Never fully dressed without a smile

This weekend was as busy as ever, with a nice carry-over into the week with my usual 7-10 page problem set to write up for Tuesday afternoon. I'm finding that even taking Saturday to do house things is sometimes not enough (well, it doesn't help that I plop down in front of the television every so often and just sit there for a while). Oh well.

Last Wednesday I decided that it was time to get a library card. So I drove down to the Champaign Public Library, got my card, and picked up a couple CDs and movies. I'm very purposeful about my music choices these days: I'm trying to get all the background music (all classical) from one of my favorite Japanese dramas. It's slow work, because I keep going in without a list of what I need, and try to remember off the top of my head. Ah well, next time I'll make a list.

I also borrowed When Harry Met Sally, which, through a series of events, led me to ask the guys in the first-years' hall what their favorite chick flicks are. I ended up only asking ten guys, and their answers were pretty run-of-the-mill. Three of the guys decided Ten Things I Hate About You is their favorite, and the other movies picked were, well, not my top choices. But the point was not to compare my taste to theirs, but rather just to ask a question they don't usually get asked. And this goes to any guys reading here too: what's your favorite chick flick? I won't judge you for it, I'm just interested in knowing.

(34) On Saturday, I finally got a chance to get my cookie gun (okay, it's a cookie press, but calling it a gun is more entertaining) out and make some cute wreath cookies. These cookies are your basic butter cookie: lots of butter, a little bit of sugar, and real vanilla seeds. I italicize that because vanilla beans are super expensive, but I sprung for them this time, just so I could do it right. If/When I make these again, I'm totally going with the 1tsp extract/bean substitution. There's also cinnamon involved, which looks very nice on the ones that I carefully sprinkled, and a little scary on the ones I rushed on. That's alright, these cookies went over well in the office, and it was fun to get to use a different tool to make pretty cookies ^.^

Alright, it's time for me to dive back in to my work, and then go teach. Fun times.

Valentine's day is a great day for single people to get things done

Yes, I am a complete nerd. I am also thoroughly enjoying being single, as yesterday my friends who are dating were busy with their significant others, while I had the time I'd been trying so hard to find to clean my apartment, wash my clothes, catch up on a couple movies, and bake lovely cookies.

Seeing as everyone is free today (and my problem sets are due Monday and Tuesday, plus some 90+ quizzes to grade by Tuesday afternoon), I'll have to keep this post short.

This semester, even though I'm only taking two classes, I feel like I have less time than ever to do things that aren't Physics. Part of the problem is that my schedule is so spread out, I spend 3+ hours in Loomis where I'm doing homework (or wasting time online). My workout schedule has also taken away from the leisure time I so enjoy, but I'm trying to take that time to catch up on pleasure reading. Yes, I can read while on an exercise machine. It's really not that bad.

Add all that to the nasty sinus irritation I had at the end of last week, and the results are disastrous. This is why I'm in homework death mode.

As of this semester, I've declared Saturday to be a No Physics Day. This confuses some people: I'm a Christian and I'm taking my sabbath (of sorts) on a Saturday? There's a pretty simple answer to that: with my schedule as it is, I can't do Sunday, and it's much more important to take a different day rather than to blow it off since I have homework on Sundays.

So yesterday, in my no-physics time, I finally got a chance to bake the cookies I'd been meaning to make last weekend. These are Pecan Linzer cookies with Raspberry filling (33). I modified the recipe a little, since it called for cherry jam and I couldn't find any that I wanted to use. Instead, I strained and reduced the homemade raspberry jam my Grandma Carol gave to me last Christmas. Seeing as raspberry is my favorite fruit, I do not consider this change to be any kind of sacrifice.

The dough for the cookie part has ground up toasted pecans in it - a little different from typical linzer cookies, which apparently are supposed to have almonds instead. I have no comments in comparison as I haven't tried it the other way. But, adding together the called-for ingredients - mostly usual things, flour, butter, sugar, some cinnamon, &c - resulted in a somewhat dry dough to roll out and cut. From there, the process is pretty simple, especially since I picked up a set of linzer cookie cutters, which are round and fluted, and have something like 6 different shapes that can be put in the center to make the nice window effect. It being Valentine's Day and all, I thought hearts would be appropriate (and cute). Perhaps another time I'll make different shapes.

So there you have it. Every so often I decide to opt for the cuter cookies, even when I don't really have the time to devote to them. That's ok, I know my friends will enjoy them, and that's the most important part.

molasses in.. february

Life continues to be far too busy for sanity - between homework, grading, and doing things with people, I find that I hardly have time to do all the other things that want doing (namely, cleaning my apartment, making fancier cookies, and reading books I want to finish).

