Fun with templates

I don't update, I just reformat.  I'm reminded of when I was 13 and had a Xanga site...when you opened up the page, the background was clouds, the cursor turned into a chick, and Billy Joel's "Root Beer Rag" (MIDI style!) started playing in the background. That was shortly after I taught myself very (VERY) basic HTML. Seriously, who needed templates when there were curly purple fonts to display?

I hope this is slightly less offensive.

DC Tourists

The other morning, when it was snowing, I was headed over to Barracks Row to spray paint the ground, and I was stopped next to some tourists on 15th Street.  They were obviously from out of town, because you can always, always tell, and a little girl remarked, "Daddy, there's SO MUCH SNOW.  Look at all that snow on top of the car!"

Never mind the fact that whoever the guy in the car was should have shoveled his roof (they never do), I was moved by this very cold but eager family with their rainbow umbrellas and DC sweatshirts shielding them from the misery of the late wintry mix.  The level of snow wasn't even that impressive--it was just wet and awful, but this little girl was nevertheless determined to be impressed by her surroundings.

When the light changed, I rode slowly next to them and asked if they were here to see the cherry blossoms (it was March 25th, and I think that was the original predicted peak bloom time).  The dad sadly remarked that there really weren't any around, and the grandma of the group said, "Maybe not, but we got some really cool t-shirts!" 

And that's what I love about tourists.  They're a breath of fresh air from my usually cynical internal monologue, they have different perspectives on life because they all come from different places, and (when they're not standing in a clump in the cycle track) they can be quite fun.  So sometimes I stop and talk to them, or I ask obviously lost people if they need help finding something.  Tourists, unlike most locals who inhabit the downtown area during the weekday, don't look at you like you have broccoli growing out of your ears should you dare try and engage them in conversation.  They seem, by and large, to be OK chatting with locals as long as the locals aren't condescending pricks--I know I welcome help and someone who knows what they're doing when I travel to different cities.

This is what I keep telling myself as I gear up for another season of giving bike tours--I seem to keep going back, and I think, aside from the money, that's a big part of the reason why.
 

Fruit and shit

As Kate pours her homemade jam from a pot into a beer glass to stick in the fridge that will sit alongside another beer glass full of homemade raspberry syrup from the Super Bowl:

Me: "I'm getting you a funnel and Mason jars for your birthday. So...enjoy those."

Her: "Alternatively, you could just get me a card and write, "Hey, stop boiling fruit into shit' on the inside."

I should perhaps explain that recently, she's taken to making sugary products that are usually store-bought (i.e. pop/soda and Nutra-Grain bars) and making them herself from scratch.  Personally, I'm enjoying this trend.

Is it a cookie? Is it a pie? It's both!

Last week, I made a pie with a hazelnut crumb topping, and it was so tasty that I was inspired to make some sort of Nutella-inspired pie.  But all the recipes I was finding were for icebox pies or cream pies (neither of which I especially like), or they called for lots of ingredients that I didn't feel like buying.  Then I ran across this recipe, which the blog author writes came from a baking experiment gone wrong.

One of my favorite recipes that I make in the fall is a pumpkin chocolate chip cookie that feels like a muffin--I call them mookies or muffkies.  Therefore, since these are a combo of pie and cookies, I hereby deem these "pookies."  Maybe that's a terrible name.  Suggestions?

The author makes her little cookies with cream cheese, strawberry jam, and Nutella.  I decided to leave out the cream cheese, and in the spirit of gilding the lily, I decided to drizzle some melted chocolate (I didn't have dark, so I mixed milk and baking chocolate) on top.  

This is what I wound up with:

Verdict: Good!  Next time, I'll try 'em with the cream cheese, and I might add more strawberry jam because you can hardly taste it. Instead of Nutella, I wound up using Whole Foods way-too-expensive ($8.49 a jar "on sale" from $9.99, but I was desperate) knock-off organic whatever whatever brand, and I think it held up in the oven better than Nutella would have.  It also has less sugar, so it kept the filling from being too sweet.

In the spirit of experimentation, I tried a batch with Speculoos Cookie spread (if you haven't tried this yet, go out and buy a jar immediately).  Since the first batch burned slightly, I turned down the temperature to 340 instead of 350 and baked them for a wee bit longer--about 27 minutes.  I melted some more cookie spread and drizzled it on top, along with a couple puffs of cinnamon sugar.

