to those who ate light breakfasts. And, the bigger breakfast eaters consumed 400+ more calories each day.

The bottom line for weight loss: Breakfast is healthy, but make sure you're eating some lean protein and whole grains, and try to keep your morning meal under 400 calories (tops)."

400 calories tops? Oh no, those breakfast sandwiches at Subway can be like 410! And I'd better start counting the calories in each spoonful of cereal, because just one extra Mini Wheat could push me right over the edge into forbidden territory.

Mock-worthy wording aside, the hullaballoo around this "news" is understandable. It's one of the top ten rules of journalism to never, ever read the scientific papers you're reporting on, because that would ruin the story. A couple seconds on Google revealed the following balloon-deflators:

The study was performed on extremely obese patients only, who probably did not have good established nutrition and exercise habits. Exercise does a lot to stabilize appetite.

The study judged the size of a breakfast by calories only. Obviously, a "big breakfast" of oatmeal and fruit is not equivalent to a big breakfast of apple fritters. The actual conclusion from this study may well have been that a big serving of sugar in the morning isn't healthy, which wouldn't be news at all.

The participants in the study did not have regular eating schedules. The authors specifically pointed out that they did not control participants' diets, but rather let them keep journals of what they ate normally. The participants would often eat no breakfast one day, and an enormous one the next. Eating a lot on a starve-and-make-up-for-it cycle is VERY different from eating a reliably large breakfast every day.

I could go on, but I have your attention for a limited amount of time so I'll get to the sausage and eggs of it: making mountains out of scientific molehills is the journalist's job, so the panic-stricken tone and overblown headlines aren't particularly shocking to me. What really bothers me was not the run-of-the-mill premonitions of doom, but the reaction of the public to the news. Here's a sampling of comments that followed the article I quoted above:

"For breakfast at 7:30 or 8:00 I always take 2 hard boiled eggs, remove the yolks, and have 2 reduced fat/sodium sausage links. Then around 10 o'clock I have a low carb yogurt with 12 all natural unsalted almonds in it! Yumm :)"

"I've been eating those fiber rich banana pancakes, 200 calories, most often. Or I have a smoothie at 169 calories and a hard boiled egg at 70 more. I probably need to quit having coffee or have less because I add more sugar and calories with my skinny nonfat latte creamer. Sometimes I'm getting 2 servings at least so adding 60 calories from creamer."

"When I eat cereal I make sure to portion everything out in the measuring cup so that I'm not accidentally eating an extra 100 calories every morning. I find that no matter what I eat I am always hungry for a snack around 10 am"

Twelve unsalted almonds? Are you sure you really need all twelve, 'cause each one is adding like .6g of fat and that totally negates the effort you went through to remove those yolks. And you, #2, 60 extra calories from creamer? You stop that this instant! That's like putting a whole slice of cheese on your sandwich every day! Obviously, that last commenter just has no willpower. If I ate a perfectly level half cup of cereal without the accidental 100 calorie overdose in the morning, I wouldn't need a snack around 10am...because I would have cannibalized my co-workers by 9.

I make fun, but thoughts like this are actually really scary to me. They're the kinds of things I would say during my anorexic days, only to these women it's In-clique girl talk. I sarcastically advised the author of the second quote to abandon Satan's creamer, but other commenters were genuinely encouraging her ("I use a splash of fat free half and half as well as some Splenda. Only 10 calories and it does the trick!") A few even felt the need justify their "bad" behavior to a bunch of strangers on the internet:

"I had a big breakfast Sunday but..it was Sunday morning! Plus we ate around 10:30 so we weren't really hungry until later anyhow."

Please tell me this isn't normal. Please tell me the entire Western world hasn't been sucked in. Thousands of people can't be digging the yolks out of their eggs, portioning 169 calories of smoothie and sneaking looks at their figures in the mirror, right?

