RoR, Cakes, and Sandcastles

Colored Pencil

2010-10-18T20:11:00.000-07:00

It's about that time in the list of my hobbies to do a rotation. Colored pencil hasn't really come back for me in about 10 years so I figured I'd put my Prismacolors to use and make sure I don't forget how to draw. I'm still sewing, but it's slow going when I am frantically finishing up a drawing for class all the time. Tomorrow will be Class 4 of 6.

I had good enough sense to do a quick sketch to see where I was at before the lessons started. Unfortunately I don't have any of my extensive work from high school. Most of it is hanging in my old room, but there is a lot of anime fanart stuffed into a closet somewhere in my parents' house.

This is Maija, one of our two kittens we adopted in July. When we got them they were incredibly sick and had to go through several rounds of antibiotics and eye cream. Not eye drops...eye cream. The pictures of them back then are kind of sad because you can see how Maija's eyes were affected by the illness. They are doing great now though, and doing cute (and not so cute...) kitten things. I'll save that for another post.

This fruit exercise was very interesting. Our teacher started off the class by explaining the concept of drawing an "envelope" to contain our subject matter and help us keep the objects with good dimensions. It's basically drawing a polygon around the major points of your composition, then gradually filling in circles or squares for objects and continuing to refine with your 4B pencil and magic rub eraser. This technique was really helpful for me because normally I just start drawing the details. However if you do that, and something is proportionally off, you can't go back and fix it. No matter how well shaded something is, if it looks off, it kills the image.

I am really happy with the way my nautilus turned out for this still life. It was extremely challenging, color-wise, to blend and gently layer the colors I had to get the colors I needed on the paper. I am sorely missing an assortment of beige pencils, and ended up not impressed by the conch. The cowrie shell was more fun, but somehow ended up looking like a rainbow shell from Super Mario. It took great mental effort to push harder with the pencils to get some color on the paper. I don't want to waste my pencils on drapes, but backgrounds are important too. I am terrible at fabric so that just means it's an area I really need to focus on improving.

I've just finished working on this still life for now. The bottle proportions were tough, but I finally got it and celebrated by spending two hours on the bottle's upper label. I also decided to bite the bullet and just get a 12 pack of the Prismacolor Art Stix (woodless colored pencils) to try out. The white was immensely useful when it came to the draping. Let's hope my professor thinks so as well.

If you're interested in seeing the progression of color, and the photographs they were based on, I've created a flickr set here.

New machines

2010-03-07T11:17:00.000-08:00

I finally decided to just buy a sewing machine and serger instead of continuing to debate which models I should get for another two years. Here they are!

My first project on the new machines was to hem a pair of PJs I bought for M. I think they were made for a giant, I cut off 9 1/4" of extra fabric.

Originally I was going to try a blind hem, either with the serger or the sewing machine, but I wasn't exactly impressed by either (serger is in yellow thread, sewing machine in black thread). UPDATE (03-24-2010): I played with the sewing machine a little more, I think earlier I was feeding in too much of the fabric fold on the wrong side of the foot divider. I practiced on a scrap of fabric and then I ran the machine on a new pair of dress pants and I was quite pleased with the result.

I pressed the raw edge under so I wouldn't have to deal with pins on this slippery rayon.

I opted to do a running stitch instead, and since I don't have two spools of black I decided to just make two parallel lines.

Happy customer:

letter to Congressman Mack

2010-01-03T11:33:00.000-08:00

Dear Congressman Mack:

I am writing you because of the recent survey mailing I received from you regarding health care reform. While I think surveys are an appropriate way to gauge the feeling of the population, I am continually disappointed by the way the surveys have leading questions. This will skew the results of the survey and render it effectively useless. You cannot call yourself a representative of our area if you only listen to the people whose views reinforce your own. You must take all the views that your constituents have into consideration when making decisions that affect each and every one of us.

While I understand your concerns with an increasingly larger role of government, and even agree in some circumstances, it is my firm belief that a country must care for its citizens. That is one of the hallmarks of a healthy society. If we had a government run health care system, you say that we would be giving up our care to a bureaucrat instead of our doctors. I think our current system already has bureaucrats with power over our doctors—they are called for-profit insurance agents, HMOs, and pharmaceutical companies. I would much rather our government, who is democratically elected in the interest of representing their constituents’ interests, be involved in my health care than a person who has no such ties to us and instead is out to make as much money as possible to please stakeholders.

Regards,

ReneVague3

More rails bugs!

2009-09-18T05:54:00.000-07:00

Seems like the only time I post is to link to yet another rails problem. Ok so this time, if you have a table with an unconventional primary key, you cannot use .create to make a new object.

http://roninonrails.blogspot.com/2008/06/using-non-standard-primary-keys-with.html

I've resorted to the .new/.save solution, which works.

Fleamasters

2009-05-16T11:36:00.000-07:00

I stumbled across an article on weather.com that mentioned attractions in south west Florida and the Fleamasters Fleamarket was listed as one of the big tourist draws. I've never heard of it, but I was sold when I read "fresh produce year-round"--the Cape Coral Farmer's Market is closed for the summer and I was so sad at the thought of not being able to buy delicious peaches and mangoes. Publix is not an option. I love that store but they have the WORST peaches. I am continually disappointed when I buy peaches from them and bite into a hard, mealy, dry, tasteless peach.

When I tried the peach I'd bought from the Farmer's Market it was so juicy I ran back to the sink with sweet peach juice dripping down all over my chin and fingers. It was how I remembered peaches tasting when my family would drive through Georgia and North Carolina on vacation.

I drove towards the fleamarket and saw a gigantic sign by Ortiz avenue advertising a "huge fleamarket" so I thought that was it and turned north. What I found was a small hispanic fleamarket...kind of scary. But excellent selection of hispanic favored produce--peppers, plantains, tomatillos, and the like. I might go back there if I decide I want to make enchiladas verdes soon. I got back in my car and left, determined to get to the *really* huge covered fleamarket.

I found it, parked, and was very excited to see a produce stand with big beautiful displays of peaches, strawberries, grapes, pears, apples, mangoes, corn, zucchini, crookneck squash, peppers, tomatoes, asparagus, watermelon, cantaloupe, butternut squash, bananas, lemons, limes...I haven't tried the peaches yet since they were not quite ready, but if they are anything like the strawberries then they too will be most excellent. Max claims they are the best he's ever had--even better than the ones we bought from Plant City during the Strawberry Festival!

The fleamarket itself is pretty big. It took me two hours to walk through every colored aisle, and some of the rows. Large blocks of vendors are missing in places since it is no longer "season". The middle aisle is pretty much the Junk Food aisle and you can buy funnel cake, Italian icies, sausage, gyros, chilli dogs, fries, homemade potato chips, pretzels, etc. But I did see a place selling salad! A Puerto Rican stall was selling beef "empanadillas" (which to me just looked like giant empanadas) so I bought two of them. They are probably entirely made of trans fat, but oh well. I didn't see the giant tub of Country Crock on the counter until it was too late.

