wendy’s posterous

Glen and I just got a portable dishwasher a few weeks ago, and our lives are drastically better (i.e., no more fighting over mile high piles of dishes). There is no room in our small kitchen for a built-in dishwasher so we lived for two years in ignorance of one of the best inventions ever--a dishwasher on wheels. Someone needs to design an affordable dishwasher that can handle delicate and odd-shaped lab glassware. The amount of lab dishes shown here takes about 1.5 hours of active time to wash between scrubbing them in soapy water, rinsing them in tap water, soaking them in dilute acid (HCl), and then rinsing them in deionized water. I hate fishing little items out of the bottom of the acid bath (second photo) because I almost always end up with acid inside my gloves. I think the reason why I never want to do dishes at home is that I spend so much time doing them at lab. Yes, that's what undergrads are for, but we don't like torturing ours.

(I've also posted a couple pictures of the "folded" disks that I mentioned a few days ago, in case you are curious what they look like.)

       

Click here to download:

Dishwasher.zip (10933 KB)

I've been reading through the Rough Guide to Australia very carefully to
plan a 3-week itinerary for a trip this coming October. I'm having a hard
time deciding where to visit since our time is limited. Do any of you have
advice for me? Is Ayers Rock worth visiting (if so, we'd just go for 2
days)? I just heard from a friend that the snorkeling is better in Western
Australia compared to the Great Barrier Reef because too many tourists
have ruined the corals on the Great Barrier Reef. If we just avoid
snorkeling off Cairns (probably Mission Beach, 2 hr south), then maybe
we'd be okay? We're definitely going to Tasmania (got to see the devils!),
Melbourne (most of my extended family lives there), and Sydney (we're
flying through there anyway). Please help me decide!

At Stephanie's request, I'm sharing some of my baking tricks. I made chocolate chip cookies according to the recipe below (a healthier version of the "Best Big, Fat, Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookie" recipe on allrecipes.com). I took pictures as I was preparing the cookie dough, so you can see how well mixed the dough should be. Just like with muffins, you don't want to overmix, or you'll get a denser cookie. Also, if you are baking two sheets of cookies at the same time, halfway through, rotate the sheets from the top and bottom so that the cookie bottoms don't burn on the bottom sheet. I also like to turn the sheets around because the oven is a little warmer on the inside versus closer to the oven door. Resist the urge to open the oven door to check on your cookies. They will be fine! With any baking, opening the door will cause a sudden temperature drop that can interfere with the rising of the dough/batter. If you think you are having trouble with an inconsistent oven temperature (sometimes stuff burns, sometimes stuff is undercooked), then it's probably because you are opening the oven door sometimes.

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted
• 1 cup unpacked brown sugar
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
• 1 egg
• 1 egg yolk
• 1-1/2 cups semisweet chocolate chips

1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F (165 degrees C). Grease cookie sheets or line with parchment paper. (I use the Williams-Sonoma Gold-touch pans, so no grease required!)
   
2. Sift together the flour, baking soda and salt; set aside.
3. In a medium bowl, cream together the melted butter, brown sugar and white sugar until well blended. Beat in the vanilla, egg, and egg yolk until light and creamy. Mix in the sifted ingredients until just blended. Stir in the chocolate chips by hand using a wooden spoon. Drop cookie dough 1/4 cup at a time onto the prepared cookie sheets. Cookies should be about 3 inches apart.
4. Bake for 15 to 17 minutes in the preheated oven, or until the edges are lightly toasted. Cool on baking sheets for a few minutes before transferring to wire racks to cool completely. (Don't wait too long to get the cookies off the pan because they'll get pretty stuck.)
   

         

Last weekend Glen and I decided to be cultured and visit a museum for the first time in the five years that we have lived in San Francisco. We even bought a membership to the de Young in an attempt to more convincingly pretend that we are cultured and to bribe our friends into hanging out with us. (We can get two people in for free at a time, so let us know!) I completely regretted not bringing my camera with me, so I went back to the exhibit today. I thought it would be interesting to photograph people admiring and interpreting the glass work, but with the dim lighting and my cheap lenses, I had to shoot at shutter speeds slower than 1/60 sec. The people turned out fuzzy, but I got some good photos of the glass work alone. I'm impressed with my steady hands, if I do say so myself. Maybe I should be a surgeon--except I'd pass out at the sight of blood.

         

Just got a call from Bank of America because someone used our AmEx credit card to buy two memberships to eHarmony.com (on two consecutive days, which is what tipped off BofA). I didn't check with my husband if he had authorized those charges because, well, he better not have! It's really scary that someone got hold of our credit card number because we have only ever used that card at Costco. My husband pays all of our bills online, and I've always told him he is too trusting of other internet users. Virus protection, firewalls, spyware removers? Slows down his computer too much! Maybe this will convince him that it's worth the sacrifice of a few minutes a day waiting for his computer to respond. I kind of want to get a credit report now just to make sure other people haven't tried to de-fraud us in even worse ways. Be careful, everyone!

I am completely amazed at how many people have visited my blog already,  even considering the short list of people I emailed about it. I am also  amazed at how obsessed I am with it right now. I really need to get back  to reviewing a manuscript that was submitted for publication in a  scientific journal. Seriously, if you perform a linear regression and get  an R-squared of 0.05, even if your p-value is < 0.001, do you really expect  me to believe that there is a relationship between your two variables?  Come on!

If my stats talk is boring, then just look at this picture captured by my  labmate, Becca, at Big Sur a couple months ago. It's a dragonfly larva molting...Ew! I'm glad I work with dirt and greenhouse gases...

I have to say that I was impressed with how easy it was for me to edit down 2 hours of video to 3 minutes using Windows Movie Maker. I had previously thought that I'd need to invest in a Mac to be able to manipulate my videos. Remember, I'm NOT good with technology, so I really need products that are dumbed down. I bought a camcorder (yes, it uses tapes) a few months ago so that I could take videos of myself and my labmates doing research. Maybe the videos will help convince others that climate change scientists know what they are doing and aren't making up global warming for their own profit (which makes no sense because we are highly underpaid compared to other professions requiring 4+++ years of graduate education).

Anyway, here are the highlights of a recent family vacation to Hilton Head, South Carolina, featuring my niece and nephew. Enjoy!

Click here to download:

Hilton Head family video compressed.wmv (7563 KB)