Creme Egg Update

I've decided to keep a running totally of all the Cadbury Creme Eggs I eat this Easter season. (Really, for me, Easter is an event that marks the end of Creme Egg season.)

So far the total is 3, which includes the one I bought for my boyfriend. He put on the counter and said he'd eat it later. The next day I asked if he still wanted it. He said we could split it. I ate my half. A few hours later he still hadn't eaten his half, so I ate the rest.  Now I'll have to buy him a new one, and somehow not eat it...

Fall 2012 Tea

My latest results. Didn't drink as much tea last semester, only 11 bottles. Not sure why.  Maybe it was colder out than usual, or I was in a bigger hurry and so went to Driftless less?  Anyway, I only have a few semesters' worth of info, and, as a responsible scientist, shouldn't be trying to draw any conclusions from a small data set.

Another Weird Dream

I had another weird dream the other night. Here we go:

• I was staying in a house with several other people, including the Dalai Lama. He had gone out for awhile, and I knew he wanted to eat some leftover homemade soup when he came back. There was only one bowl left in the refrigerator, and it was a really good, hearty vegetable soup. In his absence, this other girl came in, ate the soup despite me telling her not to, and then left the empty bowl on my bed! When the Dalai Lama returned, of course he thought I had eaten it. He was pretty mad. But then he meditated for a bit and realized he should believe me and that I truly hadn't eaten his soup.  And all was well.

I have been watching Michael Palin's travel documentaries, and recently watched one where he interviewed the Dalai Lama. (Those documentaries are AMAZING, by the way. They are currently streaming on Netflix, and if you haven't seen them, you really ought to.) I also found an old book called "Separated at Birth" that compares different celebrities it claims look related. The Dalai Lama and Jiminy Cricket were one pair.

As far as the soup, no idea. I do like food.

Three Days of Weird Dreams

People sometimes say they have weird dreams because of something they ate. This has never made sense to me. I have weird dreams no matter what. However, this week I've basically just been eating that chocolate cake I described in the previous post along with falafel chips and hummus, and I've had some unusually intense dreams.

• Night 1: My dog Theresa was digging in the dirt, and this triggered her evolution into a worm. (Even in my dream I thought "this wasn't my understanding of how evolution works...") The worm was small (worm-sized, not dog-sized) but had the same yellow and brown coloring as Theresa. I picked it up, but before I could get it somewhere safe, Evie, my other dog, ate it! I was horrified!
• Night 2: My sister was going to dogsit for Evie and Theresa. A common enough occurrence, except in the dream she lived in Florida instead of Wisconsin. "Just put them on the bus!" she said. We laughed about how it'd be funny to have greyhounds riding a Greyhound Bus. But I was concerned about their safety.  She assured me that when she'd recently dogsat for my mom, my mom's dog Fitzie had also ridden the bus.
• Night 3: My mother found the Holy Grail! It turned out to be in a park in my hometown in Illinois. It also turned out to be a large root vegetable. We told the government, who said they would award my mom $90,000 and we were free to eat the root vegetable.  It was delicious.

Chocolate Cake with a Secret Ingredient

The secret ingredient isn't weed, first of all.  :)

I got this recipe from a food blog.  Check it out!

A Tasty Love Story

OK, the secret ingredient? Black beans! And I swear, you would NEVER know they were in it.  It makes a dark, moist cake that's intensely chocolatey but not cloyingly sweet.  It'd be great with homemade whipped cream, but I didn't have any of that, so I doused it in powdered sugar.

Also, I know I haven't updated in quite awhile. I don't want to swear I will update more, because it's always disappointing to see a blog where the last entry, made years before, is a promise that the blogger will write more. So, how often will I write? We'll see.

Anyway, next time someone asks "How do you get protein as a vegetarian?" I'll say "Chocolate cake!"

My searches, other searches

What I typed...

"How can I meet"

What Google suggested...

"How can I meet Justin Bieber"
"How can I meet a girl"
"How can I meet One Direction"
"How can I meet Theresa Caputo"

What I was actually searching for...
"How can I meet a dolphin?"

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What I typed...
"Different types of"

What Google suggested...
"Different types of weed"
"Different types of braids"
"Different types of birth control"
"Different types of flowers"

What I was actually searching for...
"Different types of dolphins"

---------------------------------------------------

I was re-reading an old Madeleine L'Engle book with a dolphin in it. Also, Theresa Caputo is apparently the star of TLC's Long Island Medium.

More Iced Tea Data

I finally took pictures of the Honest Teas that I drank in spring semester of 2012, as well as the few I had on my visited down in the summer of 2012. 

The results? Spring semester I drank 20, summer I drank 7. Fall of 2011 I drank 21, so there was a slight decline from fall to spring. (Keep in mind I don't teach in the summer and drive down less than once a week.) However, there is still not enough data to come to any conclusions. I must continue to drink my teas, keep them, and photograph them. I'm already building my fall collection.

Spring 2012

Summer 2012

Favorite Books

I just made a quick (about two minutes) list of my ten favorite books, as part of an exercise on creativity that I was doing. I thought I'd share it, with the reminder that it's not meant to be a serious, well-thought-out thing: it's my top ten great books that occurred to me while sitting at my desk (away from my library) on a Friday afternoon.

In no particular order:

• Open House by Elizabeth Berg
• Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
• The Goneaway World by Nick Harkaway
• The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
• The City and the City by China Mieville 
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
• Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld
• PopCo by Scarlett Thomas
• The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
• This one about memory, about this guy in London...I LOVED it, and I can't remember its title off the top of my head, nor its author.

I just noticed that I chose five books by men and five by women. (Curtis Sittenfeld is a woman, and the person who wrote the book I can't recall is a man.) Unintentional gender equity. 

Anyway, if you've read any of these, please, let's discuss them! I love to talk about books I've read!