There were at least 3 or 4 Lucky Bamboo/Money Tree sellers. I bought a replacement for the bamboo cluster I had for just $8. The same guy also had a dollar-store type deal so I picked up a bamboo cutting board for $4. A lady selling gorgeous party dresses caught my eye and a pretty pink shirt from her set me back $17.

Max had asked me to find a black leather phone case that closes magnetically, and of course they had 3 stands selling them so I picked one up for him for $4. I tried looking for a faceplate for my new Samsung Impression but I guess it is a little too new since none of the stalls had anything for me.

I loaded up with tons of produce from a very nice elderly man on the way out. Limes: 5 for $1. I put everything in my cooler and went back to the SECOND building which had larger items--mattresses, appliances, even cars. There were several nurseries represented so I made a note of the bromeliad/orchid lady and was very good, I didn't buy any more plants. But I probably will go back, she had such a diverse selection.

Now that I'm back and cooled off (it's not air conditioned), we are going to grill some chicken along with the fresh corn, zucchini, and squash I bought. Should be tasty.

& vs

2009-04-13T12:20:00.000-07:00

I was looking at some old C++ code today and found that I was passing a pointer (*) to a function that was accepting it as *& but I didn't remember how or why I did it that way. The whole idea of passing a pointer to a function accepting a * was so that you could change the value of what it pointed to and have it "stick" when you got back to your main.

A quick note: a pointer is a special type of variable that points to an address instead of a regular value.

loopy is a regular variable that points to a value, in this case we set it to 3:

    loopy = 3;

pointerLoopy is a pointer, so it needs to be set to an address. In order to get the address of loopy we use the & operator:

    pointerLoopy = &loopy;

You can't just set a pointer to a regular variable because the types don't match. Trying

    int* pointyLoopy = loopy;

Will get you

    error: invalid conversion from ‘int’ to ‘int*’

I know this sounds confusing so:


//allows you to change the value the pointer points to
//but NOT the pointer itself
//you can't make it point somewhere else
void passerP(int* pointyLoopy)
{
    //dereference the pointer to change the value of loopy
    *pointyLoopy = 5;
    printf("Inside passerP: loopy = %i\n", *pointyLoopy);

    int loopier = 2;
    pointyLoopy = &loopier;
    printf("Inside passerP: pointyLoopy = %i\n", pointyLoopy);
}


//allows you to change what the POINTER is
// and the value it points to
void passerPR(int*& pointyLoopy)
{
    *pointyLoopy = 7;
    printf("Inside passerPR: loopy = %i\n", *pointyLoopy);

    int loopier = 4;
    pointyLoopy = &loopier;
    printf("Inside passerPR: pointyLoopy = %i\n", pointyLoopy);
}

int main (int argc, char const *argv[])
{
    int loopy = 3;
    int* pointyLoopy = &loopy;

    printf("\nloopy = %i\n", loopy);
    printf("pointyLoopy = %i\n", pointyLoopy);
    passerP(pointyLoopy);
    printf("loopy = %i\n", loopy);
    printf("pointyLoopy = %i\n", pointyLoopy);

    printf("\nloopy = %i\n", loopy);
    printf("pointyLoopy = %i\n", pointyLoopy);
    passerPR(pointyLoopy);
    printf("loopy = %i\n", loopy);
    printf("pointyLoopy = %i\n\n", pointyLoopy);
    return 0;
}

This code prints out:


loopy = 3
pointyLoopy = -1073743396
Inside passerP: loopy = 5
Inside passerP: pointyLoopy = -1073743444
loopy = 5
pointyLoopy = -1073743396

loopy = 5
pointyLoopy = -1073743396
Inside passerPR: loopy = 7
Inside passerPR: pointyLoopy = -1073743444
loopy = 7
pointyLoopy = -1073743444

Notice that for the first function, the value of loopy changes, but the address that pointyLoopy pointed to was lost--it stayed as -1073743396 regardless of what we did inside the function passerP. In the second, the value of loopy changes AND the address that pointyLoopy pointed to changed from -1073743396 to -1073743444.

This is useful if you are passing around a pointer that you needed to delete in a function. If you didn't use *& the delete would not stick and the pointer would instead revert to whatever the calling function thought the value was....thus it never really was deleted and you have a memory leak.

Another use would be if you are creating a pointer = NULL in main, and wanted to load it up with something in the function, then use that value in main later on.

However, if you only want to change the value that the pointer points to (e.g. loopy) then you can use * instead of *&.

evil snooze

2009-03-31T05:32:00.000-07:00

Last night my phone was nearly dead so I hooked it up to the wall to charge, away from the bed. When the alarm went off this morning I fought the sheets to escape the bed, flopped onto the floor, crawled to cell phone and accidentally shut OFF the alarm without hitting snooze. Because I knew the snooze would not come back on and save me if I fell asleep again, I couldn't fall back asleep so I decided to just get ready. Even if I was tired, there was no way it could possibly be worse than yesterday.

Yesterday morning was terrible. It was my usual "OMG alarm!", snooze, fall asleep, "OMG alarm!" but this time with twitches near convulsions (because I'd already started to dream), simultaneously scaring us both awake, briefly. When I finally did get up 20 minutes later, I was exhausted, and useless for anything the entire day.

With both situations fresh in my mind, I realized I may have discovered the source of my sleeping problems. I don't have any trouble getting or staying asleep, mind you, since I inherited Dad's ability to fall asleep quickly (much to Max's chagrin). I was annoyed, however, that no matter how much I seemed to sleep I was still just as exhausted as my insomniac coworkers. I was angry that I spent so much time in bed with nothing to show for it. Eight or nine hours ought to be enough for anybody. And it is, as long as you don't hit snooze. I figured that the constant wake-sleep was exhausting and set out to look for evidence. I came across this article where a commenter wrote:

Do you know why a snooze button is “trouble”? It is because the way our mind and body works, we are in a hypnotic type state when we first awaken. If you fall back into a sleep state you will actually fall deeper than when you first awakened. Do that a few times, and that is why it gets more and more difficult to get up, the alarm gets reset, and all sorts of contortions have to be done to ultimately get you up. You may think you are helping yourself by “indulging” but it only makes it more difficult. You’ll actually do better for yourself, and feel more awake (as difficult as it may seem), if you get up the first time you hear that sound beckoning you to awaken.

I rest my case. I promise to try to stop using it.

