wildlife siting!

Kevin and I went out for a bike ride this afternoon, and as we were walking home (because of a flat tire) I saw a tiny snake in the gutter by our driveway. It was really threadlike, writhing along trying to hide under some twigs and dead leaves to get away from us. It was really magical to see such a small snake. I forget about all the animals I used to see at home because in the city here I mostly just see birds and roadkill. Nice so see that the snakes are here too and doing well. I could even see it's tiny sides heaving from scared breaths... fascinating.

lesson of the day

Here is a fictitious scenario:

You hear a loud popping from the microwave where you are heating some salmon.
What do you do?



If your answer was: "Open the door and peer into the microwave to see what's happening." then you can join the me club.
Now I have a big icky burn scab under one eye. ouch.

wow... moving is complicated!

As all of you who read Kevin's blog already know, the reason for nothing new here is pretty simple. I moved Monday, cleaned the old apartment Tuesday, and spent the past two days unpacking/buying stuff for the new place. Phew! The place now looks much more normal and livable... only a few things have yet to find new homes. The best part is now having a functional kitchen! I really missed cooking the days when all our pots, pans and other cooking implements were packed up in boxes.

The good bit is that the new apartment is SO much better than the old one. It is much bigger and also lighter as it faces south. I am already thinking about the house-warming party. :) I haven't been in the pool yet (it is right next door!), but I have done laundry in the washer/dryer right in the apartment! What a victory!

Well, that's about it really... unpacking just isn't that much fun to read about, although I actually do like doing it. (You get a chance to reorganize and make things nicer.) I'm off to sushi with my housemate, and tomorrow I'm off to Vermont for a family reunion (six days). Then I get to come home and help my boyfriend, Han, move to Madison... hmm... maybe I'll be more up for that after the vacation. :)

Hotness (not the good kind)

This post is brought to you by the almighty power of chin sweat glands, which (if mine are any indication) are the answer to most droughts and forest fires. I can't wait until after next monday when I can swim right next to our new apartment.

The most worrisome angle of all this heat is that tonight has been designated "pie baking night". I bought peaches and raspberries and found a new recipe... and now I wonder how wise it is to turn on the oven. Oh well, it must be done in the name of delicious food!

On the up-side, I met a woman leaving our department after a year long sabbatical who wants to give away her furniture! I think I'm getting a desk, which should come in handy if I ever get cool enough to sit at it and think. :)

New Address!

Finally, Kevin and I got a letter from our future apartment complex with our new address. I biked out there today (I've been biking to the place pretty often just to get a sense of good routes to and from the department) but there is some sort of art festival going on. All the central streets of town are basically over-run with booths and gawkers and tourists and art, plus the traffic around there was pretty heavy since everyone was cruising for a parking place... altogether bad for biking. But, I made it just fine! I tried to take a couple pictures of my new place (at least from the outside) so I can show them to my family when I go to the reunion in a couple of weeks.

Altogether today has been a good day so far (despite art fair craziness). My housemate Kevin left town for the weekend this morning and left me yummy food to eat while he's gone. So here I am blogging away on the couch full of really good jumbalaya after a nice bike ride and a shower. Plus the weather has finally broken: still hot and sunny, but significantly un-muggy and with a nice breeze. I can only hope this continues until after my frisbee game sunday. Muggy + frisbee = wretched.

I wish all of you out in blog-land such nice mornings (or if you don't get them at least nice afternoons).

This one's for you Shelley:

Since it was Graham's advice which fixed Mercury, but you'd like some cookies (and he wouldn't) here is one of my favorite recipes for everyone. In the words of the Nutrimatic Drink Dispenser: "Share and Enjoy!".

Cardamom Cookies

1 cup butter
2 teaspoons baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
2 cups brown sugar
2 eggs
4 1/2 cups flour
2 teaspoons cream of tartar

1) Cream butter, baking soda, cardamom, and salt. Add sugar and eggs.
2) Combine flour and cream of tartar. Blend wet and dry ingredients.
3) Chill dough. Shape into balls and press with a fork onto a greased baking sheet (as with PB cookies).
4) Bake 10 minutes at 350 degrees (F).

(Note: As you may have guessed from the flour, this makes a truly prodigious quantity of cookies... luckily for those of us watching girlish figures, the dough freezes very well, and I usually only make half a recipe.)

Now I hate Microsoft more

(subtitle: a desperate plea for help)

Tonight Han wanted to show me a funny Dutch comedy skit on the internet... but it required Windows Media Player. So we downloaded that, and then downloaded another program to let us install it. Unfortunately the video still wouldn't play (possible bad interaction with my browser maybe? I'm not sure...) so we gave up, at which point I decided to throw the programs we'd downloaded off my computer. Well, all of them trashed just fine except for Windows Media Player itself which apparently contains "locked files" which I tried to just click "continue" enough times to get through, only there were about forty billion of them and at the end nothing erased. The worst is now when I try to open the program it says it is "damaged or incomplete".

I don't really know what else to do. Poor beautiful Mercury is now host to a useless icky windowsish file I don't want and can't get rid of. I guess I'll have to wait until my friend Brian gets back in town at the end of the summer (he's getting a PhD in CS) and turn him loose on the problem. (I think he has the 17" version of my computer even...)

In the meantime, does anyone out there in blog-space (with more than my pitifully limited computer skills) have any bright ideas? devilish plots? plans for a daring rescue of Mercury?

(what if I promised cookies in the mail to the hero who rescues us?)