December pleasure reading, part 2

This month I also read the second of the books based on ABC's Castle. This book was called Naked Heat and was just like the first one: fun to read but not substantive (I mean, just look at the cover. It really screams "life-changing novel" :-P). I read so many technical things at work that I'm okay with easy reads at home. The book was a lot like the show, focused on the sexual tension between the two main characters, also similar to the show Bones. But I didn't figure out who the killer was before it was revealed in the book, and I enjoyed the book. And at least I haven't fallen all the way to trashy romance novels (which I think are funny and, I'm not gonna lie, I might start reading).



Right now I'm reading The Horse and His Boy, the third book in the Narnia series, and I received Ayn Rand's Anthem and We the Living for Christmas.

#26: Mint chocolate chip cookies, #27 Puppy Chow, #28 Sharp cheddar cheese straws

I always bake a TON at Christmas, but primarily for us to give away. This year I made three new recipes that were not hard at all but were still new and therefore I wanted to sneak them in to this calendar year as far as my "new recipe" goal goes:

#26: The only thing different here is that I made these with mint chips instead of chocolate chips. Woo, fancy, I know. But I made them from scratch and I also used Splenda because I gave them to my grandparents, who are all diabetic.



#27: I eat this almost every year but I've never actually made it myself. This finally gave me an excuse to use my 4 cup Pyrex measuring cup :-) This was gone in like 3 days flat, but we did give about half of it to Keegan's family.



#28: I love cheese straws. I love the extra kick the cayenne pepper gives them, but this year I took a recipe I found online and modified it to use Cabot's seriously sharp cheddar cheese, essentially the sharpest cheese I've seen at our grocery store. Oh man, they were delicious! I know for next year to double the recipe because we gave half to my family and half to Keegan's family and kept only the ones we "taste-tested" right out of the oven for ourselves.





This mixer and my double boiler (featured in the picture for the puppy chow, where I was melting the chocolate/peanut butter combo) were life-savers this year! It made everything so much faster and easier to clean up. Also for several recipes the only moisture is the butter and that is a PAIN to stir by hand.


This year's baking list:
-Oatmeal scotchies
-Chocolate and sea salt shortbread cookies
-Peppermint bark
-Puppy chow
-Peanut butter pie
-Cheesecake (made with my grandmom's top secret recipe)
-Mint chocolate chip cookies
-Cheese straws

2010 in review

I know it's not the end of the year yet, but I'm in lab, running experiments, and this stage is about an hour of just waiting around for my surfactant to dissolve, so I figured I could do my usual summing-up post about all the stuff that happened this year.

January:
-Was the coldest I've ever been in my life while going on a trip to Boone with my mother-in-law and one of my sisters-in-law. The trip was really fun but so cold that we didn't actually get to do any of the things we were planning on doing. The zip line and snow tubing were both closed due to the wind chill so basically we just sledded.
-Started 4th semester of grad school and TAing my first class

February:
-Don't really remember anything exciting happening in February, but I did get my first credit card (wooo) so I can be building up my credit score before Keegan and I attempt to get a loan to buy a house.
-Was duteously following my plan to make a new recipe every week

March:
-Entered the lottery to win tickets to the Final Four and then actually won tickets to go to the Final Four!

April:
-Was the busiest month I've had in a really long time
-Spent essentially the entire Final Four weekend either in Lucas Oil Stadium or in its parking lot -- was SO WORTH IT to see Duke win the 2010 national championship! I'm so glad I signed up to go last year when they were such a long shot because frankly if they go again this year (2011) it'll be a mad house and EVERYONE will apply to win tickets in the lottery so my chances of winning again are dramatically decreased
-Went to Seattle to present at the Society for Biomaterials conference. This was my first big conference (I don't think regional symposiums really count) and I really enjoyed it. Seattle was an awesome city and the farmer's market was a lot of fun. I was also able to talk to some folks at the FDA and other people who are working on encapsulation about my work and received some valuable feedback

May:
-Started planning a trip for our one year wedding anniversary! :-*
-Went to the Azalea Festival in Wilmington, NC with my mother-in-law and my aunt... in-law? Keegan's aunt and uncle have moved to Wilmington, so we were visiting them and touring some of the old homes in the downtown area
-Duke BME had their retreat and it coincided with my 24th birthday
-Attended our first wedding as a married couple!
-Starting working on polymer synthesis in the chemistry department so that I could begin work on my project

June:
-Celebrated one year married to Keegan!
-Went to the Outer Banks for our actual anniversary, to attend another wedding
-Started our trip to Newport, RI/Bar Harbor, ME :-)
-Got trained on the SEM so I could start imaging my samples
-Started and stopped P90x after deciding it was really not worth my time (but signed up for a weight training PE class at Duke)

July:
-Finished our anniversary trip by attending Brochufest 2010
-Met with Duke's nutritionist to learn more about structuring my meals and balancing my diet and exercise. Mainly this was for me to start getting in the habit of eating healthy now so that when Keegan and I decide to start a family I will already know how to take care of myself and will be in better health going into pregnancy

August:
-Started my third year at Duke (how have I been here for 3 years already?!)... and that's pretty much it
-Did meet with a director of R&D at Ethicon, Inc who is excited about my project and agreed to donate materials for my research purposes. Awesome :-)

