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Oct. 5th, 2009 @ 08:49 pm Birthday dinner at Straits last night
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We finished watching our DVD of Ratatouille Saturday night. It was the perfect thing to see before visiting Straits Cafe, a marvelous and amazing restaurant specializing in Singaporean cuisine. They are more than happy to serve their dishes to a group family-style, encouraging everyone at the table to sample every dish. That worked out extremely well last night: the four dishes we had complemented each other very nicely indeed - and completely by accident, too!
What we ate and how good it was )

I can't recommend Straits heartily enough to anyone who likes really good Asian cuisine.  Overall, it's about the same price as or slightly more expensive than, say, Max's (main dishes range from around $10 to $36).  Well worth it if you live in the area and want something a bit different and extremely tasty, and worth spending a meal here if you're visiting the area.
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tazz
Jul. 13th, 2009 @ 01:38 pm Happy anniversary, us!
Current Mood: celebratory
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Thirteen years ago today, many of you watched as Huz and I became, well... Huz and I.  :)  Thirteen years later, and we're still crazy about each other.  Who'da thunk?  ;)

To celebrate, we've bought ourselves season tickets to Broadway San Jose.  (Minus one - we're neither of us interested in Legally Blonde, and they had this nice Buy Four option.)  Mind you, the tickets haven't shown up yet, and I need to bug the company about it. 

Huz has also been working with some sort of Langevin equation(s) in his programming.  I couldn't remember exactly what sort of Langevin he was fiddling with when I asked him about it, and referred to it as a Langevin whatsit.  A day or so later, he asked me what flavor a Langevin whatsit should be; after a moment's thought, I declared it should be lemon.  (He thought it would be nice to get me a  lemon-flavored Langevin whatsit for our anniversary.)  After some consideration, we decided on what exactly a lemon-flavored Langevin whatsit was:


Which we shall sample tonight.  Happy anniversary, Huz!
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tazz
Jun. 11th, 2009 @ 09:27 pm No topic, just stuff
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I stayed home today, as I guessed yesterday I would.  I slept better than I had the previous night (the cold had largely moved from drippy to stuffy), but nowhere near enough to make up for the sleep I'd lost the night before.  After breakfast and Huz leaving for work, I went back to bed and slept for something over an hour.  It helped.  As did the Peach Pleasure with Immunity boost that I went and fetched myself at lunchtime.  I'm still not healthy, but I feel a great deal more alert than I did for most of yesterday evening.

I finished Phantom Hourglass.  Last boss battle is HARD, had to look up a second walkthrough to find out how to deal with his nasty spin attack.

I acquired a package of beef jerky at lunchtime too, figuring that something I could chew on without lots of calories might help my sinuses stay clear.  Don't know if it really helped, but it tasted nice.  However, I just noticed that the nice folks at Whole Foods probably paid someone to write the following jingle I found on the back of the package:

Sing this little song the next time you're "home on the range."
  Oh give me a snack
  I can fit in my pack
  Made with beef that's organically raised
  It's seasoned just right that when you take a bite
  By the flavor you will be amazed
  Our jerky's superb
  Low in fat and with protein so high
  That when hunger is strong just remember this song
  Eat beef jerky - it'll satisfy

I can just about hear Garrison Keillor singing it as a parody on Prairie Home Companion.

Finally, I know I've been nattering way too much about Scribblenauts and how much I'm looking forward to it.  But I think I've found a demo of it that will appeal to this crowd.  You can write "Cthulu" and "God" and they fight!
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Back to work tomorrow I expect.  Mooooooooore minipreps!

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tazz
May. 28th, 2009 @ 11:31 am Bunches of sundry things
Tags: , ,
- The Ginger Peach Tea jam sold by Republic of Tea is really quite excellent.  (I ordered some for my mom, in the assumption that it would arrive sometime while we were visiting.)  There's a strong ginger flavor to it that really makes the jam.  I can't taste the tea in it, but that's okay.

