White House Snipers

(I wrote this back on Monday but never found internet access until now.)

Sometimes you make choices in life. I had a choice to make, and I decided to travel.

It was either go to a conference or the faculty retreat before classes start. It was a hard decision, but Washington DC beckoned!

Husband and I left early Saturday morning. I thought for sure we would have a great trip based on the AMAZING parking spot that we snagged.

Front row parking at the airport! Not that back row parking is all that bad, but how many people can say they had such an amazing spot? But that was pretty much the highlight of the trip out to DC. The flight was late, screaming kids and rude flight attendants. I brought my “Great Job Tickets” just in case one of the Delta employees impressed me, but I held on to all of them on this trip.

We had dinner at Gordon Biersch and had some nice beer, and Husband got some of their specialty – garlic fries – with his dinner.

It was RAW garlic. One fry and I was burping all evening. Husband didn’t even try any of them because the smell totally turned him off. If was a vampire-free zone around us that evening! He asked for some plain-jane fries but did make the comment that is the waiter said “Dude, whatever. It’s your funeral.” that he might change his mind.

I’ve been to DC a couple of times several years ago, but had never seen the White House. Originally, we wanted to tour the White House, but did you know that you need to contact your Congressman at least one month in advance? And six months is better? Considering I can’t manage to pack my lunch the night before, we didn’t end up touring the White House.

But we did see the outside:

They have fences to keep the Secret Service contained.

Did you know that there are people standing on the roof of the White House?

Husband said that they were snipers. I think that makes me a little nervous. We were a good quarter mile from the White House, but I have a feeling that if one of my exes was up there, he could have hit me, no problem.

We have been spending SOME time at the conference too. I’ve been working on my talk (which I gave today to a standing ovation – NOT!!) but Husband has been attending talks. I’ve gotten to hang out with old labmates but not much else.

More photos later. The museums are all free here so I’ve been spending lots of time looking at cool stuff.

My life on the C-list

I’m not dead! Just busy with too many things going on. Plus, I just got back from an inorganic chemistry conference. It was a pretty small, exclusive-type conference that I had to apply to and everything. I introduced myself as an “Inorganically-Inclined Physical Organic Chemist.” It was fun learning about a whole new area of chemistry which I find myself getting more and more involved in, but I was having second thoughts about whether or not I actually should have been there when during talks on the first night, my biggest question was:

“Is zirconium an element?”

In my defense, I couldn’t decide if they were talking about zirconium or zirconocene in the talk. But questions of those sorts were par for the course during this conference. I learned a lot and met some fun people, but I have decided that I am a C-list chemist, and that’s only because of who I know. If I weren’t married to an A-lister, I would totally be with Kathy Griffith in the ranks of the D’s.

I had never thought about the stratification of chemical society until I happened to glance over at the program of one of the other attendees. She is from a good PhD granting school, but it’s not ranked in the top 20 or anything. She had crossed out a couple of names of people who had presented. They were obviously beneath her notice or the science so bad that it wasn’t worth even leaving the title unsullied (at least in her opinion). I started thinking about those she had crossed out, and they were all scientists from small programs, or programs without graduate programs.

(And yes, I was one of the names crossed off! But I did talk about a lot of physical organic chemistry and may have explained Hammett Parameters a little more in depth than I should have, but I wanted to make sure that those inorganikers understood the premise of my research.)

The social hours were also pretty much broken down along ranking lines too. The conference was supposed to bring together researchers from different backgrounds (A through D list) to talk and build collaborations, and some of that did occur, but not very often. I know that some of it comes from the fact that most of the attendees know each other from other conferences. They tend to hang together. I did try to talk to a lot of people, and some times I was pretty much ignored or shut out of conversations. That’s OK though – I’m just going to claim that it is because I’m an organic chemist…

Gravy, two ways.

For some reason, I’m mostly caught up. There is still stuff to do, but I’m not so far behind that if I don’t spend 112 hours on Sunday grading, making class notes, writing exams, etc., I won’t be ready for class. I got to spend some time today working on “professional development”, whatever that means. Well, what it means in my case is writing a grant for a software/hardware update and cooking.

