The best thing about this website is that I can spend hours on it at work, and nosy coworkers looking over my shoulder may assume I'm just making some work-related charts and graphs.
Except when I start laughing really really loud.

if the kilo of cocaine and the machine gun weren't incriminating enough...

I just read this article about a dude in Lowell who had 40 POUNDS of pot FEDEXED to him AT HOME. But that's not the only funny part:

When local and state police searched his apartment they said they found baggies containing cocaine, another 10 pounds of marijuana, a bullet-proof vest under his mattress and a loaded 40-caliber semi-automatic handgun.

Under his bed they found a box with Soviet military writing on it containing 14 boxes of machine-gun rounds.

In the closet, police found an Ultimac Mac 90 machine gun with two, 30-round magazines.

They also found a magazine called High Times in the apartment.

happy Thanksgiving, and don't forget forget that Friday is a holiday too.

pumpkin pie contest

since I'm unable to win a pie contest where the participants are "other people," I decided to have a pie contest with myself. I totally won.

this year for Thanksgiving dessert, my mother is making a chocolate-y thing and my aunt is making apple pie. I'm the one who should get to make apple pie, since I've been diligently, painstakingly perfecting my recipe for over two years now. Maybe my family heard about my staggering loss at the annual Halloween apple pie making contest.

Just to recap, last year I was convinced I lost because, unlike some people, I didn't let the Pillsbury dough boy make my crust. This year I lost by an even huger margin, despite using a store-bought crust.

sooooo anyways, i basically suck at making apple pies that people like, yet I decided to try my hand at making pumpkin pie, which I don't even like. (My dad and grandfather like it though). Since I never made it before, I looked at dozens of PP recipes online, confused them all in my brain, then made two different recipes and let The People choose which was better.

PP1 was based loosely on a combination of the recipe from the can of pumpkin and the aforementioned "research." It involved a can of pumpkin, the usual spices and some salt and flour, 3 eggs, 3/4 cup of brown sugar, 2/3 cup of maple syrup, and 1 1/4 cup of half and half. I mixed them all together, poured it into the crust and baked it at 350 for a little over an hour. I had to cover the crust with aluminum foil after about 20 minutes. The middle was a little jiggly when I took it out, so after cooling it on a wire rack, I refrigerated it for about two hours. It came out pretty well, nice and dark, but too sweet for my taste.

PP2, the product of "additional research" plus the recipe from the can of sweetened condensed milk, was a lot more labor-intensive. First I prebaked the crust with foil around the edges. Then I mixed a can of pumpkin, a can of sweetened condensed milk, and the spices - but not the eggs - in a saucepot on the stove and cooked for about 15 minutes. I brought it almost to a boil and then turned off the heat and let it cool and thicken before beating in 2 eggs. I have no idea why I waited to add the eggs, but it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. I put it in the crust and baked it at 425 for 15 minutes (with foil already on the edges) and then turned the heat down to 350 for another 40 minutes, and cooled it on a wire rack.

PP2 looked much lighter and the filling was a lot less dense, but the texture was a lot better and more even. I'm sure that was due to cooking the pumpkin before putting it in the oven. It was also a lot less sweet, which I like, but the maple flavor of PP1 was really nice compared to the canned white sugar flavor of sweetened condensed milk. I can't believe modern chemistry hasn't come up with a sweetened condensed maple milk yet. If any Future Homemakers of America are reading this, consider SCMM development and testing as a possible final project. Now stop reading and get back in the kitchen!

so The People's votes were pretty much split down the middle at work today - I think they were just happy to taste pies instead of reducing toxics. So for Thanksgiving, I think I'm going to try a combination of the two recipes, somehow incorporating the mapley deliciousness of PP1 into the fluffy better-cookedness of PP2. And I'll take pictures, because these pies are a gorgeous vision to behold.

roo roo quotes

I am dedicating this post to sharing just a few of the many hilarious things Amanda has said recently. She's one of those people that makes me wish I carried a tape recorder around in my bag. Actually, I sometimes do carry a tape recorder around in my bag, as a kind of half-assed reminder to work on my thesis, but I never record anything good. Anyhow, enjoy:

"Hi, it's Amanda... I'm on my way from work to a work event, and I just wanted to chat with you about my alcoholism."