- There's a free iPhone app specifically for browsing and downloading Librivox titles called Audiobooks.  From what I've heard, it's got a fantastic interface for browsing, downloading, and listening to LV books.  Go to the App store, or visit this website for more info.

- We spent time with animals the first few days here.  Sunday night, my brother and his family (two nephews, age roughly two and five) visited us, and Monday we saw a muskrat and a heron.  (Tuesday we got hopefully passable pictures of the muskrat.)

- Watched the Star Trek movie Tuesday night (had lots of fun as promised by virtually everybody) at the Somerville Theater.  Yay for old-style movie houses with front-row balcony seats!  Though it would have been nice had my seat bottom not parted company with the rest of the seat several times.
     - Adjunct 1: there will be a Star Trek movie post later with amused snarkiness
     - Adjunct 2: the crepe place 2 doors down from the Somerville Theater knows how to do strawberries and dark Belgian chocolate.  Yum!

- My bro lent us the Get Smart movie on Sunday, which we watched Wednesday night.  Apart from a few moments that were Absolutely Not Necessary (e.g. upchuck in the fighter plane), it was surprisingly enjoyable.  It was rather refreshing to have Agent 86 be really quite competent as a field agent!  It was a good choice, I think; it would have been difficult to carry off an entire movie-length period of bumbling-incompetent-somehow-saves-the-day-anyway.
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tazz
Feb. 15th, 2009 @ 03:58 pm Ahhhhhh..
Current Location: home
Current Mood: content
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There is nothing quite so civilized, so pleasant, as sitting down to a cup of really nice tea (Stash green chai), a plate of chips (we had no cookies), and a good book on a cold and rainy afternoon.  Pure heaven, that.

Being thus fortified, I will now go do vacuuming.
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tazz
Feb. 10th, 2009 @ 09:57 pm Good things
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• I got back DNA sequence data that confirmed that I have FINALLY finished making a particular expression vector that we've been working on for what feels like ages, and which will allow us to forge ahead on our experiments.  (That's what the bizarre "5mer-Gateway-AP" message in my Gmail chat profile was referring to, for anyone who wondered.)

• There was a box with See's chocolates in the lunchroom.  Not only that, but I picked out what was either a raspberry or a blueberry-filled chocolate.  Yummy!

• After clearing out a lot of the trees in my first two attempts on Inner Yoshpet to the Spirit Gate, Huz was kind enough to finish the run for me.  Thank you, Huz!!!!!! (I could probably have done it in another trial or two, but I needed a break.)

• Bedtime now!  Hope we sleep well, while it rains.  Yay rain!
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tazz
Feb. 6th, 2009 @ 08:31 pm Whole Foods prepackaged baked goods: A mixed bag
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We live within easy walking distance of a Whole Foods grocery, and (until recently, for reasons completely unconnected to this post) have done most of our grocery shopping there. For fresh goods, both the price and quality regularly beat the local big-box grocery contender Safeway. The same is even true for some prepackaged things: Traditional Medicinals tea is a fair chunk less per box at Whole Foods than in Safeways organics section for no reason that I can imagine. Boxed cereal and canned goods, on the other hand, tend to be cheaper at Safeway. None of which has much to do with the discussion at hand, but is here anyway.

There are also some things that Whole Foods just does better than Safeway: their fresh-baked stuff, for example. In-house breads and (in particular) cakes at Whole Foods range from very good to fantastic. Perhaps with this information in mind, we've tried a few of their house brand of prepackaged baked goods - alas, with much more mixed results.

Sandwich bread, English muffins, naan, and pizza crusts )

So... overall, Safeway is better for prepackaged baked goods too.  Oh well!
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tazz
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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tazz
Sep. 17th, 2008 @ 05:03 pm Diet sodas
Current Mood: sorta headachey
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So in lab meeting the last few weeks, whoever's provided snacks has generally brought diet sodas of one form or another as drinks. My analysis thus far:

Diet Hansen's black cherry (sweetener: sucralose) - Completely undrinkable. Nasty artificial-sweetener taste, coupled with a strong cherry-cough-syrup sense.

