Picky things from last night's TV watching:

There are no Stop and Shops in Pennsylvania. They are Giant. Michael Scott would not be sending his receptionist to New York or Conneticut to get Stop and Shop prepared coffee. Office Fail.

If a body has been dead for days, the blood will stop dripping. If Have His Caracase taught me one thing, it's that the blood will start clotting in like an hour, rather than the time it takes to move the mummy, have someone find it, call the FBI, have the forensic team figure out what mummy it is, figure out who had the mummy and then find the body of the anthropologist stuffed into the mummy case. Bones fail. _

I dremt I was reading Sword Dance and woke up sad that it wasn't true, nor available for reading. _

Now I have two weeks to figure out how to reteach myself how to play the violin. I haven't played since college. I am thinking of buying Suzuki Books 2-4 and working my way through them. _

I suspect the woman's thinking was along the lines of "this might cost $100-$200" and there are a lot of violins out there that aren't worth that much, or even much more than that. My stepdad has assured me that mine would be worth repairing if that is the cost of the repair, he thinks it was around $2000. _

I don't want a new violin, I want my violin.

Maybe expensive means $100? I don't know. I know my violin was worth more than that when we bought it, and I feel like that was what the repairs would have cost originally. _

Last week, I went to the symphony, and came home wanting to get my violin repaired. I called a shop in Boston, and she asked if the violin is valuable, as it could be expensive to repair. I am honestly not sure at all; I got it in high school (my 3/4 violin was a lovely instrument and I was loathe to give it up), and I think it is beautiful with its knotted wood back, and it fits so nicely and I love it, and it's mine. I will probably take it in tomorrow, as I'm in the middle of a project right now and don't really feel like going to Back Bay at the moment, so I will just sit here and fret, and wish that Reid's had fixed it when I took it in, rather than holding onto it for a year, and then calling me up to tell me they were closing and could I please come pick up my unrepaired instrument? _

I have such a reputation for kitchen gadget purchasing that my mom didn't really believe me when I told her that all I bought for the meringues was an icing tip, not a fancy gun thing.

Which is not to say that I haven't stood in Bed Bath and Beyond, Target, or TJ Maxx and stared at a new kitchen gadget and worked really hard to convince myself that it doesn't actually need to be in my kitchen, despite not having it. This is exceptionally hard when the gadget is red. (I once stood in front of a red electric kettle at Crate and Barrell in complete anguish over having purchased a white one from Target the week before.) _

I watched the first episode of Flash Forward on Hulu. It's..strange...and creepier than I generally like my entertainment, but the pilot was good enough to hook me. (Unlike Community which I tried the first two episodes of and said nope.)

Also, strange to see a show with two leads played by Brits doing American accents. Joseph Fiennes does the accent better than...Desmond's-Penny-from-Lost-and-American-Coupling's-Susan. _

My fake down blanket has gotten flat. So, I had this idea where I would throw it in the washer and then the dryer with some tennis balls to fluff it back up. It hasn't fluffed, nor is it dry, despite being run through like 5 times. This was a bad idea.

(Also, have ordered a new blanket.) _

What happens when you take some egg whites, sugar, chocolate extract, a lazy Columbus day afternoon, and a Tori turns into:

From Food

Yesterday, while waiting for a Zipcar to become available in the middle of nowhere in residential Cambridge, I wandered into the only store there was, which was a grocery store. I figured I'd look for exotic Kool-Aid colors (I don't even think in flavors, just colors). They had nothing interesting in the way of Kool Aid, but I had time to kill so I wandered all over the store. In the organic food aisle, there was a bunch of baking stuff, including Chocolate and Hazelnut extracts. (Hazelnut meringues will be an experiment for another day).

From Food

I recently bought piping tips, and decided to make pretty little bite sized meringues. Today was perfect meringue weather -- a lot of times, you want to make cookies on gloomy wet days, but you can't do that with meringues; the humidity kills the egg whites. And so, this morning, I followed Julia Child's meringue recipe of 1/4 cup of sugar to 1 egg white, and an extremely low temperature. I piped, which was way easier than I'd anticipated. Then, having tasted some of the bowl scrapings, I decided they need a hint more of something so I lightly dusted with Trader Joe's sipping chocolate. Three hours later, I pulled out beautiful meringues.

They don't have a strong chocolate taste, just a hint of "what is that?" and then your breath tastes like chocolate for the next hour. In a good way. They're actually pretty awesome.

From Food

((Also, they look really pretty and I wanted to take lots of pictures.))

Next meringue experiment will probably be hazelnut, although I'm tempted to try dumping some of Starbucks new instant espresso in, and I also came up with the idea of grasshopper meringues. _

Vanilla today:

From Vanilla Extract

It looks pretty much like it looked last week, and I didn't open it to see how it smells. I might stop putting up pictures. _

Week three of the vanilla. This is actually last week's, I haven't shaken or taken pictures this week yet..

From Vanilla Extract

_

So, apparently, Norton Juster and Jules Pfeffer have teamed up a second time for a book coming out next year, 50 years after The Phantom Tollbooth. Despite knowing that it won't be a sequel, I am so incredibly excited. Short of, say, a manuscript of What Has Happened to Charles Wallace Murray Since A Swiftly Tilting Planet suddenly surfacing, I'm not sure I could be more excited about a follow up to an early childhood favorite. (Maybe a book about Dicken growing up and being awesome. But my impression of the things that have been attempted as sequels to The Secret Garden terrify me, and even if Colin does grow into Colin Firth, he is not to marry Mary.) _

And now, to clean my room. ((sigh)) I hate cleaning my room. I have been sitting on my bed playing Tetris and listening to Ira interview Joss and sulking about losing the silicon protector for my nice iPod earbuds and pretending that I'm going to start cleaning any second now. And the interview is over, so I really should just get up and start working. Maybe I will even find the protector thing. _

There is nothing quite as nice as staying in bed until 11, then stumbling downstairs to make tea and pumpkin pancakes to eat slowly on a Sunday morning. _

Over the weekend, a friend of my mother's (actually, the husband of my mom's friend) was asking us about colleges (they were visiting his daughter in college). After a (quick) explanation of St. John's, he asked who my favorite Program writer was. I froze. He then offered "how about one for every 500 years" which I turned into one (Seminar) author per year, and gave four. I'm not entirely sure why I made it only Seminar authors, but I did. My four were Homer, Shakespeare, Jefferson, and Tolstoy. Who are yours? _

Week two of the vanilla extract experiment looked like this:

From Vanilla Extract

I loved the color gradation in the vodka as the beans steeped. Then I shook it all up and dumped a bit more vodka on top because there were beans sticking out the top. It's starting to smell more like extract and less like vodka. _

My post about the whale watch we did for my grandmother's birthday is forthcoming, after I go through a zillion identical pictures of the ocean just after a whale dove, or right before one surfaced, with a madly tilting horizon as the boat was tossed around and I sort of held the camera out to the side and clicked at random.

But, a preview of the trip:

From Whale Watching 9-23-09

It was very exciting, even if they didn't do tricks. _

Nothing is actually that yellow, but my camera has a tendancy toward making everything look a little yellow at night. I'm sure that's a setting I could change if I sat down and tried to figure it out. _

For reasons I no longer quite remember, I became obsessed this summer with the idea of making my own vanilla extract. I found a recipe that had a lower vanilla bean to vodka ratio than I had recalled (possibly it steeps longer), which makes things cheaper, and a website that sells vanilla by region. I had a sudden inability to do math moment, and figured that if I wanted to do three cups of extract, and it takes three beans to a cup, I therefore needed fifteen beans. I realized this after I had this:

From Vanilla Extract

All over my cutting board. Fifteen Mexican vanilla beans. They smell like vanilla, but also like dried figs, raisins, and very fine pipe tobacco.

So, not really knowing what to do with an extra nine beans before they would go moldy (I have had vanilla go moldy, it was very sad), and the fact that there was a ton of vodka in the house, I decided to just go ahead and make five cups of vanilla extract. It could theoretically make spectacular Christmas presents. Once a week for two months I'm supposed to take it out of its cool, dark cabinet and shake it. I'm looking forward to seeing how the color progresses.

This is week one:

From Vanilla Extract

The liquid is still clear. It smells kind of like vanilla vodka, rather than vanilla extract. _