"Hey! Does 'OG' stand for Original Gangsta hot dogs?"
and later... "Are you guys REAL brothers, like you have the same mother?"
(to the proprietors of the Original Gangsta Hot Dog Cart, HTFD, who did turn out to be brothers from the same mother)

"I don't believe in boys who wear shorts."
(implied: cargo shorts)

"Sorry I missed you, I was in a meeting with the executive VP of global communications. WHAT."

"I want the short guy, he's easy."

the precautionary principle

henry miller didn't believe in it:

"Instead of asking - 'How much damage will the work in question bring about?' why not ask - 'How much good? How much joy?'"

but I still think that's kind of nice

this is what you shall do

a Walt Whitman poem that one of my college professors had taped to the side of his desk, the side that faced the chair students would sit in when they came to see him. I think about it every so often, sometimes it makes me feel bad about myself, sometimes it makes me feel better.

This is what you shall do:

love the earth and sun, and animals,

despise riches,

give alms to every one that asks,

stand up for the stupid and crazy,

devote your income and labor to others,

hate tyrants,

argue not concerning God,

have patience and indulgence towards the people,

take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men,

go freely with the powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and mothers of families.

Read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life:

re-examine all you have been told at school or church, or in any books,

and dismiss whatever insults your soul.

quotes of the day

"Don't be seduced by the precision of the numbers!"
~ guest instructor in my toxics use reduction planning course. He said this on three separate occasions during a single day of class. The quote was also prominently featured in the "Internal Rate of Return" slide of his power point presentation. The "numbers" in question include such things as "incremental cash flow," "net present value," "time value of money," and "risk-adjusted value," none of which has ever made me feel particularly seduced, no matter how precise. But the instructor's vehemence on this matter made me think that he had, possibly on more than one occasion, been seduced by the precision of the numbers, and maybe I should be careful. I've never been seduced by the precision of a number before, but I imagine if I did, I'd feel really dirty afterwards.

"Osama bin Laden has a John Edwards bumper sticker on his cave wall."
~ Bill O'Reilly. I can't even get into this one, just wanted to share it.

"I'm having surgery on my arm next week. So I'm just waiting to hear if they got that stuff in Guadalajara."
~ a guy at work, talking on the phone while I eavesdropped furiously, hoping to hear that someone I know is trafficking drugs, or even just getting some for himself. Much to my dismay it turns out he was talking about something totally boring. He's having arm surgery, so he can't go down to Guadalajara to do a lead-free manufacturing workshop that he's coordinating, but he's waiting to hear if they got the solder and parts for the demonstration. No office gossip, no fascinating shenanigans. Dammit.

"Let's make this a plagiarism-free year!"
~ graduate coordinator in an email explaining my program's plagiarism policy. This one really needs no explanation. Oh no, wait, maybe it does, considering the amount of students in my program who worked incessantly over the past two years to make my life a living hell, plagiarizing for fun and profit.

i just met my high school self, and it was depressing

lately I've had delusions of grandeur involving me writing a lengthy blog post that encompasses all the stuff that's been going on for the past few weeks. that's not going to happen, and I'm in a hurry to share this gem I just found upon rediscovering my TI-86 (more later on why I've been forced to rediscover it...)

:yO.ANN.YOU.SHOULD.LI
KE.USE.YOUR.BRAIN.MOR
E.AND.YOUR.TI-86.LESS
...AND.THE.ONLY.REASO
N.YOU.BEAT.ME.ON.THE.
COMBINED.SAT.IS.CAUSE
.I.HAD.SOME.IMPORTANT
.SHIT.ON.MY.MIND...

I thought that was just hilarious, for the obvious reason (it's ridiculous) but also because the "use your brain more comment" was painfully true. A good 50% of the time I spent in high school chemistry and math classes was wasted in that manner, writing programs back and forth on graphing calculators. Another 25% was spent playing Tetris on the calculator. And for the final 25% of class time, I would make other programs with all the formulas and definitions that might be on the exam, e.g.:

ph=-log h+
log= -log oh-
H+=antilog(-ph)
ph+poh=14
kw=h+*oh-=1.0*10^-14
pH=pKa+log (bs/ac)

WHAT? I have no idea what ANY of that means. Antilog? Am I on crazy pills here? I feel like I'm on crazy pills here.