Childfree

2008-12-31T11:25:00.001-08:00

Though I have pretty much always been of the childfree persuasion (not childless, since that implies lack as opposed to choice), it has taken me more than a year to get over the damage done by a cousin last Christmas on the topic of having children. The things he said to me really struck me like a stone.

He was merely teasing about the "biological" clock since his wife, who claimed to previously be childfree, woke up one birthday panicking about having a child. They went through long and costly IVF and had two beautiful children under the age of 3 at the time I saw him. I see in retrospect that he may have been lashing out about his own issues with that.

Of course at the time I was devastated. I had never thought, and did not want to think, that some day my mind, reasoning, and intellect would fall prey to my own body, by its own design (not a disease, like Alzheimer's). It was very depressing.

I did a lot of online reading, and eventually stumbled upon women whose clock simply never ticked. The women whose clocks did tick were suffering from paranoia because they thought time was running out and they would miss their chance or regret their choice. One commented, there was not, and could never be, an innate biological clock since the physically best ages for childbearing are around 18-25. It's a SOCIOLOGICAL clock, and while it is unusual to decide "no thanks" to children, it is exactly that--a decision. It's not just something you do just because you are X years old or because you are married, or because your parents are breathing down your neck for grandchildren, or because everybody else you know has done it.

What a relief that I am free to be elated and look forward to life with pleasure, confidence, and less anxiety. Now whatever anybody says in that department will roll off my back because I am sure of my feelings, and have at long last found a small community of supporters who have reassured me that I am ok, that I am normal. I've always had my husband's support, but it's difficult to be one way while seemingly the entire of society is telling you that you're abnormal, that you're a horrible person, a freak of nature in denial of biology, that you should be in therapy. Or worse, you are not taken seriously, and told, "You'll change your mind."

Places I felt helped me significantly:

Stork Spot on the entitlement of mothers

Joy of Nieces and Nephews for those that like children but just don't want them 24/7

The Childfree Life where all the forum posters are so sweet and supportive, especially for those "on the fence"

Happily Childfree for a great introduction

Mommy Salary Myth on the gross exaggeration of mommy salary

The Shape of a Mother if you ever wanted to talk somebody out of having a child

The childfree community has their own language and acronyms! For example, a "bingo" is a dumb comment like "But you were a baby once too, what if your mother had felt the way you do" or "It's all worth it". There is a great list at Childfree Bingo.

Your Kids Are Their Problem written by a mother learning about the childfree. Excellent article displaying both sides of the coin.

Candy Canes

2008-12-05T06:31:00.000-08:00

Normally I shy away from anything that isn't completely natural, especially candy with its loads of sugar, artificial colors, and preservatives. But not last night. I gave in and bought a pack of candy canes.

I really wanted *one* candy cane last year, but they don't sell the fruit flavoured ones in singles. I definitely didn't want one of those giant peppermint monstrosities that can be used as a crow bar. So for a year I was candy-cane-less.

This made me determined to buy some this year when we went to Walgreens last night. We had just bought a gorgeous 8' white pine with uber awesome stand and were looking for LED Christmas lights to put on it when I saw them across the aisle:

Spree, Sweet Tart, Now and Later, Life Savers...cherry, peppermint, mint chocolate...pineapple, strawberry, watermelon....an appalling blue colored one; all sorts of flavors. I was surprised to see so many candy companies making candy cane versions of their normal products.

I decided that if I was going to disregard my usual strict qualifications of what, precisely, is edible, I had better get some unique candy canes whose flavours were all equally appealing. I looked across the the packaging. Watermelon or strawberry was a plus, those flavours are hard to get wrong. Pineapple seemed like a tricky flavour; I had a premonition it would end up as bad as fake banana. Mixed berry looked like it might have potential...Blue Punch?? What the heck kind of flavour is that?

Then I saw Bubblicious watermelon, bubble gum, strawberry candy canes filled with gum! Remembering the packs of watermelon Bubblicious I'd buy when I was younger, I grabbed the box. I had my good assortment of flavors and a unique product--who else puts gum inside of candy canes? I had to see how this arrangement could possibly work.

I checked the back. No HFCS, no hydrogenated oils, no aspartame, just titanium dioxide (sigh...this is my white paint) along with the usual artificial colorings and preservatives. Each candy cane has 11g of sugar. Not too bad, I thought since when I do actually eat candy, it is very slowly. A single candy cane would probably last 2-3 days, a box of 10 might take a year. As I walked to the register, I told myself that it was well deserved and I would only take one of each flavour and share the rest at work.

Sound Masking System

2008-11-19T13:28:00.001-08:00

Oh...my...god. They installed a sound masking system in our office today. I think I am going to scream. Basically, they go up into the ceiling and put in speakers, then turn up the volume and play with the frequency on the white noise that they blast out of them.

It is TERRIBLE. I can't hear my music over it. It is so distracting. And, it doesn't even work!

hair

2008-10-31T10:46:00.000-07:00

I have found a new stylist, Raquel at The Rock salon. She comes with 4 very positive reviews from naturallycurly.com. I am so excited to have found this site, and found a recommendation for a real live currently working person.

I always dread getting my hair cut because curly hair is very difficult to cut...especially when beauty schools do not train stylists. You have to find somebody who has gotten their techniques from specialty training on their own, or has a lot of experience. I've found that even going to curly haired stylists doesn't really work. I was nearly brought to tears reading some of the forum posts on naturallycurly--I could have written about half of those about coping with curly hair in a non curly styling world.

I felt relieved just to make the appointment--like there is hope I can finally have a decent hair cut to show off my curls.

Peace Lilies

2008-09-11T11:33:00.000-07:00

I never anticipated peace lilies growing outwards more than upwards! We recently had to shift the plants around the living room--the palm mysteriously died, and we got an old stereo system and speakers by the TV...so we tried to put the peace lily where the Chinese Evergreen was...but it wouldn't fit! It has sprawled horizontally a good couple of feet in each direction. Even the miniature one on my desk is spreading...

Brandy

2008-08-17T12:35:00.000-07:00

I finally got around to buying some more brandy today. I ran out last winter due to egg nog. I couldn't find the brand I'd previously purchased, so I grabbed the smallest bottle the liquor store had, St. Remy VSOP.

It tastes like grapes on fire, and the aftertaste reminds me of something my dad would make during the holidays, ponche. I've tried to find more about it online, but nobody's sounds similar to Dad's. It's kind of like zabaglione/sabayon I guess. The Caribbean versions all have a bunch of other junk in it. Here is the way we make ours:

1 egg
brandy
sugar

Separate the egg into two bowls. Beat the egg white by holding the fork horizontally and making a circle with it vertically (I learned how to do this rapidly, but haven't managed to teach Max. When you do it right, the entire egg will rise up around the fork in an egg vortex kind of thing). Beat until frothy and stiff--when you can hold the bowl upside down for several seconds and nothing goes anywhere, but don't turn it into meringue either. Next, add the yolk back in, a sprinkling of sugar, and a little bit of brandy and mix some more.