Wrong. I've seen the diet mill in action. The victims are unanimously more miserable, and mostly much larger, than me. Like my supervisor boasting to everyone at the party she made the roasted nuts with artificial sweetener, my boss chugging chemically fabricated Slim Fasts for lunch, or my friend picking at the pita and hummus platter in lieu of a substantial dinner. They're jealous of the people who can drink full-sugar juice and eat pizza whenever they want and still stay skinny. I want to tell them they're probably skinny not in spite of the juice and pizza, but because they eat whatever they want without worrying about it.

Unfortunately, we can't change the way the media writes or the way people think overnight. The best we can do is point out the ridiculousness of it all and hope that eventually, people learn to filter out reality from the stream of food-phobic nonsense.

Sexist Breakfasts

2011-01-24T09:17:00.005-05:00

I haven't been posting much recently, not because I don't have the time or inclination, but because I don't have anything to say. The most exciting thing I've done this month is go to the grocery store. Just getting out of the apartment complex parking lot is a death-defying act. Corollary to the previous statement: I don't cook anything interesting because the only way to survive until April is to buy in bulk and hit the preparation repeat button.

I can't talk much about my private life, either, because (a) not even I want to hear about my readings for Organizational Informatics and (b) when I'm not doing schoolwork or work-work, I'm pursuing a project which should remain classified for at least another half year. It's not that I don't trust you; I don't trust the devious strangers who stumble upon random sites and pilfer ideas from hard-working bloggers. You know, the same ones who leave nasty anonymous comments just to feel powerful...only with brains.

So for now, you just get tiny glimpses into my mental and physical life. Like this one:

The girliest breakfast I've ever eaten: a pink banana-cherry smoothie and half-bagel with Dark Chocolate Dreams peanut butter. One day, when I have enough money to establish a bed and breakfast and hire someone else to clean it, I will put this on the menu for any pre-teen princess visitors. I could also make a blueberry equivalent for boys, just to thoroughly cement the gender divide at their impressionable age. But I'm not sure what they would have instead of the chocolate bagel. What do stereotypical boys eat for breakfast? Bright Blue No. 2-colored Pop Tarts?

Come to think of it, I'm not sure what males eat in general. Almost all of the food blogs are written by women. I have limited personal experience, and in that personal experience males don't particularly care what they eat. My kid brothers liked pancakes swimming in syrup and cold cereals with lots of dehydrated "marshmallow" bits. My father ate Cheerios or Grape Nuts during the week and classic sausage and eggs on Sundays. Sweetie used to eat chocolate-frosted mini-donuts or Totino's Pizza Rolls until I pleaded poverty. Not only were the packaged foods expensive, but those medical bills later on would be too. Case in point: his father's breakfast of choice is a cigarette and a Coke, and he's looking at $50k+ in hospital debt right now.

What do your male relatives and significant others eat for breakfast?

Bar Food

2011-01-21T21:08:00.003-05:00

It's difficult for me to understand people who say they eat out because they don't have time to cook. For Sweetie and me, going out is a big undertaking: have to dress up, bundle up, drive out, be seated, peruse menus, and then wait for the food. Since we don't have fussy tastes, professional cooks take the same amount of time to prepare the meal as I do...and I can do it in my robe and house booties for a fraction of the price.

For example, tonight it took me about 15 minutes to make some tasty bar food for dinner: nachos and "margaritas."

The beef half is for Sweetie and the black bean half is for me. A restaurant probably wouldn't let us do that. And in order to get this on the town, it would take 10 minutes of driving, 5 minutes finding parking, 5-15 minutes of walking and a lot of squeezing past college students to get to the bartender, who won't give my card back even if I emphatically specify "no tab."

Plus, soy milk instead of tequila = strong bones and no hangover. And the whole thing cost about $2 total.

There are a lot of other reasons to go out to eat. To socialize, celebrate, or just to feel rich. But "having no time" is a lousy one.

