August pleasure reading, part 4

Maybe I read to escape acknowledging the fact that I'm a fourth year Ph.D. student, but I also read While Mortals Sleep, a posthumously-published collection of short stories by Kurt Vonnegut, Sphere by Michael Crichton, and Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America by Firoozeh Dumas.  I guess technically I've read Funny in Farsi before, but I was in high school and there were several chapters I don't remember ever reading.

 

All the books were really good (obviously, since I got through them so quickly!) and I would recommend them to anyone looking for something to read that's not too involved.  I read a lot when I go to the fitness room (I usually run then either bike, walk on a steep incline, or (only as a last resort) go on the elliptical) so that's how I get through so many books I think.  I also enjoy reading before bed although lately that's been getting difficult because I've been getting up early to get to lab around 715 so I like to just go to sleep :)

I'm now reading Rising Sun by Crichton and one of my friends lent me the first book in The Hunger Games series, so I'm sure I'll get started on that pretty soon.

Anyway, lunch time over, back to work.

August's second and third new dishes: Baked chicken

Well baking chicken is not new for me, but I had some ingredients I wanted to use up as well as many pounds of chicken breasts that I bought super on sale and froze, so I looked for various baked chicken recipes.  The first one was just chicken breasts in cream of herb soup that was baked and we ate it with rice.  It was very yummy and really easy :)  My mom used to make something similar so it wasn't that new for me, but that doesn't mean it wasn't good!

On Wednesday I made chicken using this recipe; I didn't use Hellman's mayo and I didn't use as much as the recipe calls for, but that's okay.  I had the parmesan cheese and Food Lion brand light mayo that I used to make a feta cheese and artichoke dip I've made a few times and I wanted a recipe to let me use up some of that stuff.  I don't really like mayo that much, but in the dip it just tastes like creamy cheese (since there's so much cheese already in the dip) so in this recipe the mayo taste was more obvious, but it wasn't overwhelming, so the end product was really good.  Plus the small amount of bread crumbs gave the chicken just the right amount of crunchiness, mmm.

I also don't have any pictures because I haven't been charging my camera very regularly, but oh well, everyone knows what chicken looks like.

I'm excited for the seasons to be changing so that there will be new foods in season (and therefore on sale) so I can try to mix up what we eat some.  I think if we're going to buy some produce we've never bought before that I'll want to go to the farmer's market because I'm not sure how to tell if something is ripe and frankly sometimes the produce selection at Food Lion is really depressing and makes me miss Harris Teeter (except the ridiculously overpriced part).

August pleasure reading, part 3

Wednesday I finished Congo by Michael Crichton and I really enjoyed it!  I've also almost finished Sphere by him as well, but I'll write about that after I read the last 60 or so pages.  I had a lot of down time the past 2 days because I was at Ethicon doing some experiments that are mainly "hurry up and wait" types of experiments so I read in between.  I had some journal articles that I read too, but I also don't have internet access while I'm there so sometimes it's hard to read articles if there's something I want to look up.

Anyway, the book was really good!  Apparently it is also a movie, but I'd never heard of the movie.  Sphere is also a movie, but I'm glad I haven't seen them because that would ruin the suspense of the book.  Now that I've read a lot of John Grisham books I guess I'm moving on to another prolific writer.  What's next, James Patterson?

Congo was about a group looking for a valuable type of diamond in the jungle of Congo but all the groups that get close to their destination just vanish and are never heard from again.  The book follows one expedition team that is a follow up team sent in when their first team is destroyed (why you would send another group in seems stupid, but I guess business is business!).  Anyway, it was fun to read but not hard to read, which is nice sometimes when you're tired of journal articles.

August pleasure reading, part 2

This month I also read the book Lucy by Laurence Gonzales; it wasn’t something I’d normally read but it jumped out at me when I was returning the last round of books I borrowed from Duke’s library.  I had been talking to one of my labmates about Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which she saw and said was entertaining but really impractical from a scientific POV.  For instance, the guy in the movie did his experiment once on one animal then immediately said “We’re ready for human trials!!!”.  We had just been talking about this when I picked up Lucy in the library to read the inside cover and it talks about one character rescuing a girl only to discover she’s a “human hybrid, half human and half monkey…”.  So since we’d just been talking about things shown in mainstream media that are ridiculous to scientists (ie: DNA tests that take half an hour to run so that the criminal can be caught just in time) I decided to give it a read.

