Life at the GBT

The Green Bank Telescope -- my new workplace!

Hey all! I'm now about a month into my new postdoc at the Green Bank Telescope, and so far, so good! A lot of my time so far has just been getting familiar with everything -- attending meetings (whether I know what they're talking about or not), reading the various guides to observing and proposing for time on the telescope, and meeting lots and lots of new people. I've taken a tour of the telescope, and I'm going to be starting my formal training on dealing with the telescope and doing support work next week, which will be roughly half of what I do here (the other half, of course, being SCIENCE!).

For the past couple of weeks, I've also started getting back into my own science work. A project I'm on got some observations recently on the VLA, so I was going through data for that for a bit, and I'm starting to work my way through the referee report of a paper I wrote last fall. The paper in question came back to me right at the peak of my "Gah! Gotta finish my thesis!" push, so even though I've had the report for a while now, I only recently started to make corrections on it. So it feels pretty good to be thinking about science again.

My new house!

Green Bank itself is quite different from New York City, as you can imagine.  It's a very small town and is literally situated in a National Forest, and the entire area is beautiful. There is a lot of good hiking -- a couple folks from NRAO took me out hiking one Sunday for a hike up one of the nearby mountains, stopping for lunch at the top, and we saw a trio of bears on the way back down! (Momma and two cubs, so we kept our distance.) There are also regularly large numbers of deer in the field in front of my house, so that's rather neat, as well. Springtime is (hopefully) here, but we  can apparently get snow into May, according the the people here! For a while it seemed like the weather couldn't make up it's mind, it snowed one day and was gorgeous the next.

View from my back door a few weeks ago,
when there was still snow!

We *are* in the middle of the Radio Quiet Zone. This was established back in the 50's to keep the radio noise around the telescope as low as possible. This means there is NO cell phone reception or radio reception or wifi ANYWHERE in the surrounding area. I cannot have a microwave, wifi, or even a wireless phone in my house. It takes some adjustment -- honestly the thing that's throwing me the most is the lack of microwave and not being able to reheat leftovers in 5 minutes. That and the fact that, while there are a couple convenience stores in town, to do a *thorough* grocery store run I have to go at least an hour away. This past weekend I went to Lewisburg (1.5 hrs away) to go grocery shopping and go to the movies (I saw Zootopia -- fun movie!).


I am renting a house(!) about a mile from where I work -- this is the first time I've lived without a roommate, and I now I have a 3 bedroom 2 bath house all to myself. This is quite a change from my shared NYC apartment. I've set up one of the bedrooms into a guest room, and the other I am making into an office for myself. Well, that's the goal, anyway -- it's still kind of full of the boxes I haven't unpacked yet. I've unpacked all the *critical* stuff -- clothes, stuff for the kitchen, books, CD's and DVDs -- but I admit I'm being rather slow on the unpacking of things that I don't need on a daily basis.

That's all for now, just a short update. So many new things in my life right now!

Life update (and Soylent review)

Hi all!

It's been ages and ages, I realize, but I never intended to let this blog die. I've just been in the midst of writing up my dissertation and job hunting. I'm going to be defending my thesis in a couple of months, likely in late January/early February, so that's been my main focus for a while now. I haven't gone on any really interesting trips since the last time I posted, and while I have been cooking some and have been to some awesome restaurants (most notably Eleven Madison Park last May!), I haven't been doing nearly as much foodie stuff lately. The most interesting thing I've done food-wise lately was cook borscht (which turned out really well, admittedly) and to try out Soylent. If you aren't familiar with the product, it's basically a drink designed to replace food -- it's balanced so that if you consume nothing but, you still fulfill all your nutritional and caloric needs without needing to cook or prep anything.

But Jennifer, you say -- you LOVE cooking! AND eating delicious new things! Why on earth would you replace food with something like that? Well, for one, I love to try new things. And I really like the *idea* behind it -- making it easy to get all your nutrition from one source in a relatively inexpensive manner (~$2.30 per bottle right now, cheaper in powder form) seems like a good idea to me. And if I'm ever going to replace food with something else, now is the time -- like I said, I'm in the middle of writing up my thesis. I'm *busy* and when I'm not busy I'm frequently *tired* and don't feel like cooking up something complicated. If you compare the frequency at which I've been cooking for the past six months ago to any other six month period of my life since moving into my own place (albeit with roommates, but also with a KITCHEN) during my junior year of undergrad, you'll notice a SHARP drop in how often I've been doing so and a SHARP rise in take-out and super-simple instant type dinners which require minimal effort. Also, it's named after a famously cannibalistic product which I find, frankly, hilarious. Know thy audience, I guess.

