Fun with Apples

When I was a teenager, one of my favorite afternoon snack was a microwaved apple. I'd slice an apple, sprinkle it with brown sugar and cinnamon and microwave it for a few minutes. It reminded me of the skillet apples my grandfather would make on Christmas Eve during our annual brunch.

Personally, I have an abysmal track record with skillet apples. I finally got my recipe perfected. I would have posted a picture, but I ate them pretty quickly tonight. So, sliced green apple and butter in a skillet. Sprinkle over some sugar and a good amount of cinnamon. Cook that down and stir every now and then (but not too much or the apples break apart). Once those apples are soft and the moisture is getting a nice caramelized texture, toss in some amaretto and its done.

I added a little bit of whipped cream on top. Seriously, my refrigerator is never without whipped cream. The canned kind holds up well and its easy to put a tiny bit on the little deserts I can't seem to live without.

Right now I'm in the countdown to Christmas. My husband is flying in on Tuesday, which gives us 2 days to get all the cooking done for our Christmas Eve dinner. Of course this means I will be starting earlier than that. Cookies. Breads. Ham to brine. Herring to get together. And of course many, many vegetables to peel, chop, boil, mash, and whatnot. I love cooking. I still have to get the recipe for liver casserole from my mother-in-law. Not my favorite, but my husband misses it, so we're going to have that liver casserole. Maybe I'll post a picture when its cooked.

On Shitty First Drafts

One of my favorite books on writing is "Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life," by Anne Lamott. A very good friend gave it to me a number of years ago and its one of those books that gets better on the re-read. Anyway, Anne Lamott writes about the inavoidable "shitty first draft." Every first draft is shitty. That's what second drafts are for... and well sixth and tenth drafts as well. This is how you get to looking back on something you published a few years ago and wonder what awesome person wrote it, because wow, it sure reads well.

I am a master at crummy first drafts and this is because I have no fear of committing total crap to the screen. If that degree in writing has done anything for me, it has been taking away the hesitation of writing that first sentence. Yep, all due to that degree and enough coffee... or occasionally a half a bottle of wine (at home, I promise. I cleaned out my drawer of vice when I moved to the new university).

What has come as a revelation to me is that a dear former mentor of mine writes shitty first drafts also. He's one of the best writers I've ever known. He can take a few of my paragraphs, make some minor tweaks that never would have occurred to me, and the text just sings. God I hate it when he does that. So freaking annoying. I usually only saw what were probably his fourth or later drafts. Until Google docs. Collaborating with Google docs is an eye opener because everyone sees every little draft. I always knew he worked hard at being such an awesome writer, but I guess it never really clicked until I saw those awful first drafts. Crap-tastic, just like mine.

This has been pretty inspirational for me. And a reminder that good, clear scientific writing is not going to come quickly, so I might as well hunker down and enjoy the process without all that extra anxiety piled on top. It'll get there. Eventually. At some point. With enough coffee.

Farmville Addiction

I finally succumbed to Farmville on Facebook. A few people in my family are addicted, and were trying to talk me into signing up on Thanksgiving. I was on the fence, especially since I had happily blocked those notifications in the past. But then I called my loving spouse, who promptly informed me that if I would just sign up already, then he'd have enough farm neighbors to buy a bigger farm.

Being somewhat compulsive, I have spent way too much time planting fake crops and arranging fake livestock. But I have called a halt. I got things the way I wanted them, and hopefully now I can just maintain. Being a bit nerdy, I managed to do this in just a few days my maximizing harvest rates and whatnot. Thinking about optimal farmvilling rather than optimal foraging for a little while can't hurt, right?

On the plus side to the Thanksgiving vacation, I got a huge amount of work done yesterday. No brain fog then- and I remembered to write all my thoughts down this time. The girl can learn to cope, that's for sure.

This week is going to be busy. I have to write and give a guest lecture for Thursday, get the house ready for a visit from my loving spouse, finish up testing this 7th block of my current experiment, analyze that, and put together a presentation on it for the lab meeting on Friday. Oh yeah, and work on that huge grant that is due in January. And meet with 3 new undergrads about doing research in the spring. And follow up on a list of phone calls. Blech. Give me data all day long, but I hate phone tag (and even worse, having to talk to the people once I get them on the phone).

Collecting frogs becomes sadly dangerous

This is incredibly awful. Some biology students were collecting frogs along a trail only a mile from their campus, and some trigger happy hunter decided they were a group a deer. He shot and killed one woman, and injured a young man. The hunter was trespassing.

Student Mistaken For Deer, Shot To Death

We had some lovely outdoor adventures back in my undergrad days... slogging through wetlands, in the dark. Once someone had to pull me out of a lake after I sunk to my knees in the thick muck trying to collect a sample from a cool-colored algal bloom. Getting covered with ticks. Getting covered with blood. Attacks of poison ivy. Snakes. Chiggers. Hypothermia. Clouds of blood-sucking mosquitoes. Birders. Scary stuff. But, no one ever shot at us.

