The final rundown

Here is the final rundown of the things that I made and sent off in the month of December.

baklava: a combo of this and this recipe, made with pecans
pistachio butterballs (like mexican wedding cookies with pistachios; from Dede Wilson's Unforgettable desserts)
salted caramel pistachio and pepita brittle
chocolate chocolate mint cookies (adapted from this)
cacao nib and caramelized almond biscotti (Also from Dede Wilson)
seven layer cookies
ma'amouls
cherry and pistachio nougat (from Craft of Baking)
chinese 5 spice cookies
penuche fudge (to which I added a layer of chocolate)
bacon fat doggie treats
pomegranate molasses cookies (adapted from molasses cookies)
rosemary walnut brown butter shortbread
matcha shortbread (Dede Wilson)
rugelach (dorie greenspan)
white chocolate walnut eggnog fudge

All in all I sent out about 10 packages filled with various of the treats above.  Many of these recipes I'd make again.

When I look at all of these recipes, I have to wonder what the hell else I do with my life?  For a while I'm on a baking moratorium.  I'm a bit tired of it, and I'm doing so much lab work (so much rain - no climbing outside!) that it's less appealing.  Plus Sunshine gave me her CSA box so now I'm focusing on cooking the veggies.  I made cream of mushroom soup with the chanterelle I found, and red endive, bacon and fontina pasta with some red endive from the CSA box and parsley from the garden.

A billion people are going to Bishop for New Year's, but I'm a bit turned off given that all of the granite boulders will be covered in snow. I'm cranking through a ton of labwork, so maybe I'll just stay that course. Then I won't feel bad about going to Europe.

I visited both Ethan and James last Sunday.  I got to climb with Ethan at MC, which is always a treat, given that he is bar-none the best climber I've ever climbed with.  Plus he has an easy confidence about his ability rather than a grandiose it's-no-big-deal attitude I've witnessed in good climbers before. Then we went to this kick-ass Mexican restaurant called El Metate and I got some amazing fish tacos. Damn I'm so jealous of people who live in SF. The restaurants in Davis suck.

On the way home from SF I stopped in Berkeley to see James.  We had a date, where we went to Walgreen's and then ate dessert in the Berkeley Bowl parking lot. I think it would be fair to call it a dessert sesh, except I just watched him eat the things I made and got his comments on them. I'm always trying to improve.

Finally, I've been reading a bunch lately. I just finished The Help by Kathryn Stockett.  Definitely recommended. I also recently read Alex and Me, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Cleft, and How to Talk to a Widower.  Most of what I read anymore was given to me - often nice easy-read books.

Oh right - I saw Tron last night with Bjorn and Mark. I'd give it a big fat "meh". Though the Daft Punk music and cameo was pretty sweet. CGI Jeff Bridges is totally creepy.

Mendo mushrooms

Above is the view of the ranch from Grandma's house.  The lens my camera won't completely retract at this point. I like to think of it as an asymmetrical vignette.  Anyway, here are the details from the mushroom hike at the ranch:

Delicious milk caps (Lactarius deliciosus) - These are fairly common. Supposedly they are edible but I've never tried them. They bruise green which is a bit of a turnoff:

Cowboy handkerchief (Hygrophorus eburneus) - these guys were all over the place. The are SO slimy (hence the name). Mykoweb says: "Edible, but too slimy to be of culinary value."

Yellow staining milk caps - I found a ton of these all under oaks and madrones. Boring.

Blewits (Lepista nuda) - These are common in Davis too. I found these growing out of a cow turd:

California giant chanterelle (Cantharellus californicus) - Uncle Alec found this impressive specimen.  I might try to eat it. It's pretty big! YUM!

Western Jack-o-lantern (Omphalotus olivascens) - poisonous, glows in the dark, and very impressive! Bay Area Mycological Society has a funny description of the poisons: " The toxins, similar to muscarine, present in a mistaken meal of Omphalotus may produce hallucinations (a plus for some), but will also open you, prodigiously, at both ends, for a not so fun time with fungus."

Bitter Brown leucopaxillus (Leucopaxillus gentianeus). This is an inedible, classic-looking mushroom:

Amanita ssp. - not sure what this is either, but it's very likely that it is poisonous:

Witches butter (Tremella aurantia) - This stuff is pretty cool. It looks a lot like snot stuck to dead tree branches. It parasitizes another fungus, the wood rotter, False turkey tail (Stereum hirsutum).

