Back again

Well, I’ve been busy lately–or, I suppose not really, just busier than I was.  I’ve been teaching, it’s three hours at a go most weeknights, and with both the preparation I have to do beforehand and the high energy level I have to maintain while in the classroom, it’s enough to fill my days.

To catch up a bit, Brian and I spent Christmas in Weed, California with his family. Here are a few pic, unfortunately it seems like I never remember to take enough of them…

OK, well Sumi wasn’t really there, but she sure looks cute in the presents, no?

Anyway, to move on to more current news… Lately I’ve been reading a lot. I’ve read Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre, and Anna Karenina…all good books, though some more enjoyable for me personally than others. Presently I’m reading Middlemarch, which I’m enjoying immensely. But the most important books I’m reading are of a different kind entirely. They are Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training and Practical Programming for Strength Training, both by Mark Rippetoe. Brian ordered these for me for Christmas, but I just got them last week. And wow, did I ever need these books! Starting Strength is geared towards the novice lifter, which I am not, but it covers the basic movements so thoroughly and well it’s like, well, it’s like what the Joy of Cooking is for all things culinary. The bible, if you will. It’s embarrasing to say, but I have never power cleaned–and now I’m going to learn, because the book tells me how. If I had read Starting Strength four years ago when I started weightlifting, I would be a veritable brute by now, and I probably wouldn’t have lost so much time to injuries either. Sigh.

Practical Programming, though, is what is really going to change my life. I have come to a place in training some of the basic compound movements where I just can’t seem to make progress, and I know exactly why. It’s because I’ve never paid much attention to my programming. I just went to the gym, and worked hard at whatever I felt like doing, and that was enough to make me stronger, because that’s how it works for pretty much everyone at the outset. If you’re weak, any kind of physical work will make you stronger. However, after a while it gets a lot harder to make progress–once you’re strong, getting even stronger requires more than just random effort. It requires planning, and to plan properly you need an understanding of why and how the body gets stronger in the first place. That’s what this book is about. Me, I want a 1.5x bodyweight squat, and this book is gonna tell me how to get it. And believe me you, you all will hear about it when it happens.

The Great Brittle Experiment

Introduction

Lately people have been coming to my blog by running a search for “undercooked peanut brittle”. Having made some myself recently, and not knowing what to do with the stuff, I undertook the experiment that answers the question we all have: is it possible to salvage undercooked peanut brittle?My hypothesis was that while the candy part would return to a syrup that I could heat to the necessary temperature to make the brittle crispy (rather than sticky, as undercooked brittle is), the peanuts might burn in the process. I thought this because in my recipe, I add the peanuts last, just before pouring the brittle out of the pan. I know that recipes exist in which the peanuts are cooked in the syrup to some degree, but my peanuts are already roasted, so I thought that cooking them more might not do good things. And how prescient that thought was…

Procedure

Fig. 1: Large bowl, small microwave

I began by placing the undercooked peanut brittle into a microwave safe bowl, that, unfortunately, was too large for the microwave. After moving the brittle to a smaller bowl, I zapped it until it was syrupy again–this worked pretty well. I moved the goo into a sauce pan, thinking I’d heat to to a bit above 300 degrees–enough to bring it to “hard crack” stage here in the ever-damp Pacific Northwest–and see what happened.

Well, it went along fine for a while. I had the heat up pretty high (as one generally does for brittle), and the temperature rose linearly instead of pausing every ten degrees or so like usual. Around 290 degrees, though, it started to smell burn-y and smoke. Now, normally I can smell a burning-esque smell from the hot butter when I cook brittle, so I held off a bit on pouring it out. However, after about thirty seconds, it became clear to me that something in there really was burning, and I poured it out. Indeed, it was the peanuts.

Results

Fig. 2: The re-cooked (previously undercooked) peanut brittle

Discussion

Now, here’s the thing: I didn’t stir the mixture, and obviously I should have. I was treating it like a standard sugar syrup, which you don’t mess with at all. As you can see, though, the peanuts only burned where they were in contact with the bottom of the pan, not in a general fashion. Also, the candy part of the brittle did crisp up. Thus, my initial hypothesis seems correct, though the experiment failed to produce a terribly tasty result. To improve this procedure, I would recommend stirring the mixture while re-cooking it; if you did that, I believe that it would be possible to salvage an undercooked peanut brittle.

It’s raining

I'm probably fifteen, sixteen here. That's OJ, he was a Maine Coon, and a huge cat.

Well, it’s finally happening, I am in the thick of the application(s).  (I add the (s) because it doesn’t stop with AMCAS; once I finish this I have a bazillion secondary applications to do.)  For each “work/experience” entry you get 1325 characters–that’s about 200 words–and spaces count as a character too–to describe and elaborate.  That’s not much room when you’re talking about, say, five job titles in five years at OPB.  However, the people who will read it have to read an awful lot of them, so I imagine brevity is exactly what they want. I intend to use seven of the fifteen spaces.  I mean, who really has done fifteen important things in their lives, anyway?

Today I got my first letter of recommendation!  That’s exciting.  From Max Apple, my writing teacher at Rice.  They’re all confidential, these letters people write about you, so I just hope the folks I ask say nice things about me.  I mean, that’s the plan, anyway.  Max was my teacher a long time ago, but the idea was that since my degrees are actually and still in English and Art, I should have at least one recommendation that represents that.

On another note, I saw someone this past weekend who I haven’t seen in, what, thirteen years?  And who, if you’d asked me, I would have said I never expected to see again in my life.  This guy here, sitting at my kitchen table, is Brian Deshler, one of my first boyfriends ever.  We were fifteen, I believe.  He found me on Facebook, and was in the area for a conference.  It’s funny, seeing people from high school–it doesn’t happen to me much, as I’ve been out west since college–but when I do see anyone, it always amazes me how little people change.

Scores

All that time here...

Well, my score is in.  It’s allright.  Not what I was hoping for, but allright.  I feel disappointed.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s competitive.  In percentiles, it’s “98.4 – 99.0″, they say.  But it’s at the low end of the range I thought I was in.  I had wanted to do better.

Nervous

We are rather a bundle of nerves here in our house today.  Brian is waiting to hear whether he got a job that he wants, and me, well it’s a week and counting until the MCAT, and I’ve been having to start asking people to write me recommendation letters for my applications.  It’s not very comfortable for me, I’m not much of a schmooze.  And I’d like a letter or two from my professors at Rice–that’s a pretty strange e-mail to have to write.  Hi, I haven’t been in touch in a decade, can you write me a recommendation?  However, I just sent one off.

I am eyeball deep in Physics; circuits, at the moment, to be exact.  Hey, check out Brian’s rocking farmer’s tan:

Front...

I harass him to wear sunscreen, but he apparently isn’t doing a very good job of it.

...and back.

Problems

general chemistry, anyone?

Here’s a good one:

A cube of solid ice is floating in a glass of water. After the ice melts, the water level in the glass:

A. is higher

B. is lower

C. remains the same

D. cannot be determined with the information provided