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Aug. 21st, 2009 @ 08:46 pm Vacation day summary
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Today was overall quite nice, with some excitement scattered here and there.

( Trees, travel, cooking and sleep )

Soon it will be bedtime!  And then it will be the weekend!  Skating, Harry Potter, and sleep, yay!
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Jul. 18th, 2009 @ 09:14 pm Weekend
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- Tea eggs for the win!  Thanks, [info]digitalemur !

– No skating class this AM, but we went skating during public session and got Very Tired.  Reverse Killian position feels *really* weird.  But then again, so did standard Killian at first.  Practice practice practice. 

- Speaking of practicing, there were about three different kids all working on their routines for ISI Worlds, which happens in about two weeks.  They took it in turns out on the ice: the "Ease On Down the Road" girl would go, then the girl with the vaguely recognizable music, then the James Bond boy.  Then they'd do it again.  And again.  That's quite something, in kids none of whom is over the age of about 11, if that.

- Speaking of ISI Worlds, why is it that I can't find ticket information anywhere???  Grmph.

- Having fun with Tactics A2.  Everyone's about level 14, and I clearly need to buy some more spiffy weapons so folks can learn more skillz.  (No, it's not really spelled that way.)  It's a slightly odd system, if like me you never played Tactics Advance but loved the original FFTactics: equipment teaches you how to do stuff.  And everyone gets ability points, even if they didn't participate in a given battle.  Huh???

I Like Weekends.  :)

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May. 23rd, 2009 @ 04:57 pm Various
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• Suave's so-called lavender and lilac-scented shampoo smells to me neither like lavender nor lilac while using it. It smells quite distinctly of apple.

• Had a lovely (and productive!) day with [info]nezumiko  yesterday.  Acquired new sneakers, new jeans, and new tea and adorable teacup.  Then we went back to her place, watched the last four episodes of Fruits Basket, and made Tea Drinks!  We need to name them though.  The recipes are below.

My drink:
    Brew a cup of Teavana's Rooibos Key Lime tea.  Add a dollop of Bacardi Limon and enjoy!  If you wish, you can also add a small amount of honey, further smoothing out any edge that the alcohol might have.  But mostly it doesn't have any in the first place.  It's a quite refreshing drink, and I bet it would be simply lovely over ice.

Nezu's drink:
    Brew a cup of Teavana's Earl Grey Creme.  (Straight Earl Grey would probably work too; if you do it that way, add a little vanilla extract to the mix.)  Add a jigger of Tuaca (it's an Italian liquer) and enjoy.  It's quite good just like that; add a spoonful of honey to turn it into liquid candy, and some half-and-half on top of that to turn it into a drink you could seduce someone with.  (This is the drink that really needs the name.)

We're now hanging about waiting for Super Shuttle to turn up, which they should do in another hour or two.  We'll be in Boston tomorrow through early Friday, then down to the Ancestral Homeland for Huz's reunion.  See you!

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Apr. 6th, 2009 @ 10:23 pm Various
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• For the record, Bacardi Limon mixed with ginger beer is pretty good.  It's pretty darn sweet at first, but once things have had a chance to mix (and perhaps several tastebuds have been put temporarily out of commisson by the Bacardi?) it's good stuff. 

• Note to self: Next time the sewer cleanout shows signs of backing up onto the lawn, call the town to get it snaked for free BEFORE you discover on a Sunday afternoon (when the town doesn't answer phone calls) that there's a high level of standing water in the thing and you have to pay someone to come snake it.

• Huz is home safe!  He had a good and productive time at the NCBI workshop he went to.

• Worky work.  Worky work occasionally kind of frustrating.  Why oh why don't my cells want to express syg-2??

• Singy sing.  I'd forgotten that having voice lesson on the same day as symphonic chorus rehearsal leaves my voice reeeeeeeallly tired after rehearsal.

• Game-game.  Finished Zack and Wiki; will happily lend.   What to play together next?  Thinking about New Play Control! Pikmin, Fire Emblem, and Broken Sword Director's Cut.

• For those planning on descending on the Ancestral Homeland in late May for Reunion, call the Duncan Hotel - they started taking reservations about a week ago.  And man, they are CHEAP!!!!! We're paying only about $90/night, and that's with tax.  (Shampoo not included.)
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Feb. 8th, 2009 @ 07:41 pm Stuff
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• Have purchased tickets to Boston and from New Haven in May for the huz's reunion.  Flights, do me a favor this time and STAY AS YOU ARE, PLEASE!  (Including the o/n direct SFO to Boston on JetBlue, pleeeeze...)

