Ice Cream and Head Cheese

It has been a while since we last posted. This has been for one reason or another, but mostly it comes down to just being busy. Since too much has happened since we last wrote, we will dispense with trying to fully catch up and instead will just pick up again at recent events.

One of the most recent events that we dealt with was a near blow out of our tire. Last Friday we had new tires put onto our car. Somehow in the process, the tire people broke the tire. Long story short, the tire developed a bulge and began coming off of the rim. It probably was a good thing this was noticed, since we would have otherwise experienced a blow out on the interstate.

The bulge is at about 4 o'clock on the tire.

In other news, last week I took a survey that asked if I blogged, and if so, what on. Of the 15 different check boxes, I think that I had blogged about 12 of them between this blog and my previous blog. The people recording the responses probably wondered how someone could write a blog that covers fashion, cooking, travel, music, religion, academics, science, car mechanics (see tire above), child rearing, sports, and philosophy. Nevertheless, today we will be blogging about only three different topics: food, academics, and politics. The first topic is accessible to  pretty much everyone. The second topic is of a more limited scope in terms of interest. The final topic is of little interest to anyone.

Ice Cream.

One activity of interest that we have started doing is making ice cream each week. Engineer J is the lead researcher for this endeavor, since most of the ideas come from Pinterest. So far we have made five batches of ice cream:

• White Mint Grasshopper: This ice cream had mint flavoring with crushed up grasshopper cookie in it. The sweet and condensed milk was a bit strong, which we have subsequently covered by using a bit of imitation vanilla. 

• Chocolate with Strawberry Wafers: This ice cream was a sort of Neapolitan flavored ice cream. We tried to use those pink wafer cookies as a mix in for this ice cream. The results were mixed, since the flavor was fine, but the texture was off. The wafer cookies became slightly soggy, which detracted from the experience. 

• Pumpkin Spice and Chocolate Chip: This was a somewhat seasonal ice cream. This ice cream seemed to be a nice convergence of our earlier experiences making ice cream. There pretty much were no issues with ice cream. We had a bit of an issue getting it to freeze, but the final product was an overall success.

• Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough: For this ice cream we made some eggless chocolate chip cookie dough and divvied it up through a vanilla flavored ice cream. It was a little tough to get the dough to go into the ice cream is small enough chunks, but the result was pretty successful.

• Green Mint Oreo: This week we made a mint flavored ice cream with crushed mint Oreos broken up and mixed in. This ice cream was a success we felt.

Comment below if you have a flavor that you think we should try. We can also provide the recipe if you really desire. It is quite simple.

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Academics.
Since there is a small faction of readers who actually care about what we do in school, here is a quick update about our academic pursuits.

Engineer R still does his research. He has spent the past several weeks researching what can only be described as head cheese. For those who have been blessed to never encounter head cheese, and hence are unaware of its off-putting taste and appearance, head cheese is a meat product made from pressing scraps of garbage meat together with other animal byproducts to form an amalgamate of meat, fat, cartilage, and "other stuff." But what does this have to do with Engineer R you ask? This can be explained as follows.

In "the business," people will sometimes refer to a student's mathematical calculations as "head cheese." Used this way, head cheese refers to a calculation that is altogether complete nonsense, but has meaningful parts that have all been added or multiplied together. You see things like this occasionally on exams of students who just want a "formula" or who just see two numbers and automatically multiply them together.

Think of a scurry of squirrels. One can find the average length and the average weight of the squirrels in said scurry. But if you multiply these two values together, you get a meaningless piece of head cheese. The unit is the ft-pound, which is a unit of energy. Although, squirrels are energetic, so I guess this totally makes sense after all.

Over the past two weeks, Engineer R has been tasked with explaining to a colleague (of sorts) why head cheese is not a valid method for evaluating a data set. This week he feels like he finally made some progress in loosening said colleague's iron grip on the validity of her formula. It does not matter how many times you roll the dice, head cheese is never going to be a winning combination.

Here are two pictures from Engineer J's work with a molecule modelling program called PyMol.

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Politics.
(Editorial remark): This is the part that you can totally skip if you are tired about reading about politics. Frankly, I would skip this part myself I had not actually written it. What you see below is a very condensed version of some different thoughts that I (Engineer R) wrote. It has not been thoroughly edited, so enter at your own risk. There might be grammar and spelling mistakes.  