In college the TI-86 slept for the first three years, then I busted it out again for the single solitary science class I took to fulfill the gen ed requirements. I should have taken geology or "forensic biology" or one of those other blatantly easy courses that humanities majors took to fulfill the requirement while maintaining GPA. But I had a crappy GPA anyways, and my roommate and I thought it would be FUN to take a mechanical engineering class instead, mainly because it was twice a week in the afternoon, instead of three times a week in the morning like most science classes. We thought this would allow us to continue our debaucherous lifestyle by night while learning cool stuff about airplanes by day. HA. That was among the top five mistakes of my college career, and that's really saying a lot.

Anyways, the class was a disaster, but the subject matter provided a lot of good fodder for immature jokes about "thrust," "yaw" and "skin friction." In the TI-86 I found a ton of haiku we wrote, mostly involving the professor and the TA "inducing drag" on each other, and some junk like this:

:flaps incr camber an
d lift. roll ailerons
pitch tail chg dir
:yaw rudder
:elevator horistab
:vrot is tang to blad

WHAT? All of this was kind of fun to find again after all these years, but in a way it's extreeeemely depressing. I mean, I was writing all this in the calculator so I wouldn't have to actually "learn" it, but I did "know," albeit in the most rudimentary sense, what I was talking about. That's right, there was a time in my life when I had some concept of sine and cosine, and just a few years later I actually understood (kind of) how an airplane stayed in the air. These days, if it weren't for the many chemistry textbooks that live on my staircase, I couldn't even tell you the difference between an acid and a base.

I guess it's all relative, because back then I couldn't have told you how to say "nail polish remover contains acetone" in Spanish. I also didn't know the mortality rate of the Lowell mill girls, or the historical trajectory of computer and electronic component manufacturing employment in Essex County. But do any of those things actually matter?

I'm starting to wonder if maybe I'm spreading myself too thin over the years. Let me put it this way - I started nursery school when I was four years old. I'm now almost 26, which means I've been in school (in some capacity) for 22 consecutive years. Yet by some miracle, I'm still not an expert, or anything close to that, on any one thing. You know, that whole "little of everything and all of nothing" thing? Blech. I've learned and forgotten more information than I can fathom, probably due to the fact that I'm constantly switching gears, or the fact that I have the memory of a goldfish. Either way, the other depressing result of this is that I'm basically unqualified for any job that I might actually want.

(Yes, I have stopped "wanting" my current job.)

green journalism

I heard a story on NPR about greenwashing, the long-time bane of my existence. it almost made me want to start writing some thesis again. but anyways, one of the commentators was talking about "green journalism," and it made me think of this piece I read a long time ago by Jack Shafer, editor at Slate:

Often as sensationalistic as its yellow predecessor, green journalism tends to appeal to our emotions, exploit our fears, and pander to our vanity. It places a political agenda in front of the quest for journalistic truth and in its most demagogic forms tolerates no criticism, branding all who question it as enemies of the people. (read more)

the lord's day

I skipped church on Sunday morning and went to the laundromat, where I washed some of my own clothes but mostly rags and cleaning cloths, soaked with homemade furniture polish from our training on Thursday. While I was there my boss stopped by with presentation copies from Kinko's, which all turned out to be missing the even pages. he went back and re-did them, and we met up later for some collating and a long conversation about organizational behavior.

after a long work-related afternoon, I took BART to Emeryville to meet up with Han, a friend from college. he lives with his sister in a cute little loft, where he cooked us some awesome thai curry. besides the sandwich I ate the first day we were here, it was my first home-cooked meal, and it was amazing.

after dinner we smoked some cigarettes on the porch and I talked about the strange hatred I felt towards the tourists I'd seen on Saturday. Living on Cape Cod for so long, I feel justified in hating the tourists there, because I depended on them for income and so often they were cheap jerks. But i was kind of surprised to find myself hating tourists here too, especially since technically, I'm one of them. Han made an excellent point, that there's a difference between the tourist who comes to "observe" from the outside, and the tourist who comes to be a part of what's going on.

