If you like it then you should have put it in my pants

DID YOU KNOW? You can get tickets from SFO to Tokyo for $450 on Air Canada right now.

I found my brass rat today. This is the second time that my brass rat has been missing for a seven-day stretch. This is also the second time that I found it exactly seven days after its loss by checking in the pocket of the pants I was wearing at the time that I lost it.

I was trying to put a better "single ladies" pun in the title but I am too euphoric to figure one out right now. I think there is one in there and it has to do with a fact that our ring is the only recent one with a woman (i.e. a single lady) on the seal. Maybe you can figure it out?

The first time I lost my brass rat was at this awful-ass club in SoMa. I was going to a CouchSurfing social and for people who randomly break into each other's apartments and sleep on their couches and drink their scotch, these people were not especially social. I was disappointed. Anyway, I took the Transbay bus home and then when I woke up the next morning I could not find my ring. I looked and I looked and I cleaned my room and I freaked out for a whole week and then finally when I was doing laundry a week later it fell out of the back pocket of the exact pants I was wearing at the club that night. I had already checked them four times, but apparently, not hard enough.

The second time I lost my brass rat was last Wednesday, and it confused me a lot. I went to get coffee with Ian, I came back to lab, did some work, pooped, changed, went running, changed back, and came back. I just needed to find my ring before I went home, but I could not. This is really weird, because I never would have gotten coffee with Ian if I hadn't been wearing my ring, so I figured I must have lost it in lab somewhere. It was frustrating. I cleaned my desk, cleaned my lab space, cleaned the supply closet that I change in. I scoured the floors. I asked other labs that use that bathroom if they found anything there. I looked under monitors. I opened reagent bottles and shook them around to see if the ring fell in. I stress ate. I was just about to go to the UCPD tonight but their lost and found was closed. So I decided to come home and clean my room. The first thing I did was go through the pair of pants that I was wearing the day that I lost it, which I had already checked four times--but, apparently, not hard enough. After flipping them over a few times I noticed a secret change pocket near the waist. Sure enough, I stuck my finger in and BOOM there was my brass rat.

Come to think of it, I bought both of these pairs of pants at Gap. Damn you Gap and your secret spy pockets.

Anyway, I'm sitting here, kind of overjoyed right now, just because I have my ring back and also because of this strange little bit of deja vu, and also because Mitra and I went to YOGURTLAND tonight and it was delicious (but I did not take pictures to post on this blog).

It kind of makes me forget that someone jacked my bike light tonight.

Lettuce, turnip, and pea

DID YOU KNOW? The video game Hard Drivin' was originally a high-speed chase simulator that the government rejected. Developers put in loops and sold it as an arcade game.



I promised myself that I would not post anything about gardening until I was actually eating things that I was growing in my backyard and YO, I am eating lettuce out of my backyard now. kind of cool. The lettuce is not yet great, which the internet tells me might be the fault of an irregular watering schedule, so I've been giving them more care and attention recently in hopes of improving their flavor. I think it's been helping; I stole a few leaves out of the salad I made for lunch today and they were not bitter and didn't have the funky banana taste that dominated the first couple of, uh, harvests. Anyway, the point is that it is edible and now when I get up in the morning I can be like "Hmmm I think I want some lettuce with my lunch today; maybe I will go pick some out of the backyard."

Yes. I have successfully gardened. Yes. God, I wish I could wipe that smug smile off of Michelle Obama's face.

(NOTE: that was a 30 Rock reference; I do not actually harbor any enmity toward Michelle Obama although I am jealous of her biceps and have started doing 50 push-ups every day so I can be more like her.)



Here is some of the aforementioned lettuce as part of a tasty yuca salad with spicy mustard. I promise that someday I will write an entry that is not about food I ate.

There are ants in the kitchen right now which initially freaked me out a little bit and got me very worried until I discovered last night that they don't really want to eat the food (knock on wood), but instead the caulking where the countertops meet the wall. I think there are also some living in or near the stove, which is always really funny when I turn on the stove and watch them go scurrying. These are the strangest ants. So far I have watched them eat shampoo residue, caulking, string, and Ruth's underwear (it's because she's so sweet!).

I noticed their affinity for caulking while making dinner last night. I had the best dinner last night. I fried some fava beans still in their pods and tossed them with lots of salt and picked the beans out of their funny little slipper things and ate them and got olive oil and salt all over my fingers that flavored the fava beans as I ate them and then I also licked my fingers and even licked all the salt off the charred smoky pods because nobody else was home to see me (not that this would have stopped me). It was delicious. While doing that I also made some pasta sauce out some onions and garlic and a tomato and ate that with spaghetti. That was also delicious.

I love eating. I have recently realized that pretty much all foods taste good with just olive oil and salt added to them. I think I will try putting that on caulking and eating that. I think it will be tasty.

No, Sam, you will never get Michelle Obama arms with an attitude like that!

Sandwich day

DID YOU KNOW? Samuel L Jackson was an usher at Martin Lurter King Jr's funeral.

