Hubble Hears a Who?

I have had almost zero time to wander the interwebs recently. But I did run across this. I've rather gotten unexcited by astronomy in the last few years (I don't know of a reason to care if the universe is 13.89 or 13.93 billion years old or whatever the current numbers are, even if I do wonder that that's just the universe we can see meaning that if we were that far away, would it extend equally far from there? but still. bleh.) Then I ran across this picture with a charming and enthusiastic explanation of all the little bits in it.


Click on the picture and go ignite some enthusiams for the Whos galaxies that Hubble Heard Saw.

Good Gravy

It occurs to me that my updates are not very frequent. Sorry! Had a guest and did some stuff. Have two weeks of cooking class yet. So far so good. The lesson foods are mostly made by the instructors with the occasional opportunity for us to join in. We follow along with the recipe in class, try some finished dishes to know how they're supposed to taste, then we're supposed to try the recipes at home. This most recent class was braising, pressure cooking, and microwaving things which were either too slow or too fast for us to join in the prep. With merely one recipe they de-mystified pressure cookers and now I want one. But that's for another time.

In general, I don't cook fish or curry at home. Fish because it requires buying it on the day you want it and I generally cook from pantry/frozen goods. Curry because it can take forever and often doesn't give me what I want or is too complicated. (One curry exception is the frozen Paneer Tikka Masala from Trader Joe's - I doctor it by adding chicken and veggies and it's wonderful.) So not having time to do a braising trial this weekend due to having a friend in town and not owning a pressure cooker, my recipe this week is a microwaved fish curry. Sounds revolting, no? Turns out it's both easy AND delicious. Wacky.

I considered taking a picture, but maybe next time. I was hungry. This is my version derived from the school's version. The teacher's version will be after the jump, and it was derived from a Julia Sohni recipe. Mine was good enough that I made some quinoa to more easily eat the remaining sauce.

Microwaved Filet of Sole Curry - Rev 3
Rub
1/4	t	cayenne pepper
1/2	t	Penzey's Maharajah Curry
1/4	t	ground pepper
1	cube	Dorot frozen minced garlic
1/4	inch	ginger, minced
1	T	grapeseed oil
Chunky stuff
1/2	lb	white fish, thin filet(s)
1		small zucchini, cubed
1	leaf	kale, torn into 1" pieces
5		button mushrooms, diced
Sauce
1+	t	Grey Poupon mustard
pinch		salt to taste
6	dollops	sprayed from heavy whipped cream can

• Put the filet in a microwave safe dish like a pyrex bowl or pie plate. Mix rub. Rub it on the fish, both sides. Let it sit for 15 minutes.
  
• Meanwhile, chop the veggies roughly
  
• Squeeze a stripe of mustard down the fish
  
• Toss the veggies on the fish, salt the mess, and squeeze out some dollops of whipped cream a little bigger than golf balls.
  
• Cover with Glad Press-n-seal, microwave for 3 minutes
  
• Remove pan from microwave, on the far side of the dish peel back the plastic wrap (or cut slits) to let out the steam away from your face.
  
• Use a spatula to flip and rotate the fish, recover with veggies as you're able
  
• Recover and cook for 99 sec to 4 min more until cooked through
  
• Do the same steam dance - away from the face - and let sit 1 min, then plate. Heat remaining sauce in bowl up to a minute to thicken and drizzle over plated dish.
  
• Serve. Roll eyes back in head from tastiness and light texture of the fish. There's a lovely burn that shouldn't overwhelm anyone who eats any spicy food at all.
  

Badgertastic

"Please don't set the edge of the ice on fire" doesn't hold a candle to this guy's midnight jabber. "The potluck is the green car filled with spinach at the top of the hill," might rate though, unless you disqualify sideeffects of Ambien.

Now to figure out the appropriate use of Ottertastic.

Grumy McGrumpmeister

I've been a grumpy freak (way beyond cranky) all week. Don't know if it's the Blue Monday, the low light, a post holiday letdown, not enough sleep, or a combination of all of them or none of them. But I was NOT a happy camper this week. I survived, but there was collateral damage. Hopefully it's mendable.

Still, good things happened.

• I baselined my first week of sleep with my Zeo system. It looks like my sleep patterns appear mostly normalish in terms of % of REM and deep sleep. 
  


• I learned how to update my blog settings to get the new jump feature


• The organizing got started saturday and will continue.  (I don't know if I need a helper so much as I need an audience...)


• The cooking class ladies want to have a dinner party after classes are over. 


• I found a good anthology to read.  Normally I find anthologies to be very hit or miss with much more miss than hit!  Strange Brew editied by P.N. Elrod has hit on the first 4 stories, so I have my money's worth even if the last four miss, but all indications are good that they won't miss. Paranormal witch, wizard, warlock and weres featuring Charlaine Harris and Jim Butcher and Patricia Briggs.  Good enough that I'll look up and check out or buy at least one book from each author (although CH was already on the TBR pile, she'll move up).


• Got my hair cut and colored and didn't waste the first day of the new do totally.  Didn't have a date date, but did meet up with a friend for dinner and a show.


• We were able to bypass the 1.5 hr wait for a table by sitting at the bar at Claim Jumper, and I didn't even have to call in favors from my fav bartenders to get in, served, and out quickly.
  


• The show was Avenue Q.  I've been wanting to see it and got tickets with a good view for a reasonable price at the venue next door.  The cast was quite competent (not original cast but one quite skilled) and the story elements are right up my alley (cussing muppets! What do I want to do; who do I want to be?!?)
  