Rejection Paradox

2011-01-20T00:00:00.004-05:00

When we were in New York (technically New Jersey), Sweetie and I watched a rerun of Seinfeld in which Elaine decides she's going to march up to her finicky employer Mr. Pitt and quit her miserable job. When she gets there, he declares that he's put her in his will, glittering with dollar signs. She changes her mind. But after a series of comic misunderstandings involving a pillow and Jerry being mistaken for a pharmacist, her employer and his lawyer believe Elaine is trying to do him in to get the cash. When he says, "Elaine, you're fired," she's appropriately devastated. Momentarily. Until she has a nostalgic montage of all the years of suffering that made her want to quit in the first place.

I had the same conflicted feeling, minus the laugh track, after a month or two of trying to figure out how to tell my bosses at CeDIR that I wanted to leave in summer. When my supervisor beat me to it by telling me their budget was slashed and it was either me or the books, the news coincided perfectly with my own plans to leave and find a job within walking distance of my new department. Still, it made me a bit huffy for the rest of the day.

"I'm the most conscientious worker they've ever had! They have enough work to do already and I know they won't keep up X, Y, and Z. My supervisor doesn't even know how that program works and the librarian is never here. This place will crumble without me!"

The circlet of irrationality repeated tonight. Back in December, I received an email from one of the officers of the Student Chapter of the Special Libraries Association, a tiny group with no real presence but an impressive sounding name for resumes. They were calling for volunteers for various club positions, so I put my name in the hat for webmaster and rejoiced that I might be able to do something with the atrocity of a webpage they have now. Oh, there's nothing wrong with it visually, but the code is warped to high heaven and I hate badly constructed sites more than ugly ones.

That same early December week, I received a timely message, "Thanks! We have two people vying for webmaster, so next week we'll have an election."

Next week came and went with no communications whatever. I emailed to ask what was up and received a vague, "I think someone else is setting something up." The week after that school let out and the campus emptied. "Well," I thought to myself, "it's winter break and all and everyone's very busy with travelling. They'll get around to it soon."

A month later, early last week, I finally received an email about the "election." Read everyone's bios and vote online, and we'll send the results on Monday! My bio had a link to my full-blown portfolio, replete with custom jQuery animations, a list of the programming languages I'm proficient in (XHTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, and MySQL), and screenshots of the professional websites I've published in the past. The other girl's had a line that she had "HTML skills" and she would be happy to maintain the Twitter account, too. I felt kind of bad...emphasis on "kind of."

Obviously, today is not Monday. On Monday night I started to get annoyed. Yes, I know you're all busy with huge MLKJ Day celebrations, but how difficult is it to compare the number 7 to the number 2 and send a five-line email? On Tuesday I started to think something was wrong and emailed one of the members: was it sent out and my address wasn't on the list? I received no reply.

And then I decided: if they don't send the damn results out by Wednesday, I will contact them myself and say, "I don't care who won; I'm not going to work for an organization that can't get it together." Because there's little more frustrating than being a web developer for the bunch of irresponsible people who can't communicate or even stick to self-declared schedules.

Finally, the notice came at 10:30pm today: the girl with "HTML skills" is their new webmaster. I, who have been coding since the tender age of 12, was shunted in favor of someone who probably thinks a style sheet is list of next season's fashions. I have the inkling she had friends in the group...coupled with the fact that the club president was in my class last semester and got a lower grade on a group project because I did all the work for it (so the professor said in confidentiality).

But none of that should matter, because I should be happy that I don't have to cause drama by backing out now. Yet, I am upset for losing the "election." Not even doing taxes lifted my spirits (and it normally would have, because I'm getting almost $700 worth of refunds thanks to that Make Work Pay credit). I feel like becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg and making millions on the skills they turned down...minus the movies showing me in wild parties with coeds.

La sigh. I think I'm just a difficult person to please.

