chocolate cake for two

I've been making mini desserts recently, to have just one serving for both N and myself so we wouldn't overdo it.  I can down an entire chocolate cake all by myself in a few hours--my mother can testify.  Last night I made lime custard tarts, but tonight was a tiny chocolate cake.

Chocolate Cake for Two

18 g cocoa powder
56 g boiling water
56 g sugar
1 egg

1 t vanilla
1 T butter, softened
50 g flour
1/4 t baking soda

Whisk the cocoa and boiling water until smooth; mix in sugar.  Mix in egg when cooled a little.  Kneed together butter and remaining dry ingredients (flour and soda) until butter is fully incorporated.  Add dry/butter mixture to wet mixture, mixing until smooth.  Bake at 350 in an approximately 5in diamater ramekin or souffle dish until springy when pressed.  (I used a 16oz CorningWare dish.)

I made a chocolate whipped cream (heavy cream, vanilla, sugar, cocoa powder) to frost it and topped with dark chocolate crumbs.

...and we ate it so fast, I couldn't take a pretty picture of the tasty guts tumbling out.

ants and plants

I was watering some under-loved plants tonight, when lo! an ant colony swarmed out of one of my kitchen plants.  I spied a large winged one.  A queen?  Certainly; it had the characteristic enlarged abdomen.  There were lots of tiny ones with wings too.  But then I saw a second huge one.  Two queens?  That seemed a little strange.  Then a third.  And a fourth.  I began to doubt my queen-ant identification skills.  This was a tiny pot, too.

I flooded the plant to make sure the ants stayed out, then wiped them up, ensuring the demise of the might-be-queens in particular.  Ants are among the insects that I have no qualms about killing indiscriminately when they enter my living space.  (Spiders and moths get some warm words as I remove them, usually informing them that N will kill them if they don't leave.  And even bees, wasps, and flies get ushered out with moderate politeness.  Though after recently discussing Ender's game in my first book club meeting, I still felt a little guilty about potentially having destroyed a whole colony of ants.)  After wiping the ants up like crumbs, I set to work learning about the varieties of ants.  Turns out, unless you get these guys under the microscope or you're a professional, it's near impossible to identify a common household ant.  Oh well.

So my final guess on the queens is that they just hadn't matured fully.  Else why would there be four of them?  All I hope is that the ants don't make their way into my brand new lavender plant, a birthday gift from my mother-in-law, which is currently being pampered out of its mind.  The other plants might be jealous, but they get watered more now, so they shouldn't complain.  Trickle down economics, baby.  Tee-hee.

we are the 100%

Honestly, I'm a bit tired of the "we are the 99%" and/or "occupy ____."

I think that there are a lot of good ideas and moving stories, but the lack of organization just kind of irks me.  I'm not going to take a stand with someone, friend or stranger, unless I have a compelling reason.  And a group of people?  I'm not going to join a mass of folk without it declaring a clear set of goals or ideals.  Maybe I'm a persnickety list-maker, but I just don't get it.  It feels like herd mentality.

My life is pretty good right now; I might be singing a different tune if I were hugely in debt, grappling with medical issues or otherwise had life in disarray.  Despite life's goodness, I like to think that I'm a survivor by nature, doing what I need to do, even if life is hard.  [Tangent: Hunger Games is next on the reading list.]  And if I'm not a survivor, I'm at least an optimist, focusing on the good things.  Everyone has a breaking point though, and to me the 99%/occupy movement seems to be declaring that most people are close to breaking, if not already there.  Part of me is skeptical, thinking that folks might be exaggerating, but part of me knows that I'm really lucky and that there are lots of folk out there dealing with a lot of unpleasant stuff.

So, in the spirit of sharing 99%-style, here's some info about my life. As a household, my husband and I are above the 50% mark of Americans [2] by income.  We're both in graduate school and attend the same name-recognized school.  We're in the youngest 20% of Americans, including the lowest 10% being children/adolescents ages 14 and under [3].  It seems ridiculous to me that we're over the 50% income mark given that we're both at the start of our careers and still in school.  We have retirement and savings accounts, and are able to donate money as we see fit.  Our health coverage isn't great, but since we're healthy, it doesn't matter much for now.  I am worried about health coverage for the possibility of having kids at some point; I'd like the birth process and pediatric stuff to be well covered.

