Things that Make Me Happy - Dec 2007 edition

1) The goofy snowman nightlight whose body is a heat activated snowgloby-type thing. Once the light has been on for a little while, the viscous fluid within (and the sparkly sprinkles it contains) start to move around due to thermal gradients. For some unknown reason, that just makes me smile.

2) Our blue eggs.

3) This one is more of an ambivalence deal: people who are slower than I am at answering e-mail. I'm happy that there are others who are worse than I am at keeping in touch, but I hate it when it's a timely question and the other person completely drops the ball. Luckily, I don't have many timely questions.

4) Science...makes me happy even if I don't completely understand quantum physics or even the theory of evolution. As Martha would say: Science, it's a good thing.

"To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge." ~ Benjamin Disraeli (1804 - 1881)

Dare I make New Year's Resolutions?

How about just one: spend less time on the internet?!

Game plan -

1) read fewer blogs
2) no commenting, especially on blogs that already have a loyal fan base...basically enough butt-kissing going on to not miss me and my stupid comments
3) no tangential surfing, unless under dire circumstances

"To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge." ~ Benjamin Disraeli (1804 - 1881)

Eggs on my mind

Just had to note that as of Sunday, December 23rd, Alpina started laying again...woohoo! And, as if it weren't exciting enough to get our extra-extra large blue eggs back, one of the young hens that Gaia hatched over the summer has started to lay too. So, now, every other day, we get one gigantic blue egg and one teeny blue egg. So cute...I had to take a photo:



"To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge." ~ Benjamin Disraeli (1804 - 1881)

Cookies Experiment

At the Soap and the Finer Things in Life blog, one of my muses, there was a recipe from the Martha Stewart site for these really pretty cookies:


I've never attempted this type of cookies before, so, inspired by these beauties, I wanted to give them a try.

Well, despite my moderately good baking skills, I wasn't able to produce a good first batch - I avoid conventional food colorings which accounts for the fact that my colors are not as vibrant:

A Candlewick plateful

Close up of two of the variations: the one with the darker dough layer is cocoa, and the other is the natural red food dye made from black currants.

It's hard to see in the photo of the dish of cookies, but aside from the 2 layer rolls, I also made a roll that had the "red" dough in the center (as a log like for the middle of the bull's-eye), and then the chocolate and vanilla layers done as a jelly roll around the center log.

I have learned a few things from this experiment:
1) cutting down on the sugar was a good move, but I think I should cut down on the salt a bit as well (taste-wise, it's a fine cookie, but I like a shortbread texture more than a sugar or butter cookie texture)
2) when making the jelly roll design, offset the second layer from the long edge of the layer just like you do with the rice on nori for making sushi, and also slant that long rolling end to make a crisper, pointier, and therefore, prettier, center
3) I think I prefer the thickness to be closer to 1/2" than 1/4" thick for each slice
4) when cutting off the last bits of a roll, switch to a sharp serrated knife
5) use more egg whites, or make sure this "glue" is spread out more evenly
6) I should make my own natural food coloring, such as blueberry juice for a purplish-blue tint, beet juice for red tint (instead of the black currant stuff we bought), and maybe even a small bit of turmeric for an orangy-yellow tint
7) I will definitely try rolling them in sugar crystals (turbinado, maybe) for a glitter effect

Now I need to go post-Christmas shopping to snag a silicon jelly pan so I can make Anne-Marie's really pretty Jelly Roll Soaps!


"To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge." ~ Benjamin Disraeli (1804 - 1881)

Eggs!!

Gotta give thanks to our good friend, Carol, for giving us a dozen of their eggs (and a few other holiday goodies). Yum!!

"To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge." ~ Benjamin Disraeli (1804 - 1881)

Warning - whining

We had to buy a dozen eggs last week. And not too long ago, we had so many, we gave them away (because, obviously, the business hasn't gotten off the ground yet). I hate it when the chickens shut down. When making sweet potato pie yesterday (and I wish we had as many eggs as we did sweet potatoes, which nobody seems to like very much in the family anyway), I used 2 of our eggs and one of the organic eggs we got from Bloomingfoods. The store-bought egg was pale yellow in stark contrast to ours which were very orange. I don't know that I would ever want to go back to store-bought eggs completely.

