Budapest by rail… among other things…

I arrived in Budapest yesterday and have thoroughly enjoyed exploring the city. Though Ash recently posted on her blog that public transit may inspire fear (even as it also inspires excitement), but I actually find that public transit is one of the most fun and stress-free parts of my travels. Subway maps everywhere are the same: you find the dot with your station on it, you look at your map to find a station near your destination, and you get on, either counting the stops or watching the posted stations as you go. You always get where you expect to be, even if it takes a few tries and turns. As I sat down on the Budapest underground (one of the first ever, apparently), I felt a sense of calm that was an incredible relief after the craziness of Keleti Station.

Given this, you can imagine how excited I was when I read in my guidebook that the Buda Hills (northwest of Budapest, but still quite close) are best accessed by the most bizarre modes of transit possible? After visiting Castle Hill today, along with a Canadian hostel-mate and new friend, I explored the hills and also went to the Bartok museum, which was small but lovely. In the course of these things, I rode the following forms of transit:

• Tram: these electric-powered (I think) silent bus/trains are awesome, though they are terrifying as a pedestrian
• Cog-railway: not a silent mode of transit at all, and a bit bumpy, but through some really pretty neighborhoods out toward the hills
• Children’s Railway: a small-gauge 11km railway built by Pioneers (apparently Soviet scouts), it’s still run almost entirely by children aged 10-14
• Chairlift: back down part of the hill was a lovely ride with a view of Buda, the river, and Pest
• Bus: perhaps a more mundane mode of transit, but Budapest employs some rather old models that are entertaining (pictures to come)
• Metro: also classic cars on view here

Am looking forward to another fun day in Budapest, but also to a happy return home in a few days…

Bill Gates answered my question!

AIDS 2010 – the International AIDS Conference – is off to a great start.  I went to some satellite sessions (organized by groups other than the conference, but reviewed by the conference for relevance) yesterday before the opening, and attended sessions today from 8:30AM-8:30PM with only a brief dinner break, and I’m still ready to start at 7AM tomorrow…  Famous people I have seen speak:

• Deputy President of South Africa, Kgalema Molanthe
• Former US President, Bill Clinton
• Head of his own foundation, Bill Gates

Before Bill Gates spoke they were handing out note cards (fancy conference printed note cards, but basically note cards) for questions.  I didn’t yet know what he would say in his talk, but thought it would be interesting to hear him talk about what parts of the AIDS epidemic can be addressed with technology, and at what point we would run into the problem of brain drain and workforce issues.  After he spoke, the moderator took up a stack of cards, but only got to 3-4 of them.  Mine was one of them!  I was a little disappointed because he didn’t really talk about those issues directly in his talk, and his answer wasn’t amazing, but it was still pretty cool. 

I will try to post some pictures soon, but am also trying to sleep!

Salzburg

To prove that I am alive and well, I am posting this slightly fuzzy picture of me at Festung Hohensalzburg. The fuzziness is a result of the intense humidity (and my hair’s reaction to it) and also my failure to realize that if I autofocused my camera, and then put it on the tripod and used the remote to click the shutter, the focus would not adjust to my face.

Salzburg has been all that Ruti promised; a lovely little town that you can see most of in about a day. There are clearly things further afield that I haven’t seen, but I’m ready to be on my way this afternoon.

Yesterday I walked around the old town and saw Mozart’s birthplace, as well as a bunch of churches and other lovely buildings. On my way home, I stumbled onto a performance of traditional Austrian dancing in Mirabell Gardens – where part of the Sound of Music was filmed. It struck me as a combination of Scottish country dancing with Rueda Salsa. It’s nothing short of incredible that all of these partner-changing, circular dances spread across the globe.

I got up early this morning (to avoid the life-sucking heat) and went over to the Mirabell Gardens again. I walked around and took some photos, and enjoyed the cool weather. From there it was still a bit early to head up to the fortress (Festung Hohensalzburg), so I meandered through the old city. In my walking, I found some stairs that appeared to go straight up the cliff, so I climbed, not certain where I was going. It turned out I was scaling Monchsberg, one of the hills in Salzburg, and unwittingly heading up the hill toward the fortress. I kept walking and although I missed the funicular ride up the hill, I did get to see some pretty neighborhoods in Salzburg. The fortress was notable for it’s elaborate state rooms and lovely collection of torture implements.