Coca-cola zero (sweetener: aspartame) - Passable. I can still taste the artificial-sweetener, but the 'true Coke' flavor is relatively strong. Vaguely interested in doing a Diet Coke vs Coke Zero taste test.. except then I'd have to buy a can of each.

Hm, maybe that's it in terms of diet drinks I've subjected myself to recently. Reminder to self: Provide maybe some Juice Squeezes as well as diet sodas when I do lab snack; there were some of those the first week and they were taken up almost instantly.

In other news, getting much closer to done with my protein list! I have one horribly problematic one that will take some serious staring (beyond the 2 hrs I've spent on the dratted thing already), but at the moment I seem to be in an easy section of the list: pretty obvious signal sequences, and very obvious transmembrane domains. I *like* those proteins.
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tazz
Feb. 14th, 2008 @ 02:27 pm Interesting smells
Current Mood: sick
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We made a not-bad Indian curry recipe out of the 30-minute recipe book on Tuesday night.  (They were entirely incorrect on how much cooking the potatoes needed - and I cut the chunks the size they called for, drat it!)  The kitchen has smelled moderately strongly of curry ever since.

Now a strong smell of Meyer lemons has been added.  (Kind neighbor gave me a bag of them when I mentioned that I had a cold.)  It's not bad, it's just... interesting.

Mmmmm.  Meyer lemon lemonade...

(Yes, I can smell.  The nose issue is one that leaves it partly stuffy, but quite breathable and very damp.  I have had two cups of tea already today and am brewing a third.  Nice Stash lemon ginger stuff.)
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tazz
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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tazz
Nov. 23rd, 2007 @ 06:19 pm Minor weekend update
Current Location: home!
Current Music: the huz repeating Chinese vocabulary
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Good thing: It's the Thanksgiving holiday!

Bad thing: The huz caught his almost-required vacation-time cold yesterday, and stayed home rather than going and spending much of the day with parents and family.

Good thing: Lots of tasty food yesterday: decent turkey, good stuffing, good gravy, excellent sweet potatoes and rolls, and 3 different desserts, all really yummy.  (Delicate apple pie with thin apple slices that still had a lot of texture to them; a pecan pie recipe out of 'The Best of America's Test Kitchen' that didn't use huge amounts of sweetening; and my Meyer Lemon bars, this time with extra zest!)

Better thing: There were plenty of leftovers, so I was able to take back good-sized samples of everything back to the huz.  He had traditional Thanksgiving food for dinner.  I had leftover pasta, which was just fine!

Bad (but unrelated) thing: Some oxalis is successfully growing through the weed-block stuff we put down a month or so ago.  Much sadness.

Good thing: Good singing practice today!  (Especially since didn't get to practice either of the last two days.)

Zelda things: Yes, the pretty glowing crystal ball stayed outside!  Got the other one (with much hand-slapping, as it were), and made good progress through the central part of the dungeon (got to boss key, and got the small key past that in the room with many floating platforms).  Pretty glowing sword now.  But no Ooccoo - I guess Ooccoos don't live in the Twilight Realm.  Happily, all the arms of the dungeon seem pretty physically short.  Hope that the Zant heads stay dead - they seem to.  Had a nice hour playing today!
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tazz
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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tazz
Jul. 17th, 2007 @ 03:57 pm Harry Potter and the Amazing Chocolate Store
Current Location: work, soon to be home
Current Mood: good
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We saw Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix this past weekend.  Unsurprisingly, it was a significantly better movie than the book.  Rowling was starting to suffer from Writer's Fame (a disorder in which an author is so famous and sells so many copies that editors become less and less willing to edit their new books) at the time she wrote Book 4, which is presumably why it was so much longer than the previous three had been.  The director of Movie 4 very sensibly cut out quite a bit of the book's material, and in my opinion the movie didn't particularly suffer for it.  Book 5 is the longest book in the series thus far, and needed editing even more badly than Book 4 did; it's my least favorite of the series thus far, and (except for 6, which I haven't reread only due to a plethora of other things to read) the only book that I haven't bothered to reread, due primarily to the fact that I just didn't enjoy it very much.