While I'm certainly fascinated by the things that make this place different from my hometown(s), I make it a point not to come here acting like I'm at the zoo. In fact, I hate the very idea of zoos precisely because I think it's so offensive to observe animals like that. I'm sure I don't "fit in" here, but I try not to act like local things and local people exist simply for my enjoyment. I feel like a lot of tourists are here to extract and exhaust local resources, always ethnograph-izing about the strange and exotic things they see, which because they are tourists and confine themselves to tourist attractions suggested in guidebooks, aren't even representative of wherever they are.

So anyways, we talked shit about this kind of tourist for a while, then went to a store in Berkeley called the Elephant Pharmacy, where I tried not to ogle too much, despite the fact that it was the kind of place that inspires me to think I'm not in Kansas anymore. Oh, the irony. This "pharmacy," which I gather caters to UC Berkeley students, did sell all the regular pharmacy stuff, but was mostly stocked with stuff like $80 yoga mats and hemp stationery. We got some organic blueberry newtons and raw juice "health tonic."

sabado gigante

Since I got here I've kind of been avoiding hanging out with my boss and his wife, not always on purpose, but usually because our schedules don't quite sync up. Anyhow it was starting to make me feel a little guilty, so on Saturday morning I joined them for a trip to the waterfront area on the Embarcadero. We went to a cool arts and crafts fair at the end of Market Street and then an awesome farmer's market at the ferry building.

Being Saturday, the whole place was packed with tourists. It was insane, especially when we got down towards Pier 39, a place I hope I never get to visit again. There were some cool sea lions:

but other than that, it was nothing but fanny packs and visors and sandals with socks in every direction. I felt kind of bad because my boss' wife wanted to shop for souvenirs for the grandkids, but my boss seemed to think I was bored and kept trying to keep her moving. I wasn't so much bored as claustrophobic, but when they mentioned they were heading to In and Out Burger, I had to bail. I've been eating out for every meal since Tuesday, and it's hard enough to be healthy just based on eating out, never mind eating out at places like In and Out Burger. Plus if I saw one more fanny pack I was going to puke.

There were so many people out that the streetcars and MUNI cars were full and kept going right past every stop, so I decided to walk back. Even though it was only like 2pm, I already felt stressed out from all the tourism, so I stopped for a drink at a place on a little side street. I'm obsessed with bars and restaurants that have outside seating, and although the weather seems to be constantly gorgeous here, not many places have patios. I guess Californians are so used to the awesome wetaher that they're over sitting outside. But I'm not. So I ordered a gin and tonic, which I later found out cost $9.50, and had the extreme pleasure of eating these guys:

Healthy, delicious, and only $3 more than the drink. I walked towards the hotel and got accosted by a Greenpeace volunteer who wanted to talk to me about, of all things, Cape Wind. Well this poor guy, who approached me asking "Hey! Do you care about the environment?" sure picked the wrong passerby. I gave him a talking-to... told him about the time I met Jim Gordon... assured him that I, too, love renewable energy... signed his letter to Nancy Pelosi... and went on my merry way, feeling like such an educator.

After I got back to the hotel I collapsed on my bed for a few minutes, briefly stopped by the wine social, then met up with Hannah's sister Marisa in the Mission. We went to a tapas place on 16th Street, ordered a pitcher of sangria, and did some serious catching up. It occurred to me that I haven't seen Marisa since 2002, which is a seriously long time. Even though we had five years of personal life updates, we ended up talking about Michael Pollan and structural adjustments and other semi-dorky things i love to talk about. It was really refreshing to meet up with someone I haven't seen or spoken to once in five years, and feel like we hadn't skipped a beat.

