• 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!

Google has left the world of corporate domination and moved into the realm of religion. They have the ability to gain intimate knowledge of millions of people’s lives (gmail, calendar, desktop search), filter what information those same people access (google, scholar), and their followers respect and love them. Users might not physically go door to door to spread the word of Google, but they certainly do blog, IM, and gmail about how much happier they are since letting Google into their lives.

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!!!