Jose has decided to try his hand at blogging again, with a focus on the subject he finds most interesting: science! If you want to talk about anything related to astronomy, biology, physics, technology, etc, I can guarantee he will be excited to discuss it with you. You can join him here:
As Houstonians, we have to put up with extended heat and humidity for months and months each year. Therefore, during the short period in March and/or April when the weather is beautiful and clear and gorgeous and perfect -- in short, on days like today -- I think there should be a law that no one has to go to work. It's just mean to make me sit here when the view out the window is so tempting.
This kind of lovely, cloudless day happens with welcome frequency in the spring. Last month, one of the crewmembers on the International Space Station took this photo from orbit. Just to the lower left of center is a neighborhood with a golf course running through the middle. (It's easier to see if you view large on Flickr.) That's my neighborhood!
While I was looking for that picture, I also came across this picture of Dubai. I knew they had a palm shaped island. Islands in the shape of continents? That's a new one!
While I don't know if he took these photos specifically, one of the current crewmember, Soichi Noguchi from Japan, has been taking tons of photos from orbit and posting them via Twitter. (He's @Astro_Soichi.) Since I'm on the topic, here are a couple of my favorites that he's posted lately:
"Himalaya in sunset. Lake Manasarovar is still frozen."
He's also been taking photos of the glaciers in Patagonia. They are spectacular. I'm pretty sure we saw both of these when we went to Patagonia in 2006. (I need to repost those photos. Dang I was skinny then.)
"South Patagonia. One of the most beautiful glaciers of the world. 800mm lens will take you there :-)"
"Glacier lake in Southern Patagonia. See the color difference between the two lakes."
We went to the rodeo last night, but we didn't actually see the rodeo.
We got a late start, and traffic was horrendous. By the time we finally walked through the gate, it was 8:15 and the rodeo was 3/4 done. I was really annoyed at the world while we were stuck in traffic and missing the steer roping and bull riding, etc, but after I finally accepted the idea that we were just not going to get there, it was fine. Neither of us particularly cared about the concert that followed the rodeo (Rascal Flatts), so we didn't even bother going inside the arena. Instead, we headed straight for the food and the carnival and ended up salvaging our rodeo outing -- in fact, we had a great time.
We rode the Ferris wheel...
... and enjoyed the view from on high.
Then we rode the swings, which made us dizzy...
...but that was fine, since there was no one else on the ride to witness our stumbling afterwards.
Although the fact that we got dizzy on the mere swings made us decide to forego crazier rides like this one!
These turkey legs looked tasty, but we'd already eaten brisket sandwiches.
We checked out all our options for fried desserts, which included Twinkies, Moon Pies, cheesecake, and tiramisu...
...before deciding to partake of some fried Oreos covered with powdered sugar.
So you know: fried Oreos taste like chocolate doughnuts!
Since most people were inside listening to Rascal Flatts, it wasn't crowded at all!
Jose tried to win a giant stuffed basketball, but alas, luck was not on his side.
At the end of the night, we took the carnival chair lift back to the other side of the park, and waved at the monkey and banana traveling in the other direction! I'm sure they had a fun time on the rest of the rides.
(All photos were taken with the Hipstamatic app on my iPhone. There are a few more on Flickr if you're interested.)
There's not much that tastes better than a cookie straight out of the oven. And unlike most of the things I've been cooking lately, cookies are something I've been making for years and years.
No secrets here. I just follow the recipe that's on the back of pretty much every Nestle Toll House bag. I use Crisco instead of butter. Why? Because that's how my mom always did it, which made me wonder what the difference between butter and shortening really is.
While I don't think shortening is actually any healthier, it does seem to make a difference in the texture of the cookies. I've used actual butter once or twice, and while the cookies taste more buttery (obviously), they come out kind of flattened. With shortening, they come out fluffier. Actually, fluffier is probably not the right word, but they are definitely less dense. I like 'em better that way, and I don't miss the butter flavor.