Today was not the best day. But whatever. Let's talk about good things first. Let's start and end by talking about good things. We can talk about the bad things in the middle. Kind of like making a sandwich.



Because today was not the best day, I had to stress eat. I was going to go to AG Ferrari with Ruth and Lauren, but I had some stuff to take care of on the Oakland front, so instead I stuck around the home. I remembered that I had some mozzarella cheese leftover from my last blog entry, so I decided to use some of that to make two small grilled cheese sandwiches with this really dense loaf of whole wheat bread that did not rise correctly. I put on arugula and tomato so it was kind of like a caprese. They were pretty tasty. So tasty, in fact, that I forgot to drink the glass of white wine that I had poured to accompany it.

That might be a good thing, since while "stress eating" sounds kind of charming in a Tina Fey way, "stress drinking" just sounds kind of sad in a Tracy Morgan way.

One thing I am really into now is searing things and then finishing them in the oven. It's so easy with a cast-iron skillet now. I made some roasted radishes this way on Thursday night, and then today I did that with my breakfast (fried oatmeal) and lunch (grilled cheese). I took a page from the book of Sam's Mom and chopped up the tomato really thin before placing it inside the sandwich, which meant that it was evenly distributed and did not ooze out. Sam's Mom does that with ham instead of tomato, but, you know, they're both pink; same thing.

The bad thing that happened today is that the backlight on my MacBook stopped working. Gosh, I'm glad that my last computer failed so spectacularly that I felt it necessary to get an AppleCare protection plan with this one. Anyway, this required me to go to the Apple Store in Emeryville to get that taken care of.

I really hate Emeryville; so much that when I think about it in my head, I call it "Archenemeryville." Biking there is just a total pain and the Apple Store is pretty much the only one in the East Bay, so everybody from Berkeley is there with their ugly kids and stupid iPhone problems. Anyway, I think everything is going to be okay; just a few days in the shop should fix whatever's wrong with the backlight, so no worries.


I also baked another loaf of bread for future sandwiches. This loaf rose pretty well and generally turned out a lot better. It requires two different day-long fermentation steps and is kind of a hassle, but, really, it's not too much more time-consuming that the no-knead bread I used to bake and it tastes two thousand times better.

I actually like kneading. I remember that I've previously compared baking bread to birthing a child. The kneading process, as you gradually add the flour and watch the dough slowly change and become more sticky and delicious, really makes it even more like the parenting process, I think.

Except with bread you hit it a lot more and then you eat it at the end.

You know I'm no good

DID YOU KNOW? The six consecutive 9's appearing at the 762nd decimal place of pi are sometimes called the "Feynman Point."



I made pizza last night. It was pretty good. I only let the crust rise for 30 minutes because I did not want to eat pizza at 11 PM, but it still turned out pretty crispy and delicious. I am really excited to bake pizzas in the future now. I have never made pizza crust before, except for my 6th grade home economics (okay, actually "consumer education") project and that one time I made apple pizza for apple bake, but this is the first time I have ever proved it to myself as a viable source of dinner on any day of the week.

I drank Cole Coffee on Saturday morning, which is normally wonderful, but I had a large and I ended up feeling pretty blerg. Coffee is really my sweetest downfall. I love the smell more than most smells in the morning, and the taste of dark dark coffee is just amazing, but sometimes I end up just sick and nasty for an entire day. Maybe I could fix things somewhat if I got a latte or something, but, you know, I'm not a loser.

I am wondering what to sing for the ChemE talent show this Friday and I am between You Know I'm No Good, Samson, and Creep, or maybe I will just mash them all up and wear a corset.

Half day play

DID YOU KNOW? Chuck-E-Cheese was started by the founder of Atari.

So I had a choir concert at UC Davis on Tuesday in the middle of the afternoon. As a result I got half the day off. When I got back at 2:30 it seemed like going back to lab would be counterproductive, so I decided to run some long-awaited errands instead. I shopped for groceries and did some laundry, which, you know, all and all, made it a pretty good day.

Last night I put the fruits of my grocery shopping to use, and it turned out pretty well.



I made curry granola, inspired by this blog post. I kind of made up the spice ratios and I think it ended up a little spicy/salty, but it's still pretty delicious, especially with a little bit of yogurt to cut the spiciness. Some of the curry powder rubs off in the yogurt, too, and makes it all yellow and tasty.

I made the yogurt, too, inspired by Harold McGee's article, and yo? People always say that doing blah blah blah at home is super easy, but making yogurt actually is super easy. You buy a half gallon of milk, heat it up, cool it down, and add a scoop of already-made yogurt to it. Then you stick it in a warm place overnight. BAM! It's yogurt. Seriously. That's it. I was a little skeptical when I put the yogurt into the milk and it did not thicken at all, but then you just let it sit overnight and the bacteria do some stuff and, well, you have yogurt. It's amazing. I made two quarts of yogurt for like $2.50.

It's the way of the future.

Now it is raining and I'm actually pretty excited about the rain. It will make the flowers grow, and also I kind of just want to sit inside tonight and listen to the rain and drink red wine. It's that kind of night. I think I will cook lentils. It's a lentil night.