The Great Mashed Potato Battles

One of the more ambitious uses I have tried to put my kitchen to this year is to make mashed potatoes, such as I am accustomed to eating with most meals at home. To many people, this may not seem at all ambitious or difficult. Many people also seem to have a great deal more basic practical skills and common sense than I do. I don't know where they acquire these things. For me, each round of mashed potato making brings with it its own set of challenges and victories. In general, I like to think that, with each successive batch, I make progress toward my ultimate goal of conquering the potato. The latest battle, however, represented a major setback. It began with my ill-advised selection of Gigantospud, the King of Potatoes. Gigantospud did not fit in the width of my hand, impairing my recently improved peeling skills.

(Unrelated interjection: It is 7:30 in the evening, and Emily is not here. Why is her alarm clock going off? Her alarm clock does a lot of things I don't understand. She also didn't show up for our three person Bible Study that she leads. I should make sure she isn't dead...)

Anyway, Gigantospud's skin was also strangely tough and hard to cut through. There was one particularly tough point that I couldn't get past, but I kept trying. And I failed. Gigantospud broke the potato peeler! The blade bent in half, and when I tried to bend it back, it popped out altogether. I persevered with a knife, but my knife peeling skills are nowhere near as advanced. I am happy to report that no blood was shed in the process. The cooking process was fairly successful. The biggest failure, however, was the mashing process. I have learned from experience not to mix in the coated pan unless I want to eat little pieces of pan coating, so I went to put the potatoes in a bowl. But the big bowl was dirty, and Gigantospud was a bit much for the small bowl. But I went with the small bowl anyway and I got out the mixer and mixed away. Do I need to explain the rest of the story? I'm sure you can see the mashed potatoes on the wall. Don't despair, however. One of my biggest problems in previous potato battles has been adding the right amount of ingredients such as milk, butter, and salt, but, I was actually unusually successful in this regard. Even despite a slightly odd smell coming from the milk bottle, the potatoes that actually got mashed tasted almost just right. You win some, you lose some.
- posted by Darcey @ 7:51 PM

 
Five minutes later, even more self-absorbed ramblings!

(read post below first, and then ignore this one if you are no longer interested in my fall schedule.) I had a thought! What if I took the seminar instead of my marketing classes? I don't think I have to have a major, and I bet that class would be more interesting than a marketing class. I think this idea has possibilities and discussing it might even make my advising appointment worthwhile. That's all.
- posted by Darcey @ 10:37 PM

 
My Extensive Sports Knowledge

I filled out a basketball bracket on Yahoo last week, not for any particular pool, just because it was there. I just checked it, and I am ranked in the 99th percentile overall. There are a lot of people on Yahoo, though, so a couple thousand people are ahead of me. But my Atlanta bracket is perfect so far. This is because I randomly decided to become a Xavier fan. Go, Xavier! Well, actually, I am now finished being a Xavier fan, and they have to lose the next game to Duke, who first has to win the game they are playing right now. So by the time I post this, I will probably have jinxed (Is that how you spell that? I don't think I've ever written it before. It looks weird.) myself, and my Atlanta bracket will no longer be perfect. And anyway, I think my final four stuff will be all messed up, but I don't really care about that, because it's just all the good teams. The interesting stuff is the first rounds with all the schools you've never heard of. So those are my thoughts on basketball.

I had help session this morning. There was thunder. I hear the power was out. So even if people wanted to come, they probably couldn't, and so they didn't. Surprise. But, I am now a part of the Wash U tour! The tours walk into the b-school and stop outside the first classroom they come to and explain how there are no classes on Friday so the room will be empty, and then they open the door and find...me! Sometimes they stay and point out exciting features like the computer hook-ups, but sometimes they leave like they are interrupting my important business of sitting in a big room by myself playing on the computer. Speaking of which, today I was using some of this time to read Ryan's blog, and then I started clicking on the blogs that she has links to, including people I really don't know, and one of them killed my Internet. I don't remember whose it was because it wouldn't load because it wouldn't stop telling me about this stupid error that I had to restart to get rid of and the Internet still wouldn't come back. So Ryan should tell her friends to fix that. Or maybe it was just the computer I was using. Ryan should tell the computer to fix that.

