Thanksgiving is gone but the leftovers are not

I wouldn't say our Thanksgiving went off without a hitch but I think it was a pretty smooth ride.  It took a little while longer to get the turkey in the oven than we had anticipated which turned out ok because Steph and Linda were also running a little behind too.  The group agreed that Catarina's candied yam recipe was amazing.  Linda stuffing was delicious, really delicious.  And I can't say enough about Steph's filling.  I could have just eaten that.  Matt's turkey got rave reviews.  There was so much food.  S&L also made a veggie platter, brussel sprouts, and green beans.  We all ate way too much and then lazed on the couches and watch Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, ordered special from netflix since Matt had never seen it.  Before we got to taste the apple pie, which was pretty beautiful, Zelda managed to pull the pie off the table.  Luckily the pie tin landed on the bottom corner so the pie wasn't ruined, just smooshed.  So it became more of a apple crumble than a pie.  I guess she figured that since we had allowed her some turkey with her dinner she would just serve her own pie.  The pie was delicious, crumbled or not, and the ice cream was fantastic.  The pumpkin pie was also wonderful and so was the cheesecake that Linda made.  At one point, Linda fell alseep on the futon and Zelda mirrored her position and fell asleep too.  As you would expect, we had a lot of leftovers.  I love Thanksgiving leftovers, I could eat them for weeks if I could.  As it is we had them at least one meal every day since Thursday.  I wish there were more, but we're slowly running out of them, dish by dish.  Now we're starting to gear up for Christmas.

The night before Thanksgiving and no one was stirring not even the puppy

Its the night before and we have things a rollin.  I baked up the pumpkin this morning but I haven't gotten around to the seeds yet.  I baked the pumpkin pie already and it looks delicious.  I still have to make the apple pie in a little while.  The cheddar cheese ice cream is getting frozen right now.  I tasted teh base though and its amazing.  I love cheese.  I think its going to go wonderfully with the apple pie.  I also already baked the yams so that I only have to mix them up tomorrow when its their time.  Zelda has been lending me her support all day by sleeping for most of it.  When we took the turkey out of the fridge it was still frozen so we are doing what Alton Brown suggested and it seems to be working.  I still don't fully trust him but he's on a trial period now.  I'm not really in charge of the turkey though, thats all Matt's work.  I'm just here for moral support.  I think it'll work out just fine.  Its going to be a low stress day tomorrow.  At least thats what we're hoping for.  Hope you all have a great day tomorrow!!!

The bird is in the fridge

Our Thanksgiving shopping is officially done, except for two things that I want to wait on.  I got the yams for 25¢ a pound.  Steph and Linda joined us last Saturday night for some chocolate peanut butter bread pudding and Thanksgiving planning.  3/4s of us are very in to cooking so it was an excited session.  Thankfully Steph usually has a level head and was realistic about how much food four people can actually eat.  I believe it narrowed down to four appetizers, a turkey, a tofurkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, filling, yams, a vegetable dish, cranberry sauce, gravy, cheesecake, pumpkin pie, and apple pie with cheddar cheese ice cream.  There will also be drinks for merry making; Steph is bringing a warm cider type drink and there will be wine.  Matt did such an amazing job with last year's turkey that he is in charge of this year's as well.  Luckily this year its a much more manageable eleven pounds.  This is the first year I'll be using Catarina's candied yams recipe.  It was so delicious last year that I got the recipe from her.  We're going to be having dinner at about one in the afternoon.  That way we can eat, lounge around and go in for round two.  It promises to be a wonderful day with our surrogate family since we can't be with our actual families this year.

It's like Candy Land with drugs...but not the way you're thinking

The trip to GSK yesterday went well - definitely worth the time. The interesting part ended up being the networking session at the end, and not so much the drug development simulation game. The game is a little hard to describe, but I'll give it a go. First off, it's a board game, and doesn't really involve any actual skill. The woman who developed it described it as being essentially the same as Candy Land, but it's closer to a cross between Candy Land and Monopoly. They sit you at a table with a couple other people (four others, in my case), and your table represents a company. The players break into two teams, representing project teams within the company. The company has a budge of about 200 million dollars or so, which both project teams draw from. Each project team also ends up getting 15-20 "patent years" early in the game, and part of the goal is to retain as many patent years as you can by the time you reach the end, as you get a certain profit based on how many patent years you have remaining. All you end up doing, however, is to move your piece around the board (either by rolling the dice or taking a chance card) and do what it says on the space on which you land. Often, the space just tells you to spend some money and go back to the start. The point of the game, I take it, is to give you a sense of the pitfalls of the drug development process - for example, your time under the patent tends to be largely eaten up by the development process, and most drugs you start with never make it to market. Apparently, they have new employees play the game - maybe so they know what they're getting into. I had hoped that the game might incorporate the skills and knowledge of the players to a greater extent - for example, maybe have a team with grad students from biology, chemistry, business, engineering, and law, and have them work together to walk a fake drug through the development process. That would be a lot harder to put together, I'm sure, and given that this was the first time that GSK has had an education workshop like this (and that the stated goal was just to give us an idea of what the industry and drug development are like), I can see why they set it up that way.

