The Opportunist

So apparently this blog is going to be more about hilarious stuff my sister says than being a grad student. Although I suppose it's not entirely off topic seeing as a fair amount of the ridiculous stuff she says is in response to some grad-school-related situation (you should have heard her when she realized I had an office).

At this point I'm pretty stressed about the talk I'm giving at this conference next week (6 days til the talk is over! 9 days til I can sleep again!), so I'm explaining to my sister just why I'm wigging out about this. After I go on this big tirade, her response (my thoughts):


Scary. (Uh huh.)

Very scary. (Yep, about right.)

I will pray for you... (Cool, thanks.)

in French class. (YES.)

This isn't the first time she's offered to pray for me in French class. While I do believe she genuinely feels bad about me being stressed, and will pray about it, there's most definitely an ulterior motive to praying for me in French class. I had the same French teacher (Duf) for all four years when I was in high school. It was a small school, a lot of the same teachers are still there, so sometimes when I'm home I stop in to visit. For some reason Sarah says that whenever she mentions me in French class, Duf goes off on a tangent for a good 5+ minutes. And there ladies and gentlemen is her motivation to pray for me in French class. She does it every opportunity she gets. When I go on big trips she even double dips and prays for me in religion class, because apparently her religion teacher really really loves Ireland (I'll agree, it's a lovely place) and the mention of anybody traveling sets her off on a 5+ minute tangent about Ireland. She's such as little opportunist.

Cupcakes

These are out of my cupcake cookbook. Plain cupcakes...not even sure they qualify as vanilla. Not as sweet as most cake, but good when paired with very sweet frosting. The best vanilla buttercream I've ever had. Probably because it had about three times the vanilla I've seen called for elsewhere. Covered in marshmellows. Probably not my favorite ever, but very good. The only thing I'd do different (if it weren't super inconvenient) is use colorless vanilla extract rather than the brown vanilla extract so the frosting would actually be white.

I made these Sunday for the last youth ministry class of the year. Making more cupcakes today for E's birthday...

I'm just mad about saffron...

Yes, I just used a tangentially related song lyric as a post title, again.

Saturday night some friends came over for dinner - E, her boyfriend J, and Slim, a new first-year in my group. As he's the baby in his family and this is the first year he's lived on his own with a kitchen, he can't really cook, but he is a B.A. chopper. He can chop just about anything we give him. Many thanks to him for tirelessly chopping the many, many chopped items that went into Saturday night's dinner. But before I continue, I need to backtrack first. To January. Sorry.

The trip before last to StL, I found saffron in my grandfather's kitchen...and since saffron is so expensive, I brought it back to Tucson. Now before you tell me I'm a terrible granddaughter, I'd like to point out that my grandfather can't cook anything besides pasta, steamed vegetables, baked potatoes, and grilled meat. While she was alive my grandmother did nearly all the cooking, but she's not here to use her kitchen anymore, so Grandpa has always invited me to take anything I could use in terms of dishes, gadgets, baking stuff etc. I just assume that this extends to less-than-common spices as well.

Possession of saffron obvious requires a specially made meal revolving around said saffron. I went with paella. Because it's delicious, and the fact that it's a one-pot meal so I don't have to come up with any sides is also a perk. (Not that I'm all that opposed to one food group meals.)

Any good cook knows that cooking only improves with the assistance of some beverages. Since we were making paella, sangria seemed like a logical choice.


I like the recipe I linked to a lot - but some commentary in case you're looking to make sangria. I used the cheapest cabernet I could fine, spiced rum, and added apples, because they're delicious soaked in alcohol. First comment - it's a really strong drink. E thought it was rather sweet, to the point of masking the wine (which is also probably due in part to using spiced rather than white rum), but I like sweet, and the more she drank the more she seemed to like the sweetness. :) I suspect that if it's going to have that much strong alcohol in it that it probably needs to be that sweet, so if you wanted to cut back on the sugar I'd probably also cut back on the rum. This recipe doesn't call for adding any white soda, but I added about a cup worth anyways to dilute it a touch and give it a hint of fizziness. (In the past E and I have also made a delicious white sangria. Something different. A good summer drink especially.)

So. Dinner. With sangria in hand, we started where many good recipes begin, by sauteeing peppers and onions.


