Simple, right?

I've got exactly a month until I have to hand in a copy of my dissertation to Graduate Studies. Freaking out, I wrote out a list of all the things I need to do in the next month. The list doesn't look all that bad. It's only got 6 bullets, and one of them is a note to pull a reference book out of the office and carry it around with me.

Sounds simple.

Except for that whole "write thesis" bullet. That one might be a bit of a chore, although I'm really not all that concerned about that part. I think I can write the thing in two weeks. That may sound ambitious, but the truth is that I have a lot of the writing done. My literature review, for example, is done. Intro is simple, conclusions will be clear. Content??? Uh, that's the problem. I do have things to write about but I don't have the whole story yet and if I need 2 weeks to write the damn thesis then I've only got two weeks and a bit to get all my result ducks in a row. Good luck to me, result duck hunter.

The other thing that is going to take F-O-R-E-V-E-R is the mathematical notation. I use a non-WYSIWYG* program to typeset all the math, which is definitely the way to go in my field. But it takes a while to code it and it's going to take especially long to unify all the notation from all the different articles. Ugh, that is the part I'm dreading.

*WYSIWYG = what you see is what you get. These are programs like Word*. I don't feel like explaining it past that, but if you have ever spent any time at all trying to enter an equation into equation editor - or worse, change an equation in equation editor, then you will appreciate a typesetting program. Steep learning curve but excellent usability once you figure everything out.

**I don't even HAVE Word on my computer.

I don't know what came over me

Yesterday I cracked open a cross-stitching kit. I blame my friend Kathy for this purchase - crafty catalogues are evil, I tell you!

The kit is called Paris Market. Here's the scene:

I think it's pretty. I love the buildings and the flowers and the colours. Who wouldn't want to hang out here for an afternoon? And you know what the best part is? Pre-sorted thread! Holy moley!!! Back in my day, we had to sort our OWN thread, thankyouverymuch. This sure made starting a lot easier. I will have to decide whether to put the thread on cardboard spools or to leave it as is. I am envisioning a gigantic tangled mess of thread after carting the kit around for a few months if it remains in its current unspooled state.

When I bought it I managed to use a 40% off coupon at Michaels to get the kit (pay full price??? are you kidding me???). So it's been sitting in the office (what, you don't store sewing supplies in your office?) for, um, a little while year or so. And I told myself I'd do it in that mythical time period "when I finish my thesis."

But yesterday, sick and tired of browsing the web, sorting through digital photos, sending people e-mails, and waiting and waiting for my (boring) friends to post things on Facebook, I grabbed the kit, swooned again over the scene, found my embroidery scissors, miraculously managed to find an embroidery hoop, taped the perimeter of the fabric, found the middle of the fabric, stabbed myself in the finger while marking the middle, and chose which colour to start with (pink).

I managed 19 crosses before Kid 2 started fussing and I went to bed.

5 cake

The second party AKA procrastination excuse was a party for Kid 1, who was turning 5. She was so incredibly excited. So, again, we had almost 30 people at our house, aged 4 weeks to 67 years. Kid 1 and I made a 5 cake for the occasion. This is all my Auntie Joyce's fault. When Kid 1 turned 2, I made her a giant cupcake cake, my aunt witnessed this and passed on a cake decorating book from the days of yore. OK, the book's not THAT dated, but it's from another era. No Dora cakes. No Elmo cakes. We're talking Old School. (As an aside, can I just say how intimidating it is to make food for people who are, if not professional bakers, pretty darn close to being pros. I only like baking for people who have low standards. My brothers, for example, will eat ANYTHING.)

In this book from the days of yore are a set of number cakes. When Kid 1 turned 3, she wanted a 3 cake, then 4 for 4 and, predictably, 5 for age 5. I really liked 4, that was an easy cake to make, just chop up a 13x9 cake the right way. But the 5 was a bit tricky, especially since the book calls for various cake pans that I do not have and don't want to invest in - who needs a 10x3 cake pan, I ask you??? And the book designs make cakes that are quite small. So I got a bit creative. Thanks to making the 3 I have an appropriately-shaped tube-ish pan. It's not a tube like an angel cake pan, nor patterned like a bundt pan. It's a 10 inch diameter pan that yields a 2 inch thick round cake, with rounded edges. I bought it at Williams Sonoma, I think. The tricky part was making a round cake and rectangle cake end up the same height. I ended up having a lot of extra cake (to make cake pops of course, except I think I just gave the cake to my mom for some function of hers).

Here's the yummy chocolate cake with chocolate icing. It's a nice dense chocolate cake and the icing is glorious. The recipes for both come from an old issue of Canadian Living (that I stole from my Mom - she said I could take it, I swear!). The decorations were hastily made, they are marshmallows cut cross-wise with a smartie center. Super easy. What is not super easy is rotating this darn photo. Sorry!

I was happy with the cake and so was the birthday girl.