Dinner Tonight!

One problem with living alone (when you're used to cooking for more than just yourself), is that you can get lazy when it comes to cooking for just yourself. In the interest of improving my quality of life, without sacrificing my lazy non-lab hours, I have been perfecting the 10 minute yummy dinner.

Here's one of my current favorites. I boil some lemon-pepper pasta, drain it, throw in some grilled chicken strips (which conveniently come pre-cooked and frozen from Trader Joe's), toss in some olive oil, and add some feta. Then I dump it on my plate and enjoy my food. Easiest dinner ever... well except for frozen microwave meals or ramen.

Honestly, I would probably starve without Trader Joe's. Or I might end up doing like last week: spaghetti every single night. I finally burned out after day 5 and went to Wendy's the next night (thus defeating my intent to eat less fat, and my goal to avoid eating out in the interest of eating my way through my pantry).

Jardín Botánico

My Dad got me into Brasilian music from a young age. He's a tropical, relaxed kind of guy, so a little samba just fits with his general "Dad-ness." Last week he sent me a cd of some of the things he's listening to these days. Along with the actual Brasilian music, Dad added some songs by Michael Franks, an American musician who has written a number of musical love letters to Brasil. Michael Franks is also a tropical, relaxed kind of guy, much like my Dad. In any case, he has a song about getting lost in a Jardin Botanico. I can only imagine he's singing about the botanical gardens in Rio de Janiero. I like this song, because last summer I got lost in that very place.

For a biologist, or really for anyone, the botanical gardens in Rio de Janiero are amazing. 200 years old and extensive. 900 types of palm trees. Beautiful buildings full of orchids and bromeliads and even carnivorous plants. Thousands of tropical plants from all over the world. All kinds of amazing birds. Monkeys and marmosets in the trees! And in case you get bored with the orderly plantings, it backs up to a coastal rainforest, the Atlantic Forest. Incredibly dense and wet, covered with fascinating lichens and full of all kinds of mysterious things.

I have a pretty huge memory card on my camera and I ran out of space before I ever got to the monkeys. I wasn't even actively birding. I was just in awe. I saw trees I had only ever read about- like cannonball trees. Cannonball trees look like something out of a Dr. Seuss book- giant balls hanging off of a giant tree.

Ironwood Trees!

I finally saw some ironwood trees. I tagged along on a field trip with a class from Pima Community College. It has been so hot since I've been here that being outside has just not been pleasant. Last week, though, was glorious. As is this week. But anyway, we were west of Tucson in a state park full of classic Sonoran desert plants. Lots of saguaro, palo verde, acacia, barrel cactus, three kinds of cholla, lots of opuntia, mesquite... I even saw lots of little mammilaria plants. I've never seen them in the wild before. One of the students called them "Target plants," because it is one of those classic plants they put in little cactus bowls, which they always have out at Target.

As excited as I was about all the plants, I wanted to write a little about ironwood trees. These trees can get pretty huge for something in the desert. And they can live for hundreds of years (I read 1,500 years in one book!). You can imagine how important such a large tree could be in the desert- it would serve as a great apartment building for birds and would change the micro climate around it, to allow other plants and animals to thrive: an oasis of shade. Here's a picture of one of the biggest trees in the Tucson area, which was right where we were:
For scale, that picnic table could easily seat more than 12 people. I wonder how old this tree is? The trunk was really neat up close: all twisted and craggy and beautiful. Apparently this area got practically no rain this year, so the canopy is much more sparse than usual. Not that these trees have huge leaves anyway. When you grow up in a nice moist place, like I did, you can get the idea that tree leaves tend to be on the big size- like the many species of oaks, magnolias, dogwoods, and maples that I used to press into my childhood leaf collections. But most desert plants have tiny leaves. So the picture at the top is of ironwood tree leaves. They are rather small!


So why the small leaves? It has to do with water loss. Smaller leaves lose less water. This has to do with surface area: that part of the leaf that is exposed to the air around it. Getting rid of leaves altogether is hard, since of course you need leaves for photosynthesis, which is how plants make the energy they need (me, I like to cook a nice pasta with a good roasted tomato sauce). Some desert trees even nearly avoid the leaf requirement altogether: they can photosynthesize in their branches and trunk. These are the palo verde trees. They're easy to recognize because, like Kermit the Frog, they are green all over. I have two of them in my yard, one of which I am constantly doing battle with. As cool as they are to look at, some of them are covered with spines (like the one growing into the gate into my backyard). To the right is a nice close-up I took of a little leaf palo verde.... it is nearly "leaves optional"... What a cool tree!