May's second new dish: Beanie (turkey) weenies!

I was pretty excited about this not only because I really like beanie weenies, but also because I got a great deal on all the ingredients and the meal has a lot of fiber in it.

I just used a simple recipe and substituted turkey hot dogs for regular hot dogs to save a bit on the calories and fat content.  The turkey dogs were on sale and I had a coupon!  The beans were generic brand and also on sale (woo!) so the total cost of the meal was ($1.35/2) + $1.19 = $1.87 for the two of us!  We used half of the pack of turkey dogs (which is why it's 1.35/2) and I'm not counting the cost of the brown sugar and mustard I added to the dish because we already had those ingredients on hand and I used so little of each that I don't think it matters in the overall cost.

These were so very tasty and it only took about 20 minutes to make it all.  We had the rest of the turkey dogs left over so Keegan made three of them for dinner the other night (he says he's saving the last two for me) but I don't mind if he eats those also (but they are really good!  I've also been thinking about buying ground turkey sometime so maybe this positive experience with turkey products will finally convince me to take that step).  When I make this again I will probably put one more hot dog in it to make the meat to bean ratio a little more even, but otherwise it was perfect :)

Mmm, can't wait to make this again!  I'm sure it will be a kid favorite in future years (and let's face it, Keegan and I are pretty much kids at heart!)  :)

May's new dish: Fried onion-coated chicken breast

As the name of the post suggests this month I made chicken breasts that were coated in crushed fried onions.  I'm sure that's not very healthy but since we just ate steamed vegetables with the chicken and no other sauce was involved since the crushed onions gave the chicken a really nice flavor and also did a great job holding the moisture in, we didn't really need anything else to flavor it at all!  It was really easy, just coat a chicken breast with egg, shake it around in a bag with flour and crushed fried onions, then bake!  Mmm, we will definitely be having this for dinner again sometime!  :)

Well, I only have a picture pre-baking, but you get the idea.

April's new dish: Pasta dough

Well I don't have any pictures of this and really all I have is a blurb about it, but oh well, at least I tried to make something new!

One of the students in our lab finished this year so for our farewell John dinner one of the other guys in our lab made a fabulous multi course evening of deliciousness.  To help with this preparation I went to Matt's to help him chop things and generally do whatever he told me to do.  In this case I helped him make some sort of sauce that I believe eventually went into some eggplant and tomato bruschetta topping but that was something new for me.  The coolest new thing that I did was make my own pasta dough!  Matt was making some sort of squash, eggplant, zucchini (?) stuffed ravioli and he makes all of his pasta from scratch.  So I separated all the eggs, measured a bunch of flour out, and then just kneaded a lot of dough.  Unfortunately I couldn't stay long enough to help with the stuffing of the ravioli (because I would really enjoy learning how to do that!) but at least I can say I've made my own pasta!

Our lab is so crowded

I now know what it feels like to work in one of the "big" labs in our department.  We may not be spread out into the neighboring labs yet (but granted I've been using the hood in the lab next to ours for months) but we have 4 people sitting at lab benches because there are no desks for them.

I like the way our lab is set up, with individual little office spaces with desks in them that are attached to the lab space with all of our work benches.  There are 6 desks in those office spaces and then a big one at the end that's about 1.5 times the size as one of the other office spaces where an assistant professor now sits but has traditionally been a post-doc cave.  All year one of our first year Ph.D. students was sitting at a desk sort of in the corner near the post-doc area, but since we had a student graduate this year she was able to move to his desk in one of the 6 Ph.D. office space desks.

We may have had one student finish, but we've taken in a huge number of undergrads and we are busting at the seams.  Right now there are 6 Ph.D. students, 1 MS student (who may stick around for a Ph.D.), five undergrads, and then the assistant research professor.  And another student is starting next week.  Our microscope is also constantly being used by labs all over the department so there are a bunch of other random people moving in and out.  The five undergrads are the big problem because while one of them is a summer REU student, the other 4 will all be here until May 2012 and there are only two desks available for them to share.  So they overflow on to our lab benches because there is no where else to sit which makes for a really claustrophobic lab, having to weave in and out of people to get anywhere.

It's not really record-breaking news, but it's greatly impacting my life!

My new toy!

For my birthday/graduation/2-year anniversary present Keegan bought me a camera!  A Nikon D5100, to be exact!

I've been having a lot of fun taking some pictures, but sadly I haven't had a much time as I'd like to play around with it.  That, and the weather hasn't been cooperating lately and I just want to wander around with it outside.  I worked about 60 hours last week, so there wasn't too much available daylight to play around.  And now today the weather is supposed to be spotty, so I'm not sure I want to risk taking it around outside!  Tomorrow it will be nice, but I have to work (I have a lot of things I'd like to get started and/or finished up before the conference (!!!) in June).  I may take it to lab tomorrow anyway and while I wait for things to dissolve I could wander around campus and take some pics like I did last Sunday when I was working.

I need to install the photo editing software that came with the camera so I can learn to improve the lighting and stuff in the pictures, maybe make them brighter and more vibrant, but I have a ton to learn just about the camera itself.  Several of our good friends are also into photography, so I will make sure to talk to them about the settings they recommend.  :)

I have taken a couple of the pictures off my camera to look at so enjoy!  (Keep in mind this was my first adventure out with the camera)

Visit to the Chapel!

