'Tis the Season

Not the Christmas season, of course; it's much too early to be thinking about Santa Claus. Unless you're a major department store, in which case you've had your light-up snowman yard ornaments on display in your seasonal section beside the rakes and lawn bags for two weeks. I know it's true because I saw this guy at Sears last week and would have brought him home to live with me if he wasn't so ridiculously expensive.

But I digress.

What I'm trying to talk about is cold and flu season, which started a week ago for me. Despite my best efforts to wash my hands and stay healthy, I caught a real humdinger of a cold. In hindsight, handling a giggling snotty nephew wasn't the best idea, but I just couldn't help myself. So I got to enjoy blocked sinuses, sniffles, sore throat, fatigue, and a low fever, making me a miserable slug for a week. I'm grateful that everyone has given me permission to take it easy and rest up, and I'm glad that laundry is a fairly low-energy task, because otherwise we'd be out of socks by now.

Don't be like me. Don't get sick. Avoiding small, sniffling children is a good start, but that's only one (very effective) method of germ transmission. So what's to be done?

Wash your hands.

 

Everyone says this, because it's absolutely the best way to keep from getting sick. The CDC has a whole page dedicated to handwashing, with links to videos, factsheets, and podcasts.

How to wash your hands. Image from cdc.gov

Yes, sometimes people will cough or sneeze right at your face (small children, I'm looking in your direction) and you'll be out of luck, but it's far, far more likely that you'll get germs on your hands and deliver them to your face yourself. Someone coughs into their hands and then opens a door, or sneezes on an elevator and pushes the buttons, and then you follow behind them a few minutes later, unaware of the collection of cold viruses waiting for you on those surfaces. You open the door, you push the button for your floor, then you rub your tired eyes or bite your nails. The next day, you'll start feeling off and will probably start distributing those germs yourself.

Cold and flu viruses (and plenty of other nasties) can live on surfaces for up to 48 hours under the right conditions, so unless you want to wear gloves all day and get strange looks, you should make an extra effort to touch only what you need to, wash your hands every chance you get, and keep your hands away from your face. At home, if someone's sick, break out the Lysol now and then to spray doorknobs, toilet handles, and faucets. Encourage everyone to wash their hands after using tissues to blow noses, and to cough and sneeze into their sleeves instead of into their hands.

You don't need to bother with antibacterial soaps. Any soap will do, used with warm water and brought to a good lather. In fact, there's research to suggest that the main antibacterial agent in most of the commercially available hand soaps, Triclosan, is contributing to antibiotic resistance.

It's also a good idea to keep an alcohol-based hand sanitizer with you, for times when you may not have quick access to soap and water. Again, antibacterial agents aren't necessary here - anything that's got an alcohol content of 60% or higher will be effective in destroying most of the bacteria and viruses that are on your hands. You should still look for a sink eventually, though, and wash your hands the old-fashioned way as soon as you get a chance.

With all this handwashing, you're likely to get dry skin, no matter how many emollients the soap and sanitizer manufacturers add to their products. Get yourself a good hand lotion, because chapped and cracked skin is not a good barrier against germs!

What Have We Done to This Place?

I'd love to give everyone another update on the new floors, but unfortunately, nothing new has happened since the end of July. Not only do we still have our old nasty carpets, we've still got a pile of old hallway carpet sitting on the front porch because the nice Columbia Floors folks never took it away. We're still missing the shoe molding around the new tile by the door, and in the laundry room where it would hide the uneven edges left by the tile guy. All of this is supposed to be done by the mysterious carpet people, who keep cancelling their appointments at the very last minute (and only after we call to ask what time to expect them). Part of why it's taking so long is because we want one specific guy to come back and finish the work, because he showed up on time and had some pride in his work, but it's been hard to book him.

As of this post, he is scheduled for next week. Again. I guess we're just having a hard time finding reliable contractors. We bought into the Angie's List thing, thinking it would save us some grief, but we've been so disappointed with this company despite their good reviews online. Hopefully the end is almost here, and I can have my cozy new carpets in time for the cold weather.