That's it! Then you grab a soon and eat it. Yes, raw. The risk of salmonella is something like 1 in 30,000 eggs, ridiculously low. Plus it has alcohol ;)

New Computer

2008-07-29T17:56:00.000-07:00

Ever since my birthday, my compy has been acting strange. One day I woke up to all my bookmarks disappearing...then I started to come home to bluescreens. Picasa no longer worked. Notepad++ didn't work. Alcohol 120% wasn't working. As a precaution, I moved over all my temp anime to my more permanent hard drives, but was lazy and did not reformat.

It wasn't until I couldn't play AOE with Scot after he was finally able to play after 3 whole months that I decided to take the plunge and format, albeit with Max's leftover parts from the power supply murder suicide a few weeks ago. :P

Sooo yay! New computer for me. Dual core! Not that I'd actually use it, but the doubled RAM sure is nice.

xxx.cpp:424: error: request for member‘yyy’ in ‘zzz’, which is of non-class type ‘ClassA ()()’

2008-06-11T12:12:00.000-07:00

haha! I had the same problem.

ClassA variableName;

I didn't realize it thought variableName() would be a function prototype. I kept thinking it would be like the overloaded constructor functions.

Rain

2008-06-10T11:00:00.000-07:00

I kept thinking, April showers bring May flowers, but apparently it doesn't apply to Florida. Our lawn steadily died as we were the only ones on the block following the water restrictions, and some of the front lawn sprinklers disappeared under a foot of dirt and grass. There's something wrong with the valve/solenoid for that zone.

I remembered working at surf camp--how the afternoon classes would ALWAYS see rain every afternoon at about 2 PM starting from the first week in June. I guess I never realized that was the beginning of the rainy season in Florida. A few days ago...what a miracle, it rained! And then it rained the next day! And the next! And it's been raining every day since, and now the lawn is much, much greener.

I guess I've always taken Florida for granted, and haven't learned too much about it since I always thought I would leave. Now that we don't have any school pressures, and the house is coming together, I can actually take the time to learn about being here, and the types of plants grown here, and what I want to plant in the yard. I found a really great book, Tough Plants for Florida Gardens that has been a lot of fun to read.

BCC/CC

2008-05-29T12:35:00.001-07:00

Don't work in Rails.

ticket 1402

365

2008-05-21T10:55:00.000-07:00

Man, my 365 photos have been supremely crappy lately. I feel bad, and at the same time, I don't really care. At least it's been a while since I felt like truly quitting. I get ideas for decent shots, but the camera is just not cooperating with me. I know I don't really know how to use it, so I've been revisting manuals and guides to try to figure out what I'm doing wrong. http://kevinandamanda.com/photography/tutorials/a-quick-guide-to-using-your-canon-digital-rebel-xti.html suggests that I should be using Av and Tv...

It's hard to NOT take pictures of my hands with something because quite frankly, I do not want to photograph my face. I've been having a bad bout of rash/acne that just doesn't want to go away, and I always look tired thanks to my worn out adrenals (and inherited racoon eyes).

We'll see if I can turn things around in the upcoming week. I'm going to try a new bedtime schedule since I've been so sick lately with migraines and weirdness.

aughh!!!! ruby

2008-05-13T13:54:00.000-07:00

http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/11029

It just never ends!!

It should at least WARN you that it's about to ignore everything you just wrote, or that it's going into Eager Loading mode. Something along the lines of: ":select will be ignored for statements using :include"...

I love the idea of rails and what it can do, but they are seriously lacking on A.) Making it "just work" and B.) Why are they always hiding all these weird things it does without notifying the developer with a courtesy error/warning message?!

grr @ ruby

2008-05-08T14:55:00.000-07:00

http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/9301

I don't even want to get into this one. Isn't this stuff supposed to "just work"? They've resorted to hacking their own system?!

Crêpe Cake

2008-04-21T22:28:00.000-07:00

Today's big story is: I made crêpe cake! And used my torch to light it on fire! Observe:

I made a double batch of sweet crêpe batter and stood in front of the stove for like an hour and a half cooking 14 crêpes one at a time. I used my 10" omelet pan since I don't have an 8" crêpe pan, and I wanted the cake to be tall as opposed to a low stack of 15" crêpes. So, I didn't get to use my crêpe spreader with this. But I did kind of get the hang of twirling the pan about with my wrist.

Between each crêpe is a very, very thin layer of blackberry preserves (I used one of my Wilton offset cake spatulas). At the top, I sprinkled just a touch of sugar in the raw along with about 1/8 cup of brandy. Once that soaked in and the torch was ready, I poured the other 1/8 cup over the top and torched away ;)

See it? See the flames?? They're really small and lame, but believe me it was pretty cool watching the flames lick around the top crêpe for a while. Max was concerned when I leaned in to get a better whiff (it was smelling really good!) since it was hard to tell if my hair was in danger of catching fire. I poked it with a finger to be sure once I was certain I saw steam instead of blue flames.

Blackberries were two for one again, so Max was nice enough to buy me four boxes. (^_^) hehe, so basically a box of those and another little bowl of Publix fruit were my supper. I guess since this had blackberries on it, you could say it was supper part 2.

I've been wanting to try this out ever since I found the crêpe cake recipe in The Joy of Cooking. I am happy to report that it is very light and delicious!!

Bonus photo on flickr!

Dinner

2008-04-16T21:48:00.000-07:00

I had a lot of fun making dinner today. My parents came over last weekend and insisted we go out to eat, so I didn't get to cook much, and this week I've mostly been feeling like crap. Until today! I was feeling well enough to re-try risotto. The last time I made it, it came out okay, but I knew that surely it could be better. Cooking Illustrated had a recipe for risotto primavera, but I didn't have asparagus. However, thanks to my usual impulse buys, I had a leek and a celeriac in the fridge. I've never bought those things before so I thought I might make them into a soup. A kind of wintery dish for winter produce. But since I found I could use the leek (or at least part of it) in the risotto, I decided to hold off on the celery root and maybe make it into a remoulade another day.

I had a giant bundle of rapini that I thought I could use instead of asparagus, but after looking at all those leaves I decided, "Maybe not."

I steamed them like usual, and left them on the side. I really like this action shot ;)

Max helped me broil the fish. To my great surprise it caught on fire, so I flipped the piece of fish onto the fire in an effort to not only quell the flames but take advantage of them to see what it would do to the fish. It came out really good! Tasted like it had been on our nonexistent charcoal grill.

And the final result?

