Spring Break, WOOOOO!
It’s somewhat weird when you live in a spring break destination. People want to come to your town to soak up some sun and booze but all you want to do is get away. I’m not complaining though; I’m pumped that spring break has finally arrived.
It hasn’t been all that long since our last post but it has been the end of the term and Easter was on Sunday so a fair amount of things have been going on. I’ll start from the beginning, namely the end… of the term.
As you might have gleaned from Colleen’s last couple posts, she was offered a job in the Mandeville Special Collections Library. She was a little depressed from being passed over for the other jobs she interviewed for but that made this offer even sweeter. She officially accepted the position today and she begins her new job on April 14. I know she is going to rock, just like she does in all aspects of life.
She got the good news the same day that I was proctoring and grading the CSE 141 final exam. As we did for 240A last term, Steve and I started grading immediately after the exam was over and didn’t stop until we were finished. We started around 2:45 nearly 6 hours later, we declared victory. We also could have declared legal insanity as grading for that long really takes a toll on your mental state. For shits and giggles, I decided to throw on a bonus question at the end that I stole from my Philosophy 101 professor at Drexel: “What is my favorite movie of all-time?” The question was asked about me and Steve. No one actually guessed my favorite movie, although the chance of someone doing so was exceedingly small since I never gave any indication of the answer. (I’ll bake anyone a dozen of cookies if they can correctly guess the movie.) The answers we received ranged from the mundane (e.g. random Tom Hanks movie) to the amusing (someone listed Buckaroo Bonzai). The exam itself was pretty challenging, which seems to be a hallmark of the tests that I create. I don’t try to make them very difficult, I just try to avoid boring “plug and chug” type of problems if at all possible. I was quite impressed with the scores, though. People were working right up until the very end but the average came out… well… average! It was a nice bell curve around 75%.
This Saturday I planned a trip for Colleen and me to Sycamore Canyon. Well, the place we went wasn’t actually part of Sycamore Canyon Open Space Preserve but it was close enough to call it so. I don’t know how I chose Sycamore Canyon but it seemed like it would be a nice hike and there were several of them fairly close to each other in the area. On the way there, Colleen and I saw something quite amusing: (what we assumed were) illegal immigrants hanging out at the corner looking for work. Living in California, you hear about places like this but when you actually see them, it makes you do a double-take. While on our way to the Canyon, we also got to see the main strip of Poway and Colleen was super-excited by all the stores she saw. I can’t think of anything in particular but there were a lot of places that she had heard about from other people but never knew where they were. If it weren’t so far out of the way, we might go there more often. Anyway, back to our geocaching experience.
We found the first cache fairly quickly, although it seemed like a minor miracle that we were able to do so. It was only a 1.5 or 2 start difficulty rating but the coordinates were off and the location was quite random. After that we headed off on the main trail to look for three other caches that I had placed on our GPSr. After a bit of a wrong turn, we backtracked and found the hiding spot for the 2nd cache. It took us much longer to find it that it should have since there was tree cover and that spells trouble for getting good reception. Colleen was already sweaty and annoyed by the time we found the 2nd cache and she was downright mad when I said I wanted to go for more. It was getting late in the morning, it was getting toasty and we were almost out of water but we still decided to trek on to the top of the mountain/hill. We made it up to about 1100 feet when we took a bit of a breather. There was absolutely no one else in the area so it was deadly quiet. The silence was broken by what, at first, seemed like a rush of wind and the rustling of leaves. The sound became more eerie and… *gulp*… it was getting louder. That’s when I saw it: a swarm of bees headed up the hill! I saw my life flash before my eyes but luckily the swarm avoided us and headed further up the hill. About 400 feet further up the hill to be exact. Did I mention that the next cache was about 400 feet further up the hill?
Not being one to tempt fate, I decided to call that one a “pseudo-find” and started our trek back down the hill. Before we descended, I snapped a couple of photographs of the surrounding area to give you a bit of perspective of how high we were. (The picture to the left is one of the pictures I took.) I thought the trip back down the hill would have been much easier but the trail was mostly loose dirt so we had to do what Colleen referred to as “controlled sliding.” That girl sure is full of useful survival information! At the end of our trip, we were both exhausted, but happy.
Sunday was, of course, Easter. Colleen and I haven’t been very good about going to Church–Colleen actually gets up at 7am on Sundays to watch mass on the Hallmark Channel–but we figured that Easter was as good of a day as any to go again. We invited Jenne down for Easter lunch/dinner so that forced us to go to the crowded 11AM mass at Our Mother Of Confidence. It’s funny to see the church fill up with all the C&E Christians, who promptly bolt for the door after they receive the Eucharist. I can’t say anything too bad though, as we were guilty of the same thing although, in our defense, we need to get back to meet up with Jenne.
Usually Easter is one of the holidays where I create a big meal, completely with Tofurky and about 10 side dishes and desserts. I didn’t really feel like doing that this year so I tried to go for a small Celebration Field Roast instead. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find one at Whole Foods so I had to go to plan B: chickpea cutlet parmigiana. Colleen and I are gaga over the chickpea cutlets in Veganomicon so I decided to incorporate them into a new dish, which I thought up. It was very straightforward: create chickpea cutlets, slather on pasta sauce, dump on vegan parm, and throw some Follow Your Heart cheese on top. The result was rather tasty. I wish the same could be said of the chard I tried to fix.
Our refrigerator is packed with all these greens, which we have no idea what to do with. I decided to use the power of the interweb to find out what to do with our chard. I came up with a basic sauteed chard recipe. The problem was that I didn’t know how much chard actually used so when the recipe called for 2 lbs of chard and 1 T. of lemon juice (to garnish), I had to guesstimate how much of the juice I should use. I guess wrong. Very wrong. The result was a “make your mouth pucker” bunch of inedible chard. Someone needs to please enlighten us with a simple, yet tasty, recipe that calls for a fairly large amount of chard. Anyone? Please?!?!?
Jenne didn’t stick around for long after the meal was over (was the chard really that awful? :-P), so she didn’t get to see the magic happen. “What magic?” you are undoubtedly asking yourself right now. The vegan ice cream creation magic! Yes, I finally gave in and bought an ice cream maker this weekend. I have had it on my wishlist for a little while and I decided to forgo buying lunch on campus once a week so I could save up to buy it. I started with the simple vanilla recipe found here [Freshtopia.net]. This particular recipe called for a cashew base so I was able to witness the power of my new Osterizer beehive blender in making quick work of the nuts. After 30 minutes in the ice cream maker and a couple in the freezer, I had my first batch of homemade ice cream. The sad news was that it didn’t turn out all that well. I didn’t blend the cashews well enough–I was a bit cocky with my new blender–so the texture was grainy. Colleen thought it tasted way too much like cashews, which she isn’t a fan of, so next time I will try a soymilk based ice cream, like one of the recipes found on A Vegan Ice Cream Paradise. I might also try one of the ice cream recipes from Veganomicon, which all call for coconut cream.
Well, I guess that is about all I am going to say for now. There are other random bits and pieces to throw at you but it’s getting late and I’ve been writing forever so I am going to call it a night.
- Sat
P.S.
Don’t forget to leave a comment and try to guess my favorite movie of all-time.
MONA LISA SMILE!!!!!!
Colleen is evil.