But you know, we've done an awful lot to this place in the two years we've been here. It's not all drama and chaos and epic failures in our quality assessment of hired professionals. I made a list of the accomplishments:

• Painted red room, bedroom, family room, computer room
• Removed wallpaper and painted living room, dining room, hallway
• New curtains and rods in most rooms 
• New vertical blinds in dining room and family room
• Replaced porch light
• Replaced front door and doorbell
• Pulled up shrubs by lamppost
• Replaced mailbox
• New a/c and air handler
• Added doors to family room fireplace
• New sliding glass doors in family room
• Hardwood floors in living and dining room
• New vinyl tile in laundry room
• Replaced ceiling fan in bedroom
• Replaced doorknobs everywhere
• Replaced fan/heater assembly in two bathrooms
• Re-grouted shower in master bathroom
• Updated closet door hardware in family room
• New fridge
• New light fixtures in computer room, red room, hallway, dining room
• Had trees removed in backyard
• Had trees removed in front yard (post-Irene cleanup)
• New section of fence and gate (post Irene)
• Tore up vines along fence
• Repaired side fence
• Cut down dying shrubs in back and side yards
• Landscaping work in front yard, removing poison ivy 
• Put hooks up along front porch for easy Christmas light installation
• Had chimney rebuilt
• Repaired roof leak
• Painted outside windows
• Put up drywall ceiling in computer room (replaced tile ceiling)
• Replaced toilet in downstairs bedroom

There are so many things left on the to-do list, not the least of which is getting the carpet situation settled, but when I list out everything we've gotten done so far, I really feel that we're making progress. Just look at all that stuff! Bit by bit, it's all getting done, and the house looks and feels a whole lot more like we wanted it to. It feels like home.

The pet of your dreams

Full disclosure: the topic of today's post was shamelessly stolen from a Paul and Storm podcast I had the pleasure of listening to on the Montreal road trip. Many, many times while we listened to their chats, Dave and I hit the pause button and discussed our own views on the topics they brought up, which was really the best part of the drive. I took some notes on topics I wanted to explore on my own blog, and today's post will be the first of (hopefully) several Paul-and-Storm-inspired musings.

Assuming that science was able to make it happen, what pet would you be willing to pay 

20 thousand dollars for?

My first thought, my first immediate thought: House Hippo!!

Hippopotamuses are among my favorite animals at zoos. They look like they've been overinflated with a bicycle pump, and they're smooth and shiny and have those disproportionally tiny tails that make them so comical. Of course, in real life, hippos are vicious. They're incredibly large, aggressive creatures who are known to attack humans any chance they get, capsizing river boats and just being mean old sons of bitches.

SO CUTE IT BURNS

But if science could create a teeny little hamster-sized hippo, and maybe breed out some of that aggression, I would be seriously tempted to save up my money and get one. Of course, the cats would hate it, but if I built it a little hippo habitat in a fish tank, it might work.

Unfortunately, I doubt that very much research money is going towards the shrinking of giant wild animals for house pets, so my house hippo dreams are never likely to be fulfilled. So, just in case I ever end up rich enough to spend obscene amounts of money on ridiculous pets, I have a backup plan.

Glow-in-the-dark cats. 

No, really. These are a real thing. When scientists are trying to splice a gene into an animal's genome, they need a convenient way to know whether it worked. One of the simplest ways for them to do this is to pair a glow gene, usually from jellyfish, with the important gene. If your test animal glows, then the insertion was successful. And adorable.

Glowing kitties of the future!

How great would it be to have a cat nightlight? Considering how often my boys like to dart around my feet when I'm walking downstairs in the darkness of early morning, a little glow could go a long way to keeping my neck intact.

What super-creature would you fork over 20 grand to have in your house?

Montreal Bagels

Since it's a trip home and not really a vacation, you wouldn't think I'd bring home many souvenirs for myself when I visit Montreal. Usually, this is true, but this time I had a moment of bready weakness and brought back dozens of fresh bagels. 

