The in-laws visit!

So this weekend Alison's parents came to Albuquerque from Phoenix to visit us. They arrived at lunchtime on Saturday and stayed until after lunch on Sunday. Lots of driving for little old us. We started out by going to the Plaza for lunch, eating at La Placita Restaurant, where we took my parents when they visited a couple weeks ago. I went with the Enchiladas Ranchera, which translates to three enchiladas of varying ingredients (ground beef, chicken, and cheese). It was OK, but not my favorite thing I've had there. The salsa was spicy today.
After that we went back to the house and decided to go visit the Sandia Peak Tramway, which we had never taken before. It is very expensive ($17.50 per person), but pretty neat. Most of the pictures below are of the tram ride.
Tram car at the base. You can see that the off-duty operators get to ride strapped to the top of the tram car. This is what we in the business call "bat-shit insane."

Picture out the west side of the tram. It was getting on toward late afternoon so the sun is in a bad spot for pictures. There were probably about 20 of us in the car, so we were far less cattle-car-packed-in than we had been in the Funicular in Switzerland.
Picture taken off the east side of the mountains. You're looking down one of the chair lift runs toward apparently a southern tip of the Santa Fe Mountains.
This is one of the chairs on that very chair lift. Alison said that she would never take this lift due to the extreme apparent age of the chairs. For safety there is a chain that you can put across your lap.
A picture of another chair on a different lift from below. We came to the conclusion that these chairs are not meant for discomfort, but rather that they are likely padded in the winter when they're running.
Please leave the flowers! There were very few flowers up here to leave. We did not take this path.
A picture of the Williams family (minus one) above the chair lift. Smiles all 'round.
Another photo down the chair lift run toward the east.
Now if you can't beat Ned to this point, you should really give up.
A photo of a hang glider up on top of the crest. There were about 4 of these up there and they had a big crowd gathered around them.
A photo toward the south from the tramcar on the way back down. This is looking down the west face of the Sandia Mountains. After we came down off the mountains, we drove over to the Chama River Brewing Company just off I-25. We have been here for lunch a couple times before, and it's excellent food. I had a burger and Alison had hummus and sweet potato fries. I also had a beer that I am pretty sure was different from the one I ordered, but it was still quite good. After that we went bowling, which was great fun. I bowled a 152 in my first game, which I'm pretty sure was my best game ever. It would have been even better had I not tossed two gutter balls after my initial strike in the tenth frame. The second game was not so good (115).
Alison bowling. The sweatshirt was quickly removed. After bowling we went home and had a little bit of the peach pie I had made on Friday. That was it for Saturday! On Sunday morning we got up and went over to take a walk on the Rio Grande, going from the parking area on Central down to Tingley Beach and back. After that we went out to eastern Albuquerque to eat lunch at the Olive Garden. This was our second visit there this week, but there's nothing wrong with that. Breadsticks have made a bit of a comeback there, although the ends are still kind of dry and hard. After lunch the in-laws headed out of town and we got back to normal life.

OK, the post was far more boring than the actual weekend. Also, this is my 100th post! But only on blogspot; apparently I have missed 5 posts on myspace...if you still only look at my Myspace blog, this is probably a good reason to switch.

Pie! (Phase One)

Last night I endeavored to make a pie. This was only the second time I have tried pie making in my life; the first was a pumpkin pie that I made from scratch (as in, I cut up a pumpkin for it - the crust was premade). This time I made the entire thing from scratch, including the crust.

My pie story began yesterday morning when I needed to go to the grocery store. I headed up Rio Grande to La Montanita Co-op Food Market, our local natural grocery store. It's about 2 miles from the house. So I strapped on my backpacking backpack and biked up there with list in hand. When I got there, I discovered that their coolers had all broken overnight, and that everything that should have been frozen was around 70 degrees when workers got there in the morning (except, I assume, the meat and cheese cooler, since they didn't balk when I bought two bricks of cheese). This was hugely disappointing because I was devoid of milk and had been for like a week, and also because these guys were actually cheap for the first time ever.