On my way down the hill I stopped at Nonnburg Abbey, another setting for the Sound of Music. As far as I could tell, the cloisters are still cloisters so visitors can’t go in, but I did go in and see the church.

Finally, I stopped and had lunch at Spicey Spices, a vegan Indian restaurant I noticed yesterday and which was also recommended by the Lonely Planet folks. It was lovely and delicious, and now I’m back at the hostel checking e-mail, etc. I’m about to catch the train back to Vienna, where I will check into my hostel and perhaps take a nap (still a bit jetlagged) and then finalize my plan of attack for the conference and Vienna.

Travel Day

Soon I will post a photo of my bag carefully arranged to avoid counting my poster tube as an extra bag…

My flight from DTW was fairly uneventful; I managed to sleep a reasonable amount and the woman I was sitting next to was lovely. She was on her way to Scotland after winning a free tour by submitting to her tour company a picture of herself and fellow tourists (in the more literal sense here) having fun in Egypt last year. Needless to say I was envious of her previous trip to Egypt and assured her that Scotland would also be beautiful, though there will clearly be fewer mummies, which I view as a bit of a drawback. I started watching “Un profete” – a French film about a Muslim man in a French prison and had to turn it off. It was good, but disturbing, and I long ago decided that disturbing films are not good plane fare. Instead, I watched “Pirate Radio,” which I enjoyed a great deal and which was not disturbing at all.

Though airplane food is usually unremarkable, I had a rather strange meal last night that begs description, if only to convey the sheer volume of carbs that were involved. As usual, I requested a vegetarian meal when I booked my ticket (having learned the hard way that there are rarely extras on the plane), but I think (if I recall correctly) that I requested an “Asian Vegetarian” meal, though I didn’t really know what that was. Turns out it’s fairly bland Indian food. It wasn’t particularly tasty but wasn’t bad, but included the following items:

• dinner roll (just like everyone else)
• “naan”
• rice (filling 2/3 of the main portion)

Upon my arrival in Amsterdam I had about an hour before my flight left for Vienna. Silly me assumed that this would be easy and that I would have plenty of time. I had delusions of finding a bank machine and getting some cash so that when I got to Vienna I would be ready to go. Then I encountered the most disorganized customs line I have ever seen. This includes all of my travel, anywhere. It was very calm, but completely disorganized and took what seemed like an eternity. Ultimately I made it through with no problems, and also through security again, and arrived at my gate about 5 minutes before we boarded.

The flight to Vienna was short (and I had a bizarre breakfast of half of a cheese sandwich – not unexpected – and half of an egg salad sandwich – a little unexpected). I managed to get a bus ticket into the city and also some cash, and I was on my way. A cultural observation: nothing here is air conditioned and everyone is sweaty…

Now I’m riding the train to Salzburg (though there is no internet here so this will obviously be posted later) and taking in the lovely Austrian countryside.

Gratuitous Walter photo!

This is from last week when it was so hot. No modesty here…

Yotel Schiphol

Sometimes you make a mistake and don’t realize it until sometime later. If you are lucky, you realize it while it is still potentially funny rather than tragic. This is what happened to me last night…

When I booked my flight for Vienna and the International AIDS Conference, I was really excited to find a flight that didn’t leave Vienna until 8:30PM on my departure date. I thought that would give me a delightful amount of extra time to get back from Budapest and to the airport, and maybe even enough time to do something fun and interesting on that last day. Now, I am usually quite careful when booking flights. I know I checked the departure times, and while I saw that I arrived a day after I left, I considered this par for the course since I wasn’t leaving until 8:30PM. As I was mailing out my itinerary last night, however, I saw that my flight arrives in Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport at 10:30PM, and departs for Detroit Metro at 8:30AM. This is not the kind of layover I thought I was booking. I don’t know how I missed it, and can only chalk it up to the overall stress and craziness of this summer. Thankfully, however, I realized this while it was still ridiculously funny followed by a frantic search for lodging rather than a most unpleasant shock followed by a night at the gate. After a thorough search of the Schiphol website, I discovered this: Yotel Schiphol.