Explain to me how anyone can walk into a place like this and not leave with as many bagels as they could carry. I'm grateful they didn't have shopping carts, or I may have bought more. The staff was very understanding of my need to take pictures of their bagel oven. Apparently they get that all the time. See those long flat boards? They use those to get the bagels into and out of the oven, and they slide the hot golden bagels off the boards  into the big bin you see on the right, where they get scooped out and put by the dozen into paper bags for the customers waiting in line.

Brossard Bagel, in Greenfield Park, QC

One dozen of the delicious bagels I imported were to share with my coworkers, because I thought it would be a welcome change from the boxes of saltwater taffy that always appear in the break room whenever someone gets back from vacation. Also, we're a pretty seriously carbohydrate-loving group.

I sent out an excited "OMG you guys!! Montreal bagels for everyone!!" e-mail and then spent the rest of the morning trying to answer "what's a Montreal bagel?" And that's a difficult question. All I know is that they're dense, they're delicious, and I can't find anything like them around here.

So, in the interest of educating the world, I acquired different types of bagels so that I could proceed with: 

A Comparative Anatomy of Bagels

 

I started with one sesame bagel from Brossard Bagel, and one poppyseed bagel from Wegmans. I was going to get one from Panera, but I was grocery shopping anyway, and the Wegmans ones looked exactly like the Panera ones I'm used to, so I think it's a good example of a generic "bagel" available in this area. I specifically did not buy the packaged Thomas Bagels in the bread aisle, because I wanted to compare a fresh-baked Montreal bagel with a fresh-baked generic bagel from this area. The guy at the counter at Wegmans assured me that they bake them fresh, so we're on more or less even ground there.

First, let's have a look at them.

Left: Montreal bagel. Right: Wegmans bagel.

The first thing that you notice is that the Wegman's bagel looks a lot bigger than the one from Montreal. It's taller, and while it's about the same diameter, it has a much smaller center hole, making it look a lot less dense. But is it less dense?

Here's a look at the insides.

Left: Montreal bagel. Right: Wegmans bagel

They both show evidence of bubbles inside, but the ones in the Wegmans bagel are bigger. This doesn't necessarily mean it's less dense, but I noticed a big difference in texture just by poking them. The Wegmans bagel is much, much more squashable.

I crushed the bagels with my girly pink dumbbells to demonstrate the squash factor. Using a 5-pound weight on each bagel eliminates the possibility of me pushing harder on one or the other.

Left: Montreal bagel. Right: Wegmans bagel

As you can see, the one on the left barely deforms at all, and the one on the right looks like a Tempur-Pedic commercial. I'm going to let this stand as my test of bagel density, because calculating bagel volume is a little too intense a task for me, and I'm not in the mood for math.

I told my coworker that I was doing a bagel experiment, and she generously offered to get me a couple of bagels from a Jewish bakery in her neighborhood, to give me a third data point. Fantastic!

I didn't squash the bagel from the Jewish bakery, because I was too excited about jamming it into the toaster so I could eat it, but I did take a photo of its insides for you.

Bagel from Jewish bakery

It looked very much like the Wegmans bagel, both inside and out. It was fat and fluffy-looking, and it had many large bubbles inside. The biggest difference was the smell - much more yeasty than the Wegmans bagel. I also noticed that the texture was denser, but not as dense as the Montreal bagel. Many of the little holes had doughy threads across them, making me think there's a lot of gluten in this bread.

The Taste Test

I toasted the bagels in my cheap two-slice toaster, and then tasted them both with butter and plain cream cheese. I also tried the bagel from the Jewish bakery with some veggie cream cheese, which is a specialty of that deli. It seemed like the right thing to do. The bagels were tested at least a half hour apart. I am so very very full of carbohydrates.