We fairly closely followed the recipe given...well closely for us anyways. Recipes are just a starting point anyways right? We left out the squid and mussels. I don't like mussels, and I don't trust seafood in Tucson, especially when left to my own preparation. We added asparagus, because some of the other recipes I looked at called for it, because I was able to find good (ie skinny) asparagus, and because it's delicious. We put them in when the rice was maybe halfway done cooking. I also added nearly twice the amount of peas it called for. I like peas, and the more vegetables the better right? Here's the finished result:


Isn't it pretty? It was delicious, too. Things I might do different? Of course. I'd use more saffron. I've never used saffron before, and I'm under the impression that it's quite strong and that a lot should go a long way. Even so I probably still used more than it was meant to have ("a pinch" is so open to interpretation). And I'd use even more next time. Unless I somehow happened to have newer saffron - any spices claimed from my grandparents' house is going to be rather old and therefore not as strong. Other than that, the only thing I think I'd really be inclined to do differently next time is add more bell pepper at the beginning, and probably more meat. Even give these (minor) changes, I'd say my first big foray into Spanish cuisine was successful. :)

"Knowledge, like scar tissue, accumulates with experience."

That title was a gem from the student speaker at this morning's departmental awards brunch. His speech wasn't awesome, but it certainly wasn't terrible. And more importantly, it was brief.

Well the semester is winding up; commencement activities started today. Although since I'm done with classes, all this really means for me is that very soon it will be miserably hot, the lines to get food in the student union will be significantly shorter, and it will be easier to jaywalk a busy street to get to school.

While summer is a great time to be productive and get lots of research done (especially since it's way too hot to be outside during daylight hours), I miss summer vacation... I suppose I really miss vacation period - because when I do take time off from school/work (another point to ponder sometime, is it school? or is it work?) I never take a vacation vacation. I'm either traveling to see people, or I'm all-out globe trotting. Which is awesome, but not exactly relaxing.

Despite being miserably hot more often than not, summer in Tucson is fun. Because it's so hot, pretty much every apartment complex worth living in has a pool, so lots of time is spent hanging out at the pool. Thirsty Thursdays are lots of fun - who doesn't love a cheap baseball ticket combined with $1 beers? And once monsoon season rolls around we can get some pretty spectacular thunderstorms.

Even though I'm past classes, the school year is still significantly busier than summer. Over the summer there are no seminars and no committee meetings - nothing to do at work/school but research. There's definitely some pressure to have a produce summer research-wise, but the overall atmosphere and attitude around the department is still much more laidback. I've known for a while that I'm much less stressed with only one "thing" to work on rather than dividing my time between several things. So yay summer! As soon as this conference is over anyways...

It Never Stops

Sarah's not that funny only when talking to me. Over her spring break she went on a mission trip with school to somewhere in Appalachia. Gramma got a dose of her hilarity after Sarah's confirmation a couple of weeks ago.

Gramma: Sarah Jane, were there any cute boys?

Sarah: Yeah, but they were all fundamentalists.

A Conversation with My Sister

All of the following points (among others) were discussed in the span of an 11 minute and 57 second conversation with my sister.

Yesterday I went bridesmaid dress shopping for my college roommate's wedding. I just went into David's Bridal and tried on several dresses and looked at some potential colors. So Angie could see the outcome, I put all the pictures on Flickr and sent that link. I also sent the link to my sister thinking she might be amused (actually...I should probably be a good daughter on Mother's Day and also send the link to my mother for her amusement...it will give us something to talk about when I make the obligatory phone call later this afternoon too). So Sarah calls to tell me her thoughts on these dresses. She agrees that the pockets feature on one dress is awesome, but that the kelly green color looks "alienesque." Not that it washes me out or makes me look alienesque, but that the dress color itself looks like alien green. I happen to really like the bright green, but ok, Sarah.

She has to do some school project about conscience formation, listing specific people/things/events that contributed to the formation of her conscience. She's also supposed to include pictures of these things. So she has the obvious parents, siblings, God... and she's looking for a picture of Mom and Dad holding her. Except she swears she can't find a picture of Dad holding her (which is actually entirely possible - he took pretty much all of the pictures growing up). Her solution? She used a picture of Dad holding me instead. I know we look remarkably alike especially when we were young, but there's also the minor detail that not only does Dad look considerably younger in the baby pictures of me, all of those pictures also have a distinct '80s feel to them.