I feel like my photos came out quite well today, rather like the ones I took just before Thanksgiving. Doing 365 sometimes makes me forget how much I like to take pictures of just food, without straining to put myself in the photo. By the way, I left these photos large (50%) in case you want to kick yourself in the shins ;)

Oatmeal Cookie Day

2008-03-18T16:23:00.000-07:00

I have been informed that today, March 18, is National Oatmeal Cookie Day. Apparently it is also on April 30...according to Google.

In any case, this holiday deserves to be celebrated. I have already come up with a new oatmeal-raisin-chocolate chip cookie recipe for Scot and shipped them off to him (today is his birthday).

Now it's my turn. I want my spiced oatmeal raisin cookies without the taint of chocolate. I'll get on that when I get home from work...probably after I fail miserably at trying to beat a few levels of Doggie Dash.

Update!

New Building

2008-03-15T09:31:00.000-07:00

I had a hard time falling asleep last night with all the new building excitement. I actually told Max as he was sleeping that “Now we can walk to Publix, get subs, and come back to eat them!”

Although now, I can only feel a sense of anxiety. At long last, we have a full flight of stairs that I can claim for daily exercise, and we still have 1 or 2 restaurants within walking distance…but now the dress code has changed. They will be enforcing business casual, which I suppose is good, because the new building is so beautiful that you feel outclassed in jeans. This is especially significant for the developers because we got away with a lot—sneakers and jeans, and not just on Fridays. However, now the vast majority of my existing wardrobe is nowhere near business casual. I am really scared about this because I am going to have to go shopping.

I have one (1) properly fitting pair of slacks. I had another grey pair that my mom made me buy in size 4, but when I went to wear them they were so big that even a belt wouldn’t help. In January, I went ahead and finally bought another grey pair from a different store and they fit great. Fast forward a month or two and now THEY are baggy looking and make me feel like crap. Even the halter dress I wore last night (which is the only nice dress I own)…I don’t remember it sagging so far down on my back. I know I lost weight during the flu, but you’d think by now that it would be back where it belongs. Ill-fitting clothes cause so much grief for me. I’m so insecure about it that they alone can be the reason for a bad day, and all before we’ve even left the house. Then there are shoes, another item impacted by the new dress code.

Sometimes we walk to lunch places together, but I won’t be able to do that in dress shoes. After analyzing my whining to see what was really bothering me, I came up with a solution. I’ll buy a pair of shoes that I can slip on once I’m outside at the car, then change back before we come into the building. This way I get to keep my fresh air and leg-stretching without a potential VIP seeing my sneaker-ed feet.

However, this too requires shopping. It’s practically a trauma half the time, where I end up driving home in tears only to cry some more at home to M’s bewilderment. I have fantasies about hiring a personal shopper. It takes so much time and effort to find anything; I have to wait for the correct “season” for colours, styles, sizes, and prices, and all 4 criteria rarely if ever match up. I made a huge mistake last time by going to the Edison mall, a mall where you can only find ghetto clubbing clothes and have to keep looking over your shoulder. I’ve got to look up some nice places to shop around here, and not Gulf Coast. Everything is so far flung and there’s nothing for the young professional. I’m preparing myself for up to an hour’s trek to somewhere decent.

But first, some AOE3 with Scot.

oops

2008-03-13T18:23:00.000-07:00

haha! I forgot to update you.

sponge

bread

I ended up tossing out the rest of the sponge in the fridge cuz I didn't feed it. I caught the flu around the 1 week feed-by date and subsequently neglected it further.

Since then I made yeasted coffee cake, which I burned (to my standards) because I didn't think to lower the oven temp 25F for the dark pan (and liquidy dough) but it was still good, and servable to our guests at the great Risk match. I really liked the streusel topping, and I'm very glad I tripled the amount. I like to pick off the big chunks of sugary, nutty goodness. I think I'll try more flour in the coffeecake next time too.

Sponge Starter

2008-02-09T20:30:00.000-08:00

I've been looking for a specific bread recipe lately--something that uses bread flour and can be shaped in a round loaf (otherwise known as a boule). I thought the Joy of Cooking had failed me until I took a closer look at the "Breads Made With The Sponge Or Starter Method" section of the Yeast Breads chapter. I don't really know much about making bread, but I am excellent at following recipe instructions. Feeling brave, I made the Sponge Starter and now it gets to sit and ferment in the fridge until tomorrow at 10 AM, at which point I must make a decision. Do I split the starter in half, make one loaf, and keep the rest of the starter in the fridge to feed on occasion? Or do I make the full batch and make two loaves of bread? Should I reserve some of the dough to make a mixed starter, and continue feeding that?

Luckily the Joy of Cooking gives me such options :) I'm glad that I found something new and challenging to try. There is nothing quite like fresh baked bread, and it will be interesting to see how this starter method makes a more flavourful, rustic European bread compared to the straight dough method I've always done.

Warning: Ruby Does Not Like Regex on !Strings

2008-01-23T22:44:00.000-08:00

After going nuts and spending about a day trying to figure out what could possibly be wrong with my awesome regex, and looking up what the heck greedy or whatever comparisons were, I finally found the ticket that explains how ruby does not like you attempting to use a regex on anything but a string. If you try it on a float, it works in console...but in real life, it only halfway works and ends up being extremely unpredictable, so always make sure you include @variable.to_s before you attempt a =~/\A[0-9]{4}\z/. By the way...use \A and \z instead of ^ and $. It's safer. The difference is that \A and \z are for strings whereas ^ and $ are for entire lines.

You'd think it would throw a nice error at you, but no, it gracefully displays erratic behaviour...argh. It's just as bad as the has_and_belongs_to_many :validates_attributes bug I found out a long time ago as well. It was saving the attributes before validating them, which of course makes this validate function absolutely useless.

Makeup

2008-01-04T15:58:00.000-08:00

I love makeup. When I wake up looking like absolute crap, so bad I don't want to go to work, it's there for me. Twenty minutes later I can feel happy about the way I look (and want to go to work). It changes my outlook and cheers me up. Before you dismiss me as a typical girl, it wasn't always this way.

I used to vehemently hate makeup, or at least the idea of having to put it on every day. It didn't help that mom used to chase me down the hallway, concealer and blush in hand (now she just yells "Fix yourself!"). I hated being a girl, and girly things, for a very long time until I finally realized that I should ENJOY being a girl instead of hating lace and bows and pink. I've done a complete 180, and as much as I'd like to attribute it to growing up, or discovering the joys of being a woman, it's probably because of the field I'm in.

I am extremely proud of being an engineer, and enjoy not looking like your typical software engineer. I stood out in class just by being female, and sometimes I was the only one (or one of two) in a room full of 30+. It can be very intimidating, and I was shocked sometimes even though I knew what was coming when I finally finished my general education classes. In fact I had to stop entering through the front of a classroom because of all the stares. I must add I am not thinking so highly of myself that I believe everyone is ogling me. It is flat out disturbing to try and walk to your seat while feeling eyes wash over you. And if anybody else doubts, ask Max how it made HIM feel to walk into class with me!