Wegmans bagel

It got crunchy on the outside, and remained very soft and bready on the inside. It felt like it took a long time to gain any brown color. Where I cut the toasted bagel in half, the knife flattened the bagel completely. It tasted bland, vaguely yeasty, like a big soft chunk of white bread. No dominating taste or smell. Not entirely different from a dinner roll.

Montreal bagel

Much more difficult to cut in half because of its density, so my halves were uneven. If ever there was an appropriate time for those safety bagel cutter things, it's with Montreal bagels. It turned brown much more quickly than the first bagel. The Montreal bagel had a much sweeter taste, and I posit that the higher sugar content led to faster browning. Incredibly chewy, with a crunchy crust. Coworkers commented on the sweetness of the bagels I brought in, and how chewy they were.

Jewish bagel

Its browning speed fell somewhere between the other two. The smell and the taste were very yeasty, and it was chewier than the Wegmans bagel by far, which surprised me given how similar they look. It was nowhere near as dense and chewy as the Montreal bagel, though, so although it was good it didn't win my taste test. Yes, I'm biased. I admit it.

So why are Montreal bagels so dense? I'm not sure. Wikipedia has the following to say about how Montreal bagels differ from the "generic bagel":

• The bagel dough includes egg and honey.
• Honey is also added to the water used for poaching the bagels before baking.
• The bagels are baked in a wood-fired oven. 

All these things make them so much more delicious than any other type of bagel I've ever tried. I don't know why they haven't spread out and become more popular across Canada and the United States - you'd think the sweetness would be a great selling point. There are some recipes I've found online for "Montreal-style bagels", and one of these days I may give that a shot, but for now, I have dozens of frozen bagels to tide me over.

Oh, before I close this out, I have one more reason why Montreal bagels are better. Check this out, from the same Wikipedia article:

Montreal-style bagels are currently the only style of bagel to have ventured into in space. Gregory Chamitoff, who grew up in Montreal, took three bags of sesame bagels with him on his assignments to STS-124 as passenger and ISS Expedition 17 as crewmember.

That's right. I thought I was a hardcore fan because I dragged dozens across the border in my Honda Fit, and here I learn this guy brought them to space. We loves our bagels, what can I say.

Basil Turkey Burgers

I haven't posted a new recipe in a very long time. That's because I haven't tried making a new recipe in a very long time. I've been cooking most nights, but I've stuck to the old comfortable recipes. Warm weather makes me lazy, and I've earned a huge F for creativity this summer! This was a step in the right direction, and it was wonderful, so I'm going to share it.

Basil Turkey Burgers 

(makes 4 medium burgers)

1 package ground turkey (mine was 1.2 pounds)

Breadcrumbs

Basil (fresh and/or dried)

Milk

Mayo

Salt and pepper

Lettuce

Sliced tomato

Hamburger buns

Wash your hands and then get them all gross again by squashing the ground turkey in a bowl with a scoop of breadcrumbs (I used less than 1/4 cup) and a tablespoon or so of milk. Then wash your hands and chop up some basil - 8 to 10 fresh leaves should do it. Another option is to already have the basil chopped and ready before getting turkey juice on your hands. That's probably even better than the way I did it. 

Squirt some mayo (enough to spread on 4 burgers) into a bowl and toss in a tablespoon or so of basil, then mash it around. Cover it and stick it back in the fridge. Toss the rest of the basil in with the ground turkey. I decided it didn't look like enough, so I sprinkled in some ground basil too. More basil is almost always a good call. Add some salt and pepper and then get your squish back on, mixing everything up really well before forming four medium patties.

I cooked them in a pan on the stove with a little butter to keep them from sticking, but you could try grilling them. My mother-in-law, who gave me this recipe, recommended that I start out by putting foil on the grill, because the burgers are too soft to hold together and might fall through the grate. So, if you're grilling, start them on foil and them move them over to get some nice grill lines once they've set a little.