Yes, I'm behind on making fancier cookies. I intended to make linzer cookies this week, but a hastily-planned girls' night forced me to reconsider (I'll try to do it next week). Instead, I flipped through my recipe book to find a molasses cookie (32) recipe I thoroughly enjoy.

I had been hoping to wait until the summer to make these, for nostalgic purposes. When I was a kid, my grandma would buy molasses cookies with what I suppose was strawberry jam spread on them to make happy faces. Unfortunately, that bakery closed several years ago, but she continued to play around with making these cookies. The faces were a little funny when she made them, but they were still good and I enjoyed them very much.

You can see in the picture that I didn't put faces on these cookies, but that's okay too. The actual cookie recipe is about the same level of difficulty as basic sugar cookies (the non rolling kind), which means they were very easy to make. The flavor for these cookies comes, well, from the molasses in them, as well as the cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and allspice. Honestly, these are basically softer versions of gingerbread cookies. Maybe it's nostalgia that makes me enjoy these, but I think they're good cookies. Hopefully they'll be well-received by my friends on Monday.



This weekend, a front came through the Midwest, finally raising the temperatures well above freezing. As a result, everyone and their brother has been going out more. I was walking around campus the other night when I saw an example of so many people out being loud and drunk and so on, and I had completely forgotten that colleges are like this. I don't know if this means I am too sheltered as a grad student, I work too hard, or that I'm just turning into an old lady. I would say it's a problem, but I don't think it actually is. The warm weather is nice, though, and I hope I'll get a chance to actually enjoy it (instead of spending all of daylight wasting away in my office).

Warning! Spoiler alert!

Sometimes I like to imagine that school still works where the semester starts out easy and the load gradually picks up. Weeks like this past one (the second week of classes) remind me that in grad school, there is no slowing down ever. Hence I found myself dreadfully overbooked, and completely out of clean socks.

The workout schedule is holding up well, but that doesn't say much yet, again considering that this is only week 2. My goal is to not be a one-month wonder, as my friend Tyler puts it, and to keep this up so I can improve my circulation and just be in better shape by the end of the semester. I've also started running a little bit, as a result of peer pressure and a friend who promised she'd pace me (which means I'm looking into getting a flash MP3 player). Today was an extra (but not serious) exercise time: a bunch of us went to open skate at the UI ice arena. The nice thing about this is that admission for students is free, and skate rentals are a dollar. Now, I'm used to "cheap" skating costing $5, so I'm pretty thrilled. If I can do this a few more times and my ankles hold up ok, I might look into buying my own skates, but we'll see.

Other things... well... I realized yesterday that the reason my apartment has been so cold is the same reason that it's so ugly: vertical blinds over a sliding glass door. I currently have blankets hanging over the blinds to keep the heat in, but I've decided that it's time to take the next decorating step and get curtains. I'm thinking these would be awesome, but of course doing this will mean either taking down the vertical blinds (I need to see if I can because that would be ideal) or doing a rig to cover them, and then finding all the appropriate tools for the project. Man, having a non-undergrad apartment is serious work.

Fortunately, Saturday is my getting-other-things-done day, so I had time for a cooking experiment I've been wanting to do for a while. A few weeks ago I was trawling around the internet when I found a recipe for Crabmeat Brie Soup. Now, I realize that Brie is not the favorite cheese of the masses, but I enjoy its taste, and I've had different kinds of Brie soup or stew at restaurants before that I really liked. This recipe seemed the most accessible (and didn't have cooked carrots in it, which I absolutely require), and while it called for a few interesting ingredients, they were all things I could get at the grocery store. Pictured above is probably the most impressive ingredient, a toe of elephant garlic. Yes, that is garlic. For normal garlic, a piece like that is called a clove, but this is called a toe (and it's larger than one, too). The recipe also calls for cognac, which means that I have half a bottle of brandy sitting in my apartment, and I have to figure out what to do with the rest of it.

So I followed the recipe and finished my soup, and it is soooo delicious, but hardly healthy at all. That's okay, though. I'll just have to not make it often, which will work out because some of the ingredients are expensive and the cooking process is very time-consuming.

This week's cookies, on the other hand, were pretty quick to make, and this is where my spoiler alert comes in. These are called Surprise cookies (31), because there's a special surprise hidden inside the chocolate layers! The base cookie is flavored with unsweetened cocoa and your normal cookie materials: sugar, butter, flour, etc. After baking them for about 8 minutes, I had to take them out of the oven and smoosh half a marshmallow on top of each, then put them back in the oven for a couple minutes.

After cooling the cookies all the way, I made chocolate frosting to cover the marshmallows so you don't know they're there. Of course, I think it's a little suspicious to have frosting glooped on top of these cookies, but we'll see if it's actually a surprise when I share them at school tomorrow. Personally, I find that the frosting is so strong that it's taste kind of overwhelms everything else, including the marshmallow, and I fear that anyone who is not sensitive to texture won't notice the middle layer at all.