Yup, cooking is professional development for me. I teach a class on the Science of Food and Cooking. One of the things that I’ve been reading about is gravy. Gravy is hard; both cooking-wise and science-wise. It’s really all about proportions; Fat to Water to Thickener.

Today, I made gravy two different ways. This morning, I made bacon gravy and biscuits. It wasn’t sausage gravy because now-a-days sausage has very little fat. And fat is essential to gravy. So bacon it was.

Morning gravy wasn’t a rousing success. I made a roux after the bacon was cooked and then added milk. Unfortunately, I think my roux was too thick because my gravy was lumpy. No matter what I did, my gravy was lumpy. Whisking, stirring hard, smashing the bottom of the pan with a spatula, nothing worked. But I ate it anyway because that’s what snowy Sunday mornings need: Biscuits and Gravy.

Warning: Science coming up.

Flour is a lot of starch and a little protein. Starch is actually a long string of sugar molecules. It doesn’t dissolve like regular sugar does, but it does absorb water. When it absorbs water, the starch granules start to plump up and get jelly-like. If the granules are clumped together not well separated, then the outside particles swell and create a nice, waterproof coating around the inner granules. That’s where lumps come from.

That’s why it is good to sift the flour in, or add flour that is suspended in a little bit of water. But raw flour can taste dough-y, which is why you add the roux instead of raw flour. But if your roux is too thick, then it is too hard to whisk in the liquid. It’s a no-win situation.

OK: Science is over for now.

This evening, we made one of my favorite meals, Citrus-Chili Shrimp. It’s an Atkins recipe, but with the addition of a little flour, it carbs that recipe right up! I use a lot less olive oil and chili garlic sauce to add some heat. At the end, when you are supposed to boil the marinade for two minutes, I add a little bit of flour to make a gravy. Well tonight, the gravy started to separate out into oil and clumpy, yucky stuff.

So after lumps, the other problem with gravy is proportions. If the gravy starts to separate out and get oily, it means that your proportions are off. What surprises me is that if you add some water back into pan, everything will whisk back into one phase.

A little water and a whisk and I had a beautiful sauce! Along with spinach and a 2003 Melville Clone 115 Indigene Pinot Noir, it was a most amazing meal. Husband said it was the best iteration of this meal ever. I am feeling very good about my technique with this recipe because the past three times I’ve made it, Husband said that it was the best ever. Yay me!

(Funny thing: I’m watching the new season of Top Chef as I’m writing this!)

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Project 365 – No. 85 (November 14, 2008)

This is my curling iron. It is almost brand new, even though I’ve had it for about 4 months. What struck my Friday night was the tag: “Caution – This Product Can Burn Eyes”. Really. Who’s using a curling iron with a 1.5 inch barrel to curl their eyelashes?

Project 365 – No. 86 (November 15, 2008)

This is a bad photo, I know. But you can kind of see the interesting Fall foliage transitions. The small oak tree on the left, still completely green. It hasn’t lost any of its leaves. This is the poor tree that the deer ate the top off of last winter. Then in the spring, it started coming back from the base. Then the deer ate it again. It came back, and the deer ate it again. At that point, I decided that this damn tree had a will to live and it should be nurtured.

The forsythia in the back is in the process of losing its leaves and the oak on the right is completely brown.

I need to decide which oak to move. Two that close together are too much.

Project 365 – No. 87 (November 16, 2008)

Missy really wanted to go outside today even though it was snowing all day. Pretty soon we’ll have to put her out for a little bit, just to let her know that it sucks.

NPR, Shmem PR

I heard the most asinine story ever on NPR this morning.

This professor at Evergreen State College in Washington got funding from NASA to measure the number of trees on earth. (Link to story here.) When I was telling my friend the Astronomer about it, she got all up in arms at that point of the story. She couldn’t believe that NASA would fund something like that at all!

Well, either they did or someone from Evergreen State College is trying to pull a fast one on us!

ANYWAY, back to me being offended.

