Butter & Flour

So do you guys remember a while ago when I bought a holy ton of flour?  And then not too long after that I bought crap ton of butter?  Well.  Butter's on sale again.  And not like 30 cents off either.  Like a whole $1 off each box.  With the amount of baking E and I do that really adds up.  This actually comes at a convenient time as I was down to a half pound of unsalted butter and two and a half pounds of salted butter (at least a pound of which was obtained separately from the last time I stocked up).

E and I both stocked up on butter.  I got 20 lbs.  I'm not kidding.  The holidays are coming, and butter freezes just fine, and this should last me many months, maybe even til graduation?  We'll see.

Here's E's freezer full of butter. :)

For the record, I'm down to about 5 lbs of flour...seems it's getting to be time to stock up on flour again, too. :)

Like in a Movie

Last night I'm happily chilling on the couch watching the season premier of Project Runway, when I get a Gchat message from Sugar Pants.

Sugar Pants: anne

you there?

me: yes

what's up?

Sugar Pants: I did a boo boo [At this point I'm thinking he's in lab and messed up an instrument somehow.]

i locked myself in my garage

me: hahahahahahhaha

Sugar Pants: i know i know

can you come save me?

the front door is unlocked

me: haha ok

i'll be there in a few minutes

Sugar Pants: thanks

He recently bought a house, and has been doing some work on it in the evenings before he actually moves in. Apparently last night was the night to disassemble the built in cabinets in the garage (you know, so you could actually put a car in it) and install a lock on the door between the garage and the house.

About 10 minutes later I pull up to Sugar Pants' house just as his neighbor is pulling into her garage, which is immediately adjacent. I go through the house and open the door to the garage. He's sitting on the floor out of view, so I step into the garage. Before I know it, the door has swung shut behind me.

Yes. Yes, that's exactly what happened. I went over to free Sugar Pants from his garage and got locked in there with him. Go ahead and laugh. I know it's funny.

I told him his neighbor pulled in when I did. So he pounded the wall and yelled, but she'd already gone inside. He asks if I have my phone to call Dallas. My phone is in the car... (Next time I'll take my phone with me before freeing somebody from a locked room.) He doesn't have his phone either, the key to the newly installed lock is on the other side of the door, and the garage door is padlocked from the outside.

Sugar Pants has his laptop, but the battery is quickly dying. E is on Gchat still, but not answering. He asks if I know her number - I don't (Actually, since my parents phone number changed when they moved, the ONLY numbers I have memorized are my cell phone, my office, and my grandparents'.). He knows his girlfriend's number, but she lives in Pheonix. He uses Google's call feature, and calls twice before she picks up. After explaining our predicament, and some totally justified laughing on her part, she agrees to call Dallas.

After another uncomfortably hot and humid 15 minutes in the garage (seriously, why won't it just monsoon already!), Dallas arrived with his girlfriend to laugh at us. Before actually letting us out, he tried to convince us that the front door was locked, so he couldn't get in to open the door. After we called BS about 8 times he let us out.

There's a key to that lock hidden in the garage now.

Fail

A vendor just showed up in my office completely unannounced. This happens from time to time, especially when they can't find The Queen. I totally had to stand up to talk to him only to realize I wasn't wearing any shoes. And I hadn't worn flip flops that I could quickly slide on unnoticed before standing. I just had to suck it up and stand there barefoot talking to him for like 5 minutes. Hopefully people don't actually expect graduate students to be professional when they just drop in on them unannounced.

Butter

Let this post serve as a record of the fact that I bought 10 lbs of butter at the grocery store the other night (and 4 lbs of strawberries and a box of generic claritin). Like the flour I got about 5 weeks ago now, it was on sale, and I go through a lot of butter... I'm curious to see which I run out of first. I suspect the cake(s) I plan to make next weekend will consume at least 2 lbs of butter... :)

Flour

I am documenting the fact that after today's grocery store outing, I currently have 25 lbs of flour in my kitchen. Much of it is being stored in the freezer. I'm quite curious to see how long it lasts.

How to Kill Time between Spectra Late at Night, Volume 2

• Catch up on GReader
• Discover somebody took my greens. Seeing as one office mate won't touch vegetables with a 10 ft pole and that another office mate leaves containers in the fridge for weeks at a time, assume culprit to be new first year. Eat mashed potatoes & turnips for dinner.
• Read paper draft for former labmate
• Watch last night's episode of The Bachelor on Hulu (I'm a bit embarrassed to admit that one, but there's something fascinating and horrifying and funny about watching crazy women throw themselves at a not-awesome guy.)
• Freak out over conference abstract that's due in 3 days
• Spot-check and analyze data to make decisions for subsequent spectra
• Learn fascinating new vocabulary on Facebook - shack shock: to be shocked upon discovery that two people are shacking up (Thanks, Katharine!)
• Chat with Little Sister. Be informed that chemistry is "really dumb."
• Text message my aunt. (Cracks. Me. Up. that my aunts text message.)
• Discuss data and experiments with labmate
• Do dishes
• Get latte and talk boys with friend who's also working late
• Look at tomorrow's produce list. Become depressed over how many greens we're going to get. Hope spring comes soon.
• Take a Briggs-Meyers personality test. Assuming the outcome is "accurate," sincerely hope that this assessment is inaccurate.
• Walk with friend at midnight to move her car from the garage to behind the building
• Pull capillaries
• Be jealous of the rest of the country's snow day(s)
• Gripe about how sore my back is. Ponder relative contributions of old age, late night, and being tackled at softball last night.
• Stock pipette tips
• Chat with friends living on other continents

