Beer Bread

Beer is the wonder food! and now it makes wonder bread.


This is a super easy recipe my friend Corrie sent me, the original recipe can be found here:


If you can turn on an overn, measure, open a beer, mix, and set a timer... you can make this recipe.

I've made a few adjustments in the version I'm posting they will be in parenthesis:

Ingredients:
3 c. white flour
1 Tbl sugar
1 tsp salt
1 Tbl baking powder
2 Tbl herbs (literally, just measure some of the dried stuff you have. I recommend rosemary, basil, and/or thyme)
1 c. freshly grated cheese (Instead I use 1.5-2 Tbl melted butter
2 beers; one for the recipe and one for the cook. Dark beer makes a darker sweeter bread; light beer makes a lighter bread, something like and IPA or ESB adds a tangy flavor

1. Turn oven on to 350F
2. Measure and dump dry ingredients into a big bowl. Mix with big spoon (or little spoon or hands if you have no spoons).
3. Melt butter in microwave. dump on top of dry ingredients.
4. open 1 beer. Drink
5. open second beer, pour over dry ingredients. Mix with spoon/hand/whatever.
6. put in a loaf pan
7. Bake about 45 min ( I bake or 50-55)
8. cool in pan 10 m.
9. cool on rack for 10 min.
10. congratulate self on a well made bread and drink another beer.

VA shooting

My mom called me this evening to see if I was alright. Neither of us know anyone at VA Tech, what she was calling about was to see if I was scared of my students. If I had anyone in my classes who I thought might be violent/crazy/suicidal. Was I at risk to be shot by a student or fellow grad?

At first, I sort of blew off the question. Of course I'm not at risk. I go to Santa Cruz! Bannan slugs... hippies... we're a pretty chill group. We're dedicated to building a safe community and we try to tackle issues of on campus violence and sexual assault. I may be offered a 40 oz by a student* or if I'll make it out to the Porter meadow on Friday afternoon, but I can possibly imagine a student shooting me or my class.

There were warning signs, I told her. His profs were cued to disturbing behavior and he had been sent for mental health treatment.

"So what would you do if you had a student who raised red flags for you? How would you protect yourself? What if it was a fellow graduate student?"

And I was stumped. Being afraid of my students is not the answer (nor anything I feel). I certainly haven't seen any work produced for me or attitude problems in my cass that would raise alarm bells. Although my cell phones must be off rule seems more justified now. I encourage my students to talk to me when they are overwhelmed, to let me know I will work with them. I check in with the ones I know, and the ones I don't know as well but look a little like death warmed over - either physically or mentally.

But the question still remains: what do I do if I have a student who has sent signs that they may do harm to themselves of others? What is the procedure? Do I talk to the student first? The supervising professor? How do I follow up on how the admin might be dealing with the situation? What do you do when you know someone who desperately needs help but there's nothing that it seems you can do to help them get it?

How do we deal with suicidal undergrads? How do we deal with suicidal grads?

College is a stressful time. In addition to the pressures of school, being away from home, or being at home, life, sex, drugs, and rock and roll, the early 20s are a time when certain mental problems emerge. I had an acquaintence who attended the Engineering school north of my campus who had a mental breakdown while in college. He walked into someone's home, sat down at their kitchen table and simply refused to leave. He was checked into a hospital for in-patient care for an extended epriod of time, and, frankly, that was just the episode we knew about.

There's been a lot of talk on campus about the mental well-being of the student body and concers regarding the psychological health of the campus. Much of this was in wake of our chancellor's suicide, but I can only image the cries will get stronger after this week's shooting.

I guess what I want to know is what are we going to do about it? What should we do? and What can we do?


*this actually happened to me last quarter.

In!

I turned in my MA essay/thesis today!
And what do I get as a reward?
250 more pages on nationalism and notes and a reaction paper to type up!
Yay! I feel like a living PhD comic.
I *love* being a graduate student.

On another good note, I got to listen to 2 of my favorite professors lecture today on their favourite subjects: Toqueville and Genocide. So much to aspire to.

On a bad note: When I showed up to watch Peter the first thing he said was: shouldn't you be *makes typing motions with hands* and smiled.

Did I mention that graduate school is the most fun you'll have EVAR!!!11!!!

Seriously though, glad the paper is in, I feel good about it, and now, back to work.

Spike

When Luke and I moved in together in the spring of 2002, my mother offered to buy us a house warming gift. Instead of a bath mat or towels, Luke and I decided to bring home our first pet. The three of us went to Bird Crazy, the queer friendly, owned, and operated speciality bird store that most of my families feathered friends have come from. They sell only the birds they breed and help to rescue abandoned and no-longer-desired pets. After playing in the store for a good long while we decided on the bird for us: a baby spoon-fed cinnamon cockatiel.

I've lived with birds (and cats) for almost my whole life. For those who have never been exposed to birds, they are friendly, intelligent, quirky little creatures who really develop distinct personalities. We got a bird we figured was probably a male (it's hard to tell by coloring until they've hit puberty) and after three days, settled on "Spike" for his name (Turbo and Killer were also in the running). However, much like Dude (the grey cockatiel who we were sure was a male - until she started laying eggs) and Fred (my father's very confused bisexual female cockatoo), we realized within a couple of months that our baby boy bird was actually a baby girl bird. The major difference in tiels is that the males make much more noise and are more easily able to mimic sounds, so having a quiet female actually worked much better for apt living.

Spike was a picky bird. She wasn't nearly as adventurous with food as my other tiels, but she adored peas and popcorn. On the whole she preferred men to women, loved chewing on glasses, and found the true love of her life in Luke. She rarely screeched, frequently cuddled, and was never happier than when she was able to liberate a tension-held ball from someone's piercing.

Spike journeyed with us from San Diego to Glendale and Pasadena. In our big move to Santa Cruz we decided to leave her temporarily with my father and his wife, while we adjusted to grad school and new schedules. We were trying to figure out a time this summer when we could drive down to San Diego and bring her home to Santa Cruz, when I got the call from my father that they found her ill in the cage this morning. She passed while they were on the phone with the vet.

I'm more upset about Spike dying than I thought I would be. By now, we've all had pets and we've all had pets die on us - even if it's just the godlfish you won at the local fair. But Spike was Luke's and my first pet together. Luke never lived with birds and since having one in our home he's become a real bird lover. She was very much a part of our family - a very missed part that we were hoping to bring back home. She died fairly young for a tiel, I just hope she had a good life and knew how much she was loved.

Wonder Jews Uni.... oh, man, that hurt...

I fucked up my left wrist. It's been weak since an overanxious knitting rampage back in the fall of '05, and I did something to it while typing like a mad woman in the last week and now I can barely type this. As a historian who takes all of her notes on her laptop, not being able to type is like walking by a bakery the morning you started your diet. Or for my lactose troubled readers, going to a cheese fondue party...

enough, I need to stop. I keep going and it just hurts. Kungfu and Knotty may get typed notes this week.

Between Tweak and myself, we win for totally stupid injuries.

Argh.

What I did over Spring Break

We went to see the Weaners at Ano Nuevo (almost 1,000)!



Visited the snow leopards at the San Francisco Zoo


Took my in-laws to San Francisco


Planted our garden (3 tomato, 6 jalepeno, 6 green pepper, 6 peas, shallots, cilantro, and basil)


And hiked 10 miles round trip to see beautiful waterfall.