• I finally joined the modern era and downloaded some ringtones.  Instead of the pukey but least bad Verizon tune, I now have Vampire Weekend's A-Punk. It fits my criteria of starting at a medium volume for a few notes before getting loud, which it does too.  It's so perky, I love that.  I bought a ringback thing too, which I think means that if you call me, you'll hear Lady Gaga singing Paparazzi instead of a ringing sound.  To top it off, I got Ain't No Rest for the Wicked as my calendar appointment reminder tone.  The happiness of these choices overcomes my resentment at having to pay more for them than the song itself on iTunes, and the lack of good provided options.

So while I was wallowing in my funk, resentment, and despair, what were you up to?  Anything good?

Sleep Stealer Antithesis

I've received my new Zeo sleep monitor and started using it to baseline my sleep. It comes with a set of questions to log "Sleep Stealers", one of which is "How tense were you before bed last night?" I realized I was still tense from the stupid microsoft switcheroo and that's just unacceptable. As we all know, I believe strongly in figuring out the good things of the day, and just before bed is a fine time to do it. In fact, a friend of mine does this with her son, hoping that he won't grow up to obsess over the stressful things of the day like she does. Hopefully it will lift me out of this fugue and set me on the path to blissful sleep. Here goes.

"Do the Handicapped go to Hell?" a 2001 South Park repeat. The opening musical number of the hellacious luau just played and I laughed out loud. Over the top and genius. And I'd forgotten all about Sat.an's ex-lover Chris who swears by saying "butternuts". (Also, "Where's Sad.dam gonna go, Detroit?") And Cartman feels the angry hand of God.

Traffic this morning was totally clear despite the funky weather. And after noon, there was a cloud being blown off one of the nearby mountains with the sun filling in where it left.

Did I mention my review went well? I thought I was doing fine, but not great. I'm doing better than I thought. I think part of it is that we tend not to think as much of the work we do which comes easily, and I got mad props for stuff that I think was easy. (And my big deficit that was dragging down my mentality was mostly a business decision to postpone - although I feel like I sh/could have still done it, it wasn't strictly required. Big ol C project for last year. A+ now, but I can do it.) And, the big thing I was asked to work on last year (working better with production), I actually improved a lot on and made people happy. So I have new things to work on this year, but they're all do-able. I was really happy with my review. Fair, complimentary. Whew! If that doesn't make me feel better in this economy, nothing will.

Carpal Obvious

My day started out well. Ok, kind of well, but still.

I got my review and it was excellent. The work for next year is not "how to make me acceptable" but how to get me from "excellent" to "best". Whoo hoo!

Then Microsoft intervened. We "upgraded" to the new products a couple weeks ago and now use the hugely wasteful ribbon instead of the toolbars. I never had a problem with toolbars so I don't know why they changed. At any rate, now everything that used to take one mouse click takes at least two, if not four. And every click doubles my carpal tunnel inflammation.

I was in tears today, for the second time this week, trying to do crap in Excel and Powerpoint that I can normally do in my sleep. Tasks that normally take 5 minutes and no effort take gargantuan effort and an hour as I re-learn where all the commands are located because I'm making the attempt to re-learn how to do everything at the same time I'm trying to work on my work. And it's hard to know at the start of an obstacle if it would be more expedient (keeping short term and long term goals in mind) to come up with a new workaround, or to figure out what the hell they've decided to call "autofit selection". (For the record, what was

[one-click] Format - columns [one-click] Auto-Fit Selection

is now

Home [one-click] Format [one-click] AutoFit Column Width

While being an exception to the extra clicks, it took me a while to figure this out as previously trying to "Auto-Fit Column Width" would select every row in the column and fit to the widest one, which is exactly what I was trying to avoid, so I didn't immediately select this but went to the help section, which does NOT say "this used to be called...".

It turns out that I have a link to an application that allows me to run the command I used to use and it will tell me where the new command with a different name and location is. This should save me some time now that I know what it is (I assumed it was a video tutorial, most of which are 85% worthless and 15% useful, so I was putting it off.) I also found a "Ribbon Hero" application that might be useful, except for the fact that I only used the toolbars when I couldn't do things with a keyboard command, so my score is still very low due to using keyboard shortcuts. But maybe it will help.

Anyhow, jump to this afternoon when I was tearing my hair out in my boss's office. "I'm trying to give it a chance, but I can't figure out if I don't like it because the old way was better or because I was used to the old way". And she said, (drum roll, please) "You don't like it because it hurts you."

Oh. Yeah. That. It's a good reason.

YO!!! ALL CONSUMER SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS!
If you add mouse clicks to tasks, it hurts me. And I will hate you, personally. That really isn't too strong a word.

Having to do extra clicks for the same function, plus all the running around to figure out how things work now, practice them, find them again, and go back to the help has flared my carpal tunnel up to the point where I should stop typing and go home and rest my wrist for the evening. Eventually I'll have to get used to it. Eventually, I'll be able edit the dratted thing so my most used commands are on it rather than my least used commands. But today, when I just have to do something that should have taken 5 minutes but took an hour and not-inconsiderable pain, when I think about the new microsoft layout Jesus Christ has about 40 middle names.

People are People

For me, the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday usually means the traffic is lighter than normal. Fortunately other people are on the case. Check out Already Pretty and The Rude Pundit for a couple of timely reads.

And a shout out to the trivia reader who got our team a christmas present of a book of quotes by Dr. King. It's scary how topical and relevant his words remain. I guess it's because people are people. Individually we can range from wonderful to horrendous, but as a mob group, we tend to run the same patterns over and over again and most of those patterns get us into trouble. Which is why stifling dissent is bad, always, and we need the occasional leader who motivates us to be better than we had been.