Anyway, they recently updated the product so that it's no longer just in powder form -- originally you had to mix it up yourself whenever you wanted it, but now it comes in conveniently pre-made bottles which I can grab on my way out the door if I'm in a hurry. They're 400 calories a pop, so in theory you can drink 5 bottles a day to get your full 2000 calories, but I maybe have one or two a week at most, when I'm tired and hungry or in a hurry to get somewhere and need food fast. Good for a quick breakfast or snack. I bought a 12 pack a little over a month ago and recently received my second one last weekend.

Taste-wise, it's kind of like a cross between unsweetened soy milk and those last liquidy dregs of oatmeal that collect at the bottom of your bowl, in that it's got a bit of thickness and texture. It tastes fine. A bit bland, but really, I like soy milk, and that's the closest thing to it, I think. Thick soy milk with a hint of oatmeal. Fine for a bit, for a meal here and there, but if I lived off the stuff I would get cravings for actual flavor pretty fast. 

Anyway, that's all for now, this was meant to be a quick life update mainly. No promises for future update schedules because right now my dissertation writing is the most important thing.

Going the Distance

So, I just realized (today) that as of maybe a week ago, Benson and I have been dating for over 10 years now. We've never celebrated dating anniversaries or anything, and I don't know the exact day we did start, to be honest, just that it was a few days before the Superbowl, which is a thing that I can look up. (I just remember being super giddy and seeing the Superbowl up on a screen in the student center, so I can't really get much more specific then that. Kind of random how memory works sometimes.) We've been doing the long distance thing since graduation, which means of that 10 years, 6.5+ of them have been long distance. 

So! To celebrate/brag/give support to other LDRers on this occasion, here are some date suggestions and general advice for things that we've done long distance. I don't claim uniqueness or creativity for any of these, by the way... I've definitely looked at ALL the articles online on doing stuff long distance. 

- Talk. Skype. Call. Figure out what times of day work and just schedule when you can make time for each other, and make this HIGH priority in your life, even if you are going crazy with homework or presentations or paper writing.

- DON'T talk. You have a ton of work to do? So do they? Just put Skype up in the background and work on your stuff in companionable silence where you can occasionally glance up and smile at the other person and listen to them working while they try and figure out why their code isn't working, dammit, and you wrestle with trying to find the bit in this stupid paper that is relevant to your research. It doesn't even need to be work, just hang out and browse the internet together. Leading to...

- Youtube videos, articles, and general internetness. Just, if you are doing nothing and interneting or listening to music on your own (or simultaneously on each end of the line), if you find and interesting article or video... link it or play it back and forth. You know how the "oh that reminds me of this other thing" chain goes. Similarly, things like Podcasts and audiobooks and music *CAN* be listened to at the same time over Skype. 

- Music! You can play music together and sing separately/together. Just rocking out to Bohemian Rhapsody together or putting on some Sondheim and singing along to Sweeney Todd. Benson and I have also gone another route a couple times -- he plays the violin, so he's played some jigs and reels on his end while I danced to them on this end.

-Games. Games with remote co-op like Monaco or Castle Crashers or Portal (which we often do over Steam, which has the nice chat and voice chat options). Or Vassal is a free system where you can download and remotely play many different board/card/dice games, including straight up cards. We often play cards, or games like Pandemic or Ghost Stories. We've also both just gotten our own physical decks of cards and played things like Cribbage or other games where you don't have to actually interact extensively with the discard pile and it doesn't really matter if you are playing with 2 separate decks. You can also just separately play games and recommend them to each other and discuss strategy, of course. But I'm assuming that "tell your partner about things that interest you and you think they might like" is pretty much understood in a relationship, long distance or not. Actually, it can be pretty darn fun to watch your partner play something you've already done as you wait for something awesome to pop up so you can watch their surprise and delight. (Stanley Parable, I'm looking at you. Benson literally just watched me play that game as I DEVOURED it and he kept laughing at me as I worked through it and was being boggled and bemused at different parts of the game. It was quite fun.) Online puzzle games are also an option -- we have finished all but a few levels of the NotPron online riddle, and are currently working on the Tim Tang Test. We've both worked together and separately on the puzzles. We keep the solutions as we get them in a file in Dropbox, naturally. Also, good to note that screen sharing can be quite useful for solving puzzles and things like that. 

-Many many movies and TV shows. Download the thing, Dropbox it, get on Skype and IM and count down from 5 and press play at the same time, then mute them and chat on IM about the thing as you watch. We usually have multiple TV shows that we've got in the Dropbox so that depending on our mood we can go comedy, fantasy, sci-fi, drama, etc. We keep up with a number of shows (ie Game of Thrones, Agent Carter, Hannibal, Mad Men, Doctor Who, Mushishi, etc), but also glut on old shows we're interested in (ie. Farscape, The Wire, Twilight Zone, Arrested Development). Movies are generally for weekends where we have more time, and keep those in the box as well. 

