Yeasty little Buggers, Day II

It's another day in the life of a graduate student: staring until my eyes bug out at a computer screen, writing endlessly, goofing off on the internets, neglecting the kids.


Yeah, it's been a pretty dull and not so interesting day in my life.


But the wild yeast in my kitchen are so happy! That's right, the wild yeast in my kitchen loves the sourdough starter I left out for them yesterday. I am learning yeast husbandry. I want to totally claim that as my own, but Alanna came up with that one -- it's one of the many reasons we are together.


Here, take a look:

The lighting is different, it's even taken in a different room, but the important thing is you can see BUBBLES! I was preparing myself for not seeing any action or change in the starter for several days. Granted, this is after I removed half of the starter from yesterday (something about keeping acid levels correct) and mixing in another 1/4 cup of filtered water and whole spelt flour.

But the super cool thing is it smells yeasty. You know that smell of fresh baked breadstuffs, that tangy sweet smell that tells you something good is going on.

My life might be a little stressful and boring right now, but my kitchen is so full of yeast, I started tending some right away. Which is kind of cool and creepy at the same time.

Well, I'm off. I have to do something besides look at a computer. I think I have logged something like twelve hours straight today. I will need glasses when I'm done with this degree, I swear.

Tomorrow, hopefully another installment in As the Yeast Grows, or All My Microbials, or The Small and the Fermenting.

Bread and Yeast and Starters Hooray!

So I love to bake. This is not news to most people. I make a mean cinnamon roll. I love the chemistry of it all.


But I am not known to make my own bread, really. This doesn't make sense, because I feel I have mastered the sweet yeast dough (see above mention of cinnamon rolls). I have made my own bread, and it's pretty good. But I think the problem is that it is soooo good it's gone in like a day. And I wonder if all the effort was really worth it. Because, I mean, come on. the mixing and the kneading isn't the hard part; it's the waiting for 3-4 hours for the bread to rise. You can't leave the house, you are stuck babysitting this beast.


Well Saturday Alanna asked me to make biscuits for breakfast. Biscuits are yummy and I can whip them out in 20 minutes. But I decided to be adventurous in the kitchen (something for which I am also known -- homemade Limoncello anyone?). I decided to make English muffins. 


Those things that you get at the store that have the horse and buggy and whatnot? Those are nothing compared to real English muffins homemade. English muffins are a yeast dough breadstuff that you cut into circles between the first and second risings. Then you cook them on a hot griddle in butter. So delicious!


I have the bread maker yeast that only takes ten minutes for the first rise, so I was able to make English muffins in like an hour. And they were so tasty!!! I have no pictures because everyone ate them all up.


At breakfast Alanna requested that we always have English muffins, to which Marek replied that he wants me to make bread so we wouldn't have to buy any bread from the store that he hates. 


And the wheels began to turn.


Again, Alanna and I have discussed this, and we agree that it would be better and tastier, and probably save muchos dineros. So I started researching today. I know a little about breadmaking, and I know that sourdoughs can be fun and easy and fascinating science. I just wasn't sure about all the details, or if Alanna likes sourdough.


Sidenote: we cook and bake excusively with whole grain flours. Spelt, kamut, and whole wheat: various mixes depending on what exactly we feel like at the moment. I also don't use white sugar. I was using fructose for a while, but all the research about how it affects your health and tells your body to store belly fat, and we cut it out. And we both lost 5 pounds.


So yeah, awesome. I did some research. And I found Barbara over at http://www.mysisterskitchenonline.com. You should go. It's awesome. Well, she has been experimenting with sourdough for something like 5 or 6 years. What a better way to start than on the shoulders of others greater than you (or something like that!)


Anyway, she has 8 or 9 blog posts about sourdough. And I read them all.


And I'm doing it. I am making my own sourdough starter. The really super rad cool thing about this is you can start a sourdough starter WITH NO YEAST!!! Yeast is so cool because it is everywhere. Yes everywhere. I guess that's kind of creepy, too.


So all you have to do is leave a little food out for the wild yeast (that's what it's called) floating around in your kitchen -- 1/4 c. each of water and flour. Cover it loosely and wait. Every day for four days you throw out half and add flour and water. Eventually it will start bubbling and smell .... sour.

So I am on day one. It doesn't look very interesting today. We shall see what it looks like later.

So I have a new pet. After a couple of days, it will live in the refrigerator. I will feed it every week and in return, I will use it to make my own sourdough bread.


What is so cool about wild yeast is that the particular make-up of any location makes that yeast unique. When I make my first loaf, there won't have been any other loaf of sourdough like it in the world! (I think that's the subjunctive case, by the way).


