I hope you all have a wonderful day! The Valentine’s Day Shark Cake Pop will (though he is currently residing in my tummy… sorry shark cake pop! You looked so delicious!). Anyway, if you have yet to get your special someone a Valentine’s Day card, the Monterey Bay Aquarium has some adorable e-cards for you! Check them out!
I made the shark pop at a Valentine’s Day themed craft party last weekend. I also made this little Valentine’s mousey (don’t judge my sketchy sewing skills…):
Now, tell me how you really feel about Valentine’s Day. Yay Valentine’s or ugh… pink…? Are you excited to see the millionth Die Hard movie tonight or are you braving the crowd to go out to a fancy dinner (or both)? I like Valentine’s Day generally, though I worry that people will think they only need to tell their special someones they love them only on this one day. So remember to tell those people you love them not just today but every day!
In honor of the Chinese New Year this weekend, Cobalt and I had friends over to make dumplings! It turned out to be a hilarious endeavor because the recipe was written entirely in Chinese (meaning that only my friend T could read it) and instead of discrete amounts of ingredients, all of the ingredients were listed “add to taste” so T ordered us around in the kitchen – chop this, cook that, let’s wait for this – for a bit while we made the filling.
While T and our friend L were busy cooking the filling, A and I felt that there were too many people in the kitchen and retreated to the living room to make snake jewelry in honor of the year of the snake. As you can see from that top picture, I made a snake choker and A made a snake headband. Here’s another picture of my snakey choker.
Once the filling got made, we were all recruited to make dumplings. T taught us this super nice way to fold the dumpling skins so that they look professional. Look at these dumplings all ready to be cooked! I think we made at least 70 of these guys!
Then we cooked them and then we ate them! Yummm… they were delicious. We actually put sunflower seeds in a few of them so that if you ate one of those, it was extra luck for the new year. Unfortunately, the sunflower seeds went pretty well with the filling so we had a hard time telling if we ate a lucky one or not. We all found sunflower seeds on our plates after eating though, which suggests we are all lucky!
Tasty dumplings ready to eat (some of them exploded in the cooking phase but they were still equally delicious)!
Did you do anything for the Chinese New Year? How do you feel about the year of the snake? Tell me about it! Have any special plans for Valentine’s Day coming up this week?! Tell me about that too! Cobalt and I have plans but I think grad school is going to prevent them from happening on Valentine’s Day proper (boooooo lab… whyyyyy) so we will have to celebrate this weekend instead! :)
We left the shark backpack at our lunch spot and went to go explore a little. It looks like he’s feeling a little left out…
This past weekend, Cobalt and I went on a hike with Cobalt’s friend A, who just moved to Boulder! It turned out to be much more perilous than we had intended as most of the trail is in the shade and, while most of our snow in Boulder has melted, apparently this shaded trail snow has yet to get the message. It was a nice weekend and there were a lot of people out on the trail, packing down the snow and making it a very slippery hike, even in hiking boots. I was very envious of everyone who had crampons strapped to their hiking boots. Cobalt, A, and I got within a quarter mile of our destination and were so tired from sliding up the mountain that we decided to stop for lunch. It was a fairly secluded spot and gave me a great view for some photography!
After lunch, we slid back down the mountain (A actually slipped and rode part of the way on his butt – this is after making fun of me for slowly making my way down in front of him…. ahaha).
Now it’s your turn. Tell me about a scary hike you went on and why it was scary. Or tell me about your favorite hiking story or your favorite trail to hike in Colorado. The title of this post comes from a song we played in band in high school called “To Tame the Perilous Skies” by David Holsinger… I thought it was appropriate.
One more thing. Today is my friend HtomSirveaux’s birthday! Yay! Happy birthday friend! I hope you have a great day!
Staying up late (read: 11 pm… :-/) giggling in bed and whenever one of us starts to fall asleep, the other one just starts giggling again… I feel so lucky to have married my best friend… :)
Photo: This picture is from the “not dating” phase of our relationship. We were at a birthday party (actually for our friend who is responsible for introducing us) and I am dressed up as Zoe from Firefly and Cobalt is dressed up as Llewellyn from No Country for Old Men.
I say part 1 in the title because there will most likely be more posts like this in the future. Are you married? What’s one of your favorite things about being married? If you’re not married, what is something you like about relationships (either one you’re currently in or one you’ve been in in the past).
(Oven) Mitt Nomney did his job of helping me get the hot pan out of the oven and now he wants some breakfast bars as payment!