I found this blog entry this morning that explains why, if you're curious. (The difference is primarily that butter has some water in it and a lower melting point, while shortening does not. Cooking = science! Hooray for science!)
I've used that recipe a hundred times, but often substitute different kinds of chips, which can really change the cookies. I haven't done anything truly crazy, but I've made this same recipe using butterscotch chips, peanut butter chips, M&Ms, white chocolate chips, and Andes mint chips. Maybe some others that I can't remember, too. Anyway, this time I used half a bag of peanut butter chips and half a bag of chocolate chunks. You can also add nuts if you want, though I usually don't.
The recipe says to bake for 9-11 minutes. For years, I always had to bake for more like 8 minutes. I would inevitably forget this, and end up toasting the first pan a bit too much. Apparently this was due to my many crappy electric apartment ovens that ran hot. Ever since we moved into the house with our awesome gas oven (with digital temperature gauge!), these cookies come out perfect after exactly 10 minutes.
Yum!
The photo above of the flower beds in front of our house was taken last July. Everything had just been planted by the builder, and it was the middle of summertime. Lots of sun, plenty of late afternoon thunderstorms to keep thirsty plants happy.
This is what they looked like by the beginning of March. Pretty ragged, right? While I don't expect everything to look as lush and green in February as it does in July, the periods of unusually cold weather have taken their toll. I expect (hope) that most of the plants will make a comeback now that the weather is warming up -- along with the stupid crunchy St. Augustine grass that turns brown in the winter -- but the large fern-like plant that was front and center was obviously a casualty of the freeze and the monkey grass looked like it had all been stomped on by an elephant. It was time for some gardening.
I know basically nothing about plants and shrubs, so we headed over to Maas Nursery in Seabrook. Multiple people had told me it was the place to go, and it was indeed awesome. We said "show us the low maintenance section" and then picked out a couple different plants to start our experiment. We decided to address the front row of the beds for now, since it looked the worst. (Plus, we think the stuff in the back rows will perk up over the next couple months.) Our main criteria was anything that looked nice, was reasonably drought-tolerant, and liked full sun, since our front yard bears the brunt of the afternoon summer sun. We bought:
(Side note: when I googled yaupon holly, I discovered that the scientific name is ilex vomitoria. Yes, vomitoria. What a pleasant name for a plant.)
This past Saturday was an absolutely beautiful spring Houston day, so we spent two hours outside planting all of the new stuff. It was surprising hard work and we were both sore the next day. But the beds look better already!
We replaced the dead fern thing with the big viburnum. The bright green color is really nice, and it should produce flowers at some point. We also dug out most of the monkeygrass and replaced them with alternating holly and sage bushes. Those can grow pretty big if you let them, so we'll have to prune them occasionally, but that's sufficiently "low maintenance" for me.
Before
After
We do still need a new batch of mulch to put down over the whole bed. Any of my truck-owning friends want to volunteer?
Before
After
I still don't really know what I'm doing when it comes to gardening, so who knows, we may be replacing some of these again next year. It's a learning experience!
Today is my brother's 30th birthday. Happy Birthday David!
I finally got the final DVD full of the high-resolution scans of the 1000+ old slides I sent off to be digitized. They are pretty awesome.
In honor of David's birthday, here are 3 pictures of him. I snuck myself into the last one because hey -- it's MY blog. Haha.
We are dog-sitting Gizmo for a few days while Kelly and John are out of town. She is small and cute, and though she knows us, she seemed absolutely terrified when we went over to pick her up on Wednesday evening. She calmed down pretty quickly though and is now being thoroughly spoiled by Jose's mom, who took her on at least 3 walks yesterday.
She follows us around the house and watches whatever we are doing. Making dinner, folding laundry, working on the computer...it's pretty cute. Jose has already announced that he wants a dog. (He announced that a couple months ago; dog-sitting for Gizmo just reminded him.) So we'll see.