As I alluded to earlier, my favorite part was the networking session. I'm usually not a big fan of those types of things, but I was able to talk to a VP of development who gave me some very interesting and useful information about some of the jobs in drug discovery. Apparently, there are more opportunities for analytical/computational-type people than I had thought. Obviously, my training isn't in those areas, but they are approaches I find interesting - and I'm doing what I can to pick them up.

Enter the Matt

Kelly has convinced me that posting every now and then might be a good idea – so Hello, Internet! As I write this, Zelda is being her usual rambunctious self, rooting around the living room and finding new things to chew. I’m a little surprised, actually, as she’s usually sleepy enough at this point to keep her mostly stationary. Then again, normally I’m able to give her a walk in the evening, but tonight was a little too rainy for that. Eh, she’ll conk out soon enough.

Work has been going reasonably well. I’m still at the point where most of the day is taken up by fly work, but hopefully, the stock I’m making will prove to be healthy, and I can start spending more time in other parts of the lab. Spending hours on the scope is pretty mind-numbing, so to make up for it, I’ve been listening to more podcasts than I otherwise would. One of my favorites is the Penny Arcade/PvP Dungeons & Dragons podcast, but the most recent series ended a couple weeks ago, and I’ve been looking for something else to fill the void. It’s been harder than I expected – I’ve found a couple of good D&D podcasts, but none have that Jim Darkmagic…magic.

This week has been pretty ordinary, but I have something pretty interesting coming up on Friday. I’ll be going to the GlaxoSmithKline campus in RTP for a drug development simulation game with other young professional types. They haven’t told us much about what that’ll entail, but I’m eager to find out. I’ll try and post later to let everyone know how it goes.

43 days till Christmas, not that I'm counting

SoI went ahead and decorated the whole spare room for Christmas. Yes, I know that its not even Thanksgiving yet but Christmas decorations are so beautiful. I think its a shame that we only get to see them for a month. Plus, they are helping to encourage me as I dig my heels in and make my Christmas presents. The tight budget this year means everyone is getting lovingly hand made presents. My poor little sewing machine is ready to give up. I've also been playing with paint and yarn and pretty soon I'm going to be drilling holes. Sorry to be cryptic but since my readers are most likely those people who would get a present from me, I don't want to ruin it for y'all. Zelda isn't too happy about my crafting. She wants me to pay more attention to her. When she realizes that I'll be at the machine a while she lays down in her little bed and naps. Like many adolescents, Zelda does a whole lot of sleeping these days.
On the cooking front, Matt and I are working on cutting our budget. This means that we must have less fancy dinners. Not that many extravagant ingredients. I feel like beans are going to become a oft seen dinner companion. Speaking of which, I made beans today. They not only have the benefit of being cheap to make but making them from scratch makes them taste so much better than getting them out of the can. Because we had fresh made beans I made Mexican food for dinner. It has been years and years since I made chile rellenos but I think they came out pretty darn good. Oh! I almost forgot. I made pumpkin chocolate chip cookies this weekend. They were super tasty. I made the pumpkin puree myself with a cute little pumpkin that Matt bought me. I still have more left and he has requested some pumpkin bread.
After a long day of crafting, cooking, and cleaning I need to relax. Thanks to my mother, I cannot sit and watch tv without feeling antsy so I generally have something to do in the evenings. I am currently spending my evening tv moments doing this pattern. I don't know what it is yet but its fun to see it take shape, bit by bit.

We have a S.T.A.R. puppy!