Sulking

2011-01-19T10:21:00.007-05:00

Yesterday it was spring. The high temperature reached the low 40s, the snow melted, and I had to bring an umbrella to school because it was raining. Raining.

But my celebration was short-lived. Actually, I didn't celebrate at all, because I know Mother Nature's sadistic ways by now. Today we're back to winter with the standard flurries and dry air. By Friday we'll be enjoying a sunny start to the weekend with a high of 15°. And next week?

I hate that icon.

This means three things: 1) I need to get to the Recycling Center before we're blocked in again. 2) I would make the least popular weather girl on television because my face has the ugliest, most angry/depressed/resigned expression on it right now. And 3) January is officially my least favorite month in the year. September is a close runner up because it's impossible to sleep in the heat and humidity, but at least you can go about your regular business without an overhanging fear of imminent injury. Hey, those are the months of my parents' birthdays. I guess my family just has really great luck (BTW: Happy Birthday three days late, Mom!)

I have a presentation this afternoon and a backlog of activities on my To Do list (treadmill, wash dishes, find ways to make money...) so I can't sulk for too long. Right now I'm going to enter the HGTV Dream House Sweepstakes and fantasize about taking the million dollar cash option (spend my winters in Vermont? I don't think so) and using it to escape to somewhere warm and dry.

Rice Noodles

2011-01-18T17:15:00.003-05:00

This may come as a shock to 1% of you, but I am a workaholic. I'm the dreaded group member who seizes a class project and turns it into a dissertation. I'm the weirdo who goes to a bar on Friday evening for the American Library Association meet 'n greet, talks jobs all night and doesn't drink anything. I'm the straggling hourly who has to be hauled away from her workstation two minutes before the lights go out and sulks that they won't let her in on national holidays.

One of my New Semester's Resolutions was to tone down the Ebeneezer Scrooge just a tad. So over the weekend, I worked on my pet project for one day and stopped. I put off reading my papers for class until Monday afternoon, when I took conscientious breaks to watch a good-looking artist and his perky blonde sidekick decorate rooms for more money than I will ever earn in a year. And, with a little bit of planning, I enabled myself to make some real food.

We found rice noodles at Target the other day, and I bought them just because I've seen people eating them in shows recently and I'm highly vulnerable to the suggestions of commercial media. But they turned out to be one of my wisest purchases yet, because they are not only easy to cook and mix in with lots of nutritious goodies, but they're also incredibly filling.

You can't tell well from the scale of the photo, but the amount of food on my dinner plate is about twice the volume of food I usually eat. And it only took minutes: I poured boiling water over a serving of the noodles to soak for 10 minutes, and sauteed onion, carrots, mushrooms, tofu and broccoli in peanut oil in the meantime. When the noodles were ready, I drained and added to the pan, doused with soy and chili garlic sauces, mixed et voila. Food fit for a desk-bound queen.

This photo is from today, when I repeated the process with wilted spinach instead of mushrooms.

The next time I go to the grocery store, I should stock up on these. Because as soon as I run out, I'll probably start stuffing peanut butter bagels into my mouth as I walk between one library and the other again.

Disappointed Dark Chocolate Dreams

2011-01-17T13:11:00.008-05:00

Today we went to the mall because GameStop was distributing ancient fire gods who look like St. Bernards. After Sweetie harvested one on each of his cartridges, we headed back through Target. I, in my infinite folly, had suggested that we skip the College Mall Kroger, where shopping is like stepping into an exported piece of New Jersey (crowded, antagonistic, and confusing as heck), and get the groceries in Target instead.

Summary of the endeavor: the managers seem to play Roulette with expiration dates, half of my items were out of stock (or never in stock), and the store's trademark super-slow service at the check-out line was exacerbated by a newbie worker and some especially sticky bags. On the bright side, the prices were almost identical to the ones at Kroger (excepting a $3 carton of eggs) and there were a few items Kroger doesn't stock. For example:

PB&Co. Dark Chocolate Dreams, which according to all females on the Internet is essentially cocaine. Also, I bought fresh spinach, because freezer burn is starting to ruin my smoothies.