Cardinal in the Gardens -- glad I didn't scare it away as I crept closer to get a better picture!

Messing around with the color selection option on the camera -- not the best picture but it was still fun

 Can't wait to get better at this!

May pleasure reading

This month I have re-read several books and read for the first time Heart of the Matter by Emily Giffin.  She is also the author of Something Borrowed, Something Blue, Baby Proof, and Love the One You're With, all of which I have also read.  A movie version of Something Borrowed was released a few weeks ago and I saw it with one of my sisters-in-law Hadley, and then Alex, Cindy, and Priscilla who also happened to be going to the same show as us :) 

The book was good, but nowhere near as good as her first two books, the ones I like the most.  She delves a bit into what happens when marriages become tired and how people are affected by their work if they don’t make time for each other.  One of the characters in the book gave up her career to stay home and care for her children while her husband continued to work as a pediatric surgeon.  The book deals with the aftermath of that decision for both the husband and the wife and makes me think about what Keegan and I might do in that situation where one of us is a stay at home parent.  In the book the family only had two kids but Keegan and I want more kids than that, so I’m not sure at what point we’ll decide the cost of childcare is not worth it and one of us will decide to stay home (or if we will ever reach that point – who knows?)  That is probably 10 years away from now though, so I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it!

Frustration

For the past week I’ve felt very frustrated and I’m not really sure why.  I think it is because for the past 4 solid months (minus the one week hiatus while I was on vacation) I’ve been doing ridiculous amounts of work and running a lot of experiments and now that I’ve defended my Masters I’ve sort of hit a wall where I’m figuring out what needs to be done next and preparing to submit a paper for publication next month.  I think I have all the data I need to submit, based on the other papers by researchers in my area and what is included in their characterization papers, and it’s all written, I just need to extract it from my thesis and organize it into publication structure.  I think I could do this in a fairly reasonable time frame, probably before I go to Jazz Fest, but I want to meet with Monty to make sure he’s on the same page.  I feel like I know how I want my research papers to be structured but I’m not sure how to make sure they line up with his expectations other than to just ask (although that makes me a little worried about what I might hear!)  I also want to know what he expects of us before we prelim because all he has specified to date is that we have to have a first author research paper.  I already have one paper, but it’s a review paper, so by the end of the summer (fingers crossed) the paper I’m preparing will be submitted and accepted so that I’ll be able to prelim in the November/December time frame.  I’m not sure how this fits into the Monty grand scheme of things…

I’m tired of reading, but there are several things with my work that I am thinking about tweaking but each one requires a ton more background reading.  Since I’ve been doing so many experiments lately it feels weird to now spend like 80% of my time reading and only 20% on experiments, but I can’t do the experiments until I read so… sort of stuck where I am.  This perceived drop in productivity also makes me feel really guilty about going on some of my weekend trips coming up, and I feeling really weird about taking off because I feel like I should get a bunch of work done, and have a bunch of data to analyze so that when I go on the trip it’s a slight pause between the experimenting and the subsequent data analysis.  Instead I feel like I’ll be leaving my reading and coming back to more reading, not like I “earned” the weekend by getting a lot of results.

I’m not sure why I put this crazy pressure on myself -- yes I want to finish my PhD in a reasonable amount of time and if I’m here for 6 years it’s not the end of the world, but I’d like to graduate in May 2013.  When research is going smoothly I feel like this shouldn’t be an issue, but when I’m sort of mulling things over it feels like I’m going to be here forever.  I’m not really in a hurry to leave because I love the people here and Keegan has a good job in Raleigh, but it sort of feels like all the big things that come with being married and growing up (having kids, buying a house, etc) get put on hold or at least are very difficult to finagle and afford when you’re in school.

Other areas of my life are less frustrating though (yes, I have other areas of my life than school!  Sort of.)  Keegan and I have been spending a lot of time with his friends from undergrad and it’s really nice to get out and do things with people our own age that we don’t see at work.  In fact, one of his closest friends is South African and invited us to come with him next spring when he goes home to visit again!  This is very tempting since we would both love to go on a safari and spend time meeting Glen’s extended family and seeing the country from a native’s perspective, so we’ll have to see if we can plan that to fit into our schedules and most importantly, budget.  Going with a friend will save a ton of money though, when we’ve been invited to stay in his family’s house :-)  A bulk of the trip cost will be just getting there!  Maybe that will be our last hurrah before babies are in the picture.

My weight loss is also going well.  I weighed in at 133.8 this morning, so even though I’m not dropping lots of weight every week I seem to still be decreasing.  I haven’t changed anything about what I actually eat, I just changed the amounts of what I eat so I eat less of the sweet stuff and more of the green stuff.  I have been going to the gym every day for months now missing maybe one day every 3 weeks or so and although I’ve only been running (or walking at a huge incline) I think it’s making a difference.  All I did in undergrad to lose weight was run, so hopefully the difference in my 21 year old body compared to my 24 year old body isn’t tooooo much…

I'm also getting a lot of fun reading done -- you would think after spending the day reading at my desk I wouldn't want to go home and read, but I am enjoying reading things unrelated to school and it's nice to not think for awhile.