I'm excited about this recipe because it showcases the pie crust, whereas for most pies, the crust is kind of an accessory.  Plus, it doesn't involve fussing with the pastry dough in order to create an attractive fluted edge, so the pastry dough has a better chance of staying flaky and holding together.  I was pretty damn proud of this batch--it takes a lot of patience to make a decent crust, and patience is something I absolutely lack. Lots of refrigeration, and a lot less water than you'd think...you just have to work to disperse it through the pastry, but you have to do so without overworking the gluten in the flour.  I also refuse to use shortening because yuck.  The ingredients on a can of Crisco are horrifying.

The other fun thing is that this recipe can be played with.  I'd like to try something with raspberry, and potentially a peanut butter version.

Additionally, pies are a bitch and a half to transport by bike.  These, on the other hand, just need to be fully dried/cooled and tossed in a box.  My goal in life, if all else fails, is to open up a bike/bake shop and call it the Bikery...we'd specialize in portable baked goods.  Or fancy devices that would make portable baked goods portable on a bike (I have an idea for a rack-mounted rectangular pie pan that suspends the pie on springs).  It's probably a niche market, but whatever.

Anyway, thanks From the Little Yellow Kitchen for the inspiration!

Sidewalks: Not for cars

I've been bitching about this on Twitter with some regularity, but after spending a morning with a chisel, a hammer, and concrete bits flying into my face, I feel that this warrants a blog post. Presenting exhibits A through C....

 Take a good look at the rack furthest from the bike.  

 Someone pointed out that this looks like a string of licorice

 There's an alley directly across from this...

Aside from the bike racks merely being broken, here's what's wrong with this.  First of all, these three racks were all busted within two weeks of each other.  Second, in order for any of these to get as busted as they are, a car would need to go full-up onto the sidewalk and hit them.  DC regulations require bicycle racks to be placed 2-3 feet from the curb exactly for this reason.  We've all had the experience of running car wheels over a curb on an especially tight turn, but this is just BAD driving.  There is absolutely no reason at all why anyone who is driving sober should have their car that far into the travel lane intended ONLY for pedestrians and, occasionally, bicycles.    

For the first (on 11th and U), I have absolutely no idea what happened, but the vinyl coating on the rack was torn and bunched up towards the bottom. 

For the second (24th and L, outside District Hardware), that's a rack sitting in 10 inches of concrete in a brick sidewalk, so it's wedged in there pretty firmly.  In order for a car to exert that much force on it, it had to be moving at a good clip. I talked to the folks in District Hardware, and they mentioned that some guy was teaching his girlfriend how to drive, and she somehow got the car up on the sidewalk and drove halfway down the block that way.  

For the third (14th and Q, outside the Bike Rack), there's an alley directly across from that rack.  I'm guessing a truck was trying to back out.  That being said, there's a parking space right next to this rack, and since it looks like it was hit straight on, that means whatever it was backed directly into it.  This means that there was no car parked there at the time, which means the vehicle had the ENTIRE STREET to back out of the alley, so how the hell the driver wound up knocking over the bike rack, I haven't a clue.

I passed yet another bent rack downtown today, but I forgot to snap a picture.  It was one of those radiator style racks, so unfortunately, I won't be able to replace it.  Since August, there have also been struck racks at 25th and N, on Thomas Jefferson Street in Georgetown, and along Georgia Avenue near the Petworth Metro stop.

The nonchalance with which these racks are struck annoys me because 1) what if a pedestrian had been standing there instead of a bike rack? and 2) because I have to go in and fix them.  I realize that this is part of my job, but making up for other peoples' intense stupidity makes me unhappy.  It's at least twice as hard to remove and reinstall a rack as it is to simply install a new one.  Particularly for situations like the second one--that's going to require a good 45 minutes or more of chiseling to simply get that thing out of the ground.  In the meantime, that's one less bike rack for people to use.

I guess the point of this post is that if you drive in the city, CHECK YOUR MIRRORS and DON'T DRIVE LIKE AN IDIOT.  Otherwise things like this happen:

Thus ends my rant for the day.