Onto more fascinating stories about my fall registration. I got this email: "I am sure that you are aware that the Olin School offers an Honors Seminar for outstanding undergraduate students, to be taken during their senior year. I am delighted to inform you that you have been nominated by members of the faculty to participate in the Honors Seminar during the 2004-2005 year, and that the Honors Committee has accepted this nomination. Students who complete both semesters of the Honors Seminar will receive a special honors designation upon graduation from the Olin School. Additionally, students receiving the honors designation must complete a total of 126 credits of academic work, including the two semesters of the Honors Seminar (Management 490 and 491). Professor Nicholas Dopuch, who is the Hubert C. and Dorothy R. Moog Professor of Accounting in the Olin School, will direct the Honors Seminar. In addition to Professor Dopuch, a number of other members of the School's faculty will participate in the program through the two semesters of the Seminar. As a result, the Honors Seminar will be very inter-disciplinary in character, which promises to be very exciting.
The Honors Seminar is a very special experience for those students who participate in it, and is a distinctive feature of the Olin School's curriculum. I know that you have much to contribute to the Honors Seminar, and hope very much that you will accept this invitation. To confirm your acceptance, please contact Konnie Henning at 5-5775 or by e-mail at henning@wustl.edu as soon as possible, but not later than Friday, April 9th. "

Several comments on this: First, that's all well and good and nice. Apparently, one of the faculty even knows my name. I really don't know who that may be. But second, the author of this email is misled by being "sure that I was aware" of this program. Never heard of it. Third, there's a good thirty or forty classes I'd like to take before I take an extra b-school class. I was thinking I'd take six classes next semester, not including this one. Fourth, I do not consider several b-school professors to constitute a "very inter-disciplinary" or "very exciting" or "very special" experience. Fifth, this class is two hours long on Tuesdays and right after my other b-school class, on the same day as my writing class. This schedule would force me to shoot myself in the head every Tuesday. Well, probably just the first Tuesday. Once would probably be enough as far as shooting yourself in the head goes. But, in conclusion, I'm really not as bitter toward the b-school as I am making myself sound. A b-school education is high-quality and useful and whatnot, and that honors thing would probably be a good thing (but then again, would anyone really care?). There's just a lot of other stuff I think is interesting and there's only a year left.

Long post. That basketball game probably is over now.


- posted by Darcey @ 10:26 PM

 
Adviser = Grrr

I have been scheduling my advising appointment for fall registration. It is with the third different person in three semesters. The new guy only works as an adviser two and a half days a week, so this makes scheduling difficult. I emailed and said after 4 worked best for me, so naturally he emailed back and said 9 am. This has made me realize how different my schedule has become this semester from that of the normal outside world. To be there at 9 am literally requires me to wake up at what has become the middle of the night for me. And this is so I can sit in an office for fifteen minutes being asked for the third time to rank my time management skills on a scale of 1 to 5 and then listen to very deep and personalized course suggestions based on whatever numbers I pull out of the air. And then I will tell him the classes that I actually want to take, and he will say "Wait, what exactly are you studying? Are you sure you are in the business school?" and then I will sit and stare at my fingernails while he checks off that I am indeed meeting all my requirements, a fact which I already know and that he doesn't care in the slighest about, and then I will leave. And no one will be better off, but I will be disoriented by the morning light and in need of a nap.

This is my plan to confuse my adviser with:
-Consumer Behavior
-Exposition (because the literature class that I would like to take to finish my writing minor, which has been offered every semester for the past ten years, stopped being offered last semester when I first wanted to take it)
-CS 530, Database Management - if I can take it pass/fail, which I will have to check with a different adviser who actually has information that would be of use to me
-Spanish or German through U College - I can't decide which. Spanish only meets once a week and would be "useful." But Spanish has always seemed boring to me. Without having studied Spanish, I already know how to say things like "Hola. Uno, dos, tres. Gracias, amigo. Adios." I can't do this in German.
-One or two of the following:
Intro to Russian Civilization (if a class says "open to freshmen," that doesn't mean only freshmen, does it? If it meant only, it would say only.)
Intro to Islamic Civilization
History/Literature of Early-Modern England
Or any other elective I get in the mood to take when I register. Just this afternoon I was going to take a poli-sci class, and then decided on Greek mythology, and then decided on neither of them. I wish I could take all of these classes for about a week, instead of having to take one of them for a whole semester until I'm so sick of it I amuse myself by picking out subjects to get sick of next semester. But there's only two more semesters to go. Weird.
- posted by Darcey @ 10:41 PM

 
The Return of the Comment

Apparently, Blogspeak, the people who powered my comments, died sometime in January. Oops. These other people, Halospeak, claim that they imported my account and that I should be able to transfer my old comments to their system. On their home page there is a link that says Blogspeak users, click here for more information. When you click there, it talks about how Blogspeak died and then tells you to go to the home page for more information. After a few cycles of this, you may notice that these instructions are not very productive. So I don't know where the old comments are, but here is the ability to make new comments.