As most of us are aware, there has been a large fervor of activity lately surrounding the election for President of the United States. Even some people who usually avoid posting about politics jumped into the fray. Naturally, there was an uptick in posts about how the government is going to steal everyone's guns and land (maybe that is just because of our current location), as well as an increase in posts about some lady's emails. Strangely enough, Engineer R has actually done a school project on that lady's emails. It was probably one of the most boring things he has ever worked on. (Most of the  actually interesting stuff was probably redacted).

It does seem like there are a number of people hurting after this election. The weirdest thing is how people from all sides of the political spectrum think they are the ones that got the shortest end of the stick.

Before the rather surprising results of the election actually came out, there seemed to be a local consensus that something catastrophic would happen to our society. It was never quite clear which candidate they thought would bring this about. Of course, none of these people sounded at all paranoid or given to conspiracy theories. Most of the loudest voices were from people that lived through the Korean War, the Kennedy assassination, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, the impeachment of Dick Nixon, the Cold War, the Iran hostage situation, an AIDS epidemic, and numerous conflicts in the Middle East (some stemming from September 11)--if they think something serious is going to go down, they must have had some sort of remarkable vision about it, right?

Post election, the tides of trouble seem to have mostly shifted to people who have lived through nothing. A Donald Trump presidency is the greatest tragedy of their life. They obviously have never been forced to eat head cheese covered with Vegemite.

All that can be said now is that President-Elect Trump better find a way to get robots to give their jobs back to 1 million Steelers, Packers, and 'Ganders by 2020.

The Eight Hour Meeting

As is the case with most weeks, this week was pretty much completely normal. Pokemon Go was probably the most exciting thing of the week, and that is not saying much. After a long slow climb, we were able to level up in Pokemon Go. Since we do not devote very much energy to this game as of late, our progress has been rather slow.  For over a month now, we have been saving up our coins in the game to buy some magic egg and evolve a whole bunch of our Pokemon all at once. This in turn allowed us to quickly level up and become Jedi Masters/Pokemon Sensei.

Our hope is to out wait everyone else who is still playing Pokemon Go (which has to be like what, 40 people, right?) then take over everything. "Slow and steady wins the race" is what we keep telling ourselves. There is a girl that Engineer R has peripheral and brief association with through school who plays Pokemon, but she more seems like the lone wolf type of player.  Surely her stamina will begin to wane soon..........

In other news, don't sit on wet grass.

It was wet grass. I promise.

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As a number of you are aware, sitting in meetings can be rather boring. I've never really met a meeting I like. Meetings are for people that wear Desert Beige suits from Mr. Mac.

For some reason, people see the need to schedule meetings in the early hours of the day or at 4:30 pm, right when you are trying to go home. And at times, people will schedule meetings that start in the morning and do not adjourn until 4:30 pm. Engineer R sat through such a meeting this week. If meetings bore you, this post may not be the best thing to read right now.

I would tell you that the meeting Engineer R went to was highly enlightening and engaging. But that would be stretching the truth further than a pair of leather pants being stretched between two fruit wains. (I'll bet you never expected us to use both spellings of wain/wane in a single post, did you?).

Nice shiny leather pants.

This meeting Engineer R attended was supposed to teach graduate students how to obtain funding from national agencies. (The NIH, the NSF, the NBA, the NFL, the NRA, the NAACP, etc.). Obtaining external funding is of course a rather worthwhile goal. Maybe at some point Engineer R will desire to devote three straight months of his life to such worthy goals. Although, knowing how slow some of these national agencies move, Donald Trump could be finishing up his second term in the White House by the time Engineer R gets a reply. (It all depends on who shows up more strongly to the polls, the NRA or the NAACP).

The speaker at this meeting was one of those pant-suited ladies with a brushed aluminum coffee thermos permanently affixed to her hand. Most of her jokes either dealt with various methods of imbibement or were rooted in arcane references to 14th century humanist philosophy.  She also liked to throw around big words like "cognitive dissonance," or "post-masticative hypoglycemia," or "Massachusetts." And of course, Engineer R was the hapless sap whom she chose to sit by at lunchtime. Out of 70 tables in the room, she just had to choose the one where Engineer R was merely trying to eat a roast beef sandwich without drawing attention to himself. 

Engineer J continues to do the school thing. The bulk of her week is taken up by listening to people with large vocabularies, but few spoken English skills. We are considering sending an anonymous email to the professor to request that he send a different graduate student to teach the course for him.