Gripe number 2: the hag who is the moderator on this homeschool e-list that I belong to had nixed another message that I was going to post there. It was a good article about how UC Riverside is accepting homeschool applicants on the basis of portfolios only, and it is the only UC school to do so. She sent back a terse msg saying that links like that can be put in the links section and doesn't need to be posted to the whole list.

Now, 1) she had allowed others to post links to articles on the list before (I've been on this list for at least a couple of years now, and have seen enough of those links-posts), and 2) I know from personal experience with other egroups I belong to that extremely few people actually go to read or look at anything in the Yahoo Groups website. And to prove my point, someone posted today, in regard to a question about UC acceptance on the basis of examination, "You should know that UC Riverside has a portfolio admission process for homeschoolers -- the only UC that does so. I went to their first homeschool recruitment day a couple of years ago. It was very well attended and they were very positive about what homeschoolers can bring to the table." DUH!! If the hag had let me post the link to the article a couple of weeks ago, everyone on that list would have known. Just because it wasn't my personal experience doesn't make the info less valuable to others on this list.

The third thing is, this year, in the "recommended readings/viewings" page of our holiday website, we listed two atheist books - 2 atheist resources out of 17 items; simple math will tell you that 15 of those items, or a whopping 89%, are not religion related in any way. Well, that prompted a two page letter from some gung-ho Catholic relatives who normally just sign their names on the bottom of a card. Kind of amusing, really. So, that's what it takes to get some people to actually write a letter to go with their holiday cards. What bothers me is that people feel so compelled to proselytize. People seem to assume that we just woke up one day and decided we were atheists when it had taken decades for us to reach this stage in our lives. I won't go into details, but for myself, that involved 24 years of being Catholic and partaking of more bible studies than most people have done, and for dh, it involved a lot of scientific reasoning. Both of us have given this matter lots of serious rumination; we haven't arrived at our decision lightly, but rather "enlightened-ly", and we don't appreciate the insinuation that it's a condition that can be "prayed off" as though atheism is a callus and religion is a pumice stone. I'd venture to say that the reverse is true.

As for the frouth gripe, well, I'll be emailing that to my sister.

"To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge." ~ Benjamin Disraeli (1804 - 1881)

I know somebody famous!

I don't know how I managed to miss the announcement for the 2002 Nobel Prizes, but something I was reading yesterday mentioned Daniel Kahneman's 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics and a bell went off in my head. Surely, there weren't very many scientists/academians named Daniel Kahneman. So, I did a search this morning and sure enough, this is my old Psyc 200 prof! How very exciting!! He was (probably still is) an excellent prof too. I loved that man.

The year that I took the course from him (1983, University of British Columbia), I saw an article he'd written for Scientific American and talked to him about it. He was pleased that I, an undergrad no less, was interested and gave me a reprint of it, which I asked him to sign. This means I have an autograph from a Nobel Prize winner!!

This is even more exciting than when we went to see Noam Chomsky's talk. I am so pleased for Professor Kahneman.

I have to add that thespian celebrities don't excite me. Some people go to Hollywood to gawk at "stars", but those "celebrities" are generally (not all, of course) such fluff. Give me an intellectual any day!

"To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge." ~ Benjamin Disraeli (1804 - 1881)

Sauerkraut, a fine family tradition

It's true. Dh's family did it for the past several generations: great-grand-father, grandfather, father, and now him. The great-great-grandfather may have done it too, but I can't remember. The equipment has been passed down a few generations to dh. Seems like only one male in the family does it each generation.

Dh's dad did it when he became an adult and would make a ton of it to give away to his 8 siblings, their families, his friends and his co-workers. However, dh only has one sibling, who prefers it in small quantities, and his family is fussy and has a limited palate, and we're not so sure our friends here in town really like it either. So, dh makes a small amount of it whenever he makes it.

This year, dh managed to grow a nice crop of cabbage. It doesn't happen every year due to either poor timing or bad weather conditions. After an approximately 2 week incubation/fermenting period, we bagged about 16 quarts of it yesterday. Pretty tasty and stinky stuff!

Next year, dh says, we'll have to try making kimchi. Organic kimchi. Maybe there'll be a market for it. Haha!

"To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge." ~ Benjamin Disraeli (1804 - 1881)