• Invented okay peanut sauce at lunch today.  Into a small frypan, put:
 - probably around 3/4 cup water
 - about 3 T peanut butter
 - maybe 1/2 tsp roasted garlic stuff
 - a shake of red pepper flakes
  Smush peanut butter around till it's kind of dissolved in the water.  Boil awhile till it thickens.
  Add a shake of sesame oil.  Serve over noodles that had been sitting around long enough that we were worried about the integrity of the peanut sauce that came in the accompanying packet (best by sometime in 2006). 
  Add salt, which improves it a lot.  Next time, have some onions or scallions or something along those lines on hand, and add some soy sauce at the end of cooking.

• Got first place in 100cc Leaf Cup on my first attempt (though not first place in all races).  Must be getting better at this racing thing.

• There was something else, but durned if I can remember now.

EDIT:  Oh yah, now I remember.  Damned ankle acting up again.  Time for new orthotics, methinks?
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Dec. 26th, 2008 @ 04:35 pm Tasty orange sauce recipe
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It's cold.  I'm hungry.

I want a snack that's warm, but preferably reasonably healthy.

We have bananas; what can I do with bananas that's not too much work and should be tasty?

Amethyst's Spur-of-the-Moment Orange Sauce
Mix:
   1/3 - 1/2 cup orange juice
   cautious sprinkle of cloves
   somewhat more generous sprinkle of ginger
   scant 1/2 tsp cornstarch
   scant teaspoonful of honey (I just squeezed what seemed like a good amount out of the jar)

Pour into small saucepan or skillet.  Cook, stirring on low-mediumish heat.  Allow to bubble 5-10 minutes till thick.  Cool a little, and pour over substrate of choice.  Sliced bananas are fine (you can then add leftover finely chopped almonds, which adds some nice texture); this would also work well over ice cream or cake - chocolate would be preferable, but a good pound cake would also work well.

This is, no doubt, what comes of having the cover of Ratatouille staring at me for the last couple of days.  :)

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Dec. 14th, 2008 @ 05:46 pm Happy meme, day 3
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Heh! I kind of like this meme, courtesy of [info]ladybird97 and others. (Very simple: just post about something that makes you happy on a daily basis.)

• Bishop Marc Andrus visited our parish today! Very active, engaging speaker, I liked him a lot. And we had a really good trumpeter for the service, and excellent cake during coffee hour afterwards.

• After suffering TOTAL FAIL in our attempts to acquire copies of Mario Kart Wii online for standard retail price (all the big shippers are sold out, so those hawking used copies are getting around $70 for them), we found two copies of it locally. And - extra score - the huz found a copy of Zelda: Wind Waker, for which we've been searching for as long as we've had our Wii. [big grin]

• Late afternoon tea and cookies. Delightfully civilized and pleasantly yummy.

• Caldo verde soup for dinner tonight!

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Feb. 29th, 2008 @ 11:58 am A nice evening
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Last night was both productive and pleasant!  It started with my submitting my first job application of the current hunt season.  It's a posting at Stanford that's been up since December, so it may well have been filled already (some professors are very poor at notifying the HR office when they should take down postings).  Anyway, we'll see.

I  cooked another winner of a recipe from the 30-Minute Meals cookbook.  It's a super-easy kung pao style shrimp with ramen noodles.  It took only about 45 minutes, including me noodling around trying to decide when to start the actual cooking part (as with many of the recipes in the book, once you start cooking, there's not really a stopping point, and I knew that the huz would be some late getting home) and being a little tentative cooking raw shrimp for the first time ever.  Any recipe where most of the prep time involves rinsing shrimp, cutting up a bell pepper, and peeling some garlic and ginger which is then thrown in the mini-food processor is probably going to be a winner timewise.  And it was tasty too!  Definitely will do again.

We watched the first episode ("Hans My Hedgehog") of Jim Henson's The Storyteller, a program that lasted all of one season.  John Hurt in a set of gnomish prosthetics is The Storyteller, providing narration of classic fairy tales which are acted out onscreen (with dialogue) by human and puppet actors.  The narration is usually wonderfully poetic: there was a lovely description of a melancholy bagpipe air "that began with what sounded like hello, and ended with what sounded like goodbye."  The visual style is strongly reminiscent of Labyrinth - one neat bit saw a king having dinner with the hedgehog in a castle in front of what looks like a tremendous fireplace... except there's a waterfall rather than flames.  Like a good so-called children's book, this was TV for adults that kids could also enjoy. 

