Favorite pumpkin cookies

I make several batches of these a year:

Pumpkin cookies (from Moosewood Classics)

1 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1 cup pumpkin puree
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
2 cups flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp allspice
2 cups dark chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 375, line cookie sheets with parchment paper.

Cream butter and sugar together until fluffy.  Add pumpkin, vanilla and egg, beat for 1 minute. Sift together dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, allspice). Add dry ingredients to wet ingredients, mix until flour disappears into the batter. Fold in chocolate chips. Bake 375 for 10-15 minutes.

They are really really good.

Went to Berkeley today and hung out with Brad. We wandered around the Berkeley Hills and then climbed at Ironworks. Poor Red dog got attacked by another dog and had a cone of shame on to prevent him from injuring it further. Poor guy.

Sunshine and Peter stopped by the gym, so I could give her a bunch of salsas and cookies and books. Kind of cool to have my two lives intersect every now and again (academic:athletic)

So that was my Halloween weekend. And getting too drunk at the Ringelmans' party.  eeehhhh....

halloweeeeeeeen!!!

My friends and I have decided that Halloween is now a multi-week holiday. Fine by me.

Here are photos of my lame-ass costume. For me it's enough to put on a dress to look completely different, but i put on a bunch of green makeup so I'm DUH DEE DUH...poison ivy?  if I had zombie makeup I'd go the zombie route, but as it stands I have some green makeup from highschool. So I'm workin' with what I've got. One picture is kind of cute, and the other one is sort of...not.

awesomeness

I am loving this right now:



Florence + the machine.

I love the fact that she is so exuberant, and probably batshit crazy.  Rad.

It's raining, which is not so rad.  I might try to get up to Donner on Sunday to work on Bronco.  I might be close?  Unsure. Jailhouse is in season but I'm "meh" about it.  Might see B-Rad tomorrow, depending on climbing/schedule intersections.  He has become a good friend.

Halloween parties: hmmm...I have this crazy mask, so I might actually attend some parties this year.  Last year I not feeling festive and wanted to avoid people altogether; this year is much much better. On the other hand, I don't want to get wasted if I'm going to try to climb on Sunday.

Oh yeah, Lisa and Bjorn made the most AMAZING dinner last night.  Whenever I go over to their house for dinner it's like a foodie explosion. Lisa is a great cook, Bjorn is a good griller, and I always bring the dessert. This time I brought double apple bread pudding with a pumpkin brioche that I made. It was yum. Lisa made fruits der mer - clams, mussels, scallops and prawns over spaghetti in a saffron broth. It was exquisite.

Psyched out of my dome

It's times like these that I know I'm born to do science.  Maybe I'm not born to do science well, but I'm born to do it nonetheless.  I've been dreading sending some samples in for sequencing because I just KNEW that they would fail.  I've done the PCRs, gels and cleanups several times, which is a number of days of work, before I figured it out. Because I SUCK at labwork.

Anyway, I got some data!  This is so freakin' cool.  Super psyched. Wow.

Great article on science + ESA + water management

This is a fairly short article that explains some of the issues in the delta really well. I like it in part because my lab does a lot of the delta science (especially with the delta smelt and now with some of the San Joaquin chinook runs), and my part time job with the USFWS exposes me to the process of writing recovery plans and biological opinions.

Even if you aren't invested in the delta, it's a pretty cool article. If you're reading this, you probably live in California, and you probably get your water from the delta.

50/50 wet/dry winter

Thanks NOAA...actually it's not their fault that we live in a transitional zone.  Sacramento and central California are in the transition zone between areas predicted to be hotter and drier this winter (southwest) and areas predicted to be wetter and colder (pacific northwest).

Today I went up to Donner and ticked Bucko.  Sort of anticlimactic since I just tried it a couple times Saturday and then did it first go today.  I went up again to try Bronco, made it through the roof and then had some trouble getting on to the head wall.  I lowered and then used Arturo's toprope to work the headwall and did all of the moves.  The cool thing is that I sent Bucko, then did the first half of both routes two more times clean. I guess I have it on lockdown.  The other cool thing is that the last time I climbed at Star Wall I was still pretty sick.  I feel so much better now!  It's awesome.

I hope I can send Bronco before the snow hits.  It's hard to say how quick it will go (if at all). Then again, I've been finishing things pretty quickly lately, so maybe I'm on an upswing?

garden photos

Here are some photos of the garden I took today.  At the end is a photo of Vicken and John eating some habanero jelly that I made. There must be something about the amazing warm, sunny weather we have here.  Stuff grows gangbusters here!

For all you paleo-dieters...

Evidence that the prehistoric diet was more than meat and berries and fish - early humans ground grains into "flours".

brunch!

I'm having a few people over for brunch this morning, mostly so I can make donuts.  Donuts are not the sort of thing you want to make for yourself...

I've been sport climbing outside again, which is fun!  I haven't really climbed that much this summer, so I was pleased to send a new .12b and a new 11d/.12a (which is probably .11c).  Those were both at Mayhem.  I went to Star Wall yesterday and got on Bucko, which I hadn't tried in a couple of years. I think it will go pretty soon. It's a cool route and it shares the start with Bronco, which is a solid .12d.  The goal is to send them both before it gets too cold and wet.  I always follow the crowds and climb in Tahoe over the summer and then move to Sonora in the Fall, but now I'm excited to take advantage of the good temps and the thin crowds.  Star Wall can be such a shit show in the summer...and usually when the days are long I'd rather be in the mountains and not sport climbing.