We ended up at Kroger anyway because Target didn't have broccoli crowns or Sweetie's brown 'n serve rolls. But when we finally got home I had the meal most closely approximating a "real" health blogger's you will ever see here.

If I were a real blogger, of course, this would have been breakfast, not a lazy lunch. And I would have trained for a marathon beforehand. Lugging a 34 pound box of cat litter from the store to the car doesn't count.

I also would have been able to make this photo look closer to the real hue of the spread instead of letting my camera wash it out. I tried to fix it with Photoshop, but got distracted....

I showed this to Sweetie for the lulz and he started chanting "Post it! Post it! Post it!" Now he wants a company to come up with pretty bright blue frosted bagels because he's tired of brown.

If I were a real blogger I would finish this post by cooing about how Dark Chocolate Dreams catapulted me to a higher plane of existence. But I have a bone to pick with all the females on the Internet: that was not dark chocolate! It was just a sugary peanut butter. I'd have to dip my bagel in cocoa powder to even come close to registering that spread at the Hershey's milk chocolate kiss level. Note to Peanut Butter & Company: you can't just deepen the color and call it "rich dark chocolate." Hmph.

Conclusion to the Catnapping Saga

2011-01-15T10:08:00.009-05:00

As Sweetie wrote yesterday, we had an overnight guest in the apartment.

A continuously moving, camera-unfriendly guest.

Socks looks well-behaved and refined in these photos, but he was mewing up a storm and jumping on things. I think he was hungry, but didn't like the dry food we keep out for Luna. Luna reciprocated by not liking Socks.

In the morning I went to Petsmart to get this cat carrier to take Socks to the shelter.

You're doing it wrong, guys.

Luna doesn't like it when I buy things for other cats. Don't worry--you can use it plenty the next time you need to see the vet.

After tipping the carrier over and shaking a very reluctant Luna out of it, we loaded Socks in and took him to the county shelter. To our disappointment, Socks already had a microchip, and his name was Caleb. We were disappointed because that meant he had an owner, and he couldn't be adopted by a new, better one who doesn't put him out at 1am when it's 12° Fahrenheit. My parents used to put the cats out at night in winter too...in California.

This wasn't a one-time incident, either. Every morning for the past few weeks I would go out and see a tiny set of paw prints leading to our window and away again. If I see them again after Animal Control gives the owner a slap on the wrist, I will be very unhappy.

The Catnapping of '11

2011-01-14T08:12:00.002-05:00

"Sweetie" here. Tamara's currently asleep, but I'm slipping in to update about the cat we 'stole'. I've already posted about it on 'my' blog, "Thoughts of INTJ", so rather than reposting it here, I'll link you to the post there:

http://keruble.blogspot.com/2011/01/catnapping.html

Ugh

2011-01-13T14:50:00.002-05:00

Good morning!

Or afternoon, if you're picky about that sort of thing.

As of today, I have been sick for 13 days. I thought I was getting better because my throat stopped hurting, but then the congestion and sinus headaches settled in. For the past few days I haven't been able to breathe out of my nose and made a lot of people uncomfortable by using tissues extensively in public.

This morning, I was supposed to go into work at 9 and attend my first class in Database Design at 1. Sweetie woke me up at 7:30. I had Honey Nut Cheerios at 8. And by 8:30 I was back in bed, sacrificing work in the hope of sleeping it all off before class. Then I woke up and hey, it's 2:15.

Fortunately, they were only doing an introduction to Microsoft Access today, which I don't need because I had to use it when I worked at CeDIR.

I'm not used to being sick. At all. Which means these weeks have been horrible for me. Also for Sweetie, because he gets to listen to a broken record sputter, "I can't swallow! I can't breathe! I can't taste anything!"