- Books and stories. You can read the same books at the same time, separately, and discuss them, of course, like Benson and I did on the Game of Thrones series. You can ALSO just take turns reading back and forth chapter by chapter, like we're currently doing with Dune. Also, short stories are great for this. I've read Benson a bunch of fairy tales before bed, and am now going through Kipling's Just So Stories for short stories. 

-Write/be creative.  As per the previous suggestion, Benson has been reading to me from Burton's Book of One Thousand and One Nights. And from that, we're working on a grand index together, summarizing the events of each story, which level of story it is (meaning, tale within a tale within a tale and which tale it is within), and where Scheherazade breaks off the story each night and which night it is. We're keeping the master file in the dropbox and splitting it up by story. I imagine this could work for other types of things, too.

- A wild and crazy blast from the past: Actually write letters. Physical letters. We've not been doing this one since Benson moved to England, but let me tell you personally, the joy of getting an actual physical letter is well worth the 49 cents it costs within the US. And you can do stuff like write in cyphers or with constricted writing that you don't tell your partner what the key or rule was and they have to figure it out themselves. Or make crosswords and word searches for each other. Or send sketches. Or puzzle pieces. Or care-packages of goodies, of course, though this is more expensive.

- Cooking. What? Yes. Cooking. We've only done this a couple times, usually on special occasions like Valentine's Day, and it takes some planning. But. Choose a recipe, and each of you buy the ingredients. Then set up your computer in your kitchen so you can Skype. Start sautéing, or chopping, or prepping each ingredient at the same time. Alternatively, you can just eat and/or drink together without syncing to quite that degree.

- Time Zones suck. But sometimes it's totally worth it to go sleep deprived for certain things if you are both eager to do the thing together. This is why Benson got up at 6am to watch the Breaking Bad finale with me while I watched it at 1am here. And yesterday we did the same thing for the premiere of Better Call Saul. And when our time zone difference was a little less dramatic we'd do stuff like watch the State of the Union together.

There are many other things you can do, of course, but this is a good selection. But I feel that making the relationship and time together a priority is the most important thing for making things work. Within that, you can be pretty creative. Keeping positive, planning out visits and things to do together in the future, also good. And for us, Dropbox and Skype are apparently the key to our relationship. Thank goodness for modern technology!

Catching up, plus Deviled Eggs

Hey all!

It's been much, much too long since my last blog update. Very sorry about that, I genuinely WILL TRY to go back to an update schedule of every other week at a minimum. So. What have I been up to since... gosh, has it really been since last summer, basically? I've had many blog posts I meant to write. My dining experience at Per Se. The rest of my trip to Italy. The many various things I've cooked over the last 6 months or so. Well, I've been up to a lot in that time. Benson has visited twice. I've gone to Baltimore more than one might expect, including a week of housesitting plus keeping an eye on my grandfather who recently moved down to an assisted living place in Baltimore. A dear friend of mine got married and had a lovely wedding. I gave a public outreach talk on some interesting debates in the history of astronomy, plus have participated in other outreach activities with the astro department. I've been running/attending a movie night with friends in the department, too, so lots of good movies, there. My research has been going well, and I've been working on some papers and gotten several proposals in, and even accepted (well, my research group has, and I've helped). I went to the AAS meeting in National Harbour, MD, to present a poster on my research. I got glasses, and want to get a monocle (but these are a bit hard to find prescription). I bought some single malt scotch with some of my Christmas money. Benson went to Cambridge, so we've been adjusting to an all-new 5 hour time difference. I went to the beach in Ocean City, MD. I wrote a couple pieces of fanfiction (you saw the piece for the WTNV election, my last blog post!). I've been spending too much time on the internet, particularly Tumblr, AO3, Facebook, etc. I've been going to Chinatown semi-regularly with a group in my department, mostly for dim sum though recently for the Chinese New Year and peking duck (amazingness!). I went to my 5 year Brandeis reunion. There was Christmas. Iceskating and sledding with Benson. Watching too much TV, including a new season of Sherlock, starting Supernatural, the Sopranos, and the usual Doctor Who, Homeland, HIMYM, and other shows. Played a few good computer games - particularly Fez and the Stanley Parable. Movies: Godfather Trilogy, Hunger games, Desolation of Smaug, Pulp Fiction and Resevoir dogs (in a one night Quintin Terintino marathon). Hung out with my friend Lloyd and cooked with them a bit as well. Went to a Doo-Wop festival in Wild Wood, NJ, dressing all 50s in a poodle-skirt both for that AND Halloween. I may do some mini-blog entries on some of these things, we'll see how it goes.

Anyway, with this "sort of" entry, I figure I'll post a "sort of" kind of recipe. I made some deviled eggs last weekend for an Oscar party I attended Sunday night, so there we go!

