mehndi and stuff...

a practice run of my mehndi for the wedding:




the designs are way too fat and blurred because the cone sucked, which was totally my fault, cause i didn't get the right one.

other wedding tidbits:

the flower girl dress fits the flower girl. yay!

my dress is still in the works, but i've given up on perfection and am using my mom's "diamond over the ass" idea for salvaging it, instead of reattaching new back pieces of the correct size.

i got red paper cupcake liners and royal icing dahlias for the cupcakes.

my aunt that is fighting with my dad sent us a wedding card with a check and a handkerchief in it, but was too chicken to come out and say she's not coming to the wedding.

Tejas' folks are arriving a week from today.

i just find this amusing...

Saxton, M., 1995. Single Particle Tracking: Effects of Corrals. Biophysical J., 69:389-398

a small break in the craziness....

has left me enough time to update a little bit here. i have been meaning for a while to add some pictures of the practice dress i made and deconstructed ages ago now. And I finally have a few free minutes, so here they are:





I finished my NIH proposal and sent it in just 2 days before my sister and mom came to stay with us for the weekend to attend a shower the church ladies had put together for me:







it was a really nice shower, though my mom and sister nearly missed their flight home on sunday, so i think they left rather miffed at me.

it turns out that the actual wedding dress is a bit too small, because i stupidly washed the fabric after cutting out the pieces. i only figured this out, when i tried to show my mom how it looked on, and couldn't get the fabric to meet in the back at my butt. yay. so i need to fix that.

and now back to trying to figure how to do particle tracking on matlab, which i have never used before.

cupcake update

so, i found a version of buttercream that isn't quite so daunting, as it only requires that you make a tempered meringue and then add that to the butter. so i gave it a shot.

what i don't like about this frosting:

1) it might actually be TOO buttery. if that is possible. still not sure on that. will need a second or third opinion.

2) as you can see, the frosting is a really pale yellow. in the other frosting, the saffron made it really dark and bright. it's also not as strong tasting. i suppose both of these points can be overcome by using more saffron in the batch

3)like an idiot, i used salted butter. so its salty. yuck.



i also re-tried the cardamom flavored yogurt filling. this time mixing in some whipping cream to lighten it up a bit. obviously i need to work on my filling technique. the filling needs to be in the center, not right under the top. at any rate, i think the whipped cream and partially drained yogurt mix will work well for a filling.

in the end, i may just go back to the old icing recipe and just make it a little more buttery.

icing on the cake...

its only recently that i discovered that the yummy sweet icing made from butter and confectioners sugar is not buttercream frosting. i'm not sure what it is, but buttercream it is not.

i discovered this a few months ago when i decided i wanted to make the wedding cake myself (i have since altered my plans for the sake of my sanity, and have decided on cupcakes). the reasons being: 1) i love baking. this should not come as a surprise to anyone that knows me. 2) i wanted to try some crazy indian cuisine inspired flavors that no regular baker would do without charging me crazy extra for.

anyway, back to buttercream. apparently, buttercream is actually this nutso concoction of beaten egg whites, butter and sugar syrup cooked to hard-ball consistency that if not done properly, under rather tight time and coordination constraints, goes to crap. so, i decided that i could probably make my cakes with my old "fake" buttercream icing, and i did for the first two tries.

all that to say, i now think i may need to try and make "real" buttercream frosting if i want it to spread nicely and work well for decorating. i'm a little scared...

and, in case you were a little frightened about what crazy indian cuisine inspired flavors i'm trying, have no fear, the flavors are not actually crazy. so far i have had pretty good success with making a saffron flavored icing (test run by my lab mates) and cardamom flavored cake or cardamom flavored yogurt filling in white cake. the yogurt filling still needs some perfecting, but i think if done right will be good. if not i'll just stick with the flavored cakes.

either way, i'm gonna need some serious practice with the buttercream frosting making.

pets

as my time at elena's is slowly coming to a close, i realized i never introduced you all to the puppies. Oliver is the golden lab in the front. they are both eating whatever they can find on the deck. edible or not. there is a pecan tree in the back, so they spend the late summer chewing on those.

say hello to nala, quite possibly the needy-est dog to ever walk the plant earth. her desire for human contact is insatiable. she's playing it cool for the cameras, i think. she usually gives me the most piteous and pathetic look i have ever seen in my life, if my hand is not on her head.

oliver is a bit more laid back. likes his own space mostly. but he loves licking flesh. post-soccer sweaty legs are his all time favorite. its pretty gross.

they are awesome dogs though. fairly well behaved, though not always. and if you learn how to properly keep a kitchen, no food ever disappears into the great unknown of nala's stomach either.

on the other pet front, it seems that one of the cats (my vote goes to masha) has consumed (or played with until dead and left in difficult to find place that will begin reeking very soon) one of Tejas' fish. We're still not sure how this happened. all we know is that the fish disappeared. and that's the best guess we could come up with. i guess maybe it jumped out of the tank for some reason (they don't even notice the fish in the tank, so i don't think they went fishing themselves) and the rest is history. very sad. it was pretty fish. also, boo has lost a TON of weight. he actually has a waist now. he still has the flabby skin belly, but the fat is no more. he still probably weighs 15-16 lbs. but now he's a lean, mean, grass eating (and subsequently throwing up) machine. sadly, this has not cleared up his leaky bum syndrome.