From now on, I'm getting my 3-5 servings of plant-matter per day. I'm also keeping the medicine cabinet stocked with sinus headache medicine that did not expire last year.

Differences

2011-01-12T10:22:00.007-05:00

What's the difference between library science and information science courses?

Well, one looks like this:

And the other looks like this:

What's the difference between a good pet-owner relationship and a cat in the dog house?

This paper towel roll was on the kitchen counter. She is never supposed to be on the kitchen counter because that is also where the very sharp knives are. Bad Luna. Bad.

What's the difference between "these are good" pancakes and "Wow, I could open a restaurant!" pancakes?

Honey.

Last night I wanted to make more pancakes for the week. But they've been tasting sort of bland lately, so instead of sugar I used some local clover honey. Instant gourmet. They would have been more gourmet if I had lemon juice to make them fluffy, but sometimes you need heavier pancakes to make your weekday breakfasts taste substantial. Now if only it were summer and I could use fresh blueberries....

Mental Statistics

2011-01-11T08:05:00.002-05:00

You know how a lot of people can't get their heads around the concept of an infinitely stable probability? Like flipping a coin. Every time you flip it it's a 50/50 chance of getting heads. But after a stream of heads, most people expect tails to come up, just to even things out.

This is perfectly normal, I think. Where in nature do you find infinitely stable probabilities? In reality, we deal with finite resources. There's food hanging from two trees. If you keep taking food from one tree, there will be less left. After a while, it's a better bet to go for the other one. Our brains were not initially built for modern card games, which is what gets compulsive gamblers neck-deep in debt. They think if they just stick to their guns, their luck will change...simply because it has been bad for a while.

I'm a compulsive gambler with the weather.

I bore with it when it was 15 degrees in early December. I kept the whining to a minimum when we were ~~driving~~ car-sledding in 36 inches of snow in Jersey. Because it would all end soon, right? With such weird weather in early winter, Mother Nature would have to make up for it later. Maybe we'll have a warmer January, I thought.

Woke up this morning to a fresh blanket of snow. Weather.com says there will be more piling up over the next few days. And the week after that. And the week after that....

And it's still ten friggin' degrees below the average! Which is better than 30 like in December, but come on. I've paid my dues. My gloves are ruined. My jeans are stretched out from shoving them over leggings. And in ten minutes, I still have to go out to stand while frozen water falls on my head and wind kills the feeling in my extremities and the bus crunches carefully through town.

Until then, I'll just sit here refreshing the weather.com page, hoping those numbers change in my favor. Come ooooon, 30s. Mama needs a new place to live.

Sick

2011-01-10T08:20:00.004-05:00

I am super-sick.

I rarely get sick, but when I do, I do it with a bang.

The lethargy and headaches started more than a week ago, on New Year's Eve. They ebbed away after we returned to Bloomington, but quickly turned into a runny nose and lots of coughing. Now the congestion is all sitting in my chest cavity, and my throat feels like a furnace. Otherwise, I feel fine, and I shouldn't be contagious anymore, so I can go to work and start the new semester. But it isn't fun.

Last night I was supposed to make pizza sticks per Sweetie's request, but nothing looked better than the pictures on Lori's blog for homemade chicken and dumplings.

I cheated and used frozen chicken and canned broth. I also used I Can't Believe It's Not Butter and white whole wheat flour in the dumplings, which fell apart and left me with lots of soggy crumbs at the bottom. But it did soothe my upper body temporarily. And I know that isn't just nostalgia or a placebo effect, because (a) my mother never made chicken soup when I was sick...she gave me 7-Up and Ginger Ale and had me gargle salt water instead, and (b) chicken has genuine anti-inflammatory properties.

A follow-up to yesterday's post: I did actually swap that blog-happy class for one that (I hope) will be more materially useful. If I want to keep at the second degree, I can always take it next fall or spring, and in the meantime I only have one confirmed aggravating course to deal with for the next four months.