Nerd Camp

While Kate skiied, I attended a dissertation workshop in California. It was quite an intense workshop. There were 12 PhD students, and the workshop actually resembled summer camp in a lot of ways (Kate called the workshop "nerd camp"). We had roommates, and they rang a big bell before meals. The Ph.D. students also bonded really nicely -- I feel like I made a lot of new friends. On the first full day of the workshop we each had to be completely silent for 30 minutes while the group discussed our dissertation projects (we had all read 10 page abstracts of one anothers' projects). This was quite strange, but not as bad as I had feared. On the second full day, we each got to lead a discussion of our own dissertations, and on the third day there were limited activities, and we got to go and play. I joined the largest group, and we went hiking. Here are some pictures:

Vail!

This holiday weekend, Mike and I went in different directions. I’ll let him share what he did (hopefully with pictures!) later, but for now, it’s all me . . . .

Friday evening I took off for Denver, meeting my relatives from San Francisco for a 2-hour drive to Vail, where we’d all rendezvous with my Cheyenne relatives and their son, who is at CSU. Perfect plan, no?

Enter Mother Nature. A massive snowstorm/blizzard/windgust/white-out/avalanche warning situation turned what should have been a short drive into a six hour drive! We spent at least two of those hours in a traffic jam, creeping along at a pace that wouldn’t even shame the slowest snail. We moved so slowly that people’s (front-wheel drive) cars actually got stuck in the middle of the freeway while “driving.” I totally thought we’d be spending the night SQUISHED in the car (five of us plus ski gear = one tight fit) out there on the interstate. When we finally did get to the head of things, there were several cars just sitting perpendicular to the line of traffic, plus an RV (like, really, why would you even *think* you could drive your RV through this??? As if.). Big props to my uncle who drove fearlessly through all that! Also, a big thanks to my brother and Mike who both answered my panicked cell phone calls regarding road conditions.

So, we arrived at Vail around 4am. Only one of us was hearty enough to get up and hit the slopes at 8am. It was not, uh, me. I skied the half day that day, and then a full day Sunday. Despite the mess on Friday night, by Saturday morning the weather was perfect: not too cold, and really sunny.

And Vail is sooooo beautiful. Just amazing. Tons of big bowls, jagged peaks, and green trees (also some silvery aspens for contrast).

And it was so fun to ski with my cousins and aunt and uncle. My cousin Jesse is a serious shredder, but sometimes he deigned to ski with us. So it was fun to take the whole mountain as a group.

I even brought the new camera out one day to shoot some action shots:

I also used the old camera to take some video of cousin Jesse, cousin Skye, cousin Emilia, Aunt Polly, and Uncle Mitchell. Here’s more video, shot from a slightly different angle. Just kidding - the video is coming just as soon as I get the technical help uploading it.

My last day, I didn’t want to shell out the big bucks for full-day lift ticket since I needed to leave Vail around 1pm to catch my flight home, so I hung with Pru and Tom instead. Tom and I went snowshoeing while Pru cross country skied. The trails crisscrossed each other, so we got to see plenty of Pru!

I had a wonderful time – the company was good, the weather was good (after the initial woes), and the mountain was just amazing. What a great little getaway!

Love in the time of Kisses

I’ve been a bit busy lately and didn’t have the time to go all-out for Valentine’s Day (or, as we sometimes call it, Boo-al-en-tine’s Day).

But I wanted to make Mike a little something special. And I know how much he likes peanut butter. Peanut butter was actually pretty hard to find in Japan – there was something that was like peanut foam or peanut fluff (it had the right pictures on the container, but totally the wrong density/weight). Anyway, so Mike’s been a bit peanut-deprived. Add to that the fact that I rarely make peanut butter cookies because I am just not super-wild about nuts.

So, I decided to give from the heart – especially in the sense that I would be less interested in eating the dough – and make him some of those peanut butter Hershey kiss cookies. (Okay, no pun intended with that heart comment, really).

I thought that this would be a totally simple recipe to get. But, like all (or most?) simple things, the internets greatly complicated my search. It turns out that a) you can make these cookies using Bisquick mixed with peanut butter and sweetened condensed milk (gross!), and b) there’s a raging controversy about whether you put this Hershey kiss in mid-baking or during the cooling process. Who knew?

So I gave up and went to the source: my good friend Miso’s mother. Now that I think about it, her peanut butter kiss cookies were actually the first ones of the kind that I ever ate. In college (see, I wasn’t kidding about that whole not-eating-very-many-nuts thing).

Her recipe is actually pretty cool – it works off a cookie starter base, and then you add the peanut butter to that. You can scale the starter and additional peanut butter part up or down, depending on the quantity desired. And, for the record, you put the kiss in after baking as the cookies are cooling.

While my cookies were good (from the half of one I ate), I don’t think they were as good as Miso’s mother’s. Really, this could be due to a few reasons – 1) I made a math error in scaling down the recipe, 2) I used all butter, instead of a butter-Crisco mix, 3) I used the super-natural peanut butter that has only peanuts and salt as ingredients, and/or 4) I either over- or under-cooked them, because, really, how can you tell when a cookie that starts out as a golden brown is done? I felt like my cookies were too crumbly – they didn’t form easily into balls, and they tended to fall apart when I pushed the kiss into them. I solved that last problem by letting them cool a little more than suggested before putting the kiss in. And, this morning, the cookies are perfectly fine and don’t really seem all that crumblySo, anyway, that’s what I did last night. I would definitely recommend this gift/strategy to others for Valentine’s Day.