Blessed by the Potato

Well, I have some ambiguous news for a change. Talked with my supervisor, and he says that the grant he applied for was trimmed back a fair bit from the budget they asked for, but that’s to be expected usually. It’s still approved, so there’s money there for experiments when I go on to my PhD. I still haven’t heard from the rest of my committee about my thesis drafts, but he says that’s to be expected: they want me & my supervisors to do all the nitty gritty million draft revisions work, and won’t even look at it until my supervisors sign off on it as being done.

I’ve been walking for days, and I can still hear the commotion raised from the stinking pit behind me. I cast a fearful glance behind me, and still faintly see the orange glow diffused through the ever present fog. It’s the one source of direction I have, as the cloud roil so thick that it’s difficult to tell night from day, let alone which side of the sky the sun rises in.

Time for a break I decide. The dirt is less parched, almost like soil now, rather than gravelly sand. But still nothing grows for me to forrage. I check my stomach, and decide that I can do without a meal at this time. No sense using up what few consumables I carry, since breakfast might be growing just a few hours walk further forward.

An ambiguous high-pitched noise pierces the dull throbbing that fills the air. My hands reach for my knife, only to find that it’s already held tightly. I look down at my left arm, while my right holds the knife just above the skin. I slide it gently towards me, but don’t even leave a mark.

It’s amazing how many cuts and bruises I’ve accumulated all over my body, how easy it seems to tear the skin accidentally. Yet, when the morose mood takes me and I reflect on how I’ve left behind the constant tooth-and-nail struggle for survival of the pit for this slow, choking, wasting death on the plains, I can’t help but take out my best knife and just test the skin. It never breaks, even when the knife is freshly sharpened.

There’s a tradition, of sorts, amongst my people to perform such unsavory last rites on the wrists. Yet for me, there’s a spot on my left arm just below the elbow that practically cries out for the knife. Just a taste, just to see how sharp it really is.

How quickly the elation of the climb left me, here in this no-place. The slower pace and lack of conflict simply served to give me time to reflect, to regret, to despair. It’s at this moment that she returns to me, and whispers in my ear. I’m so overjoyed just to hear her voice that I almost miss what she says. More signs and portents: destined for good things, important part of the plan and all that. I dare not turn to face her, fearing and somehow knowing that I won’t see a thing.

I mumble “but I’ve done nothing of importance, and in this state seem ill-suited to perform any in the future.”

Softly, she whispers in my ear “Good deeds are not necessarily great; great works are not necessarily Good.” I think her lips brushed my ear. I know they did, it tingles.

“Do not despair, you’re doing so well. Be brave.” And with that, she’s gone.

I lie there a while longer, listening to my heartbeat and the indistinct thrums of the distant pit. I reach up to touch my ear, and the movement wakes me. I try to think about how long I managed to sleep. I can’t be sure, but there’s a wet pool of drool on my shoulder. Gross.

Did I dream her, or did she whisper sweet nothings in my ear until I fell asleep?

That high pitched noise again, closer this time. I snap to attention: time to move on again. No rest for the weary. I think I’m being followed.

I’ve been a busy little beaver this weekend. I’ve extended my thesis by 4 1.5-spaced pages, and written nearly 17 pages of blog posts, stories, and light-hearted emails. I went into my archives and pulled out three choice stories/rants from the old website. There’s still lots of gold to be mined there, but I’ll do it slowly so that it all seems like new content to you all. I’m going to have to reorganize it very soon (similar to how the recipes page is set up now), I’ll probably get to that later tonight.

For now, I really need to sleep. I’m feeling a lot better after my death flu/sore throat, but the last few days (weeks, really) I haven’t slept much at all. I got 3 hours yesterday, and haven’t managed to sleep at all tonight. I was planning on going in to the lab and doing some more work on calibrating my heat stress setup for my thesis (I don’t think it’s necessary, but it is a question that could be raised, so I was going to do it), but now I think that if I don’t sleep I’m going to go completely bananas. Enjoy the stories, leave feedback, keep reading.

And never lose faith.

Sorry about the outage there (almost 20 hours before I got it back up and running).

I don’t quite know what the problem was, as while the server was running slow as molassas when I got back, it was still functional and reset on its own. Anyway, we’re back.

I just got back from the L-dot and there’s a nice package of homemade peanut brittle on the counter. I didn’t know peanut brittle was the sort of thing a mom could make. It’s like hard candies or fudge: you know that it is possible to make them “homemade”, but that it is in fact usually only done for small “homemade” stores. It’s not the sort of thing you find your mom actually making in your kitchen. To be perfectly literal, I still haven’t found my mom making it in the kitchen, just strong evidence of it. But it’s so good, she very well could have just bought a batch from Maple Leaf Fudge and put it in tupperware for me.