allergies and jobs

masha's breakout was (thankfully) very small and did not spread this time around. on the other hand, oliver has some allergies (to the season and to fleas apparently) and has been scratching up a storm lately as well as rubbing his snout and gums on the carpet (which just sounds really painful to me). ugh.
anyway, i did not get the NIST fellowship or the teaching job, and i no longer think thats such a bad thing.

so i don't have any pictures from graduation since no one has given me any (my hood was blue), but i do have this one!

i'm pretty sure that NIST is NEVER going to let me know anything. did i mention that Courtney found out 3 WEEKS ago that she didn't get an offer? that means that they have known for 3 WEEKS who they are and are not making offers to. so what's the freakin hold up people?!? damn government agencies and their beaurocracy.

also, oxford college can kiss my fanny. the guy gave me NO information about ANYTHING during my interview. and i emailed him the following monday to thank him for inviting me out and liking the faculty, etc, crap, etc. no, "thanks but no thanks", no, "we can let you know by x", just "thanks for coming, can you find your car?" very helpful. really.

i'm offically off the pay roll at Tech next wed. i still have two papers to write for andrew though.

also, masha is showing signs of her head breaking out again (when did this happen last time? could it be a seasonal thing?) and booboo has been hairballing up large chunks if grass since we've been letting him outside recently. yum. and i forgot to feed the dogs last night, and i feel really bad about it. the problem is that they always act food crazy, so there was no obvious sign. :( poor guys.

its one of those days

you know how sometimes you want to magically reinvent yourself, somewhere far away where no one knows you and you are pretty much invisible? i'm having one of those days.

the fact that i have pretty much no control over anything major in my life right now AND no information about anything either is really messing with my head.

rather anti-climactic i would have to say

so it is obviously past march 20, or D-day, as it certainly felt like, and that means i've finished my defense (thankfully finished positively). therefore, I am apparently now a PhD. it certainly doesn't feel like it. on the other hand it DOES feel freaking awesome to be done with it! (granted, i still have a bunch of crap i have to change in the text before submitting it to the university next week, but whatever). In celebration, I have set up the office at Elena's (where i previously worked on my thesis) as a sewing room, and I finally got the chance to use the wonderful yarn swift that my dad and tejas made for me over thanksgiving. (it basically holds yarn hanks and rotates slowly as you pull to make the yarn into a ball, instead of having to wrap the hank around your knees and inevitably end up with a big knotted mess). I may have jumped the gun a little with the room conversion, as i still have to do the thesis revisions and write another paper or two in the next month and a half, but i don't care. I plan to do a crap load of sewing in the next month and half as well.

why am i doing this again?

i'm finding it incredibly difficult to give a crap about my upcoming defense on thursday. i've only (half-heartedly) worked on my presentation once this past week, and i'm supposed to be going over it with andrew tomorrow morning. and i'm still not really interested in doing anything to it. why? why don't i care? am i really in the right career if i can't summon up a little bit of enthusiasm over the culmination of the degree i've busted my ass and wasted my life over for the last 5 yrs? i'm beginning to wonder. granted, i have my fair share of non-trivial distractions, like my dad's in the hospital again (they are going to take out his gall bladder on monday, and that will hopefully fix the problem), tejas' dad is here this weekend, and a few other life altering decisions are up in the air as well. but still. this needs to be taking precedent, and i just don't seem to give a damn. bah.

finished (sort of)

so i had high hopes of being able to do absolutely nothing tomorrow. i wasn't even sure i wanted to get out of bed all day. sadly, i still need to write a future works chapter and my acknowledgements :( but i guess the worst is over. now i can start bathing again. and changing my clothes every day. and doing laundry. woohoo. oh, and i really need to start going to the gym again. but tonight there will be lots of glorious sleep. sleep that doesn't come along with dreams of writing or data analysis or any of that crap. but hopefully there will be some food and a beer first.

i absolutely, positively, categorically HATE writing. bah!

lately...

it's snowed twice now in the last 3 days. I'm sure that means the weather is really nasty farther north. Church was canceled since its cold and icey this morning. I'm supposed to be moving in for real today at the dog house. I swear someday I'll give a good account of the trip to india, but for now here is a link to my photos from the trip: http://picasaweb.google.com/ashlee.stjohn/India2007
I also have a lot of gifts for folks that will probably not get sent out til late march. I almost had a defense date set for march 25th, but some one on my committee putzed around long enough before telling me his availability that by the time i scheduled the date, someone else had planned an out of town trip during that time. now i'm back to square one. hopefully i'll be defending the the 17th or 18th of March. There is really no other time for me to do it since revised theses are due to the university by noon on April 1st and I'm not going to be done with all my research, let alone the thesis writing much before late march! I'm also still working on my application for an NRC fellowship to work at NIST in MD for at least a year. I'd really like to get the fellowship, since i'm not sure how else i will ever be able to get my foot in the door at a national lab. the application is due Feb 1 and requires a research proposal. thats really the biggest part, so i'm trying to make it good. the good thing is that the advisor that i'm in contact with in the physics division at NIST is helping me with the details.
Tejas' dad is supposed to be coming down from michigan to visit sometime in the next month or so. ok, i'm going to have to get back to paper writing now