Although it is what you might generously call a “budget” hotel, it offers a surprising number of amenities, including free wireless internet. When I clicked looked around to figure out why the pictures looked nice and the pricetag also looked reasonable, I discovered that Yotel Schiphol is a “design hotel,” and that the “rooms” could best be described as “pods on a spaceship” or “weird isolation cabins.”

This did not deter me from booking a room however, as it contains the only amenities I need for my brief stay in Amsterdam: a bed, free wi-fi, a shower, and easy access to the terminal.

If things are going to be crazy enough that I make uncharacteristically ridiculous mistakes, I can only hope that all of them can be fixed by such uncharacteristically ridiculous solutions.

I did it!

Fear not, I made it alive through the ride yesterday. The last 20 miles were not what I’d hoped, and the muscle pain last night was pretty much incapacitating, but I’m still glad I did it. I have made a note for next year to do a better job of training, and to stop and stretch more before anything hurts on the route…

We had originally intended to start riding at 7am, but couldn’t drop Walter off at doggie daycare until 7am, so we actually got started closer to 8am. I knew things were going our way though, when we got up and realized that the ratio of water to more breathable less sticky things in the air had dropped incredibly through the night, leaving us with a relatively cool and shady day to ride, free of rain, heat indices in the millions, and other meteorological cycling nightmares.

I started out feeling really good. My legs hadn’t felt quite like themselves since the move (when I lifted more things that anyone should over the course of a week), but they were ready to ride yesterday. I was pretty adamant about sticking to a 13-14 mph pace which I knew I could sustain rather than getting excited and racing through the first 20 miles only to limp along for the last 40. We stopped at our first rest stop for a bathroom break and water/snacks at 13.3 miles and I felt great. We packed some bananas to take use through the next 25 miles before lunch, and went on our way.

I was a little tired by the time we got to lunch and was definitely ready to eat! We were 38.8 miles in and I still felt pretty good.

We had some delicious sandwiches and listened to one of the worst mixes of classic jazz covers, bluesy folk disasters, and other bad things while we ate. The group was well-meaning, and in general I try not to say bad things about other people on my blog, but we were to the point of speculating that they were there to move people out of the lunch site more quickly. In any case, we ate, stretched a bit (not enough, as I would later realize), and went along our merry way.

I realized I hadn’t stretched enough (or that something was more drastically wrong) when I had a weird pain in my right leg. I later figured out that it was a muscle on the inside of my leg that was clearly tight and pulling my knee in an odd direction, but it look me long enough to figure that out that I think I irritated/injured my knee a little bit, and it made riding a little uncomfortable. At that point about 20 miles left and I thought I could push through it. I did, with frequent breaks, but I was exhausted and sore when we got back. We made it in almost exactly 5 hours, maintaining a pretty constant pace throughout the whole ride.

Fast forward a few hours and no amount of cold water, frozen vegetable ice packs, icy hot, and ibuprofen could touch the pain. But sleeping (plus all of the things mentioned above) has improved it a great deal, so I can walk today, though strong use of my quads seems inadvisable… (As an aside, Alicia is fine, which I attribute to her lighter bicycle and inherent cycling abilities... She may also be a robot...)

At record speed…

And now, a brief update on the bicycling that has (or has not) been going on around here:

My training schedule was going brilliantly through June. I was getting faster, going farther, and in general having a great time. I hit my highest speed ever going down Glazier Way, and hit 1500 miles on my bike odometer.

Then the move happened, and a friend’s wedding, and the most ridiculously hot weather ever, and suddenly it’s been two weeks since I did a really long ride. In fact, I never made it to the 35-45 mile training rides I had planned, which means that 77 miles tomorrow sounds like a painful and slow plan. Instead, I think we will be riding the 64 mile route, which will still be the longest I’ve ever ridden, a great deal of fun, and a stepping stone toward longer rides later in the summer and fall.

A ridiculous rock in a storm of boxes

Moving is a little crazy, and just a few days ago my apartment looked overwhelmingly filled with boxes:

Zooming in a bit, however, reveals the one thing that has been keeping me from going nuts:

As a friend kindly reminded me, if the dog is managing to keep it all together and not pee all over stuff, you can do it too. (I am paraphrasing, and when she said it it didn’t sound quite so much like I was trying not to pee on things myself…) Thankfully, Alicia helped me unpack a bunch of boxes yesterday and now it all looks much better. More pictures to come.