How to Kill Time between Spectra Late at Night

• Pull capillaries
• Watch 4 episodes of Eureka
• Finish assembling your little sister's Christmas gift
• Email French host family
• Send labmate birthday someecard (Happy birthday Ashley!!)
• Twiddle thumbs
• Send various friends pointless someecards
• Print reviewers' mostly positive comments for paper that got rejected anyways. Think about revising paper.
• Get a latte from the student union. Have entertaining chat with undergrad student worker involving numerous misconceptions about graduate school.
• Make ridiculous to-do lists
• Do dishes
• Send little sister facebook message
• Stare off into space

Adventures in Plumbing

A few days ago, the mechanism that flushes the toilet in our main bathroom broke. Unlike many plumbing issues, this isn't an urgent one. It's not a big deal to remove the lid on the back and flush it manually. I'm actually well practiced at manual flushing - senior year the toilet in our apartment decided to have frequent flushing issues.

Our landlord is generally pretty good about getting stuff around the house fixed promptly, but it's always a pain seeing as repairmen tend to only work when I'm at work. So just scheduling somebody to come out to the house is a hassle. Since this is well within the realm of what I can fix myself I took a trip to Home Depot yesterday.

To set the scene for my excursion, I was wearing a strapless sundress over a bathing suit. This may or may not have been deliberate, but not because I needed help at the hardware store. Thanks to my father, I am quite at home in a hardware store, and reasonably skilled with basic tools. I had removed the pieces to be replaced from the toilet, put them in a baggie, and taken them with me, so I knew what I needed. While this was the same sundress I'd had on all day, and I was headed to the pool after the hardware store, I'll admit that I wore what I did partly because I was looking forward to an entertaining reaction of some sort and I may or may not have been daring the sales people to even try to not take me seriously. There's no reason for people to assume a young woman in a sundress isn't handy. Call me cruel if you want, but I'll admit I enjoy messing with men's heads on occasion. Just a little bit.

As I'm walking into Home Depot, the greeter-guy says hello, and I respond likewise. I'm still walking, and he's staring (props to him, not at all in a creepy way, and I'm really not particularly attractive, it's just not everyday an unaccompanied female enters Home Depot in a sundress) and looking really confused. I'm guessing confused because I'm not stopping to ask for help. So then he asks how I'm doing, and I respond that I'm good, and ask how he is. Now he's clearly quite confused. He stutters a bit and then asks if I need help. I asked what aisle toilet repair parts were in, he says aisle 7. I headed straight there without asking anything further, leaving him standing there still staring and scratching his head.

When I got home I installed the new lever, which wasn't a big deal, although took a bit of jimmy-rigging. The hook that is normally on the the end of the chain that connects to the end of the lever was missing. The previous lever has a spot where the chain pinched into it. I looked at getting the exact same kind of lever, but they all came shaped to fit a front-toilet flusher, and bending them to fit when connected from the side would make them too short. But the ones that came meaning to be attached to the side of the toilet just had a couple of holes in the lever, meant for a hook.

Before I could decide how to jimmy-rig my way around this problem, E & J came over for dinner (we made a significantly modified version of these stuffed bell peppers - adding ground pork, using fresh basil, and subbing plain goat cheese for the feta - all CSA motivated changes) and a movie (Dead Man Walking). Anyways, J took a look at the toilet, and pointed out that we could just make a hook, either from wire (which we had around if I looked for it) or with a paper clip. Since most of my paper clips are colored, I decided I liked that idea. (Thanks, J!)

I thought the pink paperclip was most appropriate.

I think Dad would be proud. Don't you? :)

Confession

I'm working late tonight. We're finally tackling this (hopefully little) side project that the Queen has been pestering us about for over 2 years now. It could be interesting, but has just never been deemed important enough when we always have so many other experiments that just seem more urgent. We figured now was as good a time as any to devote a couple of days to it, run experiments like crazy, and hopefully be done with it. This is probably wishful and delusional thinking on our part, but that's the goal.

Anyways, doing these experiments means that we vented this morning to modify the instrument. So the afternoon was spent twiddling my thumbs (I may or may not have watched last week's episode of The Bachelorette on Hulu...Confession #1) while the instrument pumped down and the MCPs conditioned. Eventually I left to hit the gym (can't look like a whale in everybody's wedding photos) and have some supper. My labmate stayed to make sure everything works ok and tune the instrument. Everything checked out, so I'm back running at least one sample, hopefully two tonight. We'd rather get the instrument back to its "normal" configuration sooner rather than later, so it's going to be an intense couple of days of running constantly.

Since I don't have family out here working late isn't all that terrible. Sometimes it sucks - many nights I'd certainly rather being hanging out on the couch with my roommate(s) or doing something with friends, but working late definitely has its advantages. One HUGE plus being that hardly anybody else is here, so people aren't pestering me to fix this, help them with that, proofread this, or just talking at me. Don't get me wrong, the random chatting and nonsense that goes on at school during the day is quite possibly the best/most fun part of grad school, but it certainly doesn't help productivity. I think I enjoy the nobody-else-here-to-pester me more as I become a more "senior" student. (Although I think my grad school career has been somewhat warped in that respect - I swear somehow I became a "senior student" sometime around the beginning/middle of my second year. Definitely before my time.)

I think my favorite part of working late though - is that since I'm alone in the lab, I can blast whatever music I want and sing at the top of my lungs if I want. At the moment I happen to be singing along to the mash up of It's My Life and Confessions from Glee. Don't judge.