Looking for reassurance of what I was, I took shelter in girly things. At work, I have a purple orchid on my desk. My terminal is pink. My window scheme is pink. My desktop background is a kitty. My hotmail is pink. This blog is pink. I want you to make no mistake that this is the desk of the only girl on our floor when you walk by.

It seems like I'm making a big deal out of the men:women ratio, but it’s there and requires acceptance. It was pretty funny the first week I started when people would come by as usual to everyone else's cubes, curse, then notice me and immediately begin apologizing. This is best summarized by the funniest introduction I have ever heard (after he spouted a string of f-bombs):

"Hi, I'm X and I like to swear a lot."

Praise and Glory

2008-01-03T21:54:00.000-08:00

Today was a very praiseworthy day full of glory--27F of glory. I got to wear a puffer jacket (scroll down on that link and you'll see what I mean) to work today! This is significant because I had previously predicted I would never wear a puffer jacket in Fort Myers. It was 62F when we woke up since I absolutely refuse to turn on the heat in Florida. We should enjoy our one cold day of the year to its fullest (it's going to hit 81F this weekend). I shivered with glee while I got ready for work. Besides, who knows what dastardly smells will come out of our unit....probably more cigarette stink.

But onto the best part of the day, an awesome little site that saved me from having to write a bunch of crazy javascript. I don't know if you've ever had to write text fields with javascript validation, but I end up doing them a lot at work. For this particular problem, my text field can only accept numbers. Sure, I could check on form submit, but that is not half as cool as calling a replace the instant somebody dares to type in some unacceptable characters. Monkey #2 made a little function with a simple replace(/\D/g, "") that replaces anything that is not a numeral with "". You can type away all you want but it is futile! That little function is called onkeypress, onkeydown, onkeyup, and onpaste. However! It only works for CTRL-V pastes. If somebody...namely QA...tries to right click paste jibberish in, they will succeed.

I don't want to repeat the other guy (how many girl programming sites are there? Besides the girl code one) so suffice it to say that you must add oninput for the validation to work in Firefox. For IE, you need to make a new javascript function that sets a global javascript variable to the element you want to swipe; it will also need a setTimeout call using a 1 ms delay that summons your character swiper function. This is because setTimeout doesn't let you call a function with parameters, or something. Set your delay function to be called by onpaste and you're done! Luckily it takes care of things for Safari as well.

Looks short and stupid, but it took me all day since I thought I was getting errors from our menu system. Turns out I had to reboot my virtual windows.

Funny how it is so similar to the real thing. XD

a bad week - baking disasters edition

2007-12-22T22:10:00.000-08:00

This has been a bad week. First I hurt my wrist (and it continues to bother me), then I am plagued by headaches and cramps forcing me to leave work early twice this week (and nearly using up all my sick time), then the deal with the lawyers and the Orlando HOA, not to mention the Fort Myers HOA, the appliance bill, Max's student loan bill, toss in some extraneous relatives who will be staying in my parent's house at the same time we are (forcing 6 people to share a bathroom), and several big baking disasters...and you have a bad week.

If you don't care about baking, skip the rest of this post. Trust me. The rest of this post is a baking rant about butter and botched recipes.

<rant>

But none of that is truly a problem so much as the baking catastrophes (besides my health, of course). I have not made croissants in a while; some time back before we moved from Orlando. I had some problems with butter spurting out while doing the turns, but it wasn't a terribly big problem and although they were flat and lacking salt (for my taste) they were pretty good.

So. It is almost Christmas, we cannot buy gifts this year, I am racking my mind to come up with homemade gifts...I thought mom surely would love croissants and pains au chocolat. Mon dieu, what a calamity. This time the butter exploded everywhere. You could say my problem was that the butter was too hard, but at the same time it was too soft. I set the butter brick down and starting folding for the first turn, noticing that the butter was hard enough to almost poke through the dough so I quickly put my hand on it to soften it. I turn the dough to do the second set of folds...and now it starts going to pieces. A butter leak springs on the lower right hand side of my rectangle...then another in the middle. I try to see if I can tear off a corner to patch it, but, the butter was already nicely incorporated between the layers there so now I have effectively made things 5 times worse. I add more flour to try and stop the problem so I can continue turn 2. The dough rebels and now I have before me not a rectangle of dough with butter inside, but a rectangle of dough with soft melted butter all over the top. Frantic because the dough no longer clings to itself, I dump flour into the giant open wound. Finally after some tears Max helps me put it into the refrigerator to harden before I attempt to complete turns 3 and 4.

About an hour later I deem it safe enough to continue, and after turn 4 it is still quite buttery so I add another turn, praying that I am not overdeveloping the gluten. Exhausted, I re-wrap the envelope of dough and leave it in the refrigerator over night. The next morning after a breakfast of hash browns and scrambled eggs I take the dough pack and made it submit to me, in the form of a 24"x12" rectangle. Excellent. I toss it in the fridge to firm up before I cut croissant triangles. At this point it seems that perhaps the dough is more resilient than I originally gave it credit for. I start to think, maybe it will be okay. Sometimes when you bake, a small mistake ruins a dish; but sometimes, a humongous error can be overlooked. I decide to be hopeful and continue shaping the croissants and begin making squares and measuring chocolate chips for the pains au chocolat.

Fast forward to this afternoon, after the bread has risen for an hour and a half and baked for 15 minutes. Max zooms into the kitchen and takes a bite of a croissant. Hesitant, I also try a piece. My first bite is gummy and floury--I taste every gram of flour I dusted the dough with as I rolled it out. Gross. Max thinks it is great however, so I take another bite, and this time I notice that the outer layers are quite crisp and flaky, the way they are supposed to be, and even if the inner part is kind of thick and chewy, I rejoice that they are indeed edible. Not great, mind you, but edible. The chocolate filled ones are better. The insides are not as thick as the croissants, plus there is nearly half an ounce of chocolate in there to help you forget.

Inspired by the strength of my little army of croissants de boulanger, I decided to make tuiles, or French almond wafer cookies for my brother. He is not an easy customer. He called me asking for sweets recipes that are very low in saturated fat and sugar (he says so he can sell them...I don't know why. I know my brothers are always thinking up business ideas, but Paul? You will never find him in the kitchen.) so I am trying to find something and tuiles fit the bill. They are very thin, made with cake flour and topped with coarsely chopped almonds. The whole batch has 5 Tbsp of butter and 1/3 cup sugar. Pretty good, as far as cookies go. They turned out well, except I didn't remove them from the pans in time to shape them in the traditional style. It worked out since it made them easier to package.

