Is it wrong to make my own birthday cake?
I think I have replaced schoolwork with baking. In college I used to fill my “free” time with studying and other academic activities. Suddenly free from tests and homework I find myself with hours of open evening time, which are now filled with flour, yeast, sugar, and teetering piles of dirty dishes. I have stopped buying bread from the grocery store ($6 for a loaf of sandwich bread is absurd anyways) and my boss likes having cookies at work so much that he provides flour and butter. Which brings me back to the topic of birthday pastry. I make other people cakes, my birthday is in a few days, and I want a pumpkin pie. So, is it weird to bring my own birthday pie to work? I have already made it, so I guess it would be even odder to make my own birthday pie and then hide it (Pie? What pie? Oh, you mean the one the whole house now smells like…. Right, that pie). I think that settles it, I will have to share my pie, but don’t expect me to sing to myself!
I also made challah, which somehow morphed into challah-zilla in the oven. Not that that is really a problem; I like making bread that covers more surface area than many north eastern states.
On an unrelated tangent I present a short narrative titled “My field partner, GI Joe”:
Joe and I do a lot of field work together. When we go out ant-mapping he always leads. The leader finds the gps points and lays bait cards for the ants. It is generally the harder job, but also more fun (in a machete wielding ,jungle trail blazing, sort of way). I am usually stuck as the follower when I partner with Joe. This means I don’t have to create a trail, but rather have to exactly follow the one my partner laid an hour before.
On Monday Joe and I were assigned to a transect that can be technically described as heavily vegetated. While I settled down for an hour long nap Joe pulled out the machete and dove into the brush. A half hour later I heard him yell at me, sharing the obvious fact that he had made it less than 60 meters into the veg. At 45 minutes it was my turn to dive into the 6 foot tall wall of spiky plant life. Joe’s already stomped and chopped it down a bit, so it’s definitely easier for me…. but…. Joe has an annoying habit of walking straight through brambles. He wears heavy rain pants even when it’s sunny so that he can do this, laying trails of flagging through swaths of saber toothed blackberry vines. My lightweight rain pants would be instantly shredded by these plants, and none of my field pants offer much protection against this evil greenery. Joe marches through the brambles, invincible, and then I follow on tiptoes, wincing and cussing my whole way through.
The leader lays flagging so that the follower can follow it to the bait stations. Good flagging courtesy implies that flagging should be tied somewhere obvious on the path to be followed, preferably at eye level. While wallowing through dense stands of Pukiawe, in which movement is akin to swimming through mattress springs, the flagging suddenly disappears. Dammit Joe!!! While searching the nearby brush for neon blue plastic I happen to glance down at my feet. There’s the flagging tape, tied six inches off the ground. Dammit Joe!!! He got sick of wading through the brush and decided to crawl under it instead. The flagging was perfectly at eye level, assuming the follower was lying on the ground under the bushes. Of course, I had no choice but to follow (one bait station was actually set in the middle of all this) and had ample opportunity to practice my army crawl over the next several hours. I will crawl under Pukiawe, but when the flagging tape disappeared under a bramble, Dammit Joe !!! (When question later, he claimed the bramble was too big to just walk through … what is wrong with going around obstacles?!?). After 6 hours of following GI Joe through Joe’s Boot Camp I emerged out onto the road. During the transect each bramble thorn drawing blood added new words to the lengthening list of things I was going to call Joe when I next saw him. With a final crash I landed back on the road and there he was, sitting in the car. I guess that would have been the time to fling some of those words I had been rolling around in my mouth for the last 5 hours, but that would have taken way more energy then I wanted to expend.
Moral of the story: Get more than 3 hours of sleep on work days or fieldwork sucks!