Pine spike (Chroogomphus rutilus, or C. vinicolor - I think). I've found a bunch of these in the Berkeley hills and in an area south of Santa Cruz.  They are edible and I've eaten them.

Turkey tail (Trametes versicolor), or false turkey tail (Stereum hirsutum). These are edible, but they don't taste like much. I think some people chew on them like gum:

Fried chicken mushroom? These are supposed to be found in disturbed areas, but I found them on a rotting stump, which I guess could be considered disturbed.  Anyway, I took a picture:

Here are two more I'm uncertain about:

Finally, the Madrone trees are AMAZING this year. I have never ever seen them so covered in red berries.  Glorious.

Christmas with the fam at the ranch

Sigh. Another Christmas at the ranch with many relatives I have nothing in common with. I suppose that's typical. They all asked me if I lift weights.  One woman asked me if I was going to be a doctor, and I was like "yeah, but not a medical doctor" and she started to go on and on about some celebrity doctor guy, and asking "have you heard of him?"  I'm like "no, but I'm not going to be a medical doctor." She's like "oh but he's a chiropractor...blah blah blah".  I just listened - what was I going to say?

Dinner wasn't that fun...

My uncle (the one who writes letters to the newspaper about how global warming is a conspiracy) asked me how I KNOW that the Sierra Nevada lakes were historically fishless.  Put on the spot like that, I'm like "I just know..." and he's like "HAhahaHAhah".  I was thinking about it later and I could come up with a ton of evidence (fossil record, geology and hydrology, native american historical records, the fact that stocked fish do not produce a viable population in the long-term, frogs and other insects that were once everywhere cannot survive in the presence of trout, etc.), but putting me on the spot like that, and asking me a question that I liken to "how do you KNOW the world is round" I came up empty handed. If I were writing it in a paper I think it would be classified as "common knowledge" and not need a citation. This is good practice for...talking to people who are...ignorant? In the moment though, it totally frosts my cookies.  I can appreciate an honest question, but not ones that seem specifically designed to elicit condescending laughter for the benefit of the asker.

Glory glory hallelujah, praise baby jesus that my dad has this little Verizon portable wireless thingie so I can connect to the internet. I know it's sad that without the interwebs I'm completely bored, but to be fair it is dumping rain outside, so cut me some slack. I did bring my rain pants and rain shell though, so maybe I'll walk around in the mud and cow shit later. I hope his Verizon thingie doesn't charge by the minute...

Fortunately it did not dump rain yesterday afternoon, so I had some time to find a bunch of mushrooms.  Pictures will be coming.

I might go visit Ethan in SF tomorrow on the way home. If I'm not going to climb at Jailhouse Monday or Tuesday, I may as well get a good workout at MC. Plus I haven't seen him since before he went to China. Should be fun to hang out and hear about the trip.  I'm looking at plane tickets for Europe right now...I'd like to meet up with people for a month or so in the Spring. Maybe even 6 weeks! If not, I'll take another trip. I'd really like to go to Greece.

The clock just struck 10. My grandma (and my aunts and uncles) all have this clock on the wall that pipes a song on the hour, every hour.  And yay! There's a Christmas setting!  I don't think that I would like knowing when each hour of my life passes while I'm sitting in my house.  Kind of grim.

So, now just an interminable afternoon of looking outside at the rain, a dinner, more present opening (always awkward), and then I'm bailing tomorrow.

By the way, this is for James. Enjoy your Chinese turkey!

Merry Christmas and stuff to everyone!

Things I've been thinking about

I keep turning things over in my head that I've been meaning to write about, so before I forget I'll just go ahead and jot them down:

1) the beauty of the rant.  Ranting is awesome.  I love to rant.  I also love to hear other people rant (of course, when it's violent and/or hateful, that's no fun), especially if it's a passionate funny rant. This guy at Jailhouse named Craig is a world-class ranter - he gets so passionate about it.  Whenever I start to hear him rant I try to get closer so I can listen to the rant. Fortunately whenever he's at the crag I can always count on one or two juicy rants.  It's good.

2) You can look at the behavior of individual people the way you can observe animal behavior.  There are patterns - you can observe risk, reward, and past behavior and make damn good predictions.  However I'm never surprised when I'm surprised.

3) baking.  I've sent a crap-load of cookies out this year.  It's fun to get feedback. People love getting stuff in the mail!  I like to think that I brightened someone's day. Plus I've gotten to try a bunch of new recipes, many of which are quite good...some of which I wouldn't make again.