Jose's mom is visiting us for the week. Tickets from Corpus Christi to Houston get so cheap on Southwest that if you wait for the right time, you can fly round trip for $78. That's within a few bucks of what we pay for gas each time we drive down there -- one tank there, one tank back. Anyway, the cheap ticket prices let her come for a longer visit than usual, so she flew in on Saturday and leaves next Monday.
We can't take the week off work, so she's been hanging out at the house during the day. Yesterday I came home and she had made cupcakes. Yum! Then while I went for a run, she started making dinner and it was ready right when Jose got home from class at 7:00.
Just like I say whenever my own mom comes to visit and does my laundry: I could get used to this!
In other news, last night we finally went live with two websites I've been spending every free moment working on since mid-January. (They're paying me, so the comment about spending all my free time on it is not a complaint in any way, but merely a statement of fact.) After spending so much time on them, I find myself looking at them now and thinking that they don't look like they should have taken so much work. Hmph.
Anyway, if you are curious, here they are: misshoustonpageant.com and missbayareapageant.com. I've been working with the pageant producer for a couple years now; you may remember a mention here or there of creating the program book each year since early 2008. This time around they wanted a refresh of their very stale old site. They seem really happy with the result, so I'm happy too.
I'm in the first day of a three-day class about Simulink and Stateflow. Those are two software/coding/simulation tools that have gotten a lot of use around NASA lately as we are (or were) designing flight software for a new vehicle. They're part of Matlab, which is a coding language I used extensively in my old job down the hall, but haven't touched in the four years since I moved to the Rendezvous office.
I'm encouraged to find that I haven't completely forgotten all of my Matlab skills, and that I'm pretty good at picking up Simulink. Simulink is all visual -- as in, you drag blocks around that represent equations and functions and inputs and outputs -- and I'm pretty good with all things visual.
I'm not really sure why I'm in this class except for the fact that they needed a civil servant to meet their headcount requirements. (As a cynical aside, the fact that I'm a civil servant seems to be all I'm good for these days.) I don't have any immediate use for these skills. But it's been more fun so far than I thought, and it's always good to have a new skill. Right???
Now for a complete topic shift, and to give the non-engineers reading this something that they actually care about, I will show you what I made for dinner last night: Pioneer Woman's meatloaf. I haven't had meatloaf in a very long time, and after we finished, Jose said "that was major comfort food." And it was. Meatloaf with a side of potatoes.
Meatloaf is totally easy to make. You just put everything in a bowl and mash it up.
We were generous with the parsley, yet I still wish we'd added more.
In addition to that stuff above (meat and cheese and spices), you also add eggs and bread soaked in milk. Then you get to mush everything together, which is easiest to do if you use your hands. I suppose this part would suck if you don't like touching meat. I'm not a huge fan of touching raw chicken, but for some reason ground beef really doesn't bother me.
The only hitch was that I couldn't find my loaf pan. I KNOW I used to have a blue pyrex bread pan. It matched the blue pyrex baking dishes I have in 2 different sizes. But last night it was nowhere to be found, and the only thing Jose could find was a small aluminum loaf pan that was not nearly big enough for all that meat. Let's just say we will be eating meatloaf for the next couple days as leftovers. See, something I have quickly realized is that Pioneer Woman's recipes make a TON of food. Enough to feed her family of 6 plus a few guests, I suppose. I really need to start cutting them in half.
So we used one of the baking dishes and had "meatloaf brownies." That picture shows the situation after I'd covered half the meatloaf brownies in sauce. Don't worry, I finished covering it with sauce before I baked them.
Meatloaf brownies. Try it.
On Saturday, Debbie and I did the Great Urban Race. It's an adventure race / scavenger hunt that's held in cities around the country, and this was the first year they'd done one in Houston. Despite the fact that it occupied my entire Saturday, and the race experienced a few "first race" issues when they had twice as many teams as they'd expected, it was a lot of fun.