But worrying will do me no good. I have quizzes to grade, and wave functions to solve... it's a busy time, I'm a busy girl, and so even now I've got to run off to a friends' to watch the Superbowl and get work done (although, I'm not sure why I'm going to watch, since I don't really care about the game... um. Go Team!?).

Toodles!

put 'em all together and a-whaddya get?

The first week of classes was moderately uneventful but still full of random blessings.

One such fortuitous event occurred on Tuesday, the very first day of classes, when I missed my bus. Now, taking the bus means that my time getting to school is quantized, meaning that instead of being able to be as many minutes late as I leave the house, I can be ten minutes early, five minutes late, or twenty minutes late, all depending on the bus. Having missed the bus that would get me to campus on time, I resigned myself to taking the next bus and being embarrassed by being late to my first class. As I stood outside waiting for the next bus to come, my friend Cory drove by, saw me, and gave me a ride. It was fantastic, I didn't have to set such a bad precedent for the semester (because my plan is to go to ALL my classes instead of skipping practically every morning class, as I did last semester).

There are a few extra things I'm trying to do regularly or to cut out this semester. A recent one, and a behavior I really hope to keep up beyond the "one-month wonder" range is spending time at the gym. My friends and I set up a schedule where we go to the pool twice a week, the gym twice a week, and have a day where we decide which one we want to do. So far, it's been doable, and actually quite nice - the gym facilities here at UI are well kept, and free for students to use.

Another thing I'm up to that I think is very important is making myself take a day off from physics (that day being Saturday). As such, it's my Sabbath: I realized that school has been an idol in my life for years, and taking a day off allows me to reassert that there is something much more important ruling my life, namely God. Taking a sabbath doesn't mean sitting around on the couch all day. I went to the gym in the morning, I did some reading, I went out with my friends, and I made cookies.

On Friday, when I did my grocery shopping, I was perusing through my book trying to decide what cookies to bake, when I realized that I've been making very chocolate-y things in the past couple weeks, and decided it would be good to take a break from that. So when I saw the recipe for Peanut Butter-Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies (30), I decided they were just the variety I wanted.

Looking over the recipe, I realized that I'm starting to pick up on the basic ingredients for chocolate chip cookies, as compared to other cookies. I find that chocolate chip cookies have equal parts white and brown sugar, and lots of butter. But the brown sugar, I think, is the thing that gives them a lot of their characteristic taste, and it's in these cookies, too. The recipe I used yesterday was actually very interesting because it called for 3 cups of oats and only 1/3 cups of flour (and whole wheat flour, at that). I thought perhaps this was an error, but with the low viscosity of the natural peanut butter and the absorbency of the oats, the cookies weren't goopy at all. You'll notice I mentioned natural peanut butter: this basically means it doesn't have salt, sugar, and other random stuff added, which gives it a different taste and makes it a lot less solid. There's also salted peanuts in the cookies, which puts the salt right back in.

I thought I might not like these too much: I usually don't like cookies with peanuts in them, I'm wary about peanut butter, and I always worry about too many flavors and textures going into a recipe, but I think these cookies are delicious. They're a different take on the whole chocolate chip thing, but they're just as easy to make (with about equal yield), and the oatmeal and peanuts go together to make these cookies delightfully crunchy. This recipe is definitely getting a comment written in for quality.


That's about it for now. I've got a problem set to knock out and a lesson plan to prepare, so that hopefully I can do what I want on my birthday instead of losing the day to the demands of grad school.

Everything's coming up bright lights and lollipops

Hey all, I apologize for being a little late in posting - this weekend the Physics department here hosted a conference for undergraduate women in physics, which meant two things for me: free food and that my best friend could come visit. Yes, I realize that I sound like a typical grad student once I bring up free food, but it was good and I actually went to some of the talks, too. I was supposed to be helping but never made it onto the mailing list. Oh well.

It's both encouraging and weird to get a bunch of young women together and to hear the ways we're encouraged to keep after all the craziness we love. Unfortunately, none of the worldviews presented are particularly Christian, which means that I tend to be unable to wholly accept the social science-y talks. Instead, I get angry at the 'jokes' made at the expense of men and unemployed musicians. Yes, the Social Science woman told us that if we wanted to have families it would be best to marry a musician so he could stay home and take care of the kids. And after she said that, I partially stopped listening, although I did pay enough attention to catch her entirely qualitative graph indicating that gender differences decrease after 45... and to hear her then argue that since the average lifespan up until about a hundred years ago was 47, the gender roles prescribed by religion and tradition are no longer valid now that people are living to 80, 90, 100 years old. I think, at the very least, that the argument is a far too simple way for her to throw out stuff she doesn't like.