So some of you may know this but I love eating. I would eat even if we didn’t have to to survive. I also eat pretty much everything, even if it’s something I claim I don’t like. If I am hungry enough, I will probably eat it. Really, the only surefire way to keep me from eating something (if you are Cobalt trying to protect your food from the hungry Potassium for example), is to eat something that could kill me or makes my stomach hurt a lot. Basically, that leaves the nuts that I am allergic to (pistachios and cashews) as the only foods I will definitely not eat. Pork makes my stomach hurt but sometimes ham and bacon are just so delicious that I will even steal a bite of those things.
Okay, we are getting majorly off topic here – the point is that I love eating but I also am realizing how important it is to be aware of what I am eating. I’ve been noticing that I kind of just shove food in my mouth all the time without thinking about how many other bagels I’ve already eaten today or how I should probably not eat this entire block of cheese (or I do the “T-rex” when Cobalt and I make pot roast for dinner – eating waaaaay more than I should because it’s so freakin’ good, I can’t stop). So I was thinking about diets like the paleo diet and gluten free diets where people just totally abolish certain food groups from their life (though sometimes the gluten free diet is necessary for those friends with celiac disease). I am not sure I could force myself to stop eating such tastiness like cheese and bread and rice completely but I think I like the idea of thinking about how MUCH tastiness like cheese and bread go into my body every day. So as I was pondering all these diets and what my life would be like if I stopped eating all that tastiness, I had a horrible thought cross my mind. WHAT WOULD I EAT FOR BREAKFAST?!?!?!
So breakfast is really important to me, partially because I get hangry (hungry/angry) if I don’t eat regularly. If I fail to eat breakfast though, I get hangry and super out of it and it’s just bad. In general though, most of the breakfast foods I eat would not be allowed for someone on the paleo diet. So I went on a mission to learn about what people on the paleo diet eat for breakfast and I found this delicious recipe for Blackberry Breakfast Bars which are: gluten free, dairy free, and paleo appropriate. Then I went to the store and got all the ingredients and made them. Here are some pictures from my adventures:
Yay! I found all the ingredients (either after digging through our cabinets in the kitchen to find them or running through the store to find them)!
I decided to make my own coconut flour out of coconut chunks – mostly because all of this was really spontaneous and it was actually kind of late on a weeknight and I didn’t feel like driving to the health food store to get coconut flour. However, it turned out to be really easy to do once I figured out how to work the food processor.
The final product cooling on the stove! It was delicious. Tasted like banana bread with blackberries and coconut in it. If you had fed them to me, I never would have guessed that they weren’t your typical flour and milk type banana bread bars. Yum.
All in all I think it was a good adventure for me because 1) it really did make me think about all the food groups and what I eat every day and 2) it was actually really good even though it was slightly more of a pain to track ingredients down for. In conclusion, I’m probably never going to switch to a diet like the paleo diet but I appreciate the recipes for forcing me to think about the amount of carbs, milk, etc I put in my body.
What do you think? Are you on a diet like the paleo diet or other diet? How did you give up cheese (and bread?! Think of the bagels!!!!)? Would you ever consider going on a diet like that? What is your favorite kind of food?
My apologies for not posting more recently. I’ve been ridiculously busy both with work (exciting things happening, though not on the graduation front sadly – turns out that science is hard ;) – but I might have some exciting trips later this year!) and with life. Cobalt and I have a new years resolution called “Operation Go For It!” which has definitely taken some planning to put into effect (and we’re still not done yet) but it’s going to be epic. A hint – I just signed up for a French class through a community continuing education program here in Boulder… I am excited. My French is ridiculously rusty (and it’s more like ‘Franish’ because I can’t say a sentence in Spanish or French without putting a word from the other language in there… actually some people might say that my English is like that too, littered with random French and Spanish words… I’m weird). Maybe I will write a full post about Operation Go For It later. Unfortunately, this is just a post to tell you that I’m not dead and now I have to get back to work… :p
Picture: This picture is from my first year of grad school. On a randomly warm day in the middle of a pretty cold winter, my friend P and I went to the park near my apartment to try to fly a kite. I brought my camera because I was documenting everything then (more so than now… I know… it’s hard to believe) and somehow the settings got messed up for this picture P took of me and the kite. I actually like it this way… it totally sums up how I’m feeling right now (excited but also so busy that I am all blurry).
What are you up to? Any crazy schemes for new years resolutions? How are those going by the way? Did you make some earlier this month and stick to them or are they already falling apart? It’s hard…
Yesterday I was going through my recent pictures when I came across all these adorable pictures I took of my family’s cat when Cobalt and I were in California for the holidays. This one is by far my favorite of the 50 or so I took of her… She just looks so regal. I had originally wanted to photograph her because she’s all fluffed up for winter and she looks adorable. I think you can see some of her puffiness in this pic.