I'm stoked. And all that know me should also be stoked because my new pet will create so much bread and so much mass I can easily (and maybe desperately) give some away. Just think, you could have your own fridge pet, too!

Day II: A miserable bleary day

ho hum. today was more of a review day in the land of the bathroom book project.


You know, it was actually really pretty outside with the sun setting and the weather not too bad here.  I even got out of the house and went grocery shopping. I was very productive and did homework and ran around dealing with public school bureaucracy and everything.


But it was a difficult day emotionally. I don't know how to explain it, or if you really need to know. Let's just say that living with people is HARD, and trying to make sure everybody's needs and feelings are being dealt with takes a lot of work. And sometimes its easier to ignore and neglect one person because they are oh so nice and aren't the ones yelling and crying in your face constantly.


Marek is having a hard time at school. And we are trying to change his school for next year, but that is like pulling teeth with him. Change, it's what's for dinner, but he'd rather starve sometimes.


So bathroom book project got sidelined today. There was no quiet ",me" time today. Just a quick re-read of the prologue of Russell's autobiography. That man was more passionate about finding ecstasy and bliss and love and helping humankind's problems than he was about finding the mathematical and numerical truths. This coming from the coauthor of Principia Mathematica. Which I haven't read either. And isn't on the bathroom shelf. Maybe it should be.


I'm thinking I need to rename this project, or shorten it into a cool acronym or something, because frankly, bathroom book project is a little vivid. Suggestions?

And We're Back; With a New Mission

So it's been a while. I'm not even going to count it out. I just know that it is a lot longer of a time than I had previously thought.


I had friends in from out of town this weekend. It was super fantastic. The sad thing is they live three hours away. We should have seen them more than we did since the last time. It was something like 10 months. Too long.


Anyway, it was old college buddies hanging out at my house, eating my cinnamon rolls (more on those another day), drinking good drinks, and talking good talk, when Jon tasked me with something.


A little back story; my wife and I are bibliophiles, like really bad bibliophiles. We routinely give away, donate, and say goodbye to books. But they breed. More books come into my house than I can deal with. Now don't get me wrong. I love books; I read; my wife reads; my kids read; we READ. 


I have a bookshelf in every room of my house. EVERY. The kitchen has one shelf for books; each other room has a whole bookshelf, if not more than one, dedicated to books. I have a bookshelf in the bathroom.


When we renovated our bathroom, we converted a European style bathroom with a WC and a separate sink and claw-foot tub bathroom into one bathroom. This means we had two doorways into the bathroom after tearing down the wall separating the two rooms. We decided, and it took a lot longer to implement than I originally thought, to turn that into a bookshelf. It was going to have shelves accessible from the hallway and from the toilet sitting next to it inside. Didn't happen. We needed all of those shelves inside the bathroom. The back is clear acrylic that I glued Japanese rice paper with gel medium to. Private, but brings a lot of light into the hallway.


Anyway, the tableau is set. Each time Jon comes down from the restroom he comments on the eclectic and interesting mix of books available to peruse when one is sitting on the porcelain throne. And he kept asking me if I had read some of the books. Which I have not read all of them; that's why they are in the bathroom -- to read.


So he wanted me to start reading the books on the shelves and report on what I had read. So here is my attempt at that task. Let's see how far I go.


Today I decided to start at the top, left-hand corner -- the beginning. This book: The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1872-1914. Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1967.


I read pages 3-7, What I Have Lived For, and the frontispiece.


What I have learned: he was passionate about love, knowledge, and the suffering of mankind. And that he had horrid handwriting. There is an image of a poem of his as the frontispiece, and while a beautiful profession of his love for his wife (one of them, I think), it was not the stereotypical fancy-schmancy handwriting one thinks of when discussing handwriting from a century ago. 


I find his passion and uplifting spirit energizing. Dude was super cool. Not sure? Check here.


The poem:


Through the long years
     I sough peace.
I found ecstasy, I found anguish,
     I found madness,
I found loneliness.
I found the solitary pain
     that gnaws the heart,
But peace I did not find.


Now, old and near my end,
    I have known you,
And, knowing you,
I have found both ecstasy and peace,
   I know rest.
After so many lonely years.
I know what life and love may be.
Now, if I sleep,
I shall sleep fulfilled.


Who thought a logician and a mathematician could be so freaking sexy and romantic?


No other thoughts now.


Hopefully the next post will be sooner, and won't take as long to compose. I tell you what, reading takes a lot less time than writing about it (duh).

Oh Dear.

I can't stop thinking about you. It's only been a couple of hours, but here I am lying in bed, thinking about you. I've tried to read TWO different books, play on facebook, and go to sleep. But no, it's only you I can think about.