Desert biking (or dessert biking, if you have ice cream afterwards)

I just got back from spending 10 days in the Phoenix area with my family.  Leaving Vancouver (my bike) behind and leaving DC (the city in which I live) behind are always a little difficult, especially this year, when after heaps of schoolwork, I finally had time to go riding and the city was looking especially nice for the holidays.

And yet family matters demanded a long trip to the Grand Canyon State, so off I went.  

I have long been highly, highly critical of Phoenix for being overly conservative and also run by people who are, frankly, bat-shit insane (*cough Joe Arpaio and Jan Brewer cough cough*), and this break was no different.  After the Newtown shootings, the attorney general of Arizona decided that one person in every school (preferably the principal) needs to have a gun because the state budget is just too stretched to stick a police officer in each school.  The logic behind this thinking entirely escapes me because, as someone who is vehemently pro gun control and also a human with basic moral principles, I don't believe that guns and kids mix well.  Guns don't belong in schools.  Period.  Anyone who argues differently is missing the point.

Anyway.  The point of this post was not to make soapbox speeches, yet here I am, making soapbox speeches. Believe it or not, the point of this post relates to bicycles.

Because I have been so dead-set on hating Phoenix for the last, oh, six years or so, I have drastically and mistakenly overlooked many of the bright points of the city.  Specifically--there are a LOT of cyclists there!  Maybe not in South Chandler, where my parents live, because it's pretty far away from anything, but that doesn't mean the city hasn't built the infrastructure for them.  In Chandler and well beyond, there are bicycle lanes everywhere, and when you hit the suburbs closer to Phoenix and, of course, Phoenix itself, there are LOTS of cyclists around!  I saw people whizzing by on intense-looking mountain bikes, I saw a man teetering to and fro as he carried a large sack of groceries home on his steel 1980s Schwinn, I saw a girl on her single-speed with a Chrome messenger bag pedaling along in cut-offs.  And honestly, why wouldn't you want to bike there?  It's completely flat, so a commute of 15 or 20 miles couldn't be so bad, and if you're into mountain biking, you're absolutely in the right spot for it.  I don't know if it would be possible to live car-free in the area, but it was heartening to see so many people out on two wheels.  So heartening, in fact, that it was torture, and I longed to have my bike with me.

To me, a love a biking means a love of the environment, and in the smog and humidity-filled Valley of the Sun, there is absolutely a need for more people to care about the unbelievable natural desert landscape in which they live (fly over the state sometime and you'll see what I mean).  So I tend to equate biking with liberalism, because biker-friendly areas tend to be more liberal.  Most cyclists I know are vehement liberals, but maybe that's just because I live in DC and don't get out much in the way of the political spectrum.  But anyway, my initial thought, for whatever reason, was that maybe this massive amount of biking means that the citizens of Phoenix are less crazy than the people that govern them.

I realize, though, that this doesn't matter (it would be nice, but it doesn't matter).  If you're on a bike, it doesn't matter who you are or which way you vote, it just means that you like to bike!  If more people are biking, the government, no matter which way they swing, will need to start responding to this growing population, and ultimately, that means a safer biking environment for everyone.  My dad used to tell stories of biking around the city when he was a kid, and I had naively and blindly figured that was a time long past.  But apparently I was very wrong.  So, citizens of Phoenix, I stand corrected, and I look forward to riding with you at some point in the future.

I will say, however, that whoever is put in charge of installing bike racks has some serious studying up to do.  I saw this at least three times:

We won't get into that right now.  Never mind that a 4-bike parking capacity has been reduced to one, MAYBE two if you can squeeze one between the rack and the building.  Baby steps.

My one question to Phoenicians and anyone else living in a deathly climate--what on earth do you do in the summer months?

Thought for the morning

I once knew someone who, as a PhD candidate, was rather disparaging of Master's students and claimed that they never do any work, that they glide right on through two years of graduate school with nary a difficult task or assignment.

As I sit here working on this grant proposal for the umpteenth hour with five more large assignments looming over the next two weeks, and not really due to procrastination on my part (seriously), all the while having gained a few pounds from stress over the past two weeks, I would like to throw out a giant "fuck you" to this person.

I really hope subsequent semesters suck less.