"The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" is on tv right now. Wow is it bad. I think I saw it in the theater in high school or something like that. I saw a lot of bad movies in the theater in high school. Then again, midnight movies were 5 bucks, and we couldn't get into bars, so why not?

Going back to Star Wall was a reminder of how much people talk about climbing. blah blah blah did you hear about this did you see that article in rock and ice did you watch the Reel Rock Tour.  The answer is no.  I don't look at climbing magazines, climbing websites, or climbing movies.  Period. I might look at a link that someone sends me though.

I had dinner with B-Rad a few months ago and I remember him saying "I love rock climbing but I don't like climbers that much."  I can understand that sentiment, though many of my best friends are climbers. It's a funny thing.  I wonder if I just have very extreme reactions to life events...ever since my relationship with Alex bit the dust I've just been done with it.  I don't know how useful it is to be so stubborn, but it works for me, so there it is. Plus I always leave room for changing my mind. Who knows how I'll feel about the climbing media in a week or a year.  I try not to set hard rules for myself, and generally listen to my gut and do what I feel like doing. I'm old enough to realize that I can't force myself to do things (even though that would be a valuable skill!). At some point I'll get pushed to the point where it's what happens.

Ethan sent me a link to Sonnie Trotter's blog (which I was reluctant to open for reasons described above), and apparently Sonnie quite Facebook too.  I don't know Sonnie at all, and the most I've ever thought about him is when Shannon and I have an argument about whether he's hot or not (NOT! then again, I go for interesting-looking people rather than pretty boys, so I'm biased, but then again, attractiveness is completely subjective anyway babble babble babble).

Ethan has been off of FB for a while and I quit in January. It's funny that it's such a "big deal" to quit. I guess whenever you do something that potentially will cut you off from what's going on, and it's something that everyone else is doing, you kind of have to justify it to yourself (especially when it often seems so difficult to really connect with people in life).  Then you make the decision and looking back, it seems like a non-decision. I talked to Renee about quitting FB a few weeks ago and she was like "I don't think I could do it!".  I was thinking "well, it wasn't really a decision when I did it...it just had to happen." Not a big deal in the end. I can't handle that many people and that much chatter anyway...I'm too much of an introvert.

All that to say that I'm having brunch his morning and making donuts. YUM!

I like this

I like this cd that I just got, by the Fleet Foxes.  Here's a couple of songs.

File this under "I get hosed"

So someone broke a window on my car as it was parked in front of my house last night.  Driver's rear.

They only took a pack that had 2 pairs of climbing shoes (1 was a nearly new pair of solutions), my harness, grigri and chalk bag.  Super lame.  People who steal suck. My rack was in my car but they didn't take that (phew).

Anyway, the total cost of replacing the window was about 500 bucks.  Which is my car insurance deductible...per occurrence.  We have no homeowner's insurance that covers property, so the climbing gear is a loss.

Fortunately I have some friends who are helping me out with new gear, but I'm sure I"ll have to pay full price for the shoes and grigri.  Sigh.

Someone in my lab told me today "you don't seem that mad."  I'm like "well, what are you going to do?" I've been broken into before, but not in this car and not at this house.  In Vegas I was climbing with an old boyfriend and they broke my car window and only stole my boyfriend's down coat. That was also "lucky", because the car sat on the side of the highway for hours after the cops came and left a note on the car. We were living out of the car, so it had all of our gear in it.  I had a rental car (which I was living in) in Australia, and someone broke in and stole EVERYTHING.  Except my shoes and underwear. I was climbing in a sport bra, so I didn't even have a shirt on my back...literally.  And I had 1 pair of pants left which split up the butt the next day.  That was grim.  Fortunately my partner had his wallet on him or else we would never have made it back to Sydney. I don't know what we would have done otherwise.  I can't imagine if that happened in a non-English speaking country. I shudder to think.

I know I'm not supposed to leave things in my car, but it's Davis, so I got complacent. I don't know...it's just one more strike against general humanity.  If someone wants to fuck you, they'll fuck you, and there's not much you can do about it. Guess I need to be more vigilant...and get some property insurance.

More religious literacy data breakdown; looking ahead.

Here's a nice breakdown of some more data (by education and income levels) that my favorite science blogger put up today.

I've had a lot of energy lately...so I'm trying to channel it which means less blogging. Sitting and writing or reading is pretty difficult, though I've managed to squeeze out revisions and a final report (which will be my final chapter in my PhD). I think that sticking around most weekends the second half of summer has been a nice change...I'm climbing a bunch in the gym, canning, gardening, writing, pet frogging, baking, cooking, spending time with friends etc. However all that will probably change as the weather cools and Jailhouse and Gold Wall come into season. I'd like to start climbing at Jailhouse again, but I'm not sure if I can handle the company there. Maybe I'll just try to polish off the rest of Gold Wall this season...I'm getting semi-close!

Also, I'm looking for people who are going to be able to go on a massive climbing trip next summer/fall.  Get in touch if you can hit the road for some or all of it.