Next, blondies to use up the 2 leftover egg yolks. Less fat than his favourite chocolate chip cookies but very satisfying. I believe I royally screwed these up, I did not cook the butter long enough, I accidentally added the sugar to the flour and not the butter (no chance to dissolve!), and the dough was unusually crumbly as I had to spatula it in chunks into the pan. It came out looking ugly, tasting sugary (despite me eliminating a good third of the sugar it called for), and crumbly and hard instead of the soft gentle cake texture it is supposed to have. Sigh. I screwed up the last time I tried to make them when Adriana and Josh came over. I don't know why! I've made them a million times before but lately I am cursed. It's really heartbreaking since these were actually one of my own favourite sweets (but not anymore after these last two attempts). I think I will end up giving them to my brother-in-law and sister-in-law since they probably won't mind.

</rant>

Oh, and Brian--Today's 365 picture is an attempt to lure you out of hiding. I know you are lurking out there! You are jipping me with the no photo streak. If you quit, I will too! ;)

Merry Christmas, Feliz Navidad, and Hyvää Joulua

2007-12-17T23:03:00.000-08:00

Today I finally got around to writing Christmas cards. One in English, one in Spanish, and one in Finnish. Conveniently I just got the English one from my aunt and uncle who always mail us a card after I realized I could not find their address. We got the usual sticker decorated one in Spanish from my great aunt, and a new one this year from Max's parents' friends, Juhani and Leena, who wrote, "Thank you very mash/mush for the turkey lunch in Thanksgiving day!" I thought it was great so I had Max help me write one back. We were going to wish them a peaceful Christmas but somehow during the dictation of ll's tt's and ää's we lost the rauhaullista (peaceful) part of it. But at least they still got a happy new year, lol (onnellista uutta vuotta).

Unfortunately we don't have any remotely Christmassy stamps, so everybody is getting corn, sunflower seeds, beans and squash on their cards along with a healthy dose of 2 cent Navajo jewelry stamps. Should be interesting to see that going through Finnish mail now that the daily high is something like 34F over in Helsinki.

On a side note, I think I keep forgetting to post in here since I feel like I already am on the 365 set! So if you're looking here, check there first. There is a pretty good pancake picture up for day 18.

house

2007-12-08T20:05:00.000-08:00

Since we bought our house in August, we’ve worked on improving it. The first things to come down were the old, nicotine infused draperies. Next it was the wallpaper. I’d like to say that we’re on some new stage…but we’re not. We’ve still got the office and bathroom #2. We took down wallpaper (and painted over residual glue) in bedroom #1, bedroom #3, toilet #1, master bathroom (even behind the flipping medicine cabinets), the kitchen (even behind the refrigerator), the entry, the dining room, and the breakfast nook, at heights varying from 0’-10’. We’ve peeled off wallpaper coordinated outlet cover plates, thrown away unsalvageable appliances and furniture, cleaned where nobody has cleaned in 10 years (naked Barbies on top of the closets), turned the unruly and overgrown weeds into a halfway decent lawn, replaced lighting fixtures, scraped off black crap and tar from the windows with a razor blade, rinsed the screens, removed and washed closet shelves (they were black…until they met me and the sink), removed black chunks of dirt from fans, and taken down and washed half the blinds. “Wash the blinds?!” you say. Yeah, we wash the blinds. I could veritably peel off the layer of dust, slap it between two slices of bread and make you a hearty sandwich with it.

Sometimes I get really down about all the work this house needs, even though I knew what I was getting into when I made the offer: at least 10k in repairs to clean and update the place to modern standards. When we moved in the appliances were so trashed I couldn’t cook. It broke my heart and made me furious at the same time to see an oven in such condition. But the way the oven was abused was the same way the entire house had been mistreated and neglected over the years.

My parents help us a lot with the repairs and cleaning (Mom is the self-proclaimed “Queen of Clean”). I think that just one of them has more energy than both Max and I put together because I’m generally in an upset state of mind about the house--which saps any enthusiasm I might have for work. The image of our perfectly upgraded condo in Orlando tantalizes me with what could be…enjoying the house with just a little maintenance instead of a complete overhaul in a new area every week. I realize I keep saying “house” because it’s not my “home.” I don’t really feel like it’s ours yet, or maybe I’ve disowned it until it stops nagging me to work on it everyday in addition to normal chores.

I find that this cheers me up, especially now that I think I understand what she’s saying. And here is a camel for you, directly from my pilot brother who is probably still flying around the middle east somewhere.

Boneless. Gotta love it.

365

2007-12-03T21:15:00.000-08:00

Well once again I caved in, hopefully for the better. After much cajoling and encouragement from Johann and Brian I decided to try the 365 self portraits that they have recently started. "You'll learn about yourself." "It'll be fun!" they said. "You can see how your photography develops over the year." I even got a brief upbraiding about modern culture's views of women from what I said about myself.

At first I flat out refused--why on earth would I want that many pictures of myself! I thought they were doing the stand in one place and take a mugshot every day for a year. Yuck and no thanks. But after browsing Johann's photos, I realized it was more of a creative photo that summarizes you and your day. Having tried it out for 5 days now, it is kind of fun to see what you can come up with every day. As Brian says, "What makes today special?" And surely it can't hurt to work hard and actually get GOOD photos of myself as those are in short supply. It's a good way to eventually learn the advanced features on my camera, play with photo editing, etc.

So, if you're interested in photographs of yours truly for however long I can keep this up, here it is.

tasty food day

2007-12-02T21:26:00.000-08:00

My cappuccino with Dutch processed cocoa powder paired with pulla from yesterday.
Tuna salad with my favorite red purse and red JOY in the background.

I bought a bunch of cheap clothes today and then I met up with Max for dinner at Tokyo Bay. We sat at the sushi bar and watched large family parties get gimmicky taiko drumming along with leaps of fire that kept them ooing and aaahing at the hibachi. My cucumber wrapped sushi (no nori!) was beautiful adrift in a plate of ponzu.

.blank?

2007-12-01T19:17:00.000-08:00

Tell me, what is the point of having .blank? if it doesn't even work consistently! I started using it to replace all of that ugly
if !@string_thing.nil? && !@string_thing != "" (or if @string_thing)
with
if @string_thing.blank?
to detect nil, [], {}, (), and "" after I tested it out in console. Try to load the page, however, and you get, "You tried to do .blank on nil!" or my favourite, "You tried to do .blank on a string!" Well DUH stupid Rails! And no, it was not in Windows with InstantRails, it was at work in Ubuntu. It's not on the API site either. Maybe I should submit a ticket. At least the last time I found a bug there was a ticket for it (has_and_belongs_to_many saves attributes even if the object fails validation).