Finally, we played a stage of Zack & Wiki that (1) didn't have the threat of death every 10-30 seconds like the last two stages had, and (2) was an interesting - though hardly impossible - puzzle.  We could have made it unsolvable early on, but didn't.  Lots of fun.

Have a good Leap Day and weekend, everyone!
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Feb. 15th, 2008 @ 01:12 pm Meyer lemonade = TEH YUM!
Current Location: home
Current Mood: sick
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Squeezed one of the many Meyer lemons I got yesterday (yes, I'm still home sick) to make lemonade to have with lunch.  Joy of Cooking says: 1 cup water, 1.5 T lemon or lime juice, and 3-4 T sugar, plus a little salt.  I remembered that when I made Meyer lemonade a year or so ago, that was really more sugar than it needed.  I was right - about 2 T per cup is about right. 
                                           
And on the suggestion of a chorus friend, I then microwaved the cup for a short while to heat it up.  OMG OMG YUM.  Heightened lemon flavor, slightly syrupy consistency to the drink.  Really really really nice.  I could drink a lot of this stuff.  And hey, surely I am (1) getting a lot more vitamin C and other good stuff than I would with just the tea, and (2) not getting that many more calories with 2 T of sugar than 1 tsp of honey.... err, well, maybe not.  But worth it.  And if it makes me feel better, darn it I'm going to do it.     

Still home sick because I'm still stuffy and sneezy, and because I didn't sleep nearly well enough last night.  I may try doing it without Sudafed PE 12 hour tonight and see what happens.  We do have generic Nyquil if I get desperate.

In other realms: WTF is Square/Enix thinking, charging fifty smackers for an eight-hour RPG quest???!?  Fifteen or twenty, I could see.  Thirty, maybe.  But fifty?  You've got to be kidding me.  A definite 'wait a year and see what the used price is.'  Maybe.                        
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Feb. 12th, 2008 @ 10:49 am More various and sundry
Current Location: work
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Jan. 4th, 2008 @ 01:46 pm Mmm. Tasty.
Current Location: work
Current Mood: damp but cheerful
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We did a great dinner last night.  One of the huz's high school buddies was in town, and we had him over.  Below follows the scrumptious - and easy - pasta recipe we served.  I should note that this is about the third revision of the recipe it's seen in our family since it was originally published in Gourmet magazine around 30 years ago.


We served the pasta with a green salad and Italian bread, and finished up with some of our Meyer lemon ice cream.  Danged good dinner, if I do say so myself.  :)

I'm expecting to hear back from the vet with a time to come pick Tazz up anytime.  The bronchioscopy started a little later than planned due to the arrival of an emergency case, and I got a call around 2:15 saying that the procedure was just getting started.  From talking to the doctor yesterday, I know that the procedure itself is pretty short - 15 minutes or so - with a couple of hours of waking up and being observed after that. 

It's very very wet out here at the moment, and I just got a call from [info]nezumiko, who lives about a mile away from our house, saying that her power's out.  So our power may be out too.  Huzzah for well-charged batteries in portable game systems, say I!
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Dec. 14th, 2007 @ 03:18 pm Busy personal day. And I'm not done yet!
Current Location: home, briefly
Current Mood: lethargic and headachey
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Spent much of the morning in downtown Palo Alto doing shopping-related stuff.  Acquired: Video for dad-in-law and couple of things for the huz from Borders, bunches of holiday cards from Long's (on the assumption that a holiday letter is in fact going to get written).  Also, tasty panang curry with beef for lunch after searching for a new parking spot.  I think everyone took the afternoon off for shopping today.

Stopped at Target on the way home.  Acquired: Two cute shirts for local nephew for Christmas; one adorable sweater for local niece for birthday (on something like the 28th of December; the huz's family is very irritating that way!).

Just spent bunches of time online.  Acquired: Book for dad-in-law, CD for mom-in-law, almost everything for my brother and his family from Amazon, and toy drum for youngest nephew from Little Tikes because Amazon's subcontracting merchant's price was friggin' $10 higher than anywhere else AND they wanted to charge $10 for shipping.  No thank you!