While she was looking through older pictures, she decided that all of the pictures taken before she was born are just weird. Like they're "from another world or something." (Because how on earth did we survive without her?) But I obviously wouldn't understand...because I'm in them.

I was relaying parts of this conversation to aforementioned college roommate while still on the phone with my sister, and Angie's conclusion was that she would really like to go drinking with Sarah in like 8 years. Sarah's response? "Sheesh, how young does she think I am? Doesn't she know that she could go drinking with me in 6 years?" Angie does bring up an excellent point - that she could be incredibly entertaining after a few drinks. However, she's so entertaining now, that I have a hard time imagining how she could possibly be funnier. Only time will tell I guess.

Seminar Highlight/Disgrace

Yesterday's seminar was generally pretty good (even if I was nodding off anyways...) - all about single molecule enzyme kinetics. At the beginning of the talk, the speaker is talking about the Michaelis-Menton equation, the sort of be-all-end-all equation for enzyme kinetics.

And he says, "Michaelis, he was a really famous enzymologist. Menton, she was Canadian."

Seriously? I know you're a big famous researcher-dude, but really? He's an enzymologist? And she's Canadian? Wtf.

There's a reason it's the most dangerous city in the country...

I love St Louis, I really do. It's one of few places that I'd seriously consider "settling" at this stage in my life (which is a very weird concept on its own - perhaps I'll write about that at some point). While it's got lots of charm and fun stuff to do, there's also a certain je-ne-sais-quoi quality about it. You can meet some pretty um, interesting, people - especially if you spend any amount of time in the city itself. For example the charming man who proposed to me (my first and possibly last proposal) on Grand Blvd my freshman year. I was walking back from brunch at Gries on a Saturday morning wearing gigantic pajama pants and a hoodie. He asked if I'd marry him. I said, "No, thank you."

Anyways, this past weekend I was back in the StL for wedding planning adventures, and came across another classic example of the type of charming men you can meet in StL. I was on the shuttle bus from the airport to the off-site rental car place, and there's a rather skeevy looking man at the front trying to talk to the shuttle driver. This guy is probably in his 40s, balding, greasy, thin hair combed over - a real looker ladies, let me tell you. He's asking the driver if he knows of any good clubs in the area, clubs with good dance music and an older crowd. Because you, his chances go way up with an older crowd. He's not interested in a college bar, because with the younger girls he just doesn't stand a chance, he needs a slightly older crowd to up his odds - wink, wink. Two women, maybe about 40, are sitting directly across from me, and we're all giggling a bit and looking at each other like "this guy is PATHETIC." As creepy as this guy was, I very much appreciated that he was seeking out the clubs with older crowds. The last thing I want is to walk into a bar and find him hitting on me or some poor girl my age.

So then I'm in the rental car place, getting my car, and he's talking to the next agent over from me. He asks if he can have a black car, because that's clearly going to help him get laid. She offers him the choice of 3 cars, and he says (skeezily of course), I don't know, which one do you think is the coolest? The poor woman kind of mumbles and tries to point each type of car out in the parking lot around the building so he can decide for himself.

I just wish he had turned and asked me so I could have told him just how gross and creepy he was.

Comics & Publishing

PHD Comics is one of the many wonderful little things that makes gradual school more bearable. While at first glance PHD might logically stand for Doctor of Philosophy, it technically stands for Piled Higher & Deeper in this case. A pretty accurate description of grad school I must say... The strip is written by a fellow who did his PhD in engineering at Stamford, and what makes it so brilliant is how frighteningly true many of the comics are.

Today's comic is brilliant. It's essentially a list of phrases you'll never see published, but one or more of which could be honestly applied to probably just about ever paper ever published in a peer-reviewed journal. Which brings me to another point. Why does nobody publish negative results? While understandably lots of negative results are crap, there are also lots of negative results that would be useful for people to know about before they go off to be the 123857th person to attempt and fail at _____ experiment.

For your enjoyment, here are a few of my favorite PHD comics that particularly hit home.

Exclusive Focus

If TV Science Was More Like Real Science

Seminar Bingo - This is possibly the best ever. One of the comic's readers made a little algorithm that will shuffle the squares, so you can have variations of the board so each player's is different. One of my classmates printed and laminated several copies, so now we can play seminar bingo whenever we want. :) Several times during seminars we've made lists of bingo items specific to our department - Dr. Hruby falls asleep, Dr. Brown arrives as the seminar is ending, etc.