In the midst of conferencing, I took the time to make my usual cookies (on time this week), which I will have to distribute tomorrow, seeing as there was no school today and I got caught up in apartment decorating. Classes start tomorrow, which means everyone will be back and will help me eat these lovely chocolate-expresso orange cookies (29)!

These small cookies lack eggs and baking soda, which is something that I would expect out of a shortbread, but these don't seem too much like shortbread, perhaps because there's a decent amount of flour in them. The flavor, as you might expect from the cookie name, comes from dutched cocoa, instant expresso, and orange zest. I really think the orange zest makes this cookie, although it just may be that when it's January I want citrus. However it may be, I approve of these cookies.

In other news, I finally found out what and when I am teaching this semester, and while I'm glad to be teaching Physics 101 again, I'm not at all happy that I have to teach 4 sections instead of 3. This will mean grading 96 quizzes every week instead of 72, and at least another two hours lost out of my week. At least I'm only taking two classes this semester, and I really shouldn't complain because I expected to work hard in grad school, but, well, I'm just a little disappointed I suppose.

Everything will be fine, I'll get over it once the semester's momentum picks up (and I very much look forward to when it'll warm up outside and I can start riding my bike again)

I left New Orleans for sub-zero temperatures. Bad form.

Last weekend I took a train to Louisiana to visit my sister and brother-in-law. This was my first time on a real train (the metrorail, subway, and so on totally don't count), and the ride was 17 hours both ways, which was agonizingly boring.

I have a couple comments about the train ride, although they're not specifically related to riding the train:

A few weeks ago I downloaded an application called Stanza for my iPod Touch. Now, this application is basically a document viewer, but it's set up to go online and download free domain books from Project Gutenberg and a few other sites. On the train (and in some other situations), I've had the chance to read classics that I've been wanting to read, and all for free. Which totally beats the overpriced versions they sell at Borders. So I suggest that if you can deal with reading on the computer, look into such websites. Although, I definitely don't suggest reading The Time Machine before bed. It leads to somewhat disturbing dreams.

The other thing the train reminded me of is my complete inability to sleep while sitting up. And even when lying down in awkward positions, one of my legs falls asleep and then I wake up (at least my leg got some rest). I haven't really figured out how to deal with this, but I'm open to suggestions. Drowsy-making medicine doesn't work for me, though.


So I took the train to New Orleans, and my big sister picked me up and took me to Slidell, which is just across Lake Ponchartrain. She and her husband have a lovely apartment overlooking the lake, and I got to spend the weekend with them there. While I was in the area, I felt like my clothes and speaking style and so on screamed out "Yankee", but oh well. It was nice and warm, so my coat was a little lonely in my bag, and I was thrilled.

On Saturday, I delayed my cookie baking so that I could go visit Stennis Space Center, where my sister and brother-in-law work. For those of you that don't know, NASA has a space center in southern Mississippi, where they test rockets. And testing rockets, of course, is fantastic, if only because it means that Becca and Justin can rightfully call themselves rocket scientists.

Being in the area meant that I had to request local food, and Justin was so kind as to get some boiled crawfish for us to eat on Saturday night. I think that a year ago I would have totally been grossed out by the idea of pulling these guys apart and eating the meat from their tail ends, but I think after spending time in Asia I'm not quite so squeamish. In Louisiana, of course, the spices are different, and I couldn't figure out exactly what they were, but in my defense, I was paying more attention to not eating the guts part of the crawfish. Wikipedia says "salt, cayenne pepper, lemon, garlic, bay leaves, etc." Fair enough, although the etc seems a little sketch.


And now I am back in Illinois, where the current temperature is a balmy -6˚F (or 252K, which makes me feel a little better about life). That made Tuesday a perfect time to make these chocolate pistachio biscotti (28) to dip in my coffee (and to share with my friends who've already made it back to town). These are... not my favorite thing I've made, partially because biscotti are awfully hard, and I've never been particularly fond of pistachios. And I had to shell 1C of pistachios. It was a drag. Then I rinsed them in the hope it would make them less salty, but it didn't get rid of enough salt, in my opinion.

Alright, I realize that I'm making these sound like they're bad. Which they are not. These aren't weird like the Pecan Tassies I made back in the summer. In fact, they're quite edible, which is fantastic, because Saturday is coming up again, and I'll be making more cookies then (I won't tell you which until I actually make them, so you'll have to wait to find out).

But now, the goal is to keep my apartment warm against this horribly cold weather. Usually I turn my heat off at night, but I found that was a bad idea with last night's chill, and hope that I'm smart enough not to repeat my mistakes in such close succession. So the heat stays on (but so do the sweaters).