Spread the basil mayo on the buns, assemble burgers with lettuce and tomato, and YUM. They are so soft and delicious. And because they're really summery, I highly recommend getting some fresh local tomatoes to put on the burgers. I used locally-grown beefsteak tomatoes, in part because I was intrigued by the name "beefsteak" and wanted to know how they were different from regular old tomatoes. Turns out it just means that they're big. Fresh and local taste so much better than the other junk, so make an effort to find some - the tomatoes really pull the whole thing together.

Note to self: try this with mozzarella mixed into the burgers next time, call them Caprese Turkey Burgers, feel super fancy.

I promise someday I'll get a better camera and learn a few things about taking pictures of food, so this stuff can look as delicious as it actually is!

My Oven is Talking to Me

I don't know enough Morse code to know what it's trying to communicate, but I'm pretty sure my oven is trying to speak to me.

Can anyone translate for me?

This happens every time I use the oven. As far as I can tell, something is wrong with the temperature probe wiring. It's a very old, very small, Maytag wall oven, and I would love to rip out its guts and replace the whole thing. Unfortunately, since I want to get away from the wall-oven-and-separate-cooktop setup I currently have and put in a regular old stove, I have to wait until we redo the whole kitchen. Otherwise, I'd have to take a chainsaw to some cabinets. As much fun as that would be, I doubt the end result would be functional. Or pretty. 

I've done a bunch of reading, but can't figure out how to fix it. I've considered finding an appliance repair guy, but with an oven this old (I can't even find a model number anywhere), I'm doubtful that anyone will be able to find parts for it. Currently, when it beeps at me, I open the door and use an oven mitt to smack at what I think is the temperature probe. Usually, it goes quiet for a few minutes, while I beam with pride over my repair skills, but nothing is a permanent fix.

Luckily, the oven still seems to work properly and maintain the temperature I set, so I'm able to cook with it and get reliable results. That's why I haven't tried disconnecting the temperature probe entirely. Instead, I camp out in the kitchen the whole time the oven is on, so I can be ready to smack the probe periodically. The bright side is that I'm more likely to keep up with dishes while I'm cooking instead of waiting until after dinner, since I'm stuck in the kitchen anyway! 

K-cup Vivisection

Things got a little brutal yesterday at work.

I've moved up in the world and now work in a place with a communal Keurig machine in the break room. Everybody buys their own K-cups, so there's no fighting over who paid how much for their coffee dues, and we all get to make our favorite flavors. Heaven. Seriously. It's the small things.

After spending too much money on K-cups, my coworker and I each picked up one of those DIY-K-cups from Bed Bath and Beyond (with a 20% off coupon, naturally). The packaging says you just fill it with your preferred ground coffee and pop it into the machine for a delicious cup of coffee for a fraction of what the official K-cups would cost you.

The thing is, we can't get it to work. We get coffee, yes, but it's terrible. Even filling it to the absolute maximum line and setting the Keurig for the smallest cup (6oz), the result is extremely weak. We've tried putting more coffee, less coffee, finer and coarser grinds, and different brands of coffee, but it always comes out like a cup of watered-down coffee. Watching the process closely to pinpoint the problem, I noted that the liquid coming out of the Keurig with one of these things in place was a lot lighter in color than when a K-cup was in there, so I put in a K-cup (since I wanted a decent coffee!) and watched the machine to confirm my suspicion. Sure enough, the coffee looked dark at first, but gradually got lighter until it looked as watery, right at the end, as the stuff coming out with the Solofill cup.

Hypothesis from the peanut gallery in the break room: Maybe the K-cups are super-packed with much more coffee than we could fit in the Solofill! Considering how everyone who walks up to the machine with a K-cup is always unconsciously shaking their little coffee pod like a maraca, I knew this couldn't be true: if it was packed really tight, it wouldn't make noise when shaken. The group wanted proof, of course, so I fetched a sacrificial K-cup from the box of freebies in the office supply closet, which is stocked with decaf and flavors nobody likes. My victim: spicy eggnog. Eeeeeewww.

It was obvious, once I held the pod up to the light of the window, that it was only half full. The interesting thing is, it's the top half that's full, and the bottom is just air. I cut it open to confirm that it was just air and not a filter or something, and yes, just air¹. The top half of the cup was taken up by a thick papery filter full of coffee.

Second hypothesis from the peanut gallery (we have very chatty peanuts in our group): maybe it's not real coffee in the K-cups! Maybe they put instant coffee in there to fool us! The problem with this, though, is that a used K-cup still has coffee in it. Yes, we dismembered one to check. 

New hypothesis! Maybe there's a combination of instant coffee and real coffee in there. This would explain why there is still coffee in the pod once it's done brewing, and explain why the coffee is darker at the beginning, because the water dissolves the granules right away while the rest of the coffee does its thing. My goodness, what a sexy hypothesis! How to check? We tore the lids off the new and used K-cups to compare the volume of coffee grounds, because obviously the instant coffee would have melted away. Weighing them was immediately rejected, because one was waterlogged. Instead, we dumped out some of the dry coffee from the new pod and compared it to regular ground coffee. It looked the same, but just to be sure, I sprinkled some of the K-cup coffee in a coffee cup and added warm water to see if it would dissolve. It did not.

So now we all know what goes on inside a K-cup, but aren't much closer to making decent coffee with the reusable filter. The current hypothesis is that the filter isn't fine enough and the water goes through too fast, not bringing enough coffee flavor with it. Cramming more coffee into the Solofill just causes an overflow problem, so that's not the answer. The paper filter in the real K-cup is very thick, so we're thinking that's the key.

They sell other kinds of multiple-use Keurig pseudo-pods², so the new plan is to buy a couple of different ones and see if they work any better. All of them seem to have similar reviews online, so it's hard to decide what to try, but with our filter hypothesis, I'm going to look for one with a very very fine mesh.

1. I suppose it may have been helium. I did not run it through a mass spectrometer.

2. Pseudo-pods, as in "false pods" not as in "a temporary protrusion of the protoplasm, as of certain protozoans, usually serving as an organ of locomotion". To my knowledge Keurig coffee machines are not amoebas.

Booksnobbery

I can be a bit of a book snob.

I'm not proud of it, but I judge non-readers pretty harshly. There are people out there who say things like "I don't read", and they don't seem to think that it's a serious hole in their lives, which is very difficult for me to understand.

Books are, for me, a necessity. Since the day I was able to read Grover At The Farm all by myself, I have been reading. I have a quick link to my library's website on my Firefox toolbar, and I choose new purses based primarily on their size, because they must have enough space for an average hardcover. I have read hundreds of books, from classics to to sci-fi to non-fiction on almost any topic, and I've got a "to-read" shelf (currently growing online at Goodreads.com) that never seems to get any shorter. I deeply regret that I only have one lifetime during which to read, because I'll never be able to read everything I want to.

I think more people should be regular readers. The digital world is slowly chipping away at our attention spans and encouraging us to absorb written words in small, manageable paragraphs, instead of pages and chapters, so I smile when I see people at bus stops or in coffee shops, holding an open book. So why, then, do I feel such hostility towards adult readers of tween-and-teen-targeted "literature"? See, right there, I used sarcastiquotes without even thinking about it. I get all sorts of annoyed when I see a grown person paging through Twilight. They're reading something, so I should be happy about it - they made a decision to acquire and read a book, which is what I want more people to do.

But why would anyone other than a 12-year-old girl voluntarily read about angsty sparkling vampires (unless they're parents of teens and tweens who want to be familiar with what their kids are reading)? My parents weren't standing in line at the store, waiting excitedly for the next Babysitters Club book to be released so they could discuss it with their friends at work, so what changed over the past 20 years? Did young adult (YA) literature get more complex and adult along the way, blurring the lines?

It sounds sort of rhetorical, but it's a question I'm honestly asking of my readers: has there been a shift in the complexity of YA books over the years, making them closer to adult books?