The restaurant was ridiculously loud, so as soon as we paid the bill we got right out of there and headed to a bar called Delirium, where the people were dressed in black and the PBR flowed like water. Marisa ordered us pints of a delicious local amber beer called Boont's and we resumed our catching up. By the time we got to about 2004, it was already past my bedtime, which has gotten a lot earlier since I've arrived. The time change was actually really beneficial to my waking up early, but that night was probably the first time since I got here that I've been out past midnight.

dia cuarta: viernes

at this point I can barely remember what i did a few minutes ago, let alone what I did on Friday. but for the sake of all of you for whom a day without my blog is like a day without the Lord, I'm going to try.

I got to sleep a little later than usual, and we went to a meeting near the Embarcadero to check out the location of our second two trainings. the lady was a half an hour late, so we pretty much saw it without her help. But then she got there and we all went out to lunch at the ferry building.

The ferry building is kind of like Quincy Market, lots of food and food-related retail. Its customers seemed to be half tourists and half people who work in the neighborhood. We got some fresh bread from the Acme Bakery (lame name, good bread) and some interesting cheese from the Cowgirl Creamery (ditto). And I got gelato.

After the meeting I decided to walk back to the hotel, which turned into an epic excursion. I stopped at a few places trying to find tarnished silver, as is my custom, and got some [relatively] cheap pants at Anthropologie. Thank GOD there aren't any of those around Lowell, or else I'd be insanely broke.

I figured since I was already on a three-hour-minimum walk, I'd veer off and take an even less direct route and ended up back in the Mission. I wandered into a bookstore where I found this little gem:














if you can't see it clearly, it's Kermit the Frog saying "modernity has not come to terms with its own technics." true, I thought, and bought a postcard of some Mexican luchadores.


I made it back to the hotel just in time for the wine social. I was pretty thirsty after my four hours of walking, and ended up polishing off an entire bottle of white wine with another guest. He was kind of a strange bird, a dude from Baltimore who was here to visit his boyfriend. At first I was talking to a couple from England who were here celebrating their anniversary, and he was kind of off to the side, chiming in occasionally but looking a little like he was off in space. After the English guys left we bonded over missing our boyfriends (his lives in SF, but it seemed like something weird was going on between them) but things got a little awkward (for me anyways) when he started talking about personal stuff like his boyfriend's blanket-stealing habits.

All of a sudden I realized it was already dark out and I'd been drinking wine since 6pm on an empty stomach. My boss called to see if I wanted to go to dinner with them but I felt a little bit beyond the point where I felt like trying to make intelligent conversation in a family setting. So I took a long walk and ended up stopping at a dark, dank diner, where much to my own surprise, I ordered a beer. They had Newcastle, which I haven't seen much here, on tap, and I just couldn't resist.

day three: thursday

morning came very, uh, early on thursday. I woke up around 4am and realized that I had fallen asleep in my street clothes, with all the lights on. I turned the lights off, changed, went back to sleep, and woke up what seemed like 5 minutes later. We headed off to the train station with even MORE supplies, schlepped everything to the conference room, and prepared for our first training.

I was a ball of f-ing nerves, so I headed downstairs to smoke a cigarette before the training started. By then my boss had already caught me smoking for the first time, so I felt OK about telling him where I was going. In a way him catching me was a blessing in disguise. I had briefly considered making my first day in SF my "quit date" and trying to go cold turkey. In fact, I suffered through the entire day on Tuesday and most of Wednesday without smoking, not wanting to let him and his wife know I smoke. But after he caught me on Thursday morning, I figured, "who am I kidding? this is one of the more stressful times in my life, and trying to hide my smoking is almost as stressful as not smoking at all." almost.

so aaaanyways, I went downstairs for a cigarette. Although we were in a pretty busy area of downtown Oakland, only two people walked by me the entire time I was smoking. Guess who those two people were? Oh yes, you guessed it, the commissioner of the SF Department of Public Health, and a woman from the American LUNG ASSOCIATION. Jesus Christ on a bike. Of course, i didn't know who they were until i got back upstairs and found my boss talking to them inside the conference room. yes, these ladies and 20 other asthma activists were participants in the training we were about to do. The training in which I had to get up in front of the room and tell people about avoiding toxics in household products that can decrease indoor air quality and trigger asthma attacks. When he introduced me to them I nearly passed out. Granted, my area of "expertise" has more to do with chemicals in cleaning products and pesticides, but I've never felt like such a huge asshole in my entire life.