4) I get so excited when I get a batch of sequences back from Davis sequencing that I drop everything and run to the lab to have a look at them.  It's awesome!  You get a ton of data at once, and you know what you are going to have to do next. At this point it's looking like I'll be learning some new techniques for getting sequence data.  Kind of cool and kind of annoying.

5) I'm worried that I might get scooped by the guy I'm trying to scoop for the project I'm collecting data for (see 4). He has the title of a paper and "in revision" on his website...hmmm...I already told my advisor that I feel bad for spending so much money (a couple thousand already...and I haven't even collected a fraction of the data), but he said he didn't care.

6) my parents are coming.  My mom sent me an email where she laid out ever detail of their visit and exactly what I'll be doing as well.  Lauren and John say that this is what old people do.  Plan shit.

7) Surprisingly, I've been going out a lot lately.  Thursday was happy hour for Bjorn's birthday, Friday was Jailhouse, Friday night was a Japanese fry party at Lisa and Bjorn's house (lots of panko), Saturday was lots of lab work, Sunday was a gym session with Jake and dinner at Lauren and John's.  Winter is good for that.

Ugh. rain.

Day 3 of interminable rain. Going stir crazy. Went to the gym today...

Stuff. Blah blah blah, then more stuff.

No end to the rain in the 10 day forecast.

Why James is awesome.

It's raining here, so I'm lab-bound and gym-bound for a while. Add this to the many hours of darkness every day and you get a more angst-y version of me.  Scary thought, no?

I was talking with my friend James today about trying hard.  Six years ago today he fell while free-soloing in Joshua Tree.

James climbs a lot.  He aspires to do things that are very hard for him, and he gets them done. James isn't the most physically talented rock climber (most of us aren't talented - it's rare to be truly talented I think, so I don't feel like this is insulting), but he still accomplishes very impressive goals.  I'm a lot more impressed with people like James who face great odds (he's put together with pins now!) and accomplish goals than I am with people who find things easy.  Stubbornness levels the playing field: James has climbed more hard shit than most people who are naturally talented. He has more tenacity than anybody I've ever met.

James is inspiring to me. I'm not a talented rock climber by any stretch of the imagination. I actually have to try, and I definitely get scared, and bored, and give up on things.  If I don't pay attention, I put on weight, I get weak, and I have to work hard.  At this point, I'm less interested in what I could do if I were actually talented, and more interested in what I could accomplish if I were more like James. James is rad.

That said, I have worked hard this fall. After 2 days on a route called Cell Block, I think I could send it within a few tries.  This route felt completely impossible to me a few years ago.

I feel stronger than I've ever been before, and more mellow about climbing in general.  I'm hoping to send some stuff before the balance shifts more towards suck, as it inevitably will.  And I hope it stops raining!!!

omg

not only for the cute factor, but wtf is it doing?

I find this very interesting

How impulse control relates to prosperity.  

There is a LOT of information packed into this piece. Of course when I think about impulse control, I think about the people I know, and who is good at it and who is not and how that relates to their life.  But this perspective can be broadened to think about nations and culture, and the relationship between impulse control and wealth.

It circles back to an idea that I've been pondering lately that is inspired by basic behavioral ecology: The decision to do something is also the decision NOT to do something else.  The decision to spend your life climbing is also the decision to not, for example, go to college. Or to not stay in one place and cultivate meaningful relationships. Ultimately my decision to go to graduate school was, in some ways, the decision to not depend on climbing for overall happiness. It is not sustainable for me - the gain in climbing harder doesn't make up for what I would have to give up.

I think it's a decision that most obsessive climbers come to in the end, whether because they are not good enough to make it a profession, or because they don't want to limit their lives to such a narrow focus. I've seen a lot more depression/struggling in people with the former scenario.

By the way, this guy is so so smart. And so productive with his writing and blogging. It's really impressive.

Ugh.

Pineapple express coming our way.

Tilden mushroom hunting with Shannon

Today I went down to Walnut Creek to pick Shannon up so we could look for mushrooms.  First we went to Briones, but we didn't find much.  Just a couple of boletes that were infected with another fungus.

So we decided to go to Tilden, because I know there are mushrooms there.  We found a couple, but nothing like what Drew and I found a few years back.  Here are some photos:

Western Grisette (Amanita pachycolea), below with Shannon to show the size. It's a pretty cool mushroom, in the Amanita genus, which includes the mushrooms that are deadly poisonous - the Death Cap and the Destroying Angel. I went on a mushroom hunt with Sunshine when we lived in Santa Cruz and she found a HUGE Destroying Angel. 