I've done a lot of thinking about my hostility towards the YA stuff, and I posted my thoughts to one of my message boards to start a discussion there, learning more about myself in the process. A big part of my problem is that I assume that someone reading "kids' books" isn't going to want to read Asimov, or John Irving, or a history of the life of Henrietta Lacks. But how do I know what else is on their shelves? Just like someone at Taco Bell might cook fancy gourmet dinners 95% of the time, some people who read lots of good stuff sometimes like to read "fluffy" books because they're easy.

I think I tend to lump all YA into the "bullshit fluff" literature category, because of what I remember from the books of my childhood. The problem with that, if I think about it, is that I enjoyed the Harry Potter series, and if I'm being honest, I have to say they were better written than Sophie Kinsella's "Shopaholic" stuff, which was aimed at adult readers. So where's the line? What's a YA novel and what's a crappy grownup novel? I count Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Anne of Green Gables among my favorite books and I've read them dozens of times, despite the fact that they're intended for younger readers. But they're good. Conclusion: maybe I'm putting more overlap in my Venn diagram of "YA" and "crappy writing" than is warranted.

Why should it even matter that people are reading badly-written junk? It's not my business what people read, and on a conscious level I know that, but I see someone in a waiting room reading Fifty Shades of Grey and I die a little inside. I'm sure there are folks who will look down on my collection of science fiction and medical memoirs and declare that I'm not a real reader if I don't know Tolstoy and Dumas by heart, and I'm sitting here in my glass house, tossing stones around. 

Full disclosure: I haven't read Twilight or 50 Shades, mostly because I've heard enough about them and read enough reviews and quotes from them to know that they won't be to my taste. Hunger Games, on the other hand, is being recommended to me from all sides, by people I know and whose opinions I usually trust, and that's a big reason why I started this thread. I really don't want to read the books, and I'm not entirely sure what my resistance is about. I don't think I'm the hipster type who avoids things when they get popular, so what is it? I thought maybe it was the YA label that was doing it, but I'm not sure, given that I do count some children's classics among my favorite books.

Maybe I'm guilty of lumping the Hunger Games books into the same category as the Twilight series, when it belongs elsewhere? Is it more Little Women than Sweet Valley High?

I'd like this to open up into a discussion, if anyone's game. I need help pinning down what it is that bugs me so much about the popularity of fluff, because otherwise I'm not sure how I will ever change that prejudice.

Mars and the Wright Brothers

During my week in the Outer Banks, I braved rain and high water to visit the Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kill Devil Hills. Even on a do-nothing-and-relax vacation, as this one was supposed to be, I couldn't resist visiting something historical and museum-y.

 

This boulder and metal track in the ground mark the takeoff point of the Wright Brothers' Flyer, and the four smaller plaques in the distance mark where the first four successful flights landed on December 17th, 1903.

First successful flight of the Wright Brothers

One hundred and twenty feet. That's how far Orville Wright got on his first successful powered flight, which the brothers were smart enough to capture on film. It is amazing to me that there is a photograph of this huge step forward in technology, this incredible achievement. And this all happened in 1903, which isn't really all that far away if you think about it. Not much more than a hundred years from their success in flight, we used a rocket-propelled sky-crane to gently lower an automobile-sized rover onto the surface of Mars.

I bring up the Mars Curiosity rover not only because it's awesome and on Mars, my favorite planet that I don't currently live on, but because we stayed up late on Sunday night, in the big rented house on the beach in Avon, and hooked up the TV to the internet to watch the live feed from NASA as they monitored Curiosity's descent to the surface.

Four of us, and a couple of sleepy weenie-dogs, settled in on the cushy sofas for the whole thing, from the interviews with NASA engineers to the triumphant cheers and tears of joy on the big screen when a safe landing was confirmed. More than once that night, as we watched the camera pan over the control room and the excited and nervous NASA folks speaking into their headsets, I was overwhelmed with a sense of awe and insignificance. Not only are we at a place in our evolution as a species that we can safely place sophisticated technology onto other planets, but it's become routine enough that it's not much more than a blip on the news. Sure, the nerds and space geeks of the world were huddled in front of their TVs and computers to watch it all unfold, but there's a bit of a "been there and done that" feeling from the news coverage, and that makes me both happy and sad.

