Hey look, its acting like spring!

At least this week... Whether or not it stays that way is another matter entirely. The temperatures have been consistently above 60 and I'm pretty sure we have even topped 70. The trees are budding and blooming, the lawns are thinking about greening up and there are daffodils popping up in a fairly sporadic fashion around campus.



On a completely different note, there was a mini math conference here on Saturday. We ended up with far more bagels than necessary for breakfast and they were left sitting in the corner of the room where we had lunch. There was more time alloted for lunch than we ended up needing to eat. Thus there were a bunch of mathematicians with nothing in particular to do and a pile of bagels...

That is a bagel that has been cut so that it forms two linked halves. Now I just need to learn how to cut a bagel into a trefoil knot :-)

Om nom nom: Squash Bread

Yes, squash bread. Butternut squash to be more precise.

Last weekend I made a butternut squash and sweet potato tagine, based on a recipe from A Veggie Venture, though I seem to be incapable of following a recipe exactly. I altered the ratio of squash to sweet potatoes so that they were close to even and stirred in some shredded chicken I had left over from a different cooking project before adding the raisins. It was delicious and went well with both tortillas and couscous (huzzah for slight variations for leftovers).

In the process of altering the recipe, I realized that using the whole squash would have produced a rather larger batch than was reasonable (and might not have fit in my casserole dish). Instead of making a giant batch, I left ~1/3 of the squash unchopped and put it in a separate dish to bake while the tagine baked. I then ran the squash through the food processor to produce squash puree and stuck it in the fridge to determine what to do with later. During the semester I spent in Budapest I learned that I could make "pumpkin" pie from the Hungarian winter squash that I have yet to come across in the US, so I figured I could probably make some sort of "pumpkin" X from the squash puree. I was right. As a base recipe, I used Kitchen Parade's Autumn Pumpkin Bread (and bah to anyone who points out that it isn't autumn). I roughly halved the recipe (roughly, because I cut both kinds of sugar to 1/4 cup) and added a couple dashes of cloves. Oh, I also replaced 1/2 cup of the flour with whole wheat flour (since I happen to have it around). With my small (but wonderful) loaf pans, the half recipe made two loaves. They both came out as gorgeous as they are delicious.

Snow!

This past weekend the temperatures were in the mid 60's at least. The previous weekend, however, we got approximately 3 inches of snow! This first picture is looking up the stairs right outside the math department

I have a tendency to find streetlights intriguing anyway (you have probably noticed this), but they are especially cool when shining on snowy trees!


The only logical way to spend Friday evening was to go out and play in it :-) Here is a snowman that my roommate and I created

Here are a couple of other snowmen that I ran into that weekend. The first is standing by the gate to Tech's president's house and the second is at a restaurant I pass on the way to church.

My view of snowy Atlanta on Saturday morning

And to finish off, a few lovely flowers peeking out above the layer of snow

Someone has apparently been hanging chains of light around the city... I'm not quite sure what to make of it.

Maybe the chains of light are what holds up the cables in the sculpture in the next picture.

Now a story about Tech. If you click on this next picture to see it bigger, you will notice that the letter "T" is missing from the word "Amphitheater". Last week I gave you a picture of Tech Tower. A traditional prank is to steal the letter T from that tower - and there are all sorts of traditions about how that should be carried out. However, the administration decided some number of years ago that it very strongly does not approve of this prank and implemented a variety of security features that sound as though they would be quite effective at thwarting attempts to steal the T's on the tower. The response was that people have been stealing T's from other signs around campus instead. If you are ever on campus and a sign seems to be missing a letter, you can practically guarantee that it was a T.

We actually had a non-white sky for part of the week! This is Tech Tower, one of the more iconic buildings on campus:

Atlanta under the full moon:

One of my cousins got married last weekend. This is where the reception was held:

And we will finish with a picture that captures part of why I am perfectly happy to not have a car in Atlanta:

The light is green - the cars are not moving. I frequently find myself walking past cars that are either creeping or not moving at all. In addition to not being caught in traffic, walking means I can better appreciate the beautiful sunset.

It has been overcast a lot lately. The only part of this that I find frustrating is that it makes it hard to get pictures where the sky is anything but just white.

The clouds parted slightly for a short while. I was intrigued by the fact that I saw the break in the clouds reflected in the building before I saw it in the sky.

Those first two were from last Sunday. The next one is from Wednesday, when it was just as overcast.

It did decide to clear up this afternoon though - and I found a new window to take pictures from :-)

Snow!

The closest it got to snowing while I was in Coquitlam was a heavy frost. The pictures I have posted of Canada so far have all been nature shots, but I'm supposed to be trying to get better at urban photography, so here is a shot of part of the Coquitlam skyline before we go back to Atlanta.

The day after I got back to Atlanta the temperature dropped below freezing and we got snow. Not a lot of snow, but enough to be pretty (at least where it didn't promptly melt and refreeze into ice sheets...).
The sign in front of my building:

A light post near the industrial engineering building:

Birds! The cold seemed to make them more willing to sit still than usual.