Capricious Me » 2008 » May

… is meant to be dabbed, not doused.

The woman on the bus next to me today smelled like she bathed in perfume and then rolled around in a tub of baby powder to dry herself off.

Disgusting is an understatement by far.

Today I got to see Cirque de Soleil: Corteo, courtesy of the MSR intern program. Awesome. Amazing acrobatics and amazing strength shown. These people, or at least the ones doing the tricks, are in top physical condition. I mean, there was one act where there was one man and one woman, both attached to two large ribbons… (think of the rings event in men’s gymnastics) and at one point, the woman holding on with her feet and her hands while holding the man up by her HAIR. And of course, there were the bits where they both held on with just one hand and did tricks. It was amazing, and a little creepy. (Costumes, story being told was that of a clown dreaming/witnessing his own funeral.)

Several other Davis students are here. Daniella, Chris, and Shubho. Yay for familiar faces! (although I never did interact with them much in Davis…)

Next week we’re going to have a banana splits ice cream social as our intern event.

How do you not love a book where three little pigs are put on trial for murder of the big bad wolf? And complain that the investigating officer had the gall to eat a bacon sandwich?

I’m going through the Thursday Next series and the Jack Spratt Investigates series as well. I wish I’d read The Eyre Affair years and years ago!!

Mike is here, visiting me for the weekend. We went to Ipanema, a Brazillian BBQ place, for lunch today. Three words sum up my joy and extreme satisfaction: Bacon Wrapped Steak.

That is all.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is probably the ugliest paperweight you’ll ever see. I made it last Thursday when the interns at Microsoft Research got to go try glass blowing. It was an experience filled with much danger, fear, and heat. Fiery furnaces holding clear, molten glass are kept burning constantly for a year or two until the furnace is rebuilt. The intermediate steps require smaller furnaces on either side so the clear glass isn’t contaminated. And at the end, there is an oven to temper the glass. The glass, even with it’s “cool” enough to be solid, is at least 600 degrees F.

We learned to “gather” the glass, which meant sticking a metal pole into the bucket of clear glass and rotating it so the glass would be balanced. Then we had an option of making an ornament (required blowing) or paperweights. I chose the latter because we could pick more colors.

You dip the gathered molten glass in glass chips of different colors, making sure that the colors touch only clear glass, because color mixing doesn’t work as you might imagine. Then you heat it up again so the colored glass melts. Next comes the fun part, where you take scissors and tweezers and pull and stretch and distort and fold the colored parts. I didn’t get enough color on mine, which is why it looks so… awkward. Anyway. After you do that, you have to shape it and make it smooth. Then you take ginormous looking tweezers and pull the glass off the tube. Not all the glass gets pulled off, of course, just the parts that you pull, which hopefully contained most of the color. By then, the glass is fairly solid though it’s still moving pretty fast. The colors are still indistinguishable, because it’s so really hot. You let it cool a little more, and then to detach the pole from the paperweight part, you just give it a little tap. Of course, to minimize the danger to use, we didn’t do that bit and we had one of the glass blower people helping us hold and rotate while we cut and tweezed and pulled.

And, in other news, I posted more food pictures. Weekends, I’ve decided, are going to be my food testing days.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the office I’m in doesn’t quite respect my presence. The lights are on this motion detecting system, so they go off if there’s no movement detected over a period of time. When I enter in the mornings, I stomp around to get lights lit. And then I sit… and everyone who knows me knows that I fidget non-stop even when I’m silent or typing. And yet… the lights will go off after a while and I’ll roll around in my chair stomping about like a madwoman to turn them back on. The people in offices near me must think I’m throwing a fit. This doesn’t happen when my officemate (today a new one joined us) is there and he’s just as quiet as I am. And thus, I’ve come to the conclusion that the room refuses to acknowledge my presence unless I force it to.

And for you nagging boogers, here are the pictures of cheesecake. I threw in some pics of crepes and star fruit, so never let it be said that I don’t post my food photos!

Ah, in my excitement about the doughnuts and hazelnuts and piroshky and mocha, I forgot that my gluttony also made me purchase one mochacino cheesecake (of which I shall post pictures, as I’ve restrained myself from eating it thus far) and lots of fruit. Muscat grapes, which I love, some pears, bananas, strawberries, a giant grapefruit, and some peaches.

I AM trying to eat slightly healthier, even though I cannot resist pastries.

The internship is great. :) I’m enjoying it immensely.

Last weekend was An and Jonah’s wedding, for which I flew back to Davis. It was lovely and I’m so happy for them!

This weekend.. I participated in a “playtest” at Microsoft, where you basically help them test video games by playing them and answering some questions. I also met up with Jason, who used to be at UCD but now works at Microsoft.

Today was absolutely beautiful and warm so I went to Pikes Place Market for some grocery shopping. I waited in a long line, patiently, and bought a dozen assorted donuts (plain, powdered, cinnamon, sprinkles over chocolate) which are so tiny and delicious. I have to resist the temptation to eat them all. I also got half a pound of roasted hazelnuts. I’ve only had raw hazelnuts before, so I was very pleasantly surprised to detect a faint taste of sweetness in the roasted ones. The hazelnut flavor is definitely enhanced by roasting and I’ll have to get more when I run out.

I went to Piroshky, Piroshky again and waited in line, again, for a smoked salmon pate piroshky. They were out of the ham, cheese and spinach one AND the bavarian sausage. Ah, elusive Ham, Cheese and Spinach Piroshky, I’ll taste you yet!!

On my way back to the apartment, I stopped by a little window called Monorail Espresso for an iced mocha. (Yes, the weather was just that good today!) The man working there was so kind and made small talk while he made my drink. He shook up the mixture of chocolate with espresso and ice and poured in whole milk, saying “You and I could both use some whole milk to gain some weight.” Hehe. What girl doesn’t like being called skinny? The mocha was delicious. I’ve been avoiding mochas because Starbucks always makes them way too sweet for my taste. This mocha was not too sweet and I tasted more of the coffee than the chocolate, which makes me very happy.

And that brings me to my last point and intended topic for this post, which is that I’ve now regained this obsession with mocha flavored things, from the dark chocolate espresso chocolate bar I sectioned into small pieces for a piece a day last week at work, to a quickly depleting supply of mocha rocas, to the coffee addiction that’s growing because I drink a cup of hot coffee mixed with powdered hot chocolate in the mornings at work.