Summer’s Here

**Apologies again for the posting delays… I moved this week and will be back on a more regular schedule soon!**

The weather is still a little crazy, and I’m increasingly convinced that “global weirding” is a more appropriate term than “global warming,” but summer has definitely arrived in Ann Arbor. I took some pictures with my phone while I was out on a bike ride a week or so ago (because my camera is too big and too expensive to make it worth loading on my bike somehow), and even with the inferior image quality, they are worth at least 500 words…

It's amazing how little distance you have to travel in Ann Arbor to be out in the country!

Restaurant Week: Summer 2010

Once in the winter and once in the summer great food in Ann Arbor becomes a little bit more accessible. We have places that are cheap and delicious all year round, but down town also has its fair share of more upscale establishments. I rarely make it in to any of them, in part because of the cost and in part because it seems that as the restaurant gets fancier the vegetarian offerings dwindle. There are obvious exceptions, but for the most part I know that if I’m going out for a really nice meal, I can plan to order one of 1-3 fish-based items on the menu, or some kind of cheesy pasta. As a result, I have to know there is something I really want before I’m willing to head in and ask for a table. Enter Restaurant Week: lots of restaurants offer $12/lunch and $25/dinner for fixed price menus, and some even offer 2 for 1 lunches ($12/lunch for two!). Not only are the prices impressive for many of these restaurants (with lunch being the real bargain, but at a time of day I can rarely swing), but the menus are put together to highlight the chef’s specialties and to offer enough variety that everyone can find at least one thing for each course that looks delicious.

Alicia and I had been eyeing Logan, and eclectic looking American restaurant with a bright interior and a simple but delicious looking menu, for quite some time. Their restaurant week menu looked tasty, so we made a reservation. (NB: If you want to eat dinner at one of the smaller restaurants during restaurant week, and there is one day left, you need a reservation. It gets crowded, and then it gets ugly, so call ahead!) We were not disappointed. Between the two of us, we ordered just about everything on the menu. I had the asparagus tempura (but forgot to photograph it), and Alicia had the Logan salad to start, and I had the gruyere salad (not worth a photo, but delicious) and she had the asparagus penne for part two. Finally, Alicia got the pork tenderloin (pictured below) and I had the trout (pictured at the top) for the final course. Everything was delicious, but the jerk sauce with cilantro that surrounded my fish was my favorite part. I like spicy food, but usually jerk spice is used on meats I don't eat. This was so exciting!

New York, New York

As promised, a post about the exciting things I did on my trip to New York City last week:

Since I was working (and getting paid!), I didn’t have nearly as much free time as I’d hoped. What I’d anticipated would be a light teaching schedule turned into all-consuming days that, although rewarding and even fun, were exhausting. By the time I left around 6:15pm or 6:30pm, I was a little drained. By the time I’d attended a networking or dinner event, or found dinner on my own, it was 9:30pm or 10:00pm, and I was ready for bed (or at least to head back to the hotel to go to bed shortly). As a result, I didn’t take many pictures. Here are a few of the lovely Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia’s medical campus in Washington Heights, which is quite lovely:

The one really exciting and touristy thing I did while I was there was rent a bike and ride around Central Park. It was shockingly similar to riding in traffic in Ann Arbor, which I found a little disappointing. It’s not that I wanted it to be terrible, I just wanted to come home feeling like the drivers here were so much more aware of cyclists on the roads, etc… After navigating my way down 57th St. to 8th Ave and through Columbus Circle to the entrance of the park, I had a lovely ride. It took me a little bit to find the road (where bikes are supposed to ride) rather than the walking paths (where bikes are not supposed to ride), but once I did, it was great. There is a huge bike lane as well as a walking path beside the road. I assume that on a normal day these are used more or less as marked, but I happened to be there on a day when there was “an event.” I’m still not sure what was going on, other than that it appeared to be some kind of corporate fitness challenge, but I am sure that part of the loop road was closed, shunting me out of the park and on to real streets. I turned around and did another U-shape around the park, turned around again, and then went out on the real streets to see if I could find another part of the loop. I should have paid more attention to the map before I left (or brought one with me!), but I didn’t, and when I reentered the park (and what I think was the southeast corner) I was hopelessly lost. I thought I was at the north end, and so went down to where the road was closed (which I thought was southeast of where I needed to be, but was actually northeast of where I needed to be) and asked the nice park guides how to get back. They rightly pointed me toward the opposite side of the park, but I was so turned around that nothing would have helped. After completing the U-shape again and asking another park guide (who pointed me back south, which I thought was north), I was starting to panic. I had rented my bike at 7pm for only an hour, as the bike shop closed at 8pm. It was dangerously close to 8pm and I didn’t feel like I had time to be lost in the park. Instead of trying to navigate the loop, I stopped another park guide and looked at his map. I headed out on the 72nd St exit and made a quick left onto Central Park West and headed south. At that point I realized how turned around I had been, but knew where I needed to go. I made it back to the bike shop by 8:10pm, and thankfully they were still open! (They didn’t even seem to notice I was late…)

