Color

I have missed fall... It is nice to finally have it again.


Last night the buildings all appeared rather red as they reflected the sunset. This morning it was almost as though the buildings were trying to camouflage as they reflected the blue sky and fluffy white clouds.

Playing with Light

The sky cleared last night. This meant that the temperature dropped nicely so that it was rather on the chilly side this morning. In response, I got out one of my Budapest scarves for walking to church. Since the sky had cleared, the sun was out and making fun shadows. I was particularly entertained by the shadows formed by the fringe of my scarf. The sun being out also resulted in lots of interesting reflections.

Hello Again!

A lot has happened since I last posted. Most notably, I graduated from HMC and have moved on to grad school at Georgia Tech. I've been adjusting to living in a city again (and Atlanta is very different from Budapest). I have been working on learning to see the beauty in my new urban setting and, as part of this goal, I have been trying to figure out how to take pictures of cityscapes. To make sure this keeps happening, I'm going to try posting pictures here on some kind of regular schedule - I haven't decided exactly how often yet. To start off:
A sunset picture taken from the window in my apartment

I have also been discovering that there is natural beauty to be found in the city, you just have to be paying more attention:

Pumpkin and Spice and Everything Nice

I greatly enjoy Halloween at Mudd - it means getting to carve pumpkins, try all sorts of tasty cheese (we go trick-or-cheesing at East), and generally serves as a good excuse for everyone to come out of their rooms and hang out.

Now, being a mathematician that happens to also enjoy crafty/artsy type projects, I am never content to just carve a face in my pumpkin. This year I carved two iterations of Sierpinski's pentagon - oh, and I cut the lid of the pumpkin out using two iterations of the Koch Snowflake. Math is pretty :-)


Two of my friends also carved pumpkins and we set the three up outside our suite:


Now, the pumpkins that we got had rather thick walls - far too thick for the sorts of things we wanted to carve. We dealt with this by scraping down the flesh of the pumpkin on the inside until it was a more reasonable thickness. In the process, we ended up with a rather large bowl full of pumpkin shavings. It seemed silly to let these go to waste, so I adapted a recipe for


Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients:

• ~1 cup mashed pumpkin
• ~1.5 cups brown sugar
• 1 stick butter
• 1 egg
• 1/2 tsp each of baking soda and baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• Spices. I just dumped them in until it smelled and tasted delicious, if I had to guess at amounts: heaping teaspoon cinnamon, shy teaspoon each of ginger and nutmeg, half teaspoon cloves
• enough flour to make a nice dough, probably around 3 cups, but it will depend on how much liquid the pumpkin adds
  
• 1 bag chocolate chips
  

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 350.
   
2. Cook the pumpkin. I took the bowl full of pumpkin shavings (note that I mean that actual flesh of the pumpkin, not the slimy part that holds the seeds) and microwaved it for ~5 minutes, If you have a solid chunk of pumpkin, baking it works well too. Once it is cooked it should be soft enough for you to mash it up with a fork.
3. Cream the butter and the sugar. Once they are completely blended, add the egg and pumpkin and mix well.
4. I tend to not want to get any more bowls messy than necessary, so I then dump ~two cups of the flour on top of the pumpkin mixture and then stir in the baking powder and soda, salt and spices on top before mixing the whole business together. If you don't get the dry ingredients mixed at least partially together before you blend in the wet ingredients it is easy to not do a good job of, say, getting the salt well distributed.
   
5. At this point the dough is probably still really, really sticky. Mix in more flour. How much more you need will depend on the moisture content of your mashed pumpkin. As it turns out, there is not just one perfect consistency for the dough, so just mix in flour until it feels manageable. My guess is that adding another 1/2 to 1 cup should be reasonable.
   
6. Stir in the chocolate chips.
7. Scoop the dough out in cookie sized dollops on your cookie sheet.
8. Bake at 350 until they have started to brown and bounce back when you touch them.
   
9. Enjoy!

Oh, and you might enjoy checking out the pictures from Mudd's Study Abroad photo competition

Cookies with Flowers

One of my friends is particularly fond of both the scent and flavor of lavender and has begun to incorporate it into her cooking. Most relevantly, she has discovered that it goes extremely well in shortbread. The only problem with this is that lavender is not quite a typical cooking ingredient, and so is not carried by grocery stores. It is, however, used in landscaping. Thus, we went on a lavender hunt and successfully brought back plenty of lavender flowers to stir into shortbread batter. I agreed with her that the result was quite tasty. Incidentally, I am starting to add various herb type things to my mental map of where I can gather foodstuffs around the campuses. It is really amazing just how much rosemary is used for landscaping...

Some pictures from around Mudd (and one from Pomona). As always, you can click on them to see them larger.


More bugs

Blue

Lines (at Pomona)

Greetings from Mudd

I was hanging out in Hixon Court between classes yesterday and noticed that there were several dragon flies flitting around the pond. I managed to have my camera with me, so you get pictures:

If you click on a picture you can get a larger version where you can see more detail on the dragon flies!

I have been to all of my classes at least once at this point and it looks like it should be a fun semester :-) I will try to update on a somewhat regular basis.

How many airlines does it take to get from Missouri to Oregon?

Air travel is ridiculous, but overall life is good.

Friday Aug 1
I get an email in the morning from Delta reminding me to check in online. I follow the link and am informed that my first flight is actually on Pinnacle (who?) and so I can't check in online. Right.
Around 11 pm I get a phone message from Northwest (Pinnacle flights are apparently operated by Northwest) informing me that my first flight has been canceled and that I am now scheduled on a US Air flight that leaves rather later in the day *sigh*.

Sat Aug 2
I arrive at the airport. I booked my flight through Delta originally, got a call from Northwest and was taking a US Air flight. Who was I supposed to check in with? I could not find a US Air desk, so I went to ask the people at Northwest... who sent me to United. I go talk to United and am informed that I am booked on their flight but that somehow Northwest still has control of my ticket, so their computer system will not let them check me in. The Northwest and United people talk for a while and get things sorted out.

After hanging out in the airport for a while, I had a relatively uneventful flight to Denver - arriving at the far end of Concourse B. The departure boards in Concourse B only have departure info for flights leaving from Concourse B, ie only flights on United and their affiliates. I was supposed to be connecting to a Delta flight... I eventually found someone who could tell me that Delta flights are all on Concourse C. I go to Concourse C and find that my Delta flight is not appearing on the departures board. There is however an Alaska flight with the same time and destination, so I go talk to the Alaska people. After a few tries they manage to find me in their system and then manage to trick it into letting them check me in (I think they had the same problem the United guy had had in the morning).

Anyway, I am at camp now (though the bag I checked is not). The puzzle hunt was fantastic :-)!