Month: November 2008

  • Thanksgiving Leftover Time begins

    I’ve been sick since last Sunday. Blech.

    New recipes for this Thanksgiving:

    Soft Ginger Cookies – switch margarine for butter.

    Much Fancier than Stovetop Stuffing     – made a half recipe. Started with the sausage and used its fat and only small amounts of butter to do the rest of the sauteing.

    Really happy with how both of them came out.

    I think I’ll finish my coffee before I take Alkaseltzer.

  • yay fall break!

    Thanksgiving/Fall Break week
    “dead” week (I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard them say that here.)
    finals week

    While I still have plenty that needs to get done, at least I know what I’m down to.

    Today (and at least one day next week) it’s time to do simulations for my research. Now that I know that they’re meant to be simulations, this piece makes way more sense!

    But the biggie is my econ paper/presentation. The paper is maybe 1/3 done, but I haven’t started the presentation – and I present one week from Thanksgiving, so I don’t get that extra weekend. Hopefully I can reuse a lot of my midsemester presentation and the tables for the paper.

    There’s one last class for Continuous Modeling – and I told the teacher I’d make her a list of places I’ve seen concepts from it already (2 direct references (3 if you could a scifi novel) and 2 “this was a great refresher for”s so far) which I’d like to do sooner rather than later so I don’t forget.

    The first pie of the season happened last Saturday. It was a Hypocrite Pie, which N had been talking up. I want “plain” apple for Thanksgiving, so I thought I’d start with that one. We tried draining the apples, but they still overpowered the custard and rose to the top. I’m not sure if I’m making it right, but it’s consistently yummy. (and first pie crust of the season came out great!)

  • frayed nerves time of semester

    I’m not sure what it is, but everyone at school (including me) just looks and feels incredibly tired. There’s so much more we have to get done by the end of the semester, and not really enough time to do it. And all our brains desperately need a break.

    Last Friday was ASA fall meeting – due to the above brain-deadness I usually manage to miss fall meeting, but I’m glad I finally made it to one. Part of the adventure was taking the school shuttle between campuses (I bet it wouldn’t take 45 minutes if we took the highway.) even though it turned out that it is possible to park at the other campus for free (since it’s not downtown like mine) We have a great statistics group – it’s fun seeing talks that get well into the problem, and then say “And this just didn’t freaking work. Ideas?”

    Had to send KK a “that super simple thing you told me to do? Yeah, can’t figure it out.” Haven’t heard back. Also got 4 more books that might help from the library, so I have something (hopefully) productive to do besides staring at my non-working code and freaking out.

    Making slow, steady progress on my econ paper. Maybe I won’t have so much trouble making it long as Dan expects.

    Recipe of the week: Super Rich Blueberry muffins. It halves and quarters fine (depends on how much sour cream I have on hand.) and frozen blueberries work just fine.