Happily, the director for Movie 5 cut out lots of stuff.  He also put in a few nice little modifications, most of which are not major, but do add nicely to the movie.  It's not the best film of the series, but it's pretty good. 


After the film, several of us went for dinner at a local chi-chi mall.  Tasty food court food.  We then went to CocoaBella for dessert, and are thinking that a visit there may be a requirement whenever we're in that part of the city.  They sell a variety of very high-quality chocolates, generally with absolutely amazing fillings.  The huz and I both chose a kind that had a strawberry, lemon, and thyme filling (called Kerry).  The thyme was actually the strongest flavor of the bunch, followed by the fruit notes, and there was an interesting spice burn at the end of the mouthful.  Our friends got ones with (1) tea, (2) violet, and (3) caramel with fleur-de-sel (3 individual chocolates).  I tasted #1 and #3.  The tea flavor is subtle, you have to kind of wait for it.  And the caramel with fleur-de-sel starts off with a perfectly balanced salt-sweet mix, followed by a gentle caramel flavor.  (Yes, I'm deliberately mimicking the BPAL-style reviews I've seen in several people's LJ entries!)  All delightful, and all more than worth the $1.50 or less per piece.  Yay, tasty chocolate!
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tazz
Apr. 21st, 2007 @ 05:20 pm Reviews and stuff
Current Location: home
Current Mood: good
Current Music: Rayman noises
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Food/restaurant:
The Bean Scene Cafe may be physically convenient to the Mountainview Center for the Performing Arts, but boy are they sloooooooooooow.  We ordered around 6:20 or 6:25.  There was one order ahead of us, consisting of two dinner crepes and a salad.  It should not have taken nearly half an hour for the single guy who was there to put together that order plus our two sandwiches.  There are several places nearby which would probably take an equivalent amount of time to get to, acquire and order food, and return to the MVCPA by showtime which we will investigate next time around.

Theater:  We went to a show that was part of a local New Works theater last night and saw Equivocation, by Bill Cain.  It was very good: Will Shakespeare is asked to write a play about the 'true' (well, official, anyway) story of the Gunpowder Plot.  There's lots of reference to recent/current events (Robert Cecil, the Prime Minister, cannot produce the 36 barrels of gunpowder because the powder has been dispersed - after all, together those barrels could kill a lot of people.  Old weapon of mass destruction, ya know) and the writing is almost Shavian in its witty and biting humor.  The second act tends to drag a bit, and will likely be the focus of future rewrites.  Perhaps we'll get to see it in its final form in a year or two!

Zelda happiness: Finished the Forest Temple earlier this afternoon!  It took a lot of tries to successfully use the monkey-swing, but once in the room I beat the end boss in only one go! 
Now, admittedly, I drank all three doses of healing that I had with me.  And after every cycle of defeating the two sub-creatures, the boss just kind of stood there and didn't do anything harmful while I attempted to deliver bombs to its  head.  And I had to hunt for heart-pots later on, and I had the huz looking on and offering very helpful advice... but I did it!  And I have a fourth heart container!

Rayman sadness:
The huz had been working on day 11 (I think) of Rayman, and had essentially just completed a somewhat nasty task... when the console crashed.   This is one more reason to dislike games that won't let you save any time you want to (or at least, any time that you've completed a task, but not a day.)
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tazz
Apr. 13th, 2007 @ 04:20 pm Tasty food....
Current Location: work
Current Mood: content
Current Music: lab chatter
Tags:
A work friend and I went out to lunch earlier.  (Hey, I'm here late-ish tonight, and ain't no way I've got enough serious work to fill up all the time I'm here for!)  We went to a local Olive Garden, and had our favorite dishes. 

It was, admittedly, a late lunch (got back around 2), but I'm still enjoying a nice, full feeling.  :)
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sleepy tazz
Feb. 21st, 2007 @ 12:13 pm Adventures With Lemons
Current Location: work
Current Mood: full
Tags: , ,

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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tazz

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