Out of breath and sweaty in my lovely bike gear, I headed back to the hotel. I called Alicia to tell her of my escapades, and didn’t want to get into the elevator and lose my signal, so I sat in the hotel lobby in my padded shorts and jersey, which seemed hilarious to me. After I got off the phone, I tried to capture the hilarity, and largely failed, but here is my bike gear in the hotel lobby photo:

Overall I had a good time, though I came back tired and feeling behind on my work. Back to it…

Beer intervals…

Apologies for the delay – I was in NYC teaching last week and hardly had time to take a breath, much less post… Will post more about my trip soon, but wanted to get this out since I started writing it before I left…

I’ve really been enjoying training on my bike, though the distances I’m going at this point are starting to feel long. For my short rides during the week I shoot for 15-20 miles and my long rides on the weekends are somewhere between 25-50 miles. The rides actually don’t feel long in terms of the biking, but I get hungry and have to go to the bathroom during the 1.5-3 hours I’m spending on the bike. Enter beer intervals, the clear answer to all of these problems. Though none of the training manuals or calendars I’ve looked at recommend beer in the middle of a ride, I think it’s a lovely way to break up a longer ride. Pick a bar that’s about half the intended distance from home, pick a beer that’s not too alcoholic and pair it with a salty snack (to replenish electrolytes, of course), and then bike home!

Alicia and I biked to Sidetrack in Ypsilanti’s Depot Town on Thursday evening (a week and a half ago now). We both had the Dark Horse Raspberry Ale, which was delicious, and shared some chips and salsa before biking home.

The following day we headed down to the Ann Arbor Green Fair/Bike Fest. After we’d browsed the bikes (including running into some friends from Common Cycle, an amazing new non-profit bike coop in Ann Arbor), we headed over to ABC, where I tried their take on Raspberry Wheat, which was delicious.

After coming back from New York, I was a little rusty on the bike, but not so out of shape that the promise of ice cream couldn’t motivate me. A variation on the beer interval, the ice cream interval, is also a favorite training technique of mine, and today we drove out to Chelsea and did a nice loop through the rolling hills around there. We stopped in Waterloo (not to be confused with the one in Belgium, or the one in Iowa) and had some delicious ice cream before heading home. I must say, the placement of this stop just about 18 miles in to a 26 mile ride was great; riding more than halfway before you stop and have a snack is a lovely arrangement.

**Photos courtesy of my phone... Apologies for the slight graininess/odd color balance.**

Just fix your problems with solutions…

This has been Ash’s Google chat status off an on for quite some time, and it always amuses me. So rarely are the solutions easily identified and implemented that it makes it seem silly to even suggest this as an answer. Unless, apparently, your computer is still under warranty and something seems to be technically malfunctioning. The oh-so-sleekly-designed-yet-vaguely-less-functional media button panel on my laptop started to malfunction a while back. It would stubbornly try to eject a CD when the drive was empty, or eject a DVD in the middle of watching. It would also turn up the volume to the maximum, entirely of it’s own accord. I called Dell and had a lovely tech support person update the drivers/firmware/BIOS on my computer, all to no avail. Finally, since none of these had worked and the buttons continued to act like pieces in a haunted house, they said they would replace the parts – the CD/DVD drive and the buttons. I believed that it would be worth the $40 to have a technician come to the house and replace these rather than to mail my computer away for 7-10 valuable working days, and Dell proved me correct. The kind technician arrived on time, disassembled and reassembled my computer with the new parts in about 20 minutes, and all is well. Yay for fixing problems with solutions!

A day for gratuitous Walter photos…

I took some cute pictures of the dog the other day and wanted to share. I do not think it is a coincidence that he looks progressively less pleased that I am taking his picture (and not taking him out) as they progress.

Longest bike ride of my life thus far!

Today Alicia and I biked from the apartment out to Dexter and back, going through downtown Ann Arbor and along Huron River Drive. For good reason, this road is widely known as the most scenic bike route around, and there were tons of bikes on the road today. (I learned that there are many ways to acknowledge fellow cyclists on the road: the head nod, the low left-hand wave, the left- or right-hand finger raise, or some combination of the above. I think I prefer the head nod and left-hand finger raise – it’s hard to miss and doesn’t throw off your balance.)

I had planned to do a 25-30 mile ride today, in keeping with my training schedule for One Helluva Ride. I’ve been slowly increasing my weekly mileage, and trying to increase my long rides by 5-10 miles each week. Last week we biked ~22 miles round trip, and prior to this weekend, my longest bike ride ever was 26.2 miles. (It is notable that I biked a marathon in the same time it took the women’s Olympic marathon team to run theirs. Tried not to feel demoralized… Failed…) I’d never ridden on Huron River Drive, mostly because it’s a few miles from the apartment just to get there, and I was never game for a longer ride. Until today…

The key to making this ride a success was the Dexter Bakery. A convenient and delicious destination (and having some kind of destination makes biking so much more fun), it marked the halfway point of our ride. We got some really delicious raspberry-and-cream-cheese filled muffins (which were sort of like cornbread meets cake), the perfect fuel to get us home (except for the cream cheese part, which neither of us ate).

When all was said and done, we’d ridden 28.8 miles, and happily made it home (I was only concerned for a brief stretch that I wouldn’t make it up a hill)! I stretched a bunch, and am planning to do so again later this afternoon to avoid the pain and suffering of hip flexors and quads less than 1/4 their usual length…

Led astray…

Mark Bittman is one of the few people outside my close friends and family that I trust almost unquestioningly. His How to Cook Everything and How to Cook Everything Vegetarian are my go to cookbooks, and his column in the New York Times inspires me on a pretty regular basis. (The 101 Simple Salads article was a particularly notable hit!) When I got an invitation to a barbecue earlier this week, I immediately thought of baked beans, and remembered a recipe I’d tried a while back from the aforementioned How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. The recipe is vegan, and includes kombu, the seaweed used to make dashi, the delicious broth in lots of Japanese soups. What I did not recall about the recipe, however, is that the cooking time is not correct.

Last night I put the beans (a mix of small kidneys and cranberry beans, both slightly larger than the called for navy beans, which should have been a red flag) into the crock pot. I left them for a bit, until they got as big as the crock pot and wouldn’t fit anymore. At that point I sautéed the onion and tomatoes, added the mustard and molasses, and combined everything with some water in a larger baking dish. I baked the beans for an hour, and then put them in the fridge for the night. I got up this morning (just before 6am; thank you, Walter) and put the beans back in the oven for another hour and a little bit. When it was time to leave I put them back in the fridge for the day and headed to school. At this point they had cooked for several hours in the crock pot and two hours in the oven. I anticipated 1-1.5 hours left to soft, creamy baked beans. I came home after my seminar and put them back in the oven. Two and a half hours later it was time for my barbecue and the beans were still vaguely crunchy! They cooked for a total of 4 hours in the oven (compared to the 3 hours described in the recipe) as well as in the crock pot and still weren’t done! I put them in the fridge, went to the barbecue (after picking up some ready-made salads at the grocery store), and had a great time. After I came home, I turned the oven back on, put the beans in, and went on a bike ride. (Don’t worry, Alicia was home with the oven on.) When I got back, they were just about done – they only cooked for 5+ hours and were finally ready. Without further ado:

Baked Beans
adapted from How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman

1/4 cup neutral oil, like grapeseed or corn
2 medium onions, chopped
1 large can diced tomatoes, mostly drained
1 5-inch piece kombu
1 pound dried beans
1/2 cup molasses
2 tablespoons prepared mustard
salt and pepper to taste

Soak the beans overnight or get them started in a slow cooker for a few hours.

Preheat the oven to 300F. Heat the oil over medium-high heat and add the onions. Stir until the onions are soft and golden. Add the tomatoes and stir until they smell good – another few minutes.

Add the kombu, molasses, and mustard, mixing well. Combine with the beans in an ovenproof pot or casserole or a cake pan, and add enough water to cover. Cover with a lid or foil and bake for 2 hours. Stir and add water if necessary to cover the beans, and put them back in the oven until the beans are completely cooked, another 1-2 hours (this will vary a lot with the size of the beans).

Sprinkle with salt and pepper, stir well to help break up the kombu, then taste and add more molasses or mustard as necessary. Turn the oven up to 400F, and bake uncovered for 30 minutes so that the beans are creamy and the liquid has thickened. If they still taste crunchy, simply add a little more water, cover, and bake at 350F until they are done.

120 miles!

I’ve biked just over 120 miles as part of my training for One Helluva Ride in July. Today, I biked a 10 mile interval workout with the end point at the Farmer’s Market. This was lovely, and the morning ride was much cooler than later in the day. I picked up green onions, asparagus, spinach, and some greenhouse tomatoes, and saw the woman who runs my winter CSA picking up strawberries to freeze – yum!

I’d checked the weather report before I left, and while it said 100% change of thunderstorms around 11am, it was only 30% at 8am (when I left the house). This seemed like good odds to me. Lesson here: do not gamble. As I left the market the thunder began, and by the time I was at the bridge over the river, large droplets began dampening by jersey (and shorts, and helmet, and bike, and bag)… I made it home before the downpour began (see below), but just barely. Drying off now…

Schedules and things I don’t want to do

In general, I’m pretty organized and disciplined. (Stop laughing, all of you…) I make schedules and to-do lists and put reminders into my phone. In spite of this, and perhaps, at least a little bit, because of it, I am also singularly good at putting off things I really don’t want to do.* Most of you, I’m sure, have to-do lists that look like mine and you know that there are always a million things to do. Usually 999,999 of them get completed within a reasonable time frame, but that last one can get dragged along for quite a long time before you realize that it is the one thing that you only really allotted 2 hours for each week, and then you somehow filled those up with other projects that really, truly, needed that extra 30 minutes each to stay on track.

I’ve realized that often this happens with projects that I’m not sure how best to get done, or where I need help but am hesitant to ask for it. Sometimes it happens when someone else has dropped the ball and I’m overwhelmed at the possibility of picking up all the slack. Sometimes it’s both of those things plus some other stuff. Whatever the situation is, it invariably leaves me feeling vaguely irritable. Sadly, there is no way to get rid of the irritable feeling without doing something. Generally that something is work… on the abandoned project… until it’s done…

Here it goes…

*I know that at least some of the commas in this sentence have to be wrong, but I don’t know which ones. To those of you who care, I am so sorry… And please, let this apology carry through the entirety of this post which is filled with a unique combination of appropriate and inappropriate commas.

The data arrived!

I think I’ve already told everyone I’ve talked to in the last 24 hours or so, but I’m still pretty excited. I mailed my completed application for the Add Health restricted data set in early February, with hopes that it would take 4-6 weeks to process, maybe 8 weeks if things got difficult. Instead, it took a solid 3.5 months, arriving yesterday afternoon. This, I have learned, is why we build time into dissertation schedules.

Now that it’s arrived, it’s time to really get to work. This is a little scary, as it seems like I’ve been working. I’ve been pushing my way through the programming for the computational model that comprises the final 1/3 of my dissertation, and have thankfully realized in the last few weeks that I’m actually almost done with it. There are still some parameters to set and experiments to run, but most of the really frustrating stuff is done. After a minor crisis of confidence as others in my program are publishing papers and moving along their paths, I realized that I’m moving along too! Fingers crossed, I will have a draft of (ironically, as it's likely to be the 1st one done) the 3rd paper of my dissertation within the next few weeks. And if all goes well with the data, the rest of it can a follow along soon.