slhs winter party

So our department really knows how to throw a party. The Friday before finals week, the chair of the department had all grad students, faculty, and staff over to her kickin' pad designed by her architect husband. There was an amazing buffet of food, wide selection of beverages, and wonderful company. My favorite nugget of the evening to store away in the old memory is of one of my professors, who is majorly renowned in his field, very effectively getting rid of all of the alcohol. All first years were assigned to bring wine or beer, so the proportion of alcohol to people was pretty high. Pretty soon after we got there, he took it upon himself to start opening bottles of wine and taking them around the room, making sure to top off everyone (mind you, we were all perfectly comfortable opening and pouring for ourselves and everyone had been doing this from the beginning, so this was just a bonus). Also to note is that our cups were the classic party 8oz plastic cups, and he filled those right up. So each bottle probably served like two people. Here is a photo grabbed by one of my classmates on the sly. Rachel, if for some reason you ever stumble upon this blog, sorry for stealing your photo! Then he started in on giving away all of the rest of the beer...and finally bottled water. Hey, we all need to stay hydrated, after all!

just a couple of kitchen mishaps

Sometimes I feel like I am the queen of them.

We used to store our oatmeal lying down on the shelf above the stove. However, one Sunday a few weeks ago, when I decided to have oatmeal for breakfast, this is the scene that followed.





FYI. It does not work to vacuum up oatmeal. It just sprays it everywhere. Even using an attachment on the hose does not work. It was as if the oatmeal would get sucked toward the attachment and then go ricocheting off somewhere. I'm sure there is still oatmeal to be found in odd places in our kitchen. Oh, of course there is. Just tonight I smelled burning when utilizing a burner not often used. I took out the burner pan and found oatmeal below. Wonderful.

Two nights ago I was making this delicious soup. I bought a new bottle of paprika for the recipe. I am terrible at opening freshness/safety seal things unless it has that nice large semicircular pull tab like ketchup often does. Just tiny pull tabs around the circumference? Think again. So I am in a bad habit of opening that type of seal with my teeth. Terrible idea when you live at a higher altitude than most food items are packaged. Paprika exploded out of the top when the seal broke. This might have happened regardless of how I opened it, but I would not have had a mouth full of paprika had I opened it in a more conventional manner. It was all over my mouth, face, shirt, and arms (made them very dry...odd), not to mention the counter, floor, and refrigerator.

Winner.