Still to do, preferably today: 
• order things for distant aunts (2) (probably nice-smelling things from Crabtree and Evelyn like last year)
• order thing for distant cousin (probably boring Sephora gift certificate, but if the enclosed photo of her in the family Xmas card is any indication, she reeeeeeallly likes unusual makeup)
• get movie gift certificate(s) for brother-in-law.  Don't yet know what we're doing for his birthday on Dec. 26th.  (EDIT: Postponed; it's an easy walk to the local movie theater.)
• shop for dinner
• practice  - FAIL
• make dinner, including Meyer lemon muffins
• figure out something to tell my brother for a gift to us from his family
• catch up on Librivox stuff 'cuz I haven't logged on since Tuesday - FAIL
• nap????  maybe??? - WTH was I thinking?

----

Added later: Unh, stressy-feeling. 
We modified the muffin recipe to use just juice and zest of two lemons, and distributed mix into twelve muffin cups rather than 18.  Probably won't bother doing it again; it's a fair amount of work, and the amount of butter in it is kind of insane - the paper muffin cups were greasy, and there was a lot of melted butter in the pan afterwards.  Yegh.
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Aug. 1st, 2007 @ 10:12 pm Okay, hungry now!
Current Location: home
Current Mood: hungry!
Current Music: French film noir music
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We just went and saw Ratatouille.  Wonderful, wonderful film.  I don't think I've ever had my mouth water during a film depiction of food... but there it was, at the title dish.

Dang, I wish we had something around to cook.  Like eggs.  You can do a lot with eggs.

Ah well.  Yogurt it is, 'cuz that's what we got.
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May. 22nd, 2007 @ 02:53 pm Lemon pasta remixed
Current Location: work
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Remember this post, where I talked about lemons and recipes thereto?  In particular, the pasta sauce involving cream and wine and the seizure of the dish as a result?

I tried the recipe again last night.  I was careful to keep the wine at room temperature, and I added the solid ingredients (including 2 cups of frozen peas) to the warm milk and lemon peel  mix.  And turned the heat off.  I added the wine very slowly, noting that it still had a tendency to do some minor curdling of the milk in the local area, but I could keep that effect to kind of a minimum if I stirred it around immediately after adding.  Once the wine was all added, the milk had a kind of thick texture, which was probably more like what's supposed to happen.  Adding the room-temperature lemon juice thickened it more (acid also precipitates proteins nicely).

Adding the still-hot pasta to the sauce, however, completed the 'cooking'/curdling of the milk. 

Happily, the (thickened) milk was pretty well distributed in with the other ingredients, so we ended up with lots of tiny bits of curd, rather than the large lumps we ended up with on our first try.  *shrug*  I'm guessing that that's just... what's supposed to happen.  I note that the recipe does suggest saving some of the pasta water in case you need more liquid when you're mixing it all together.  This instruction may indicate that you're supposed to have a mix of (mostly) solids when you get to the end stage.
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Feb. 21st, 2007 @ 12:13 pm Adventures With Lemons
Current Location: work
Current Mood: full
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The area where we live had truly beautiful weather this weekend; temperatures were in the 60s and 70s. I was outside doing some weeding Saturday afternoon when a neighbor's little girl passed by with a paper bag in her arms. "Want some lemons?" she asked. I looked up at her and replied that sure, I'd take a couple. "Okay," she said cheerfully, continuing down the street. "I'll be right back with your lemons!"

I went back to my weeding. There had been some rain earlier in the week, and the warmth and the wet had brought up a whole new crop of oxalis, a plant that looks kind of like clover. It's a weed that's astonishingly good at spreading itself: it can grow new plants from bits of root left in the soil, it can have sex like other flowering plants, and it can reproduce asexually by means of little bulb-like appendages it grows on its roots. It's horribly pernicious stuff. Anyway,I dug and pulled a few minutes more before the little girl came skipping back, again with a paper bag in her arms. "Here's your lemons," she panted as she handed me the bag. "We're pruning our tree, and we've got this huge bag of lemons that we don't know what to do with!"

I thanked her as I received the bag. From its heft (and from the girl's comments), it clearly contained significantly more than the 'couple' that I'd said I'd take. I looked in, and sure enough there were around a dozen of the things. I stepped inside and told the huz that we needed to do something with lemons for dinner that night.

Interestingly, the lemons that we had been given were not the standard bright yellow fruits that are commonly seen in your local grocery. These fruits were lemon-shaped and smelled lemony, but their skins were quite distinctly orange. These were Meyer lemons, a cross between a true lemon and (probably) a mandarin or sweet orange (Wikipedia). The fruit is hard to find in groceries even out here, but plenty of folks have Meyer lemon trees in their yards as our neighbors do. As one might guess, Meyer lemons are sweeter and have a fruitier flavor than their true lemon cousins, but they can be used in essentially the same fashion in cooking.

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