Museday Tuesday

I ran around from meeting to reading group to meeting to seminar to long (surprise-myself) workout at Antrim, and finally home where I have been sitting squarely on my ass since my arrival. Qual I results came out today. They have a way of making my stomach churn even when I didn't take it. I feel like this is very context-appropriate:

Spider Kitties and Canned Pumpkin Fever

I have pumpkin on the brain. Pumpkin bars, pumpkin doughnuts, pumpkin rolls (or 'logs' as Jen likes to call them, but 'pumpkin logs' just makes me think of pumpkin turds), pumpkin scones, pumpkin ice cream...Jen texted me to inform me that Kroger has finally stocked canned pumpkin puree. I will be making every one of these recipes that requires pumpkin.

Ran from CRC Westerville tonight with the usual other 3 of the Fabulous Four; the group was a little thin today but conversation was good which was comprised mainly of food, mostly candy bars, and bathroom habits. I told everyone about my f*&#$ed up dream-no, nightmare I had last night. The point at which I started remembering the dream was realizing that I had this pet kitten, but something was a little odd about it. I spend a few minutes watching and examining it and realize that this mutant kitten has 8 pairs of legs, but each pair of legs are all but fused together, so the kitten looks like it essentially has 8 double-thick legs. Think Baby from Toy Story only furry and cute:

 Ok, so (in my dream) I'm sitting there observing this bizarre little thing start to move. Instead of moving like one would think-like a spider would, it moves its legs simultaneously like an octopus moves its tentacles when pulsing through the water. Skin-crawling weird. Then appears a mama spider kitty, who apparently was angry at her baby because she wraps her larger spider kitty legs around the almost handicap-like baby spider kitty and squeeze her legs in this vicious, pulsing motion...ew...ew... I don't even want to describe it anymore because whoever has taken enough time to read this far is going to start to wonder about my mental health. At this point, I wake up pulse racing and covered in sweat. 4:45am and my body thinks it's time to be awake. I asked C (the psychologist) on the run (jokingly) what it means. He laughed and merely said "that's screwed up." We all laughed. In agreement. I was telling Dave about it this afternoon, and the weirdest part is that after describing how the mommy went cannibal on her baby, he told me that that's how tarantula's really eat. I've never seen a tarantula consume one bite. Weird, right?

I'm currently sucking down a glass of cold Airborn and salivating over these raw nomnoms.

Ok, now I need to go think about bivariate smoothing. G'night!

Losing my blogging virginity.

I've decided to start keeping a blog. What's it for? I don't want this to be a journal, per se, but I do want it to keep track of various tidbits that I find particularly interesting, so that if there comes a time in my life where I have enough hours in the day to pursue something other than grad school, running, and feeding myself, I might come back here and start checking some of those things off the list. These things that I mention? Subjects, topics, hobbies, and endeavors that I haven't gotten a chance to investigate yet but if I had life to live over and over again, I'd take one of those lives and venture down that road. Most of the avenues that I'm interested in are right-brained sorts of stuff: design, fashion, art of any kind, culinary endeavors, you know. And every other random topic that might interest me that day. Maybe it'll interest others. So there.

This morning, I met Rob and Liz for a 20-miler at Antrim-the usual Sunday business. Went to Northstar afterward and had what has now become the usual liquid breakfast of smoothie, shooting star, and coffee. Came home and decided that the zucchini chocolate cake I made last night from this site was good enough to feed to others, so I made a second batch and baked them in cupcake form:

I was a tad skeptical about how good a cake could possibly be that contained almost no fat, but I was pleasantly surprised. I added this vegan chocolate ganache...because who doesn't like chocolate ganache? I meant to do work today. I really did. But there was cake to be made and a nap to be taken. Signing out, but first, I can't even tell you how much I love this apartment: