Hopkins?

I got into Hopkins this morning. I had to turn them down. I would have done it, on a lark, for next semester, but I'm Student Academic Advisor for Washburn and on the SAA steering committee and everything so it's really not an option. This is a little disappointing but also a relief. It looks like I'm in Washburn for good, then, because I wouldn't want to move out senior year and have to acclimate to a new house. I particularly wouldn't want a house like Hopkins, which is noisy and where you have to do time-consuming chores, while writing a thesis. It's hard to imagine writing a thesis in a co-op.

There's very little left for me in Washburn- all my close friends are gone. But I feel very comfortable there and the people are all right. I would want to walk with Washburn at graduation. I guess I'm glad I'm staying. Mostly.

Summer Day

What a nice day I've had. I woke up early and read for awhile before breakfast, which was eggs and which I've been looking forward to all week. I don't know what it is with me and eggs lately; I just can't seem to get enough. Then I went downtown to the farmers' market where I bought (such luxury!) sugar snap peas, a tomato (the first tomato I've had in weeks and weeks), and a carton of strawberries. I went home, called my sister Floss for a recipe and then mixed up some banana bread, and while it was baking I went down to the river and had a little swim. The water was blissfully cool and pleasant. Back home, I showered and took a nap (after taking my bread out of the oven, of course). I had the nicest dinner I've had in ages- a black bean burger on fresh bread, mashed potatoes, snap peas, tomato, and lemonade. After dinner, I went to a party at Sara's boyfriend's house, where I talked to a young man in town for an activist conference. Very interesting. Now I'm home, eating cool, sweet strawberries. I am feeling good.

Friday was Laura Cantrell, who always puts on a good show, and last night was no exception. She played almost all new stuff, which was quite nice. I'd really like to hear her new album. Tomorrow I'm going to see the New Pornographers, which is exciting.

These are the sorts of things I'm looking forward to remembering some day.

Knights, Knaves, Klingons, and Elves

Knights and Knaves is a puzzle invented by the logician Raymond Smullyan. The premise is simple: in the land of knights and knaves, knights speak only the truth, and knaves tell only lies. There are many variations on this puzzle, and it's a motif throughout Sweet Reason, the book I'm working on this summer. Here's an example of a knights and knaves puzzle: You come to a crossroads and see two people standing there. For some reason, you know that one is a knight and the other is a knave, but you don't know which is which. Can you, by asking one question, determine which road to take?

I'll pause while you think about it.

One solution is to ask either person, "If I asked this other guy which road to take, which one would he say?" Then you take the other one.

An important feature of this puzzle is that no one ever says he's a knave. A knight won't say it because it isn't true, and a knave won't say it because it is. This being the case, if someone says, "I'm a kgiagha," you know that he's claiming to be a knight.

Jim thought it would be a good idea to include a puzzle like that, using nonsense words. Except he didn't want nonsense words, he wanted Klingon and Elvish. In their special typefaces. This project took three people most of the morning.

Naturally, someone has figured out a way to use Klingon and Elvish script within a LaTeX environment. What's not so easy is figuring out how they did it. I kept telling Jim I could just do it as a picture, but it was important to him that we not do it that way. Finally, after a multitude of error messages, we gave up. Behold the Klingon term "de 'ngeb," meaning something along the lines of "untrue statement"



...and the Elvish "ilanwe quettar," which means something like "false speech."

Fun with Science

Sooner or later, my beginner's luck in the kitchen was bound to run out, and sure enough this week has been characterized by culinary mishaps of Anne of Green Gables proportions. On Sunday, after Quaker Meeting, I decided to bake some bread, as I've been doing all summer. I tried a new recipe from my Mennonite cookbook- Easy French Bread. Disaster! The bread was solid, with none of the little bubbles one likes to see in bread. Also, even after twice the advised length of time in the oven, the bread was raw in the middle. (Presumably because it was a solid lump of undifferentiated goo.) It was inedible and had to be thrown away.

The following day, since I had the day off, I decided to try Easy French Bread again and to make up a batch of black bean soup to eat for lunches. I was very careful with the bread- I had identified several places where I might have gone wrong the day before- proofing the yeast too far in advance, not letting the water cool long enough, not preheating the oven adequately. The bread came out beautifully- my best to date. The soup, though... yesterday for lunch I heated up a bowl of it and took a sip. Vile! I almost spit it out. Seems I'd been a little too liberal with the vinegar.

But I'm no fool. I took high school Honors Chemistry. What's the opposite of sour? Bitter! Sour is acid; bitter is base. I'd simply neutralize the acid of the vinegar with, say, a tablespoon of baking soda, and my problem would be solved.