I really like peanut brittle. As I write this I’ve eaten almost half of what she left me, and I think I broke a tooth in the process. It was worth it. Anyhow, despite my obvious love for all that is sweet and nutty (hi Wayfare!) I hardly ever buy peanut brittle, because the best peanut brittle is only found in small confectionary shoppes or at tiny booths in town fairs. And those places without exception always have fudge available as well (usually peanut butter chocolate fudge at that), and for some reason peanut brittle costs as much or more than fudge, pound-for-pound, so I usually end up going with the fudge.

Yes, it is hard on the teeth. It’s hard, so you have to chew (it might dissolve upon prolonged sucking, but I don’t have that kind of patience, and from what patience I do have, it’s obvious that it takes more than 3 licks to get to the tootsie pop centre… er… I mean, it disolves slower than comparable “sucking” sweets, such as life savers), and once you bite into it, there’s a good chance that it will form some kind of peanut brittle concrete in the cusp of your molars.

My teeth are in terrible shape to begin with. I’ve liked my dentist a fair bit since she took over the practice from my old dentist, but there’s one thing that’s got me a little concerned. You see, due to a number of factors including diet (lots of sugar, acidity, and a terrible tendancy to graze rather than eat a small number of larger meals), behaviour (apparently there’s a period after eating where the most damage is done to the teeth, and that the damage over time goes down drastically about a half hour to an hour after eating, so eating non-stop never gives your teeth that minor break, and on top of that, my dentist says that I have a very strong bite, which is just doing mechanical injury to my teeth), the side-effects of my depression medication (chocolate) and genetics (my dad maybe has 6 natural teeth left in his mouth, having had dentures since his 20’s [gulp] and my mom’s had at least 4 root canals, 2 crowns, and a filling in every other tooth except her 4 front ones; I often joke about whether I’m not sure if I’ll end up with my dad’s teeth or my mom’s, but that it can’t be good either way), my teeth aquire cavities at prodigious rates. A new spot has formed since my last visit that is now large enough to poke with my tongue and see in the mirror. My dentist will wait until they get a bit bigger (the first sign of pain) and fill them then. The issue is that I’d like to see if there were some way to prevent these cavities from forming in the first place (aside from you know, brushing my teeth more than 2x a day, since I’m really only a morning & evenings kind of brusher, and, er… flossing, since I’m just really bad at it). Wayfare claims her dentist gives her teeth some sort of plastic film every year or so to seal out the worst of the damage. I remember getting this as a kid, and figured that they must have found out it caused cancer or something, since they stopped giving it to me. I asked my dentist about it recently, and she said she wouldn’t bother scheduling me to get it since with my “ferocious” bite, I’d wear through it in about a month, so there was no point. Now, it’s good that she’s always dealt honestly with me (AFAIK), but Wayfare thinks I should get a new dentist who will let me pay to get a much-needed protective coating on my teeth, and I think she has a point.

As for the coke that I drink, Wayfare’s been looking into buying 2L bottles instead of cans. I like the idea, since I know it takes less material to package a single bottle than a handful of cans, though I don’t know about the downstream recycling efficiency (apparently they make money recycling aluminum?). The big benefit she sees is that you can adjust the amount you want from a bottle, taking less than a full 355 mL if that’s all you want (though I’m not sure she’s counting the extra load of dishes in her figuring). The cost is comparable: cans are on sale for $3.33 for a 12-pack every other week (though the regular price is a painful $8 for 24, or $4.50 for 12, but unless I’m desperate I never pay that much), which is about 0.078 cents/mL, while bottles go for between $1-$2 (depending on sales, again), which works out to 0.05-0.1 cents/mL. However, I find cans to be much more convenient since there’s a nice spot on the door for them (whereas bottles would take up room on the already crowded shelf used for juice and milk), they’re more portable for taking in the car and to work, and since they’re small, it’s easy to keep a number of different flavours in the fridge (typically I have 2 7-up, 4 Coke, 2 diet mountain dew, 1 ginger ale, and 1 orange pop or root beer), and most importantly, you can finish a can of coke before it goes flat.

To help with that problem Wayfare recently got a pop bottle pump, a little device that replaces the bottle cap with a small bulb pump. The idea is that you use the pump to keep the pressure inside the bottle high so that the carbonation doesn’t come out of solution. It seemed to work well enough at first, as I was able to use the pump to make the pressure inside the bottle high enough that I was barely able to dent it with my fingers. However, the seal on it was very poor, and after about an hour, it was actually worse than simply screwing the cap back on in the first place (which might seem impossible, until you realize that with the old fashioned cap-only method you get atmospheric plus the pressure of some of the lost carbonation over an hour, whereas with a leaky pump seal you’ll always bleed back to atmospheric as the pop degasses). So it looks like the best method is still my uncle Al’s (yes, I have an uncle Al and an uncle Bob, it’s very stereotypical :) method of simply crushing the bottle until the liquid is near the top, then screw on the top. I haven’t had as much luck with that, since I’m as the Gungans say “… er… clumsy”, so in the process of trying to squeeze the bottle, I usually get a bit flying out the top if it’s more than half full, and if it’s less than half full then it gets really hard to squeeze enough of the air out of the bottle. It remains a handy method for crushing bottles and having them keep their small size for recycling, however.