Thwarted at the cooler, I made some bonus finds in the produce section. At the co-op they have $0.99 bags of produce that they've decided they can't sell in the normal section; things that are too ripe, or slightly damaged, or what have you. I picked up two bags: one that held like five organic red bell peppers (Wild Oats sells these for like $6-$7 a pound) and a couple of yellow squash, which I love. The other bag was full of peaches, red plums, and pluots. The pluots and red plums were not too ripe, but the peaches were (they were leakin' just a tiny bit). But who out there can resist ripe peaches?!

And then there were the bins full of apples. Like major big bins. They were all hail-damaged and going for $0.79 per pound. That would be pretty good for normal apples, but these were local! Sadly, they had a picture of the farmers on the bin, and it was this older couple...I couldn't help but think of how much money they were losing because their crop was damaged; of course, they probably had crop insurance. So with a bag full of gala apples and another bag full of peaches etc. I decided it would be a grand idea to make them into pies.

For our wedding KS and PS gave us the New Best Recipe cookbook, which is a mammoth tome detailing the best way to cook all of the American classics, incorporating science! I relied on this to make my pies. The crust dough, it turns out, is easy to make but it is a pain in the ass to actually turn it into crust. I couldn't get it to work and got really frustrated, but in the end we had a crust that was filled with peach pie filling. I tried some last night and it was actually pretty good! I don't know if it's worth the effort of making the pie crust; the filling was easy. Next time, store-bought crust for me. Next time being when I make the apple pie, which should be awesome.

See below for a couple pictures of the wife making some cinnamon twists out of the extra dough!

Take THAT, nerds!

I received an e-mail from the old HWR announce list. Those of you who are got-damn nerds will maybe appreciate this as much as I did.

1. Ratio of an igloo's circumference to its diameter = Eskimo Pi

2. 2000 pounds of Chinese soup = Won ton

3. 1 millionth of a mouthwash = 1 microscope

4. Time between slipping on a peel and smacking the pavement = 1 bananosecond

5. Weight an evangelist carries with God = 1 billigram

6. Time it takes to sail 220 yards at 1 nautical mile per hour = knotfurlong

7. 16.5 feet of silver in the Twilight Zone = 1 Rod Sterling

8. Half of a large intestine = 1 semicolon

9. 1,000,000 aches = 1 megahurtz

10. Basic unit of laryngitis = 1 hoarsepower

11. Shortest distance between two jokes = A straight line

12. 453.6 graham crackers = 1 pound cake

13. 1 million microphones = 1 megaphone

14. 2 million bicycles = 2 megacycles

15. 365.25 days = 1 unicycle

16. 2000 mockingbirds = 2 kilomockingbird

17. 52 cards = 1 decacards

18. 1 kilogram of falling figs = 1 FigNewton

19. 1000 milliliters of wet socks = 1 literhosen

20. 1 millionth of a fish = 1 microfiche

21. 1 trillion pins = 1 terrapin

22. 10 rations = 1 decoration

23. 100 rations = 1 C-ration

24. 2 monograms = 1 diagram

25. 4 nickels = 2 paradigms

26. 4 statute miles of intravenous surgical tubing at Yale University
Hospital = 1 IV League

Those of you who are got-damn nerds and graduates of the HWR might get an extra little kick out of it to know that The Shut is who sent this out to everybody. So when you read it, the voice in your head should have a stodgy english accent.

Replies and NEWS

OK so I've been really slack about blogging due to my reunion with my better half and my general lack of free time due to my return to school. But here's a short one. I got two comments on my last post that I'd like to reply to:

lady of leisure said...

could you videotape one of the classes you teach? i would like to see it.

10 September, 2007 06:35

This isn't the kind of school that records lectures. They may have one recorder on campus somewhere. The focus at this school is way not on good teaching.

BernieFondue said...

For someone who is a full-time doctorate student, a TA and baseballholic, when do you find time to read? You have quite a long current reading list...

