Becca Stareyes

Sorry, I haven't been blogging much. My life is just being average. I'm getting ready for a conference next week -- I still have to finish my talk, and buy some nicer shirts to wear. (And maybe either capris or skirts that fit -- I have one set, and I probably shouldn't wear jeans. On the plus side, the highs are supposed to be in the 70s, so I could probably get away with pants.)

On the way down (to Virginia Beach), our group is road-tripping it. Eight hours with four scientists (me, my advisor, another grad student and a postdoc) in the car -- this can only be trouble. When I get there, I'm sharing a hotel room with an undergrad from Wellsley whose advisor is friends with mine. (I met this student once -- she was considering Cornell as a grad school, but ended up going elsewhere.)

Diet is 'meh' -- I've been hovering around the same weight for a month or so. My love of vegetables is being balanced by my love of sweets and free food. I've taken to eating* roasted veggies, which are yummy. Though next time, I think I need to add some carbs to the veggies and chicken so I don't get hungry and have a bowl of cereal three hours later. (I got rice. Rice is good.)

* Okay, I had it for dinner today

In related cooking matters, I discovered that if you place a piece of Pyrex glass -- like, say a casserole dish placed under a roasting pan to catch drips -- that has been sitting in a 375° oven for 25 minutes directly into a sink with cold water in it, the glass will shatter. Impressively. In retrospect, the fact I got an A in Thermal Physics probably should have clued me in that this was a Bad Idea. At least, if I didn't want to buy a new casserole dish. It was a great idea to see physics in action.

I'm out of things to say.

Oh, wait! Swine flu! I used it as an excuse to restock my medicine cabinet, and buy some staples In Case of Generic Disaster*. Not terribly worried, though -- I figure the supplies are good to have on hand anyway, since I'm prone to headaches and allergies.

* Read: pasta, chicken broth and toilet paper. Probably should add in some Instant Soup and Cans of Stuff that couldn't be eaten by people feeling icky. (Especially since there's instant Thai Curry soup that tastes wonderful when I have a cold, probably because I can actually breathe after I eat it.)

I like my slow-cooker. The reason is that I can spend fifteen minutes shoving canned/frozen vegetables and chunks of chicken into it, add some herbs, and when I get home, dinner (with enough for lunch the next day) is waiting. The house even smells like cooking. I feel horribly domestic, except it's the kind of domesticity that I like -- the kind that takes very little work for the results.

I found a lovely passage of kitchen-witchery in the book I'm rereading (Whisky and Water, by Elizabeth Bear). I need to get a copy to kuchehexe because I think she'd get a kick out of it. I'm enjoying my re-read of that series (The Promethean Age) -- there are two books (Blood and Iron and Whisky and Water) set in the modern world, with two set in Elizabethan England coming out soon. It's urban fantasy, but it feels different than The Dresden Files. While Harry has a page out of the pulp hero, the world in The Promethean Age is much more complicated. It's not the sort of thing that a guy with a quick wit and handy fireball can easy come in and make things mostly right in 400 pages. Don't get me wrong -- I like both, but they are a bit of different tastes, for all that both are clearly in the 'urban fantasy' subgenre.

Though Whisky and Water does feature the Archangel Michael in a Trogdor the Burninator T-shirt.

It says something about me that I am the sort of person who, after a thunderstorm and upon noticing that the Sun has come out, will dash outside to see if there is a rainbow. I like to think that that something is flattering.