September:
-Keegan made his first trip up to the Cambridge, MA office
-Keegan celebrates his 25th birthday!
-Booked our trip to Costa Rica with Caitlin and Zach :-)

October:
-Completed(/survived) graduate student campout! Didn't win tickets though... boo.
-Presented at BMES in Austin, TX where I received even more feedback than from my presentation at SFB in April
-Went to Austin City Limits! Definitely going to make it a plan to go back there for ACL or for South by Southwest. Or both. Already on my agenda to go to Jazz Fest this year!
-Review paper (finally) accepted for publication! (Was submitted in May, and it took this long for me to hear back)

November:
-Went to see HP7 at midnight! When I had a test that day! Movie was awesome, so worth it. And I got a really good grade on the test. Maybe I should do that all the time...? Oh wait, I have no more exams to study for!
-Ran my first 8k! When I signed up I thought it was a 5k... only to find out 3 days before hand that it was actually 5 miles
-Began tracking the miles I run every day; goal is to run at least 20 every week

December:
-Got our Christmas tree!
-Finished my last classes and my last TA-ship! Bring on the experiments and labwork!
-Review paper appears online (woot!)
-Finish out my last semester of classes at Duke with a 4.0

And then just because I always track where I've been in the year:
North Carolina
Virginia
West Virginia
Maryland
Pennsylvania
Delaware
New Jersey
Connecticut
Rhode Island
Massachusetts
New York
Vermont
New Hampshire
Maine
Kentucky
Ohio
Indiana
Minnesota
Washington
Texas

That's a pretty impressive list for one year! The new states visited were Kentucky, Indiana, Minnesota, Washington, Rhode Island, and Maine :-)

2011 is definitely including at least one new place -- Costa Rica! We could also be going to England and Wales because I'm applying to present at the International Conference on Self-Healing Materials in Bath, England in June/July. Since I'm also planning on Jazz Fest with Cait, that would at least give me Louisiana as a new state visited, and perhaps Alabama and Mississippi depending on where we fly and if we go to visit her dad in Alabama. I'm not sure how else I would go to those states unless we decided to drive to Texas for Keegan's cousin's graduation... which would be unpleasant hah.

December pleasure reading

I am continuing to read The Chronicles of Narnia, and last week I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. They don't really take that long to read obviously, since they're only a couple hundred pages, so now I'm on to the third book in the series.



The book was nice to read, but I think the thing I enjoyed the most was actually the dedication. I didn't know that C.S. Lewis's goddaughter was named Lucy and the book was written for her :-) I thought the dedication was cute/funny.

I don't really have anything that deep to say about the book, although I'm pretty surprised it is considered a "childhood" story since it's got a fair amount of violence in it. But then again I guess one could say the same about Harry Potter. I'm also always surprised at how simple the book is compared to movies that are made based on them. For instance, I don't remember much about the movie and I'm not even sure I saw the whole thing, since it was just on TV, but I know the battle scene took up like 1/3-1/2 of the film time while in the book it was literally one line that didn't even specifically say that Aslan had killed the White Witch. It was only stated a few lines later that the witch was actually dead. I know those are the scenes that make the most money and make the movie more theatrical, and I'm seriously looking forward to some HP battle scenes in HP7p2, but it's still interesting the way Hollywood changes things.

Good news or bad news?

I'm pretty much over having to study for this exam. There are several parties tonight that I wanted to go to (such as Keegan's office holiday party and then a guy in BME is also having a party). But today I also realized that I really didn't want to study because there are a lot of experiments I want to run in lab. Yes, yes, you heard me, I don't want to study not only because I don't want to study but because I'd rather be working in the lab. Does this make me a true grad student now? Or just a loser...? I mean, maybe both. But anyway, I never thought this day would come *sniff sniff* and I'm so proud.

November pleasure reading

My book of November was The Magician's Nephew, the first book in the Narnia series by C.S. Lewis. I decided to start this series because I saw one of the movies was being aired on ABC Family or something a few weeks ago and I realized I'd never read them all. I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe when I was in elementary school but I literally remember nothing about it other than the fact that I read it (so that's the book I'm currently reading).



This book was really easy to read since the whole series is geared towards younger kids, but it was still something simple to occupy my limited free time. I think it's just meant to introduce the rest of the series really, and how this land of Narnia came into existence. In that regard the book is just sort of filler that's not really necessary to know when reading the other books (I mean, obviously it's not important if they didn't even bother making it into a movie :-P) I guess I just read it for completeness. But still, it was a nice little story even though I'll never read it again.

I want to check out Duke's library for more adult and current books, so I'll probably do that once the undergrads have left and my exam is over. I think the reason I gravitate towards autobiographies and books for teens is that I don't have to concentrate when I read them and that's something I like. I don't always feel like reading things that I have to concentrate on really intensely to understand when I've spent all day reading papers, doing experiments, working on my TA duties, and going to class. But in the spring, when I don't have classes for the first time in 19 years, maybe I'll feel more like reading grown-up books :-P

I'm very sad because the name Keegan and I have picked out for our first daughter (yes, I know it's a ways off) has just entered the top 100 names this year. Damn! We want a name that's unique but not weird, and now it looks like our name is on the upswing. Back to the drawing board I guess...