This about sums up the post. Tune in next week to possibly hear a story about a job interview with a tractor salesman.

Wearing Spandex and Riding The Bus

The original title of this post was "Sorcery and Science," but the current title is more catchy I feel. Nevertheless, the original title does give a nice introduction to two of today's prevalent themes. First we talk sorcery. Then we talk science.

Nice leather spandex pants

As some of you are aware, last weekend was not successful for those who fall in the upper echelons of the ovine-caprine scale. Losing to a team whose core fan base considers pro wrestling re-runs to be quality entertainment can be frustrating. Now admittedly, not every Fruit is MUSSing themselves over men wearing spandex and women in leather pants (although some still are). Indeed, these spandex and leather loving fans are more recently being supplemented by persons that would otherwise just fall in the ambivalent middle of the o-c scale.  These persons only like to ride the fruit wagon now that being a Fruit is popular. 

Just remember, the longer a Fruit is on a wagon, the more rotten it becomes. Eventually the sorcery ends.

Do you ride the bus or the bandwagon?

In other news, Engineer R pulled the bus cord for the first time after almost a year of riding the county bus. This is that cord you pull when you want the bus to stop. Since he previously always rode to stops that multiple parties had selected as their destination, it had never prior been necessary for him to pull the stop cord. However, with the change of residence--and in an attempt to avoid riding the bus that slowly ambles about campus shuttling mostly freshman from their dorms--Engineer R rode an obscure bus to an equally obscure location. Hence the pulling of the chord.

Engineer R rides the bus

When he is not pulling cords on buses, Engineer R pretty much does nothing. He has two classes on mathematical statistics and time series, then some credits of research, all of which he dabbles in. This leaves him free to eat dinner at home and to exercise and lose some of the 90 pounds he has gained in the last year. (Good thing spandex stretches, right? Rest assured though that he is not going to become a pro wrestler.)

Engineer J has significantly more responsibilities at school. Because of the structure of her major, she has ended up taking a number of 1-credit courses that meet for long hours each week. Some of these classes take place in the evening. They offered sections that were earlier in the day, but they were all full by the time Engineer J could send something like 29 copies of her transcripts and finally get approval to register. Engineer R has found by sad experience that it often takes a lot of attempts to finally get it right with these state schools. Maybe next year.

In closing, we are going to include some images from Engineer J's homework. These are images she has created. Comment below if you have further questions or comments. Or if you need a referral of a good leather clothing shop.

The (Nearly) Yearly Fate

Within the past few years, it has come to our attention that some things are just facts of life.

If you do not go to the dentist, your teeth fall out.

If you come to teach a class in a belly shirt, people will make fun of you on Facebook. (Pro tip: don't wear belly shirts if you have stretch marks on your stomach).

If you eat 60 chicken nuggets in a single sitting, you might end up in the ER. (I actually have witnessed such a feat three times: With chicken nuggets, with tater tots, with breaded shrimp. None of them have resulted in hospital visits). These are just the facts of life.

Dame à la mode.

As some of you are aware, this weekend will pit persons of various extremes on the ovine-caprine scale in an athletics competition. Engineer J maintains a pretty even keel throughout these (nearly) yearly proceedings, but Engineer R is (unfortunately?) quite involved in them.

• He wonders why the caprine student section purposefully chose to name themselves after a near-euphemism for cow-pies. 
• He wishes we could hang onto the ball better. We just cannot keep stepping in the cow muss. 
• He wonders why it has become a fact of life that the goats always end up eating our laundry. 
• He wonders if it even matters.
• Thank goodness for regional conference. No hats on the pulpit this week. 

Admittedly, neither of us have lost much sleep over the upcoming weekend. Most of our lost sleep has come at the hands of the 5 a.m. visits from the garbage truck. (Why did we have the unfortune of being assigned the apartment that is right above the communal dumpster?) 

Since most of our waking hours seem to be spent chasing papers around the diaspora of buildings and bureaucracy, this post will have to end here. Next week we promise some photos of what we have been doing, so consider tuning in. 