If anybody knows how to get ruby script/generate anything with InstantRails, I'm all ears. I can get console but only by using the InstantRails button for it. I can't figure out how to get anything to work remotely the way I got used to doing it with Linux. Oh, another problem, I can't get my <div>'s or <ul>'s to have a background image with style="background-image: url(/images/Paul green water_sm.jpg) repeat-x;"

Sometimes Rails can be so elegant and time saving (I really love rescue "" when pulling data from hashed params)...but sometimes I get so frustrated with the lack of documentation, and the weirdness that is agile programming.

Pulla/Vehnäpitko

2007-12-01T17:17:00.000-08:00

Next time I will put sugar on the 4 ropes before I braid them. And probably add more cardamom and raisins.

Your Average Day

2007-11-29T23:19:00.000-08:00

So Thanksgiving was a smashing success, there are no pictures of turkey since it disappeared so fast. I really liked the new cranberry recipe -- enough to put it in my little handwritten cookbook.

I'm still thinking about that sewing machine so I started another loom knit to distract myself until we pay off the camera.

Speaking of which, I got a good picture out of today's shish ka bobs.

They were especially tasty after it took me two HOURS to beat Frederick the Great on Hard in Age of Empires (Carolina map). It was awful, I let my town get destroyed twice but eventually rebuilt with complete upgrades in Age V and got my revenge for my miserable loss yesterday in Sonora. I personally think he is the hardest opponent. I looked at the score graph after the skirmish and his empire was pretty much an exponential curve...but in the first 20 minutes. I am no match for that, even playing French.

Did anybody ever watch Wheeled Warriors in the 80s? The French version of the theme song just came on and Max recognized the tune. Although I've had Nicolas' music since last summer's Europe trip I don't think I've heard even a quarter of it and it continues to surprise me on a daily basis.

Thanksgiving Cooking Day One

2007-11-20T23:03:00.000-08:00

My plans today were to make at least the Cranberry Relish with Apple Cider and the short cut turkey stock that I’ll be needing for gravy later. I managed to squeeze in the super mushy sticky wet vodka pie dough and the pâte brisée…twice. The first time I halved all the ingredients except the ice water. When I was taking it out of the food processor I thought it seemed rather wet...and gummy. Hmm. My slip wasted a whole stick of butter for this dough that now had too much gluten. Luckily yesterday I bought not one but two pounds of butter. Just in case. Right along with 4 cartons of chicken broth since they always seem to run out of the organic kind.

My next mission was to make cider syrup and add it to a chopped granny smith apple, a 12-oz. bag of cranberries, and some zested lemon peel.

I think my pictures came out much better this time.

Rebel XTi Camera

2007-11-18T20:44:00.000-08:00

I made milk bread this weekend, inaugurating my new Calphalon large 5"x10" loaf pan. Looks like refrigerating the dough for one of the 3 rises did the trick for the crust...or maybe it was the melted butter brushed on top. It was so good...and made awesome French toast too.

I love our new camera.

We've been playing with our new camera. Max's guitar pictures are good.

After trying to take a nice picture of these apples for 20 minutes I ended up eating my shiny model, the Empire apple.

Thanksgiving Planning

2007-11-18T19:04:00.000-08:00

After a lot of fluctuating my guest list for Thanksgiving has finally congealed: 12 people and 4 kids. I am excited for this, my most favourite holiday of the year. It turns out that my menu is actually simpler than I thought since I am not making appetizers and only making 4 side dishes and 3 pies.

Appetizers

Crudités

Salad with Vinaigrette Dressing

Karjalanpiirakat ja munavoi

Accompaniments

Cornbread Dressing with Roasted Fall Vegetables

Green Beans Almandine

Cranberry Relish with Apple Cider

Green Onion Gravy

Potatoes

Candied Yams

Rye bread, wheat bread

Desserts

Apple Cranberry Pie

Pumpkin Pie

Pecan Pie

Fruit Soup

Pulla

Drinks

Lemonade

Iced Sweet Tea

Water

Coffee

Espresso

Hot Tea

My mom is bringing crudités (I am secretly planning to eat the whole tray while I am cooking). She volunteered to bring the salad and candied yams, and dad will make fruit soup aka fruit salad.

My mother-in-law will bring yummy Karelian pasties which consist of a thin flat rye dough wrapper filled with rice or potatoes and served with egg butter (hard boiled eggs + butter + salt). She’s also going to bring a potato dish, presumably garlic potatoes, and the breads: rye, wheat, and pulla—a sweet coffee bread.

Of course my favourite pecan pie will make its appearance along with a new pie this year, apple cranberry. I will be brave and re-try the disaster that was my last fresh pumpkin pie, mainly because I couldn’t find a halfway decent 8” glass bottom springform pan (I won’t even get into the burned pumpkin seeds). I’ll make Darjeeling iced tea sometime soon, and if Publix ever decides to order enough lemonade to actually stock it for more than an hour, we’ll have that too. We can test out the limits of our new coffee/espresso machine with 8 Finns and 8 Colombians in the house.

P.S. This is not a kick in the shins! ^_^

Sewing

2007-11-16T23:12:00.000-08:00

I got another JoAnn coupon in the mail today, and saw a dressform on sale tomorrow from 7AM-12 for $89, marked down from $189. At first I was elated to see a reasonable price, but began to doubt that I should bother. After all, when was the last time I sewed an item of clothing? I should probably go ahead and buy a new sewing machine first…but I’m putting that off until I finish The Mighty Samurai cross stitch I have been working on since late June.

If I work at the same pace I did for Jewels of the Orient it should be done by February but that seems pretty daunting. I have a long way to go. I am still taking pictures of every thread color I sew. I swear not to give up like last time in hopes that I will end up with a very cool 30 second video clip.

Sandsculpting Festival

2007-11-12T22:23:00.000-08:00

So here it is, the Sandsculpting Festival. It took a long time to get from one end of Fort Myers Beach to the other (by car) and when we finally got to Lover's Key to park, there was a huge line to get on the bus back to the beach. Seeing this, Jason suggested walking as there was no way to get on the next bus, but I remembered seeing a 2 MILES to Lover's Key sign after desperately looking for event parking for a while...I knew we were in for a long walk. We checked the odometer when we left and sure enough, 2.8 miles. Good thing I had my beige boots on (almost as good as the infamous red pumas).

I figure we can include the walking around on the beach and just tell everyone we got our exercise for the year by walking 3 miles at midday in Fort Myers.

First Post!

2007-11-12T22:19:00.000-08:00

I have finally succumbed to peer pressure and made a blog. The original intention was to use it as a glorified facebook photo sharer-thing, but now maybe I'll just rant about things that go wrong in the kitchen instead of complaining to M, lol.