I think we might have a problem. It's too soon. I can't say that yet.

I am realizing how insular I can be. It's really easy to be. I live with four other people, and as much of an extrovert that I can be, I need my space. So I get most of my other people time right here in my house. Sometimes too much. So by the time I should be calling friends, talking to other people, even my mom, I'm done.

And speaking of done, i want to go on the record that i am officially done with winter. this always happens around this time of year for me. i hate february; and in cincinnati, winter isn't really done until sometime in march. which is also dreary and wet.

i'm tired of being cold. i live in an old house and we set the thermostat to 65, so i spend the winter in sweaters, socks, another pair of socks, and a blanket. add to that the fact that i am now working from home as a graduate student, and i'm cold all the time.

i think being a vegetarian might also have something to do with it. an old friend of mine told me after going back to eating meat that she's never cold in the winter anymore. maybe it has something to do with the meat staying in your body longer, or more iron or something. then again, it might have nothing to do with being warm at all.

tomorrow is wednesday. this means that it's practicum day for gideon. this being my second quarter of graduate school for special education, i spend one day a week at a school working with a mentor teacher to get some experience and exposure under my belt. this quarter, i'm at a k-8 on the westside of cincinnati. and my mentor teacher is awesome. and my cohort (i'll get into that silly term later, i promise) buddy that i am placed with is AWESOME. and this kids are just amazing. i am working with k-3 kids right now and they are so cute! i love them. i love seeing them succeed and be happy and smile. i even love them when they are crazy and want to run through the halls all day. which happened three weeks ago. i am very lucky to have gotten into special education.

education is one of those things that i never thought i would do. my mom, my dad, and even my grandmother were all teachers. i always wanted to teach college, but i thought there would be no way you would catch me in a k-12 classroom. the best times of my life weren't spent in a school. i was very weird, shunned by most of the kids. i was a little too smart, a little too geeky, and a little too fey for the likes of cincinnati public schools. and kids can be so vicious. why would i want to go back and submit myself to more torture at the hands of school age kids again? now that i am older, and have kids of my own, i finally internalized what my parents and adults in my life were always trying to teach me: that what those other people think and say about you really doesn't matter. like at all. so these little kids can go all crazy and stuff or be mean to me, and you know what, i don't care. they don't know me; don't know who i am, so they really aren't lashing out at me, just a perception of someone they see. it has nothing to do with who i really am. now if i could just get that to apply to the rest of my life.

So, yeah.

So I gave in. I started looking at my Twitter account today, and set up a blog. We'll see if anyone really cares or not. But I thought, I have no time to talk to all of the people I love and enjoy. Hell, I barely speak to any of my friends on any consistent basis. It's one of those things that the little demon in my head likes to bring up at night when I'm trying to go to sleep -- when there is absolutely nothing that I can do about it. Yeah, like I'll go and call him right now. Right. Whatever.

Anyway, here is my attempt to get myself out in the world a little bit.

I am definitely going to need to work on the layout of this little fucker. Can we talk about the unreadability of these typefaces. GRR.

So my car has been broken down for over a week now. Not too bad, as I can always borrow Alanna's car, and my dad lives with us, so I can borrow his as well. I went ahead and joined a car club, Better World. They are an economically conscious car club that lobbys for things like bike lanes, instead of against them. Anyway, I had to wait three days before it was active.

So I called this morning to get the car towed to my mechanics. I had already tried jumping the car and filling the tank. (I tend to run my car until empty before I fill it. It's a bad habit, I know). So the tow guy comes by, tries to turn the car over, then brings out this car-battery-jump-box thingy and the car starts. GRRR. So I feel like a total fool. All I needed was a new battery. So my dad took me to AutoZone and I replaced the battery within the hour. I should be happy that it wasn't more serious and all I had to pay for was a new battery. But, damn, I feel like a total fool. Part of me would like to be justified with a steep car bill. Oh well.

Today is one of those days that you have to write a list to keep on point. I am in graduate school full time, and by luck and a great mate, I don't have to work. This means I am home alone all day three days a week. Do you know how hard it is to stay focused like that. And because all but one class is online, I have to be in front of the computer all day. Ah the temptation of fails, facebook, and now you, oh blog.

But, of course, the simple act of writing down (or in this case using the task function in outlook), all that I had to do, I got through all but two of the ten items before noon. This is some kind of record for me. So next quarter, only one online class. This will help tremendously.

Only problem with this is the three classes are at night. Hey, I'm in graduate school, this is the norm. So I miss out on some family time two nights a week. But the sacrifice is worth it. I would much rather be in a class for a couple of hours than do twice the amount of work on my own time.