The Land of Milk and Honey

This past week we [returned/came officially for the first time] to the land of milk and honey (LoMaH). As I explained last time, this piece of titular geography should be taken more literally and less figuratively.  For some reason we use the term "milk and honey" to refer to a place of regal opulence and promise. But, I mean, does anyone actually consider the consumption of milk with honey to be a delicacy? If so, you are probably one of those freaks that also eats honey on your stewed tomatoes. (Yes, I have eaten this. No, it was not appealing in the slightest). Milk and honey is one of those food combos that falls into the category of "all my real food is gone, but tomorrow I go on Christmas break so I better not go shopping, let's just eat cherry pie filling and a handful of uncooked rice" type of foods.

I think this literally is a re-labeled jar of  spoiled mayonnaise.

Every time that I drive into LoMaH, I always drive past a shop that purports to sell "raw honey." Isn't "raw honey" just a euphemism for "still probably has wax and bee's wings in it, but we will pass this off as healthy"? When I Googled "raw honey" most the sites that came back were from the nether-regions of the interwebs. I'm sure we have all seen such sites. They have the ads for "One weird tip to cut your belly fat in half" or have flashing banners proclaiming "This little-known loophole saves (fill in current state) drivers $297 a year on car insurance." Maybe my time in LoMaH will help me better understand the benefits of raw honey.

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Part of getting all of our possessions to LoMaH was renting a UHaul truck. Although we have only been married for a short while, we have a lot of stuff. I think that this is one of the major reasons why the median marriage age is on the rise around the world. Back when our ancestors got married, they were lucky if they even had a change of pants or a pair of shoes to their name. We've all heard stories about great-great-great Granny Mildred and how she moved an entire city block in a 4' x 4' handcart. Now days getting married necessitates having at least three or four pairs of shoes. And let's not get started on pants and their necessity in marriage. (Okay, in a word, they are necessary; however, you would not know it from the looks of some of these LoMaH denizens. Perhaps this is to cut down on moving costs).

To make a long story short, we ended up renting a UHaul truck from a place that pretty much resembled Watto's Junk Shop. The place was run by a squat balding man that probably was wearing a shirt, but I cannot remember. (Pants are a definite check mark though. He must not be a LoMaH local). The walls of the shop were adorned with all sorts of blasters and gadgets that who-in-the-galaxy knows what did. There may or may not have been a small horse-like creature trotting around the show-floor. We did not go in the basement part of the shop, but I'll bet that Jabba the Hutt had someone in carbonite down there.

Originally we had reserved a 15 foot truck, but I guess that reservations with UHaul are just façades to make you think you will get what you want. We ended up getting a 10 foot truck, which worked out just fine. At one point we were actually offered a 20 foot truck, but when you are expecting to be flying an X-wing, being offered a Death Star instead is not exactly what you want. We had a lot of stuff, but not that much stuff. Plus, we did not have designs on shooting a high power laser cannon at anyone.

Our apartment here in LoMaH is pretty nice, certainly a step up from where we were before. No snoring neighbors, no maggots in the vacuum, and no people playing night games until 3 a.m.

Tune in next week. I do not know what the topic will be, but it probably will have something to do with the U of Fruits.

Entering an Eating Contest

We have unfortunately missed several weeks now of writing on the blog. Being displaced mid-month from one's apartment tends to prevent blog writing. We are going to start off with a partial post from a few weeks ago that we never got around to publishing.   

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Unlike when we last wrote, the past several weeks have actually had exciting elements to them. A few weeks ago, we spoke about our participating (somewhat unsuccessfully) in a scavenger hunt competition of sorts. But, this past week, we got another shot at winning. In the previous go-round of this scavenger hunt, the first person to find the prize was declared the winner. However, this more recent installment of the game provided an added twist: After finding the prize, the first five (or sometimes 10) contestants there had to engage in a head to head competition to be declared the grand winner. The runner up competitors were given a shirt, but they were not given any further prizes.

Because of our proximate location to several competition sites, we had multiple opportunities to be one of the first five contestants to arrive at the prize. We spent most of the morning, and even some of the afternoon waiting for the announcement that our location was "live" and ready for contestants. Our first attempt failed, as we were about the 100th person to arrive at the prize. This was good enough for us to be included in the picture of all the possible contestants to show, but was insufficient to be included in any head to head competition (an egg hunt at this specific site) for the grand prize.

