Moving On

After several great years with Blogger, I have decided to officially retire the Brandeis Briefs blog. I'm going to leave it up, since it's a part of my history, but starting today I'll be doing all of my new blogging on my own website.

I'm not giving up blogging entirely, just moving shop. I've got a much more detailed explanation of how and why I made this decision in my new blog. If you'd like to follow, please visit me at my new and improved blog: BlackTabi Blog, and update your bookmarks to the new url: http://blog.blacktabi.com

If you've been reading this based on a feed subscription, you will probably also want to update that feed as well (there's a handy RSS button on the new blog!).

Thanks for reading Brandeis Briefs, and I hope to see you at BlackTabi from now on!

Yak Yak

Scenes from Massachusetts this morning included a slick, very clear, casing of ice on everything, me chipping my car out of the ice (I must admit that I took the lazy way out and turned on the car, cranking up the heat to start melting the ice from the inside...or I wouldn't have gotten to work until noon. Ice breaking off your windows looks alarmingly like you've just shattered the window itself.), and many annoyed locals slip-sliding their way across parking lots and sidewalks.

At first, I was a bit annoyed when I came out of my building to find this sight:
That's about 1/4 inch of ice over the entirety of my car. Not pictured: similar ice all over the ground.

However, the more I thought about it, the more I was thankful that all I had to do was chip my car out and then drive to work on the well-salted, well-sanded public streets. I did not envy all of the students I saw sliding and shuffling their way down extremely treacherous sidewalks trying to get to school.

I'm well-acquainted with the ice. Last year in a single week I had not one, not two, but THREE painful and embarrassing falls on the ice in our apartment parking lot or trying to cross streets. They left me with a good dose of humility, a painful arse, and a lingering dread of walking on the ice.

Today I faced the ice in the parking lot with my usual sense of trepidation, but armed with a new tool. Say what you will about "practical gifts" at the holidays, my Hanukkah present from Matt is already worth its weight in gelt.
My very own pair of glow-in-the-dark YakTrax (note all the ice on the ground behind my feet...). Despite the "black ice" all over our parking lot, I was able to chisel out my entire car without slipping or sliding once! Free, once again, to enjoy the season without having to fear for my rear (and the falling there-on) every time I step outside. Woo! What more can a girl ask?

(Yes, Mom, Dad, etc: I drove very carefully. I was very glad the streets appeared to be quite clear, but still drove carefully.)

As an aside: I'm doing some hacking this week - if the blog looks strange or gives errors or behaves oddly, it's not you, it's me. Stay tuned for further updates on the matter.

Don't you love it when someone understands you?

Today, that "someone" is XKCD.

Oh, python, how I miss you...

(Python is a programming language, for the non-geeks in the audience. A truly fantastic programming language, if I do say so.)

Cooperative Menu Planning

I'm not actually dead, just been quite busy lately. Holidays, work, preparing for other holidays, etc has taken a lot of time. This rash of busyness has led to lazy cooking, and a brainstorm.

I'm not sure how this would work, but I've been tossing the idea around in my head. I know we eat out way too much, and part of that is due to a combination of lazy menu planning, and good menu planning just being plain difficult. After awhile, we lose a lot of variety because we get tired of thinking of new ideas and start relying on pasta with tomato sauce and other boring staples again. So, I've been trying to think of ways to reduce the work load of menu planning and increase the variety. My latest brainstorm would be cooperative menu planning.

In my mind, small groups of people with similar tastes in food could split up the burden of menu planning.

One way might be to split the week into 7 days (inventive, that) and have each person plan a few meals. All 7 days worth of menus/recipes could be posted, along with a grocery list and all participants could make the meals in any order they wanted.

It seems like that wouldn't work very long, however. It's complicated, and reliant on everyone participating fully all the time. Not to mention that it would probably result in a lot of over-buying of food since the meals wouldn't be very well coordinated with each other. One of the most difficult parts of menu planning for me is coming up with ways to use ALL of ingredients we buy for one recipe, or ways to re-use leftovers so that they don't get boring.

So the next idea I had was to start a collaborative collection of menu blocks. There are tons of cookbooks and online recipe collections out there, but they're all single recipes. There are leftovers. There are foods that you have to buy in larger quantities than the recipe calls for, so there are leftover raw ingredients, too.

The idea behind menu blocks would be that people could submit a collection of 2 or 3 meals that are closely related. For example, a menu for dinner one night plus a menu that uses up the leftovers for lunch the next day. Or a menu for dinner plus a menu for another dinner that uses up the raw ingredients not needed the first night.