Um, yeah. We won't dwell on the mess or the horrible smell or the sinister, foaming concoction that looked like a witches' brew. Nor will we dwell on the fact that, despite all that, I tried it anyway, because I am a moron. Suffice it to say that this week it'll be peanut butter sandwiches for lunch, on my admirable Easy French Bread.

Induction Stove

We have an induction stove in Hopkins, consisting of two raised black squares on the counter. It's very mysterious and I haven't yet used it. It works with some pots but not others; you put a pot on the burner and if it is the right kind of pot a little light comes on and you can turn the stove on. Darned if I know how it works. This morning at breakfast Susie said, "I just discovered the induction stove! That's so cool! And it's so nice to have two extra burners at mealtimes."
"Yes," I said. "It's very mysterious, though. Do you know how it works?"
"Not really," she said.
"I think it works by mathematical induction: you put the first pot on and it works, and then you prove that if it works for any arbitrary pot, it will work for the pot after that."
She's a math major, but she looked at me like I was crazy. "I don't think that's how it works."

Oh. Hm. Well, it was funny to me.

Hobos are going to come and steal my pie. 

Who took my chair pie?! 

Dinner with the Profs. deVilliers last Friday, which is always very nice, and especially so since they insisted on sending me home with a collection of herbs from their garden as well as several stalks of rhubarb. I'd never eaten rhubarb before, let alone cooked with it, and my Mennonite cookbook proved uncharacteristically unhelpful. The internet, however, yielded a staggering array of recipes, and so it was with one of these that I baked my first, slightly peculiar, rhubarb pie.

[What have I been reading? What has happened to my syntax? Good heavens!]

The oddness of the pie was due to several things. One, someone put whole wheat flour in the white flour bin and I didn't notice until it was too late, which is not the way to make a light and flaky pie crust; two, the pie consisted of a layer of goopy eggy rhubarb substance topped with a thick layer of sugary sludge- um, better than it sounds though, really- and three, that rhubarb pie, in my opinion, is a strange concept. The pie was actually rather tasty, however, the moral being that all pie, by virtue of its pieness, is pretty much all right with me.

I had enough pastry dough leftover to make a whole additional pie, which I did this afternoon. I didn't know what to put in it, but we have numerous jars of peach-apricot preserves up on the top shelf in the kitchen, so I figured why not. I glopped a jar of preserves into the pie shell. Looking at it, it struck me there was probably a reason you don't often hear of people filling pies with jam, and that this pie would be appallingly sweet and gooey. Going through the kitchen with an eye to remedying this problem, I found a number of apples in the crisper. Well, better I should have found them sooner, but it wasn't too late. I plopped the apples down amidst the jam and tossed the concoction in the oven.

Haven't tried it yet, but I posed it for a couple pictures. It's the Schillaci in me, I guess.

Adventures are scary.

Off to New York tomorrow for MoCCA. This event triggers panic attacks from "What if I'm eaten by an enormous rat in the subway?" to "What if I'm a hack and die a failure, flies buzzing around my eyes?" to "What if my red dress makes me look like I'm trying too hard?"

I'm a little nervous.

But, as my dad points out, I'm always kind of nervous, even when the situation doesn't involve subway rides and Capybaras.

Oh, dear. You'd better send good thoughts my way. I'm something of a wreck.

I Can Nap and You Can't

There's a sign on Jim's office door which says that if the door is shut, not to knock- he's either not there or he's asleep. I always thought that was a joke, but it's not- he really does nap in his office daily, much to the amusement of my fellow logicians' apprentices and me. Today Jim, wearing his yellow Chapter 8 party hat, explained to us the science of the ten-minute nap. You stretch out, and close your eyes, and relax every muscle in your body. This, he says, is sometimes difficult. If you have an itch you can scratch it. "What if you have a lot of itches?" asked Sally. "You can take care of that, too," Jim assured her.

After about ten minutes, you will feel yourself transitioning from a heavy state of sleep to a lighter state. Prolong this moment: it is a very restful thirty seconds, even though you are conscious. Then you wake up.

"It seems like it would require a lot of willpower," said Caroline. "I think I'd just go on sleeping."

"I don't think of it as involving willpower," said Jim. "I want to get up. There are things I want to do."

"You should write a book," said Sally.

"Well, not if this technique is non-transferable. It might only work for me," said Jim.

"You could call it `I Can Nap and You Can't,'" I suggested.

"We should all try it out for you," said Caroline.

"Go ahead," said Jim. "That's why I'm telling you. You've all been yawning all morning."