However, this failure still turned out to be a minor success in that we were able to identify the car the "prize givers" drove, which contained other grand prizes yet to be delivered. Engineer R identified the prize van by discreetly looking inside the vehicle while no one was watching. After waiting in the bushes (not to be confused with the bushes of love) for about 15 minutes, we followed our new victims like cat and mouse. Sadly, our cat and mouse chase a was more like a Tom and Jerry scenario in that Jerry (the car) got away. In the future we may try tailing the prize van more closely.

Our next move consisted of driving around town waiting for the next competition site to be announced. After about an hour of driving, the next site was announced: a fast food joint, and we were only four minutes away! After a frantic drive to the restaurant, Engineer J was able to elbow out several people for the fifth and final slot. The judges allowed Engineer R to step in as a replacement, since the competition turned out to be an eating contest.

We will not bore you with all of the inane details of the eating contest, but suffice it to say we got second place. This won us a pair of T-shirts. The grand prize went to a huskier fellow than Engineer R. He was born to eat large burgers with mayonnaise and pickles. We attempted to enter several more contests later that evening, but to no avail.

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Since the excitement of this eating contest, nothing else superbly exciting has happened. At the end of the week we will be moving back to the land of milk and honey. This is to be taken in more of a literal sense, not the usual figurative sense. We will provide a post next week with the details of our move.

The Roller Derby and the Voxettes

Over the past week, our life has been extremely exciting.  Okay, it actually hasn't been exciting, but let's pretend it was. That's pretty much how life goes: If your life is exciting, you wish it wasn't, and if your life is not exciting, you wish that it was. People spend all of their days seeking to sit on the couch and eat ice cream directly from the carton, yet when we get there, we find out that such a life is boring. Anyway. This is getting too philosophical. Let's cut directly to some of the anecdotes for the week.

Sally can wait, but she knows it's too late.

One semi-major project that we have undertaken this summer is emergency preparedness. Engineer R reads a mommy blog that advocates making 72-hour kits. For the uninitiated, 72-hour kits are bundles of supplies (food, water, clothes, gas-mask, military-grade helicopter, etc.) that one can use to survive during a disaster.

They say you should always pack your own parachute, so we assumed that it was the same with 72-hour kits. Engineer J was the chief project manager for these kits. She oversaw most (okay all) of the purchasing of the supplies. Engineer R assembled his own pack, but otherwise did nothing. His jobs mainly consist of writing this blog, checking the mail, and watching Batman cartoons. He also moonlights as a backup dancer in the vocal quartet "Fatema McVee and the Voxettes." They mostly cover Motown (a portmanteau of 'motor' and 'town', origins Detroit) songs from the 1960s and 70s. Picture a meld of Marvin Gaye and Gladys Knight, with a bit of Oasis mixed in (for an early 1990s flavor).

Another endeavor that Engineer R  has been undertaking lately is selling things online. There is a site called "eBay.com" that he is a casual user of. He has not sold much besides a guitar and a board game.

A 1996 Fender Telecaster

This is a guitar, not a bomb.

A board game. 

The game was a prize in a drawing. (It's a long story). Neither Engineer R, or Engineer J are followers of such types of things. Supposedly this game was at one point actually worth something, but now it is out of vogue or something.

Selling things online can be much like life. When it is exciting, you wish it wasn't. And when it is boring, you wish it were more exciting. Online shopping is just the pursuit of obtaining fungible commodities and nothing more. And then you find that what you have obtained in life is out of vogue.

Our last story originates in a TV show that we saw this past week. One of the main characters in this show becomes a roller derby queen. This lead to our researching women's roller derby in more detail. The Women’s Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA) is the international governing body of women’s flat track roller derby. The WFTDA covers 18 different countries and is still growing. And with the Olympics coming up, it is worth mentioning that roller derby was actually under consideration for being added to the 2020 Olympics (as part of a "roller sports" package). Unfortunately their bid was denied.

One of us may or may not have watched a roller derby competition between The Rose City Rollers (Portland, OR) and The London Rollergirls (London, England). Final score was 166-154 Rose City Rollers. RCR went on to win the 2015 WFTDA championship.

We will dispense with explaining all the details about roller derby, but let's just say that the scoring can be crazy. Most of the competitors have player pseudonyms such as "Scald Eagle," "Hurricane Red Thunder," or "Maven Mash."  Not people you necessarily want to cross.

This is their day job.

In conclusion, if any of you are considering joining the roller derby circuit, be sure to wear your elbow and knee pads. Comment below if you have a really good roller derby pseudonym.