Thanksgiving

I went to Tallahassee for Thanksgiving. Normally I would have had my camera out taking tons of pictures of the food, but there were two other people with cameras out and I decided that three would be going overboard. However, I can't not have any pictures of food in a Thanksgiving post, so here are two that my sister Karen took:


While we were down in Tallahassee, my grandparents took us to Wakula Springs - and I did have my camera for that. There were lots of cool critters hanging out - alligators, turtles, a whole host of birds...and manatees!



The swamp is also pretty in its own right.

Catching up on November...

Yay for fall!



The trees here do a much better job of knowing that it is fall than the trees in Claremont did, but they still had trouble agreeing exactly when they were supposed to start changing colors/shedding their leaves. One tree was particularly confused and seems to think that since it has almost lost all of its previous leaves, it must be time to start making new ones...


Now, part of my goal with reviving this blog was to work on finding beauty in my urban setting. Focusing on trees makes for pretty pictures, but feels more like finding ways to avoid the city than finding beauty in it. Some of my earlier pictures reflect (hah) the fact that there are a lot of reflections in the city - having lots of windows will do that. This next picture shows that there are reflections beyond the ones in windows:

Night

The end of daylight savings time means that it is essentially dark out by 6pm. At least it means that it is less dark in the morning when I am trying to wake up.

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