Other than that embarrassing little incident, about which no one said anything, thank god, the training went fine. Everyone seemed to really respond to the make-your-own cleaning products activity, which i was excited about, because it's kind of my forte. After we lugged all the supplies back to the hotel I went on another adventure, this time to the Mission neighborhood.

As you might expect, the Mission is full of old Spanish architecture and taquerias. As you might not expect, it's also full of auto repair shops, used book stores, and hipster-y vintage clothing stores, where used clothes cost more than new clothes from regular stores. I wandered around the Mission until I got hungry/thirsty/tired, then I stopped at an amazing bakery called Tartine to sit outside for a glass (OK, maybe closer to a bottle) of red wine and a ridiculously delicious prosciutto and provolone sandwich.

I sat down next to a girl with blond dreadlocks who weighed about 75 pounds. She struck up a brief conversation with me, something that people seem to do all the time here, which I actually find really refreshing. Coming from the heart of puritanical frown-at-strangers land, it's been so nice to find that people here are genuinely friendly (and not half as pushy as they are in Boston). We were both peacefully drinking and reading our books in the sun when her obnoxiously hipster friends walked across the street from the laundromat and sat down across from me, blocking my sun and loudly fawning over the "energy" of the vintage Russian Army hat they had just bought at one of those stores I just mentioned. They were arguing over who should take the hat - one of them had bought it for herself but decided that it matched the other girl's "spirit" better. I wanted to puke. But it only got worse.

I like to think I'm an open-minded person, I do yoga (when I'm not busy smoking and drinking and eating meat) and love my neighbors and all that. But these girls pissed me off so much that had I not been completely fascinated with their vapid conversation, I would have gotten up and left. It's hard to do the experience justice through the written word, I even tried to explain it to a few people on the phone and it was impossible, you just had to be there.

A homeless and somewhat not-quite-there guy had apparently followed them from the vintage clothing store to the laundromat, and eventually found them across the street at the bakery. he came over to the table and asked them for a cigarette. I was smoking at the time and he probably thought I was with them because we were all sitting so close together, but I kind of ignored it because at the time I thought he was a friend of theirs. Instead of saying "No, sorry," they went on an interminable tirade of cutesiness, throwing out gems such as "smoking isn't sexy," "we don't kiss boys who smoke," and "why don't you go to the public library and take out a book about yoga?"

Honestly, this poor guy was just confused by their egging him on. Like I said, there was something a bit off about him, I'm not sure if he might have been a little slow, or maybe just a little mentally ill, or both. But either way, their tactics were not constructive. They kept rolling their eyes at each other, and when he would wander off to ask someone else for a cigarette, which he did several times, they would say stuff like "oh that poor lost soul, I feel so bad for him, but I wish he would just leave us alone." But every time he came back, they kept going with their quasi-flirtatiousness and led him to believe he was getting somewhere. At one point he asked for one of the girl's phone numbers and she told him "I don't have a phone," although she had been texting a minute earlier. He said he didn't either, but he used a pay phone sometimes. they laughed, and i wanted to punch them. he asked them about their parents, and one girl said her father was an astronaut, winking at the other girls. again, I felt a twinge of violence. what they were doing was cruel, not kind like they thought.

after what seemed like forever, he gave up on them and asked me if he could have the rest of my wine. I said "no, sorry," and he said OK and rode away on his bike. After he was gone, the girls practically wet themselves laughing and saying "oh my God, i can't believe you just got rid of him like that!" Then, to top it all off, one of the girls felt some remorse and confessed that she felt like they might have been messing with him. NO FUCKING SHIT, YOU DUMBASSES. The other girl said, "no, you're just so kind, but people like him need to be with other people who are on his same level." Same level? Thank GOD they got up at that point, because that was seriously the last straw and I was about to break the bottom of my wine bottle off on the pavement and assault them with it.

before they left they told me they hoped I wasn't insulted by their "smoking isn't sexy" comment, saying that they all actually smoked. Like the pleasant person I am, i said "no problem," because in the end I'm sure they were nice people, just a little misguided.

sorry for that little rant.