In case you are unconvinced about how soft and cute this cat is or if up close cat pictures scare you, here’s another picture of her being similarly adorable/puffy/soft:
Thoughts? I love being a crazy photographer with the cats when I’m home because 1) they are interesting subjects to photograph and 2) then I can look at them when I’m feeling homesick throughout the year (this happens a lot). One day Cobalt and I are going to get ourselves a cute kitty but until then, I guess we’ll be okay with our stuffed shark friends… :-/ Cobalt, Potassium, and Finn, Christmas 2012… This was shot using my infrared remote for my DSLR… You can even see it in this picture. Look how tiny… Don’t you want one for your DSLR?
Do you have pets? Tell me about them! Show me pictures! I love animals. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a vet or a marine biologist (not sure how I ended up in grad school studying biochemistry now, looking back…). Even though I grew up with pet cats, I worked at a vet in high school and had college roommates (one of them is the reason why I met Cobalt) with multiple pet reptiles (a story for another day). These events have not only continued my love of pretty much all pets (cats, dogs, snakes, hamsters, bunnies, etc) but also taught me how to take care of them. Cobalt, you better watch out or you might come home one day to a house full of creatures! ;)
I’ve been working a lot recently in preparation for taking time off for the holidays. Yesterday morning, I got the pleasure of watching the sun rise and hit the flatirons over Boulder just right. It was breathtaking…
Thanks Instagram for helping me capture the moment (PS – I’m doing a photo a day challenge this month on Instagram. Want to follow my pictures? It’s easy! I’m Iampotassium of course…) :)
I hope you all have lovely weekends! Anyone getting snow?
Today’s fun with lights post involves stars! So now basically, I turned all my out of focus light into star shapes (instead of those pointy starbursts from Tuesday’s post). This is also done by messing with the aperture on a prime (non zoom) lens. Basically, I cut out a star shape on cardstock and taped it in front of my lens. Then I used a really wide aperture (refer to this lovely picture from Wikipedia if you need to refresh your memory from Tuesday – the top is a wide aperture and the bottom is a narrow aperture) to take all these pictures. This wide aperture + the star in front means that all of the out of focus light turned into the shape of stars instead of circles.
Anyway, below are some other fun examples of stars. The top is my Christmas lights again.
So I’m not sure how many of you know that I play trombone but I do (I used to play it a lot more in high school and college… boo grad school eating up all my time)! Here is my trombone covered in stars:
Fun with tealights and mirrors, part 1:
Fun with tealights and mirrors, part 2:
Yay! Shapes! What shape should I try next? My friend Jem has done this with music notes! Super cool idea! Do you guys have any fun plans for this weekend? This is my last full week in lab before Cobalt and I escape for the holidays so I will probably be working… :p
I’ve decided that today’s and Thursday’s posts will be full of fun with lights! Today we focus on Christmas lights! I bought some purple Christmas lights (though they look red in these pictures…) this weekend and put them up around mine and Cobalt’s office. So immediately, the camera came out and I had to play with various settings. Today we are exploring starbursts! I briefly talked about them last week in my post about A but here’s how it works. If you have a prime lens (so it doesn’t zoom) and you set your aperture really narrow (= a small hole in the lens), any out of focus light will be the shape of the petals of the aperture (Click here for a picture of a large (top) and small (bottom) aperture from Wikipedia). So the smaller the aperture, the more starbursty the out of focus light becomes. It’s kind of fun to play with…
Anyway, here are a few more pictures of me playing with my Christmas lights…
Those of you who are my friends on Facebook have probably seen this one by now (It’s a self portrait taken with my awwwwesome remote control for my camera… TOTALLY worth the extra cash btw for those of you who are thinking of purchasing DSLRs… makes family pictures during the holidays SUPER fun/easy):
More starbursts:
Getting these Christmas lights was actually one of the highlights of my weekend. Life has been fairly ridiculous for us lately so anything that I can do to make our office/house more relaxing/comforting/etc is a huuuuge plus.
Tell me how you feel about Christmas lights! Do you like them? Hate them? How much is too much? I’ve seen a lot of people wrapping Christmas lights around just the tree trunks in their front yards this year… I’ve gotta tell you that I’m not so sure I’m a fan. It looks like a lit up post in the middle of a dark yard… :-/
Speaking of Christmas lights, here is my favorite picture I took with Instagram in downtown Denver this weekend:
Potassium Photography 