I'm happy, because it means that awesome feats like this have become common enough not to make a big splash. Not only can we send stuff to Mars, or Jupiter, or to explore giant asteroids, but we do it all the time. We are an amazing damn species. But I'm sad, because when events are common, they stop being news, and people stop caring. When people stop caring, people forget why we're doing all of this in the first place and see it as a waste of money and resources.

But it's not a waste. No, it's not directly ending world hunger or fixing the economy, but space exploration has brought us so many advances in technology, and is worth every penny put into it. And, frankly, it's only pennies that are put into it. NASA's budget is a joke, and the joke keeps getting smaller. This comparison puts it into perspective:

I'm not trying to get all political here - I still don't have a vote in this country - but when you see how little NASA gets from the US budget, it's hard to understand the folks who are complaining that we're spending so much money to visit other planets for nothing. Especially when you see this:

Not that I'm bashing the Olympics (just NBC's dismal coverage and overuse of Ryan Goddamn Seacrest), but in the grand scheme of things, we get so much out of space exploration, and it's silly to argue against funding it. It's not just about rockets, minerals, and spectral analyses. It's about engineering, programming, and robotics, and dozens of other applications to medicine and nutrition and memory foam mattresses.

Three days after I watched Curiosity touch down gently on Mars to begin its mission of exploring the planet, I stood in the spot where we first took to the air in powered vehicles, and I whispered a thanks to the Wright brothers and all those who built on their work, for what they've made possible so far.

Round or Folded?

"Round or folded?"

The guy at the drive-through window repeated his question, since we were still staring blankly at him.

"Your egg. Do you want it round, or folded?"

Dave and I looked at each other. Both of us had eyebrows raised and shoulders lifted slightly to indicate that we had no idea what in hell the guy was talking about, so Dave bravely took initiative, turned back to the impatient McDonald's employee, and declared:

"Round."

We got home and spread out our breakfast goodies on the counter so we could see what consequences we'd now have to endure, and luckily our orders had resulted in one egg in each style, so we could compare them. The sausage and egg McMuffin, on the right, was the bearer of the round egg in question. The bacon, egg, and cheese McGriddle, on the left, features the mysterious folded egg.

Round eggs are regular old eggs, cooked in round kajiggers like these:

Blue silicone egg kajiggers

Folded eggs, meanwhile, are made from the egg-like goo that all fast food restaurants now use in place of scrambled eggs. Pre-scrambled for efficiency, I guess, but even though they're made from actual eggs, I never feel like the texture is right, and I wish they'd never been invented.

Powdered eggs, AKA the Cheez-Whiz of eggs

This stuff is why I have to pointedly ask for "shell eggs" when I order scrambled eggs at diners. Otherwise what I get is nasty, uniformly bright yellow, and spongy.

But the McDonald's experience opened my eyes to another way of making DIY breakfast sandwiches. I've always tried making a round-ish fried egg to put into an english muffin, with varying success. The egg often turns out too wide, and requires minor surgery to keep from poking out of the muffin. I had hoped that using the egg kajiggers would help, and I was very excited when I first opened the box they came in, but they got squashed in shipping and the now best I can manage with them are elliptical fried eggs. While I am entertained by the thought of eating conical sections for breakfast, the problem of fitting egg to muffin remains.

Enter the folded egg. I don't have a flat griddle or a square mold to contain liquid egg, but I took a shot and scrambled an egg and poured it into a frying pan, spreading it out like I do with crepe batter. As thin as it was, it cooked quickly, and I had it done and folded up on the english muffin within two minutes. And it fit on the muffin, with only little bits of its corners sticking out!

Sorry, round egg. Your day is over in my house. I've moved on.