My problems are very, well, insignificant next to issues of starvation or vaccination.  There's still pretty small next to eviction or massive debt.  I feel like I have 1%'er problems, even though I'm in the 99%.  I feel like a lot of people in the 99% have this same magnitude of problems, and that income is not a good metric for separating the privileged from the struggling.  I think that's part of why the whole thing irks me: it's including me when I shouldn't be included.

[1] per this article by the WSJ
[2] internationally, it's a whole 'nother ballgame
[3] I did this with rough approximation, given the percentages listed here.

sporadic obsessions

This totally describes my life.  Except instead of Dragon Ball Z, it was Sailor Moon.

my ideal tech setup

Currently, I have a razor cell phone, a 13" Macbook pro, and an iMac at the office.  I video chat with my family more than I call them, but it's nice to have the phone for emergencies or when I don't have internet access.  I use my laptop at home and when traveling, for both work as well as personal stuff, and I love having a big screen at the office.  A desktop also forces me to work for extended periods of time.  When I worked only on my laptop, I'd be tempted to close it and go home early, thinking that I could just pick up where I left off, which rarely happened.  When I do need to work remotely, I can just ssh into my work machine and or grab whatever I need with scp.

The biggest gap in my current setup is a touch-screen type device that would be useful for reading papers or digital books.  I'm not one to give up my paper books, but a lot of libraries, public and private, now distribute content digitally.  Here's the hitch: I don't want to have just another gadget.  Even if it's useful, I feel like so much technology overlaps already that an iPad/Kindle/Nook would be silly given that I already have so many things.

Here's the setup I really want:

1) A mobile device.  I could make phone calls with a wireless earpiece or do video chat on this.  I could read PDFs and other digital media easily without feeling like I'm using a traditional laptop.  I could check/write emails, work on programing projects, and do other typing intensive tasks easily and for long periods.  Imagine as if a Macbook Air and an iPad made a baby--this is that device.

2) A desktop/server.  All my projects and digital media are hosted here.  I can ssh in from my mobile device.  It has a large screen that makes my daily work easy.  It's powerful enough to do computation on large data sets.

Just two things.  The second one already exists, but the first one doesn't.  My bet is that it will sometime soonish, and when it does, I'll be ready.

11, 11, 11!

Eleven is my favorite number.  I should have planned a party for today or something.  Instead, I might just go read The Eleventh Hour, cut edible things into eleven pieces, and other such nonsense.

another gratitude list

I've been off balance lately--my fuse has been short and I've been feeling generally entitled. Like everyone, I constantly walk the line of being respectful of others and protective of my own needs. I don't want to be a push-over, but I don't want to be mean either. Sometimes I fall one way, sometimes the other, but falling on the selfish end always feels worse, and that's where I've been of late. There's nothing like a bit of gratitude to put things in perspective and help restore balance. Plus, it's November, so here goes.

Some things I'm grateful for, in no particular order and with no particular organization:
- Daylight savings time that gets me on an earlier schedule without any effort
- A bouquet of beautifully smelling roses currently sitting on our kitchen table

- N takes care of the dishes almost all of the time, even when I wreak havoc in the kitchen.

- I can walk everywhere I need to go regularly, except the grocery store.

- Access to essentially every book I'd ever want to read (big local library + the university/ILL)

- I have the freedom to set my own hours and determine my own projects.
- Work/school is really enjoyable and fulfilling for me. (Related, but distinct from above.)
- All of my basic needs are easily met. (And will be for the foreseeable future; life is stable.)
- I have friends, family, and communities (school and church) that support me.
- Most of the people I love (as in philía) are in good health and are generally happy.

25 hours

N made the observation last night as we were going to bed that I had a 25-hour day for my 25th birthday. Hurrah for daylight savings time!