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!!
It's been a rough week. There were plenty of bright spots, like our dinner with Meryl and James last Saturday, birthday dinner for Becca on Tuesday, lots of Olympics on TV, and getting paid for all the work I've done on a website. But other events have left me feeling frustrated, beaten down, and tired. I will spare you the details, mainly because this blog is not an appropriate place for the details, but suffice it to say that I am VERY glad that Friday has arrived.
Instead, here are some photos I took last month when I went to California for a day. The weather was brilliantly sunny on the return leg from Ontario, CA to Phoenix, and I had a lot of fun taking photos out the window.
It's always interesting to see the land use patterns in the desert. The contrast of bright green and surrounding tan and brown is striking, especially when it's as bright and sunny as it was that day.
When we flew over this cloud, and the view was really strange! You could see the blurry shadow of our airplane, surrounded by a halo. No tricks -- this photo captures exactly what it looked like. I'd never seen this phenomenon before.
As we neared Phoenix, I noticed we were basically paralleling I-10! I watched the tiny cars move along for quite a while.
Hello, Phoenix. I enjoyed my half hour in your airport.
So a couple weeks ago when we were in Florida...
After watching the most excellent launch of STS-130, we all drove back to our hotel in Orlando and took nice long naps. My parents and brother headed back to Charlotte that afternoon, but Jose and I stuck around for one more night, which gave us time to head over to the KSC Visitor's Center.
Unfortunately for JSC, the KSC Visitor's Center really runs circles around Space Center Houston. It feels more modern, more welcoming, and much larger right from the start. You walk through the main gate and are met with this huge NASA meatball, so of course we had to take a photo. (The "meatball" is NASA's nickname for the agency logo. Even that article I just linked to doesn't explain why, other than to say that it's round. Like a meatball. Shrug.)
Next I took a picture of Jose in front of this Orion mockup. Of course Orion is the vehicle that was just cancelled. Another shrug.
We walked past this shuttle mockup on our way to the Space Shuttle Launch Experience. This is a fairly new attraction, and is a ride that gives you a feeling of what it might be like to launch on the shuttle, complete with shaking, smoke, and the roar of engines. It was actually very well done, and I was really impressed. The ride presented a lot of solid technical information, but in a way that made it accessible and understandable to the general public (which, after all, is the point of a visitor's center). They had lots of video interviews with former astronauts describing the entire launch process, and I was very amused to see that the astronaut who did the bulk of the narrating for the ride was Charlie Bolden. Who is now the NASA Administrator!
After the ride, we walked around the Rocket Garden, which included the gantry that the Apollo 11 astronauts walked across on their way into the capsule!
Jose stopped to admire this F-1 engine. There were five of these babies on the first stage of the Saturn V rocket that took men to the moon. Seeing Jose stand next to it really shows how big they were!
We also hopped in a Gemini capsule mockup, which gave me a newfound respect for the early astronauts. Let's just say I would NOT be first in line to spend two weeks in one of those. Talk about cramped...
Next we walked over to the early space exploration area. One of my favorite things there was the flown Gemini 9 capsule, which was down on the ground so that you could walk all the way around. I particularly love seeing the heat shields on these old vehicles, and imagining all the craziness that went on during the heat of reentry.
After our trip to the visitor's center, we used our badges to drive into KSC. The sun was setting so we had to hurry, but we made a quick stop at the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB). This is where they attach the orbiter to the external tank and solid rocket boosters before flight. Then it rolls from here down the 3-mile road to the launch pad. This picture really doesn't convey how immense the VAB really is. It's the fourth-largest building in the WORLD by volume. Each of the stars in the flag painted on the side is 6 feet wide. Yes. It's big.
We drove out to Launch Pad 39A, the site from which Endeavour departed so spectacularly only 14 hours earlier. We had to stop at the gate, but it was still cool.
The sun was setting rapidly, but we also made a quick stop at the press site across the street from the VAB. If you've ever watched a launch on TV, you probably recognize this view of the big clock and flagpole. It was counting up. 14 hours, 25 minutes, and 15 seconds had passed since STS-130's launch!
We also drove past the Shuttle Landing Facility (aka the big runway), but it was almost completely dark by the time we got there, so there was little to see.
We hit the road back to our hotel in Orlando, and the next day we started the two day drive home. The only incident was that I left my toiletry bag in our hotel in Mobile, Alabama. It's been more than 2 weeks, and I've yet to get it returned. I don't care so much about the bag itself and the shampoo and crap in it, but my glasses were in there! I'm hoping it turns up this week, because I really don't want to have to buy a new pair of glasses. My eyes suck, and thus my glasses are not cheap. They say they have it, and each time I've called they say "oh, I'm sorry, we'll go mail it today." But I've heard that 3 times now.
All in all, it was a great trip. Going to see the launch was 110% worthwhile, and although I'm not planning to undertake another drive like that anytime soon, I'm so glad we did it.
On Triathlons and Training:
I had a great 4 mile run last night as the sun was setting. My training is picking up this week as I prepare for the Lonestar Half Ironman at the end of April. I'm about a month late in adding swimming and biking to the mix, but it's now or never. I've struggled quite a bit with training over the past year and a half. At first it was understandable, since I was swamped with wedding planning and house buying. But now it's more confusing. My motivation is...uneven. I find myself spending a lot of time comparing myself to others instead of concentrating on myself and what I want to accomplish.
I don't have a good group to train with. Many of the people in my triathlon club have gotten more serious about the sport than I am interested in becoming, rising as early as 3:30 a.m. to participate in 4-hour long spin classes. I am not at a point in my life where I am interested in getting up that early or spinning that long. This means that I am back to training by myself. Sometimes I don't mind training alone, but sometimes it gets lonely.
On Social Media:
The NASA tweetup last week was great, and I loved participating in it, but after tweeting for a solid 2 days and following dozens of new people on Twitter, I found myself feeling overwhelmed by the amount of social media I was trying to keep up with. When I'm feeling stressed out because I missed the last hour of tweets, something is seriously wrong. So I unplugged from Twitter and Facebook for the whole weekend. A couple times while we were watching the Olympics, working on the bonus room, or enjoying dinner with friends, I thought "oh, I should post this or that." Then I shook my head and groaned at myself.
Yesterday, I unfollowed about 50 people on Twitter whose updates I realized I had begun skimming past anyway. Then I logged onto Facebook and hid a whole slew of people. If the answer to the question "have I communicated in any way with you since high school graduation" was "no" then bye-bye. You can be my Facebook friend, but I do not have to read your updates. Unfollowing and hiding people probably sounds like an insanely obvious thing to do to some of you, but it was long overdue in my life. I feel less overwhelmed already!
(And don't worry -- if you're reading this blog at all, that pretty much guarantees that you are not on either of the lists above.)
On Major Life Decisions:
It's three weeks later and I still don't know anything about what NASA's new direction means for me. Overall, people are worried, scared and unhappy, and listening to the din is stressing me out. For the moment, I've tried to tune out most of the commentary and opinion and just read what's officially released by the people at headquarters. I'm planning to stick around through the end of the shuttle program this fall, since I'm the lead Rendezvous for the last shuttle flight, STS-133. After that? Who knows.
I have many ideas of what I could do. Jose has many ideas of what he could do. A lot of those ideas are compatible. The sticking point is that it will be nearly impossible for us to move into new careers without taking a very large pay cut. That isn't the end of the world, and though it would change our lifestyle, if we must do it, we'll do it. But I feel like we just got settled. The NASA uncertainty makes me feel unsettled. And I like settled better.