It was pretty entertaining and the author threw a lot of scientific garble into his description of how Lucy was made, but even with my somewhat limited understanding of genetics I know that the sentences were not coherent.  But I guess using a lot of multi-syllabic scientific jargon is really all you need if you’re just writing a book for the general public to enjoy.  It’s not like this author was claiming this could really happen.  It kind of made me want to read Jurassic Park again, just to see how Crichton described that process now that I’m not 12 and know more about science.  I am currently reading a book called Congo by Crichton, but maybe then I’ll reread Jurassic Park and The Lost World.  I also checked out Funny in Farsi, which I read in high school but don’t remember much about except that I liked it.  I read Firoozeh Dumas’ other book and talked about it here, but I’d like to read her first book again.

Last week I also read Something Borrowed and Something Blue by Emily Giffin, but I’ve read them both a few times, so there’s nothing to summarize really.  It had just been awhile since I’d read them.  It feels like I’m averaging 2+ books/week this summer!  Maybe it’s because I know writing my prelim is fast approaching and I’m trying to get all my pleasure reading in while I can…

Ron Paul love

I do love the way Jon Stewart calls everyone out.  His segment on Newsweek's cover of Bachmann was also really refreshing (although she's a moron, and I much prefer him defending Ron Paul)



 

The Daily Show
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Progress on my yearly goals

Well it has been a long time since I thought about the goals I made for myself this year.  I have accomplished quite a few things on my list, started a few of the things on my list, and abandoned a few of the things on my list.  I guess that’s why I have a lot of goals – so the odds of meeting at least one of them are increased.

With respect to labwork:

• I have been in lab at least 45 hours every week, but at least twice a month I work on the weekends, so I think I’ve been sporadically meeting my goal of working 50 hours/week.  I guess it doesn’t necessarily matter the amount of time that I’m at work but the quality of work I’m doing well I’m there
•  Submitted abstracts to 3ICSHM and BMES 2011; both accepted, one for a talk (which I already gave on our England trip!) and one for a poster, which is in October in Hartford, CT
•  Successfully defended a Master’s thesis, woo!  Now I need to actually hang the diploma somewhere
•  I wrote a research paper which I gave to Monty a week ago to get his first round of feedback (which I'm waiting for now but will hopefully arrive soon so we can get a bulk of the revisions finished before he starts teaching again); it took me longer than I wanted and I’m still waiting on data for part of a figure from my undergrad; my new revised goal is to submit by September 30

With respect to finances:

• I’ve been able to save at least 20% on our weekly groceries every week at the store with the exception of 3 weeks; however, I’ve saved more than 30% on numerous occasions, so in my mind that balances.  I’ve averaged more than 20% savings every month, so that’s good.  I don’t think we’ll be able to save a month’s rent at the grocery store, but maybe.  I’ll have to see how the stars align with stuff going on sale when I need it and that will probably determine what we save.  Right now we’re at about $500 saved with MVP and coupons (I think) so maybe we can squeeze another $300 in savings by Dec 31.
•  I've started using online coupons -- maybe this will be a way for me to find more useful coupons for things I actually buy
• I haven’t been making regular monthly contributions to my mutual funds, but I have made several large contributions that almost even out to what I would have put in otherwise.  It’s been a little slow because I opened another checking account and was moving my direct deposit so the past few months have been weird setting that up and I haven’t been able to set up an automatic withdrawal yet.  I did however buy a fair amount of shares in the mutual fund for our house last week when the market opened after the US credit downgrade so hopefully we’ll make some money on that purchase in the long run.
•  I have opened two individual mutual funds in addition to our joint one to make more use of my money than letting it sit in a money market account  

With respect to health/wellness:

• I didn’t make it to the target weight I wanted to be at before our England trip (the trip itself definitely messed with my weight loss plans haha) but I have been hovering around that target weight (130) for a few weeks now.  My ultimate goal is 125 but honestly I haven’t been trying too hard to reach it.  I need to be more serious if I want to lose the other 5-7 pounds because I still eat pretty much whatever I want, I just exercise a little more.  I do eat a lot of fruit and vegetables, but not a large variety.  For example, last week I ate an apple, a banana, cucumber, spinach, and watermelon every day.  But maybe I need to shake things up a bit and eat the foods I don’t usually eat.  But still, I’m 15 pounds down, so that’s something!
•  I’ve made about 8 new recipes this year, so I’m keeping track with that.  They’re pretty lame recipes though, so I should keep working to improve this goal.  Not that they aren’t tasty, they just aren’t really grown-up foods hah
•  I’ve given up weight training.  Once classes start again maybe I’ll try to make more use of Duke’s gym.  I do lift weights in our living room, but nothing nearly as involved was what I was doing last fall.  I also do the ab workout for P90X twice a week, so I’m trying to strengthen my core.
•  I’m doing well limiting my caffeine intake
• I go on the treadmill every day, or at least 13/14 days and going for at least 40 minutes each time (sometimes running the whole time, sometimes a combination of running and walking at a really steep incline)

Other random goals:

• I have been reading up a storm, probably 25 books this summer alone (if you count all the ones I’ve reread, like HP before the movie came out)
•  Campout is in 4 weeks (only 4????) and I’m definitely going
• Attended Jazz Fest in New Orleans (still need to get my poster framed though…)
• Put pictures from our Costa Rica and England/Wales trips in albums (still need to put the rest of our wedding pictures in an album though…)
• I won’t get to run the Turkey Trot this year because we’re having Thanksgiving with my stepdad’s parents this year, and they live out of town, so we’ll have to leave early-ish in the day.  I can still get up and run 5 miles though, so I will aim to just beat my time from last year on my own this year

All-in-all I think I'm on track to accomplishing a lot of the things I wanted to do this year, although maybe not by the deadlines I had originally set for myself; better late than never I guess :)  I'm really mainly hoping to get this paper submitted by the end of September so I can set a prelim date.  Monty won't let his students prelim until they have a first author research paper published, so I'd like to try to aim for the November - February time frame to prelim, which means I need to publish soon!  Hopefully preliming then will keep me on track to finish in 2013 (fingers crossed).  I guess there's really no HURRY to finish because at least I'm getting paid, but I'd like to finish in 5-5.5 years.  We'll see... it all depends on how successful I am at figuring out all my little problems hah

August pleasure reading

So far this month I have read two more John Grisham books, A Painted House and The Last Juror.  Both were suspenseful but The Last Juror was definitely more interesting to me and had a better ending.  In my opinion the end of A Painted House was a bit of a let-down and the ending felt a bit abrupt.  It was still well-written with colorful side stories along with the main plot so I'm not too disappointed.  I’m still not sure what genre to classify John Grisham books because they aren’t really mysteries or detective novels or anything, I guess they’re just “suspenseful” and that’s their category.  I’ll still continue to make use of Duke’s library because they have quite a few other John Grisham books that I can plough through. 

I also have a book by Kurt Vonnegut that is from the library as well as mystery-type book I saw there the other day when I was returning a textbook.  I borrowed The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo from one of my labmates so I should restart that soon too.  I read the first 80 pages or so the day she gave it to me, but then I got distracted with the Grisham books.  Maybe I just need to stop reading books concurrently and that will solve my problem.

Talking about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo reminds me of this website, which a friend sent to me but I had seen on someecards.com on other occasions – it’s pretty entertaining!

August's new dish: Crunchy parmesan chicken tenders

This week I made some very tasty chicken tenders using this recipe.  Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of it because neither of my camera batteries were charged.

It was especially good because the final product was very lightly breaded and was way more chicken than breading (which is a common problem in the chicken tenders/strips I've often had at restaurants and such) so I was a lot fuller by the end of the meal.  The dipping sauce was also good, but I ended up eating most of mine plain because although I really like balsamic vinegar I do not really like olive oil when it's the main ingredient to stuff.  For instance, I don't usually dip my bread in oil at restaurants and while I don't mind a hint of the taste of olive oil, I don't want to eat it straight either.

I would highly recommend this recipe to others!

July pleasure reading, part 3

I was a busy reader in July!  I also read The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters.  This book was pretty good and a little spooky but I enjoyed it.  The main action of the story took a while to develop and it was never reeeeeally clear what was happening.  I guess that is the way to keep the reader interested, trying to pay close attention so they don’t miss anything.  It’s kind of like the excellent older movies, like Alfred Hitchcock movies, that are scary for what you don’t see than what you do see (ex. Psycho).  Anyway, this was another book I checked out from Duke’s library, the “New and Noteworthy” section.  I think I’ll go over there this afternoon while my experiments are running and see if there’s anything else that catches my eye!