Party!

Yesterday (sheesh, now it's two days ago) I posted a list of things I've been up to. Today I follow up on party throwing. Note: I am not a party-throwing expert (far from it!) although I am getting better with practice. The thing with me is that I am a "go hard or go home" kind of person - so parties at my place always end up big. This wouldn't be such a bad thing if I didn't only have seating for 4 in the room everyone likes to congregate in.* No seating for 25 people who I invite to my home. I always hope for good weather so I can kick everyone outside. Long term solution: renovations. That is a whole other issue for another... well, I'm procrastinating on renos.

First party was a baby shower for my sister-in-law. This was a joint project between my SIL's SIL and moi (with a lot of prep on the day of the shower from my cousin Teresa. Thanks Teresa!) My house has been such a disaster lately, I needed to do a LOT of tidying and cleaning for this one, especially since normal people were coming, not just my family (mwahaha). We decided to have a Winnie the Pooh theme, since my SIL is such a Pooh fan. This was a fun theme to play up, it gave me the opportunity to play around with a few things. First, cake pops. I had been dying for an excuse to make cake pops. Do you know about cake pops? Bakerella has a lot of ideas. She even has a book. Darn internet, though, meant I couldn't just make a regular cake pop. No, I found Winnie the Pooh head cake pops and Hunny Pot cake pops. Awesome! I was smart enough to do a test run and realized very quickly that the Pooh heads were beyond my patience level. But the Hunny pots were easy enough. The tricky part was writing "Hunny" - the Wilton food markers I had were not up to the task and I ended up using black gel icing and it was drippy. If I were going to focus more on cake pops in my life I'd probably hunt down the markers Bakerella recommends. Anyway, these were super easy, even making a cake from scratch instead of using a boxed mix. I just made the cakes the weekend before and froze them. I think I made the cake pops out of red velvet cake.




The other fun project for the shower was a Winnie the Pooh cake. It all started because Kid 1 is allergic to peanuts, which means bakery products are always a bit iffy, so I volunteered to make the cake. I had intended to make just, you know, a cake. But that darn internet! I found a cool Winnie the Pooh cake. This was such a neat idea, I loved the look of the cake. But it was too blue for a girl cake (I love blue but not for a girl baby shower) and it used fondant. There is something you need to know about me: I don't like fondant. First of all, fondant tastes gross. Second, fondant means you have to put two layers of icing on the cake - one buttercream and one fondant. Too much work! Third, I hate rolling out anything, there was no damn way I was going to roll out icing! (I could add a fourth: cost.) A bit of internet searching led me to the paper towel technique. Absolutely fascinating, the things people come up with. Turns out if you ice a cake with buttercream and stick it in the fridge (or just let it sit on the counter long enough), you can rub the cake with an unpatterned paper towel and smooth the icing out to look a heck of a lot like fondant. Smooth fondant look, no rolling pin. I was sold! It was a bit finicky but I could handle it. The inspiration cake had the Pooh characters sculpted out of fondant, but my aunt managed to find some figurines at the Disney Store when she was on vacation. Score!

Anyway, I think it turned out pretty well:

 The "cake board" is an inverted pizza pan covered in scrapbooking paper and then saran wrap. The top layer is strawberry cake and the bottom lemon cake. Both were double layer with raspberry jam between the layers.

OK, that is enough for today. Next up will be the kid's birthday party cake, which wasn't nearly this complicated.

* I do realize that I am ending some sentences with a preposition. I know this is poor grammar. I promise not to do this in my dissertation. But perfectly proper grammar always sounds so haughty to me, I just can't write that way and keep a conversational feel. Suck it up.

Long time no post

Hmmm, been ignoring this blog for a while, huh? I think this proves I'm a procrastinator (I could pull the "I'm working on my thesis" card but really, my thesis is not why I don't blog). However, I'm trying to spark my creative writing muse, which I will need to write my dissertation, so I am challenging myself to a blog post a day until I am done. Writing, I mean.

So... what have I been up to?

1. Distributed/parallel computing,
2. Raising two rugrats and sort-of homeschooling a kindergartener,
3. Baby shower and birthday party throwing,
4. Reading (I have recently banned myself from reading any fiction until I'm done my thesis)
5. Sorting through digital photos. I am taking WAY fewer photos than before, but I need to actually DO something with the ones I have taken,
6. Researching borderline diabetes,
7. Organizing, decluttering, giving stuff away and throwing things out,
8. Facebook. Yup, I got sucked in. It's a mommy networking tool.

In the next few days I'll elaborate on some of these points.

Programming can suck sometimes

One thing I haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate doing as a programmer is naming variables. Naming a variable is a tough job and it's a pain in the ass. Each name needs to be descriptive, not too long, and typeable. When you need to name 40 variables in a program, it gets tedious. That's when I start naming things after Harry Potter characters, tree species, street names, old cars...