I've always loved deviled eggs. It's probably one of the first dishes I made on my own without help or recipe from my parents. I'm not counting sandwiches or scrambled eggs or cake mix here, or a recipe I made 100x with my mom before doing it again by myself - I mean a recipe I sought out on my own. This is also not counting the numerous instances when I was really young when I would mix spices, water, and food coloring to make 'magic potions' - those were pretty inedible, considering they were made entirely of edible substances. Anyway, deviled eggs. I ate them for the first time... probably at my aunts New Years Eve party or something similar... and really loved them, so resolved to make them on my own. I don't know the age when I started making them, but it was probably sometime in elementary school.

Now, my recipe is a bit different than most deviled egg recipes because of this. When I was younger, I HATED mustard. Would not eat it. Could not stand it. So that very classic ingredient in deviled eggs has been substituted by thousand islands dressing, which apparently my childhood self decided was the obvious substitute for that much-hated condiment. And I think it works very well.

The other thing about this recipe is that it doesn't have 'proportions', per se. I just tend to add each thing until it looks/tastes right. My usually 'stopping' point for adding ingredients is and always has been that when I can't stop myself from tasting it because of deliciousness, that's when I can stop.

This recipe has also evolved to be spicier over the years. The hot sauce is a relatively recent (ie, college-aged me) addition. This is because, in addition to my spice-tolerance growing, my mother dislikes spicy food. In fact, I'd always fill a couple eggs early for my mother prior to adding some of the spices (like the old bay and chili powder) before making the rest of the egg fill more spicy for my dad and me. I contained this trend of a separate early non-spicy batch in college for my dear friend Kaila, who has an even more extreme spice intolerance.

So my point is, this is not so much a recipe as much as a flexible set of guidelines for how to my style of (awesome) deviled eggs. Modify and taste throughout for your best personal results. Feel free to experiment until you find the combination that's best for YOU. But DO include the Old Bay - it is my not-so-secret key ingredient.

Deviled Eggs

Eggs (hard boiled and shelled)

Miracle Whip

Thousands Islands (French) dressing

Hot Sauce

Spices:

      Old Bay

      Cajun seasoning

      Chili Powder

      Paprika

      Pepper

      Anything else you think might be delicious, like chives, if you have them!

Obviously, the first step is to boil and shell however many eggs you are planning on making. I usually make a minimum of 6 at a time. I have a very nice egg transport container, with little divots for the eggs so they'll be stable, and that will hold 20 half-eggs, so when making them for large groups I'll make a dozen, eat 2 of them, and put the rest into the container for transport! So. Once you have your eggs boiled and shelled, slice them all lengthwise (as shown) and remove the egg yolk and put it into a small mixing bowl. The egg whites go into your egg container to be filled later.

Now, first, add in *roughly* equal parts Miracle Whip and Thousand Islands dressing - not *quite* equal, though, I tend to put in a bit more of the Miracle Whip than the dressing, because I like the tang. How much of each of these, you ask? Well, that depends on the number of eggs, for one thing, so add a bit at a time and MASH everything with a fork. You want the yolks to form a thick paste - on the creamy side of crumbly, and as smooth as you can get it, like really thick icing. When the texture seems pretty good, take a taste to balance the Miracle Whip/dressing ratio, make sure that's good, and then you can start adding your hot sauce and spices. The amount of hot sauce, of course, depends on how spicy you like things and the spiciness of the sauce in question. I have a thing of "Dave's Insanity Sauce" which I've been very slowly working my way through for a while now, because a little goes a LONG way. As far as spices, I'm VERY generous with my Old Bay (being a Maryland Girl at heart). But the cajun spices are also a really good addition and I put those in with a fairly liberal hand as well. And of course, chili powder and pepper for a bit more kick, and you can't make deviled eggs without paprika. All I can say for this bit is just keep mixing and tasting. This time I also happened to have some chives in my fridge, so those turned out to be a really nice addition, but I don't usually have those around.

Once you're egg-paste is to your satisfaction, you can fill your egg yolks. I would be generous in how much you put in each egg - it's better to have nice fat eggs and just munch on an empty egg white or two than to be skimpy here, I feel. Plus, you've added mass to the egg whites by adding in the Miracle Whip and the dressing, so you should be able to fill most of them. Once that's done, for a dash of color (and a bit more spice) I toss a dash more of Old Bay and paprika (and sometimes the cajun seasoning, or in this batch, chives) over the top as a lovely decorative touch!

Anyways, hopefully this is a useful set of guidelines for deviled eggs. Also hopefully it won't take me forever to update this blog again. I do like writing it, I just got busy and then out of the habit of posting. Ah, well! Such is life. Like I said, I may try to do a few mini-blog entries describing a few of the things that have gone on in my life in the past 6 months in a bit more detail in the future!