The Western grisette is edible, but we let it be.

 This is a Cauliflower mushroom (Sparassis radicata), well-spotted by Shannon.

Apparently these are cultivated for food in Asia. Here's a quote I lifted from Wikipedia: Sparassis crispa can be very tasty, but should be thoroughly cleaned before use as the folds can contain dirt and other material, as it grows and envelops objects around it such as pine needles. Antonio Carluccio reports that European Sparassis crispa should be picked when creamy white, and once yellow are too indigestible to eat. It is good for drying and reconstituting as it retains its cartilaginous texture and hence is good for soups.

A Sulfur tuft (Hypholoma fasciculare). This guy is NOT edible.  Here's what wikipedia says: "consuming it can cause vomiting, diarrhea and convulsions." We didn't pick this either.

So that was my day.  Not too many mushrooms this year. There was a hard freeze for a few nights in a row last month, which I think put the kibosh on a good mushroom year.  

Haul of Justice

So Jailhouse season has begun for me, and I'm trying to climb there two days a week.  I started working on a project called Electric Chair, but it sucks and the crux is a big sideways dyno that I can't do, so I gave up. I started working Haul of Justice instead, because I figured that if I'm going to fall of a route, I may as well fall off a quality route.  This one is pretty fun. Hopefully I stick with it.

It's hard.

Someone who was around for part of the Spain-Trip-from-Hell is coming to climb at Jailhouse, and I'm a bit hesitant to spend time with him.  I don't want to dredge up the past, and this guy is a notorious boundary-pusher (putting it generously). Blargh. Maybe I'll get lucky and not see him very much. What's done is done.

I remember last year I was...not spyched...around Christmas time. I don't think I got any gifts for anyone, and sort of hid from the festivities.  This year I'm pretty psyched though, and I have a bunch of gifts planned for people. It's fun!  Last year I made some truffles for my family as a last minute gift.

I have big plans for homemade gifts this year, starting with the salsas and jams I canned late summer. I want to make some cookies, some apple cider gummies (like gumdrops), maybe some biscotti, truffles, doggie treats for the dog owners, and whatever else I think of.  I wandered around Davis and picked some pink peppercorns (the trees are planted ornamentally around town), and I'll make some toffee with them.  I was worried about poisoning people, but I told Emily that they grew around Davis and she made some caramels and already fed them to people, and they aren't dead yet, so I guess they are ok. I'm glad she did some testing for me...I'm a bit conservative when it comes to eating things I gather.

January 11 I turn 31.  Or, as Bjorn and Lisa call it: thirty-WON-derful.  can't. wait.

Arsenic-based life form? Don't get too excited.

Here is a nice piece on the arsenic-based life forms hullaballoo from Slate. I think it's kind of messed up that NASA's press release was:

NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.


Because, really, that's not what happened at all.  If you want to get into the meat of the criticism, see here.

Though often science is not very scientific, at least there is a broad community for peer-review. Even if a paper or a piece of research gets beyond the first gauntlet of getting published, if it's no good, or there are big questions remaining, it will be eviscerated in the science blogosphere, and perhaps a rebuttal will be published in the original journal.

NASA scientists are not commenting.

This is why I don't sleep in

Holy shit I had the weirdest dreams last night. I think it's because I overslept (usually I wake up between 6 and 7, this morning I made it until 8). Also, my housemate and I watched two intense movies last night: The Last King of Scotland and Notes on a Scandal.  So my brain was prepped for weird dreams.  I don't mind weird dreams except for the fact that they seem SO REAL. I'll even have internal conversations with myself in my dreams about how this is probably a dream but it feels real.  Very real conversations with real people...it's intense.  So here are some highlights from last night: my sister (who's been dead for almost 10 years) murdered someone that had something to do with the Catholic church.  The person was a friend of hers who was in the hospital. My parents were trying to deal with it. Simultaneously, my ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend was sending me texts of her tits (in my dream she is foreign and has poor command of the English language, perhaps texting tits enabled her to communicate more freely?).  I was super annoyed by this, so I was trying to post them on the internet for the collective embarrassment of all involved, but my cell phone plan had some privacy setting that reset text messages every night so I couldn't retrieve the picture. Yes.  So. Weird.

My point is: sleeping in - not for me.