11 September, 2007 10:07

Oh, I never have time to read; that's why I have such a long reading list! I've gotten through about 40 pages of The Origin of Species in the past week or so that I've been reading it, in two sittings. I wish I had scads of time to read books for fun instead of articles for research. Too bad I wasn't smart enough to study literature.

OK that was fun. This morning I happened across a bit of news out of Russia. Seems they have tested the most powerful ever non-nuclear weapon in the history of ever. Bigger than anything we've created. If people are not concerned about our imminent resumption of cold war-era hostilities, they should start paying attention. Note in the article where it basically tells you that Russia can build up their military technology because oil prices are high. If you did not believe before that alternative energies were just about the most important thing for us to be focusing on, please believe it now. The real reason I linked to that story is because there is a hilarious paraphrase of a quote from a Russian official in it:

Unlike a nuclear weapon, the bomb doesn’t hurt the environment.

If that's not crazy, nobody has any hope for the future.

In other news, I'm thinking of starting another blog so I can feel even more high-and-mighty. I just wish I had time for it.

Breaking the silence

Wow, it's been awhile since I blogged. Ever since Alison got home I've found myself much less bored, and therefore less apt to look around on the internet trying to find things about which I could feel high and mighty. I am, however, still alive.
We went to Santa Fe (twice!) this past weekend. My parents came to town on Saturday and left Monday morning. They claim that they came to visit me for a certain event; I'm pretty sure it was an excuse to see Santa Fe. We went to a baseball game on Friday with BT and friends, then another on Saturday with my Dad. The Saturday game didn't start out so well, with the Isotopes quickly falling way behind. And it started raining; we left our berm seats to get under some cover. When it got up to 14-4 (Isotopes losing) the game was postponed due to lightning. Not rain, mind, just that the lightning was so close to the stadium that they couldn't have people out on the field. At that point, the rain was still not strong. We drove home through quite a deluge. The game was resumed the next day and the Isotopes ended up losing something like 20-6. By losing the regularly scheduled Saturday game as well, they dropped themselves out of playoff contention. I think they ended up third in their own division after being in first like two weeks ago.

On Monday we went back up to Santa Fe to go hiking with K&PS, which was neat except that I was so exhausted afterward that Alison had to drive back to ABQ. These folks make a mean picnic though. I hucked a 6-pack of beer all the way up the Santa Fe Ski Area. I also got to see my old buddy Monkey, which is always a treat.

So now I am entrenched on the commuter van to Socorro. I went down four times last week, and will probably have to do the same this week. This means that I'm gone from the house for 12 hours a day. I never see my wife. It's bogus. Hopefully the semester will calm down a bit and I'll only have to go thrice a week. However, I am theoretically actually going to be going out to the field this month to do fieldwork for myself! What a rush. This semester I am only taking on class and it shouldn't be a backbreaker, but I am also the T.A. for another class of 21 students. This class has never been taught before, and I am responsible for teaching the lab; this includes creating the lab, writing up a lesson plan, writing up the lab materials, teaching the lab, and grading everything. This turns out to be more work than it sounds like. Yesterday I got to take my class around campus so they could learn how to use a GPS, which like half of them already knew. Good stuff. Next week we might deploy over 50 rain gauges somewhere and then do a rain dance and hope.

Last night I finally finished my book that I was reading, Picture This by Joseph Heller. I've now read Catch-22, Something Happened, Good As Gold, and God Knows by Heller, and enjoyed all of them. Catch-22 is Alison's favorite book ever, and probably my favorite by Heller, although there's something about Something Happened too; if anybody reads this who has only read Catch-22, I would highly recommend Something Happened. Anyway, Picture This, unlike his earlier books, seems to me to have a little less depth of feeling to it; in previous books he could take you from hilarity to the depths of tragedy in mere moments. There isn't the tragedy in this book up until you get to the end. But still it was a good read. Now I'm on to the Origin of Species by Darwin. This one will likely be less easy to read.