• Still in school.
• Sept 2007 – Dan proposed
• Juggled wedding planning and grad school – I don’t recommend it
• Sept 2008 – Got married and went to Maui for our honeymoon
• Yep, still in school. At least now I’m an official PhD *Candidate*. Yeehaw.
• There’s no “average” day at lab, but at any given time I may be writing Matlab code, injecting mice with one thing or another, watching mice run on a treadmill, harvesting mouse bones (remember dissections in 7th grade science class?), cursing at the HPLC, breaking bones in a mechanical tester, reading journal articles, sitting through or presenting at meetings, writing, feeding cells, taking/analyzing micro-CT scans of mouse bones, etc. Consider this an incomplete list.
• When do I graduate, you ask? Don’t you have any manners?

The recipe Bittman put into print varies somewhat from the recipe in the associated video (same link), but the basic ideas are the same. Mix flour, yeast, salt and water in roughly defined proportions. Get really sticky dough, kind of like biscuit dough. Cover and let it rise for 12-18 hours at room temp. The yeast does its magic, helping to align and develop the gluten in the flour. Eventually you get a big poofy, sticky, bubbly blob. If you tilt the bowl, it pulls away from the sides very slowly w/ lots of long strands. Turn the dough out of the bowl onto a VERY floured surface. Pat it down, fold it on itself like a letter, sprinkle it with wheat bran or flour, and turn it over onto a dish towel (not terrycloth – it’ll stick more). Sprinkle the other side w/ bran, wrap the towel over to cover it loosely, and let it rise another couple of hours. Put a heavy ovensafe pot with lid (like a dutch oven) in the oven and preheat it to 450 or so for at least half an hour. You want a really hot pot, got it? Toss the dough seam-side up (seam from the folds you made earlier) into the pot, cover it, and let it bake for 30 minutes. Take the cover off, let it bake for as long as it takes for the crust to brown properly and the inside to reach 210F (use an instant read thermometer). Probably 10 or 15 more minutes.

Let it cool on a wire rack, and resist the temptation to cut it open before it cools completely.

Voila!

In other news, school has pretty much been more of the same. Biochem class and lab are driving me nuts, and what time I’ve had left to devote to research has pretty much been spent planning the experiments I want to start in January. I wish biochem wasn’t sapping so much of my motivation…

Now, here’s the part where some of you will laugh, and others will say good for you. A month or two ago I joined eHarmony on a total whim, with thoughts in the back of my mind like “what the hell”, “can’t hurt to be proactive”, and “probaby better luck than the bar scene”. They’ve matched me with more guys than I could ever keep track of (>80 at last count). After going through Eharmony’s communication system with a number of them, I’ve talked to a handful of guys through AIM, met a couple in person, and generally enjoyed the experience. Is eHarmony the way to find my “soul mate”? Eh, no way to know – I’m not going to rule the possibility out, nor do I have any expectations. Is signing up worth it? I’m meeting new people and having fun, so at this point I’m not too concerned about that issue. Wish me luck, I guess.

Happy Birthday to me, thanks in large part to a generous birthday check from my parents. Yay 30 gig video Ipod!!

I can’t wait!!!

I’ve always been interested by the strangest things, and once I’m curious about something I latch onto the idea until I get a chance to try it. Then, once I’ve tried said thing out and the newness wears off, I typically lose interest. It’s only ever been a few things that really stayed with me as true loves for long periods of time (like piano).

I think what gets me fired up about new hobbies is learning how to do something. I love the satisfaction of creating things or making something work. A few years ago I was inspired to build a dynamic website from scratch. I taught myself PHP, MySQL and stylesheets so that I could build purplegiraffe.net with a database-stored journal. Next, I decided to learn flash so that I could spiffy up the Alpha Phi Omega website for Tau chapter (I used php to build the calendar/event system throughout the site, as well as flash to make the menu/titlebar). But, when the time came to rebuild my website in the form of prpl.net, I just couldn’t get motivated. I already knew how to use PHP, and I didn’t really want a flash site (though I did tinker around and learn how integrate MySQL data into flash). Alas, my fierce interest had died to complete apathy. The site is now run by wordpress. I did, however, spend a few days improving my Photoshop skills so that I could make the page header. In with the new, can’t be bothered with the old….

So, to answer my first question, several things come to mind as necessary pursuits given the opportunity to do anything. All of them are things I’ve thought about and wanted to do for years, but just haven’t had the chance. 1) Travel. Where? Anywhere, but definitely France, Ireland and Greece. 2) Play the cello. I wanted to do this in 3rd grade, but my parents steered me towards the (less expensive) violin. They know I’m still bitter. 3) Ride a unicycle. I have researched unicycles at least 3 different times in my life w/ the fantasy of buying one and getting good at riding it. Why? Because it would be fun.

However, I’ll take Ann Arbor temperatures, and the Michigan Marching Band, over the Florida alternatives anyday. (No offense, UF band, but UM band kicks your ass.)