The way the story was edited, it made it sound like this poor professor got the number of trees on earth (over 400 billion, give or take a few). She then looked up the number of people (6.5 billion as of 12/31/05) and started wondering how many trees per person that is.

The reporter then had this minute long diatribe about how many trees he thought and how many she thought is was going to be and how upsetting it would be if there was less than one tree per person.

The whole time, I’m yelling at the radio. I came up with a range of between 50 and 70 about two seconds after he told us the population of the earth! This isn’t rocket science.

FINALLY, they let us in on the big secret:

You take the number of trees and DIVIDE by the number of people on earth to get 61 trees per person.

Really.

But why am I so upset about this story? Not because they took us through the math. No. I am teaching a non-majors class right now and realize that math doesn’t come easily to everyone.

I am upset about the way the story was edited for the radio. The reporter (Robert Krulwich if you care) made the poor researcher sound so ignorant! The radio report sounds like that she wasn’t sure if the ratio would be greater than one, even after she had the two numbers. I have to assume that this isn’t the case. That she started thinking about the tree/human ratio as she was doing the calculations to get the number of trees.

Remember when Husband was interviewed for the story on the new water splitting catalyst? The same thing happened. When he called and talked to the reporter about it, she said that the real science just sounded too complicated and that her way of reporting it was easier and the details didn’t really matter.

I’m starting to think that perhaps NPR is not my best listening choice.

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Project 365 – No. 81 (November 10, 2008)

On Sunday (No 80 of Project 365), it snowed a little. A nice, cute dusting of snow. On Monday when I woke up and looked outside, there was snow all over everything! I am so not ready for winter.

Project 365 – No. 82 (November 11, 2008)

This is the scarf that I made, with the black cat that I am going to strangle with it. Keeping the two cats separated is starting to be a big pain in my arse.

Project 365 – No. 83 (November 12, 2008)

I just thought that November 4th would be the end of all the random crap in the mail. I forgot that the holiday season means catalogues. This was the haul from today. Yup, one day. I think that Signals and Wireless are sending about one a week. Thank goodness for recycling!

Almost there!

Two things that is:

• My voice is almost back to normal. I’ve been trying to keep quiet today to give the ‘cords a rest. I’m a little nervous about tomorrow though. I’ll be able to get through organic, I’m sure but I’m not confident about the rest of the classes, especially considering Monday is one of my longer days.
• The election is almost over.

On November 3rd, my phone will be safe to answer again. I won’t have to worry about picking up the phone and being accosted by some robotic voice telling me who to vote for and how awful the other guy is.

I’ll also be able to watch TV without having to fast forward through a zillion political commercials. I’m starting to like seeing them in double time. It’s TV for cats. Lots of photos that really don’t have anything to do with each other.

The doorbell won’t randomly ring and scare the cats to death. Although, with Saki having to spend time in the basement, when the doorbell rings, it finally shuts him up for a few minutes. I’ve shaken hands with more politicians this season than I ever have in my life.

The mailbox will be safe from the thousand or so political flyers that I get every day:

Project 365 – No. 72 (November 1, 2008)

This was the haul from Saturday. I have no clue who these people are or what they are pushing. I guess I should be a better voter and read them, but I prefer to get my information from a neutral source like www.ihatepolitics.com or www.bobalexanderrules.com. Every time we get something from Bob Alexander, I think of the movie Dave.

With this next photo, I am officially up to date with Project 365 photos.

Project 365 – No. 73 (November 2, 2008)

It’s official, winter is here. Our first fire of the season! Fuzz is definitely enjoying it.

Stay warm, light a fire (in the appropriate place!), grab a cat and a glass of wine and enjoy the madness of the last 48 hours of the election season. No matter what happens, we’re going to make history!

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A student sent me this the other day:

Memo to Palin: Fruit Fly Research Has Led To Advances in Understanding Autism

Sometimes, projects that seem absolutely ridiculous can lead to important advances and insights, and sometimes not. Research is important not just for the information that it leads to, but also for the training in problem solving and project development that students receive. Don’t take away our funding!