Let's see, what thought-provoking topic shall I now discuss that will generate the most use from my new comments? How about the stunning tale of my throroughly mediocre day? All right, if you insist. I woke up at noon and took a cold shower, because Emily had recently taken a shower as well. Emily's shower was fairly short, but nonetheless, the shower's attention span is just not very long, and by the time I arrived, it had lost interest in the whole heating process. Then I went to meet my marketing group, and we wrote a survey. It wasn't too painful of a group meeting. Then I came home and ate lunch. I ate a banana, even though the bananas are getting kind of mushy. Then I worked on my CS lab. It wasn't too painful of a CS lab either. Then I baked a chicken nugget casserole, a highly sophisticated recipe I recently discovered when looking for ways to challenge my culinary expertise. Then I graded some quizzes, and they were multiple choice, and once again, there was a lack of pain. And one person signed their name "Jack Handy" and got an 8.5/10, and this intrigued me. Who would have access to a quiz that wouldn't want to use their real name but knew enough about the class to get an 8.5? And I tried to watch basketball, but there is a pathetic lack of teams from Indiana, so there was no game to care about. And then I applied for some internships for the summer. Indiana InternNet is really a very nice site. If anyone would like a summer internship in Indiana, you should go there and apply, as long you don't want the internships that I apply for. And then I found new comments, and here I am. After all this excitement, the comments should practically write themselves!
- posted by Darcey @ 12:19 AM

 
Where have my comments gone? Have they been gone long? No one can answer me, because the comments have gone away.
- posted by Darcey @ 2:13 PM

 
Grades are Silly Things

In college, it has surprised me to learn how little grades can reflect your knowledge of a subject and how frequently mine seem to be backwards of where they should be. For instance, I have recently gotten several midterms back. On my CS test, in a class where on a day to day basis I have little to no concept of anything going on around me, where before the test I was genuinely upset by my inability to understand things the way computer geeks do, I got nearly a perfect. Then there was my marketing research exam. This is a business school class. There is nothing in the material which requires the slightest bit of mental strain to understand. And so I get a seventy something. While I really, really don't want to be one of the kids who whine over every little point they got taken off to the professor, I seem to be developing a habit of seeing the merit of my answers very differently than the people who grade marketing classes, which is bad since this is now my major. So I asked the professor to regrade it, though, unlike most b-school professors, he has made no mention of being at all open to doing so.

The class I TA for also has had their first midterm, so I am now learning how silly grades are from the other side. You want to be fair to each person, and give each individual answer the grade it deserves, but this is not as simple as it seems. You have to be consistent from one person to the next, and you have to grade it the same as the other graders. So how can you come up with a complex grading system that is fair to each individual answer when it takes you three rounds of emails to agree on whether a certain part of the problem is worth a point or half a point? So now I have a guy complaining to me about the exact sort of thing I'm complaining to my marketing research professor about, and I think he's right, but I probably won't be able to do a thing about it. He has been doing very well in the class and was probably expecting a much higher score than he got, but now I will get to help teach him what I have learned about how grades don't mean anything at all about what you know. It's lessons like these that are what college is for.
- posted by Darcey @ 12:21 AM

 
Complaining About St. Louis Traffic From Indianapolis

I got an email today saying pedestrians are no longer allowed to cross Skinker at Forest Park, and instead must walk down to Lindell. A chain link fence has been installed along this portion of the road. This fence is for our "safety," and certainly not simply to enforce their new plan to send us several minutes out of our way. I would like to emphasize that interfering with pedestrian traffic is different than interfering with cars. In a car, these changes inconvenience you for approximately 30 seconds, if at all, but small changes in distance for a car take more time to walk, which requires being out in usually unpleasant weather conditions and physical effort. But, hey, it's all so they can open up a nice, pretty Metrolink stop the second I'm gone! And four days a week the first place I go is Lopata, and there is no reason for me to walk all the way to Brookings and then double back, and certainly no reason to walk straight down until I'm at a ninety degree angle with Brookings instead of cutting across the parking lot. But I suppose they've been screwing with people's ability to walk in the parking lot from the Forty all year, and nobody even gets a Metrolink stop out of that. So now it's my turn. And maybe I can find some way to cut through the neighborhoods on the other side Skinker, assuming they'll let me cross before I get to Forest Park. So now I will stop whining.

So, in local news, I've been watching movies and going out to lunch with my mommy. Today was my doctor's appointment day. I had three of them, the regular doctor, the eye doctor, and the dentist!
- posted by Darcey @ 4:34 PM

 
I'm older than I look

In fact, according to the mail today, Smithsonian magazine says I qualify for a senior discount! Few people have my name and address here to begin with, so I don't know how they managed to get that information but also somehow get the impression that I was a senior. Is this some sort of weird advertising trick? It seems people that are less far away from actually qualifying for a senior discount would find it insulting to receive such an ad. But I just found it amusing.
- posted by Darcey @ 4:41 PM