We had twelve checkpoints -- figuring out where they were required puzzle-solving and Google-searching skills (phones and laptops were allowed, and calling people was also fair game) -- and were allowed to skip one. We started at Lucky's Pub just a couple blocks from Minute Maid Park, and ended up running through downtown and all the way to Montrose when all was said and done.
Debbie named our team the Lollipop Lobsters, and she invented lobster costumes for us to wear. Our extra arms turned out looking more like sausages, but oh well. One of the clues had nine things to take a photo of, and we needed any 3 in a tic-tac-toe pattern. The first one we got was both of us with a stranger wearing a cowboy hat. Since there was a gun show going on at the convention center, this was quite easy to find.
Another of the tic-tac-toe options was to take a photo of us with 5 strangers in front of a fountain. This one was right in the middle of Discovery Green, and there were tons of people around so it was easy to find some enthusiastic strangers. Being dressed in our ridiculous lobster getup didn't hurt either.
The first couple checkpoints we attacked were downtown. (We weren't required to do the checkpoints in any certain order, but could determine ourselves how we wanted to proceed.) The clue for this was to take a photo of both teammates touching the statue at a given set of coordinates, which turned out to the Joan Miro statue in front of the Chase building at the corner of Milam and Capitol.
We also had to take a picture of us in front of the clock on the corner of Main and Texas. The catch was that we had to be within a minute of 20 minute increments (i.e. 1:00, 1:20, 1:40, 2:00, etc). Fortunately we timed things well.
From there, we hopped on the Metro and rode along for a few stops until right after we'd passed under I-45. Public transportation was allowed and encouraged! A few blocks from the stop was the Nouveau Antique Art Bar, where we had to take a picture of ourselves in front of the mural on the wall. We then ran over to "the best place to watch hockey in Houston," which turned out to be the Maple Leaf Pub on Elgin, where we had to get a ping pong ball into a cup a la beer pong. There was one more checkpoint in this area that we skipped -- it would have required one of us to eat a habanero pepper, and neither of us wanted to do that!
Then we had to head out Westheimer. We kept looking for the bus to come by so we could hop on, but it never did. The winning teams did indeed take the bus, so I guess we were just unlucky. No bus meant we had to go on foot, which added about 3 miles to our path. We did it anyway. One stop was in front of this mural at the Leopard Lounge, another was at the Aurora Picture Show, and a third was at Cherryhurst Park where we had to do an obstacle course.
We had no luck with buses on the way back either, so we had to go all the way back to the Metro stop and ride a few stops back into downtown. We ran over to the Houston Public Library and made origami. I have to say, we totally ROCKED the origami challenge. We were in and out of there in about 5 minutes, and it sounded like other teams had been there for a lot longer than that.
Our final stop was "the Travis location of the restaurant founded by Tom & James Papadakis," where we had to take a photo of one teammate feeding the other teammate a cookie. The restaurant turned out to be James Coney Island. (Thanks to Jose for Googling that one for us as our "phone-a-friend!")
We passed back through Discovery Green on our way to the finish line, where we stopped to get a photo of Debbie shaking a dog's paw to complete our tic-tac-toe. We'd had to change direction halfway through the race after failing to find a restaurant with a to-go menu with an eggroll on it -- it was amazing to us that we couldn't find a single Chinese restaurant with egg rolls. Oh, there were spring rolls galore, but no egg rolls!
We finished back at the pub, where we think we were in the middle of the pack. We'll know for sure when they post results later this week. We hung around for the awards and costume contest, but sadly we didn't even make the finals. There were a lot of people in great costumes, and since the voting was done by applause, the guys who won were the guys who had the most friends there, pretty much. They were entertaining though.
I mapped something close to our path this morning, and found that we covered around 10 miles. About 2.5 of that was on the Metro, which means we ended up covering somewhere between 7-8 miles on foot. I didn't realize it had been that far, but that explains why I was so tired that night!!