Last night was our final senior puppy class.  The goals of this class were to give our puppy the skills to pass the American Kennel Club's S.T.A.R. puppy program.  We had a series of tests last night that Zelda had to pass in order to graduate.  Zelda passed with flying colors.  The tests were:  1. sit stay in a specific spot, 2.  walk sit walk, 3.  sit stay on top of a platform, 4.  go through a chute (short tunnel), 5.  jump over an obstacle, 6.  allow a stranger to examine her ears and paws,  7.  go through a long tunnel, 8.  sit stay in front of a stanger,  9.  down stay, 10. come from a distance and then as a plus we were supposed to do a trick if they knew one.  Zelda only had a problem with #8, mostly because she loves people so she wanted to get a belly rub.  A lot of the other puppies originally had problems with #'s 3, 4 & 7.  Zelda, being a dachshund, has never had a problem going through tunnels and she loves to get on the highest spot she can reach so the platform thing was no problem.  We got a certificate and ribbon that said she passed the class and now we have to send off for her S.T.A.R. medal.  The trainer gave us each an evaluation and she said, "Zelda is a wonderful little dog who probably would enjoy almost any class."  She also reccomended that we skip the next level of class and go to either Family Dog 2 or the Canine Good Citizen class.  Impressive.

On another note, Zelda and I have been puttering around the house trying to organize everything.  The past week or so we've been concentrating on the spare bedroom.  Sadly, since nobody sleeps in there it ends up being a catch-all room.  No more!  We are nearly done organizing and getting rid of things nobody wants/need.  At the same time we've been trying to set up the room as a man cave/craft room, as we had originally intended.  The desk is now cleared and is currently housing my sewing machine for christmas presents.  While all my craft things are hidden throughout the room they are almost entirely out of site.  The decorations are going ot be very guy compatible--no flowers and lace.  Its going to be all Star Wars and video games.  Its not done yet but its getting there.  Double bonus:  Zelda gets incredibly tired checking everything out while I'm working.

Some food pictures

I know, its been a lot of pictures lately. I remembered to finally take all these pictures off of the camera so while I still remember I'm showing you guys. I know I said I cook a lot and here are some of the dishes I've been doing.

This is an FLT (facon, lettuce, and tomato). I believe that the
tomatoes are from our garden and the bread is homemade
rosemary olive oil bread. Yum

This is what Matt calls fancy salad

I made my own pasta

Which made me want to make real fettuccine alfredo, not that cream stuff Americans usually make. This alfredo is only butter and cheese. Oh yeah!

Blueberry bread pudding with a lemon rum sauce. The blueberries were hand picked by Matt and me.

Zelda pictures

I take pictures of Zelda like people take pictures of their kids. I don't get around to posting them as often as I should. So here is a montage of Zelda pictures, in all her ridiculousness.

State Fair, 2009

Ah State Fair, how I love you.  It never dissapoints.  Matt, Steph, Linda, and I took off early to the fair on Friday afternoon and met up with Jess and Jacob.  I'm putting up a slideshow of this year's highlights because otherwise there'd be too many to pick from.  The major part of any State Fair, at least to me, is the food.  This year's new additions were fried HoHos and chocolate dipped bacon.  We didn't manage to get around to the HoHos but the bacon booth was near the front of the line so we headed there right after we got our corn fix.  I'm a vegetarian but chocolate dipped bacon was so insane that I had to try it.  I'm not sure I even need to say it but it was fantastic.  I think its probably hard to go wrong with bacon in general.  But yeah, chocolate on bacon with a little bit of sea salt, mmmm.  I only had one bite but felt it was necessary to do it it in order to faithfully describe the fair experience.  Along with the mandatory fried veggies and fried cheese, this year Steph and Linda had ostrich burgers and Matt tried his very first corndog.  We also made sure to get a cup of the NC State ice cream that they make on their campus.  As always the fair food was both amazing and unsettling at the same time, in the best possible way.  As it turns out a friend of ours won several of the crafting competitions at the fair this year.  Tony Perdue is in charge of the very expensive microscopes in the biology department.  He also grows his own cotton, spins his own yarn, and then knits beautiful pieces out of it.  The little old ladies who are in charge of those competitions were all a flutter when we told them we were friends of his.  Looking at some of the entires this year has inspired me to enter a few of the contests myself next year.  I'm pretty sure I have the skills to at least place in some of the competitions.  This year we made sure to get to the pig races a good 45 minutes early to get seats.  I think that the duck racing portion is actually my favorite part but they're all pretty cute.  To sum it up the NC State Fair delivered once again.

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