So, if you need to buy packages of celery and carrots for soup but only need two of each, the coordinating menu would somehow incorporate the leftovers so they don't go rancid in the fridge before you think of a way to use them. Perhaps lunch the next day consists of hummus and raw veggies. Or, make curry for dinner one night and then use the leftovers as filling for steam buns so they'll be more portable and a different meal the next day. The two meals coordinate, the raw or cooked leftovers are used up, but you don't have to eat the same thing 2 or 3 days in a row to use them all up.

This is, of course, the whole idea behind menu planning, but I find it tiresome and frustrating to sit down and try to find 1-2 weeks worth of menus that work together this way. So if there was a repository of blocks already set up like this, you could just go through tetris-like and fill your weekly meal plan with pre-coordinated meals instead of finding one meal, then needing to search for a coordinating meal, and doing that over and over again until the week was full.

A single person could certainly set out to do this alone and keep a personal collection, but with collaborative input you'd see more variety and different ways of combining meals. Plus, with multiple people working on something like this you'd get a much bigger collection of options in less time than you would with only one person. We could sort them by type (dinner+lunch, lunch+lunch, breakfast+lunch, etc...) so that it would be easier to find the "right pieces" to snap together to create a full weeks worth of menus.

Does this make sense? Is it interesting? Would anyone use something like this? Is it feasible?

FreeRice - Socially Responsible Time Sink

Saw this on a friends blog, and oh man it's fun and addictive.

FreeRice is a (free) web based vocab game. It displays a word and 4 possible synonyms. You choose the synonym you think defines the word, and for every correct answer 10 grains of rice are donated through the UN to help end world hunger. It also keeps a running total so you can see your "vocab score." Each round only takes a couple seconds, so it's a great time-filler.

Watch out, it's really addicting! (I am the proud donor of 1070 grains of rice so far, with a vocab score of 40)

http://www.freerice.com

Sherlock Cloche - Pattern

I haven't test knit this pattern, so it might have some errors. If you attempt to knit this and run into trouble, please let me know!

Size: One size - fits my head, 22" around the ears. You could go up or down in gauge to make this hat larger or smaller as necessary.

Materials:
270 yards fingering weight yarn (I used handspun from The Merry Little Lamb), US size 6 (4.0mm) double pointed needles

Abbreviations:
kfb: knit in front and back of stitch
PM: place marker
k2tog: knit two together

Pattern Notes:
This pattern can be worked with any repeat of stripes you like. I changed colors every 8 rows for the sample, and carried the alternate color up the side of the hat by twisting the yarns tightly around each other at the end of each row. The following pattern allows for 7 stripes that are each 8 rows wide (if you include the bind-off row). Any striping pattern that divides evenly over 56 stitches should work fine.

Increase Round:[knit in FB of stitch, knit until 1 stitch before marker, knit in FB of stitch, SM] repeat for for all stitches

Seed Stitch (in the round):
Odd rows: k1, [p1, k1] to end.
Even Rows: p1, [K1, p1] to end
------------------------------------------
Knit entire pattern with yarn doubled.

Cast on 15; join without twisting.
knit 1 round straight
knit in front and back of each stitch; (30 stitches)
[PM, knit 10] repeat for all stitches
knit 1 round straight
knit 1 increase round
knit alternating one round straight with 1 round of increase, until 114 stitches
knit 2 rounds straight
Knit 1 increase round (120 stitches)
knit 3 rounds straight
knit 1 round increasing (126 stitches)
k 8 rounds straight
[k9 m1] repeat to end (140 stitches)
knit 6 rounds straight
knit 3 rounds seed stitch
Bind off as follows: k1, p1, slip rightmost stitch worked over left stitch worked. [k1, slip rightmost stitch over second, p1, slip rightmost stitch over second] repeat to end.
Break yarn.

The 15 stitches at the beginning of the pattern should have left a circular hole at the top of the hat.
Pick up 6 stitches evenly around the this hole.
Knit 5 rounds (30 stitches total)
[k2tog] repeat for all stitches (3 stitches)
break yarn, thread through remaining stitches and pull tight

weave in all ends.

Pattern for Sherlock Cloche is copyrighted by Elizabeth Gifford, 2007.  Feel free to use the pattern for your own use, but copying for mass distribution or sales is prohibited without permission.

Sherlock Cloche

Taking photos of yourself at night is tricky business.

The hat I've been working on didn't come out quite as I'd hoped (I wanted it to be long enough to cover my ears, but then the brim started flopping in my eyes!).

Pattern to follow pretty soon - I've got it all jotted down, I just need to transform it into an actual pattern.