On My Way Home...

I had a lovely trip back to my Alma Mater. I am so incredibly proud of the friends of mine who finished their theses this semester. It was a lovely and wonderful weekend.

I am resuming my teaching tomorrow. It's a new class so there will be new fabulous moments and challenges. I am excited to continue working on my teaching skills because those communication skills are vastly important for every part of my life, and the ability to impart knowledge will come in handy in graduate school and in my life as a professor.

A Bacchic Celebration

Today, I am going to see a couple of professors, and then there is the gigantic bonfire celebration of the culmination of theses. It should be fabulous!

Updates: Kindle and Free Books

I wrote two blogposts of the last few weeks which I feel are in need of updating: A Bibliophile's Review of the Kindle DX and Problems With Free Books. (I also recently updated the Blog on the Minoan Octopus Jar.)

Kindle for Cooks

One of the things that I did not mention in my original review is my use of the kindle for cooking. I use it in two ways. One is to download and put recipes on my kindle and stand it up on my counter-top. This only works, obviously if one downloads a cookbook or creates a PDF or MOBI document. I used a particular case, a platform kindle case, that allowed me to stand the kindle upright so that I could read the recipes easily. The other way that I used the kindle was to have it read to me while I was cooking. I downloaded a free version of The History of the Peloponnesian War and had the Kindle read to me while I was cooking so that I did not waste time [1]. It was pretty helpful, except for the pronunciation of the Greek names. For example, Themistocles (the-mist-oo-cleez) was pronounced (the-mis-do-cls). Although the humanoid voices can be kind of annoying, it gets the information across and entertainment can be found by poking fun at it.

As a random technological sidenote, I have had my phone for 6 years and it is finally beginning to break down (people cannot hear me when I answer the phone and I have to shout, etc). Does anyone have a good recommendation?

A Clarification and More Amazing Free Books

I realized that I never explained the meaning of the title "The Problems of Free Books." The idea is that Google Books provides some downloadable free books as well as providing essentially an enormous, no-membership-required digital library that allows the reader to browse through editions of books online for the purposes of research, as well as for the ability to preview books online. For any other book, there is the difficulty of finding the book in the first place, making sure that it is the correct edition, etc. Speaking of free ebooks, there is another Amazing Site (referred to me by Propertius II) that has a bunch of academic books marked "public" which can be read online.

Endnotes

1. At the time when I was doing this, I was taking a class on Thucydides: Book 1 in Greek, I was attempting to read the rest of Thucydies' History of the Peloponnesian War for context. Usually I would read the beautiful Landmark Edition, which was a wonderful gift from my parents, but I ended up just trying to breeze through the kindle edition, and look at the Landmark for reference.

Proud Parent of Two Sourdough Starters

I am now the proud parent of two sourdough starters:

One is twelve hours older than the other. I was a little apprehensive when i fed it for the first time last night, because the instructions on breadcetera (1) told me throw some out. However, the starter has doubled the size that it was before I tossed some of it out. Crazy.

This was last night

This was this morning!

Anyway, I'm SUPER excited. I cannot wait to try making some sourdough in a week. The real challenge will be the sourdough pizza dough for Cerinthus. He liked the pizza dough last night so much (even though it was underdone) because it was crisp on the bottom and fluffy that I cannot wait to try the recipe on breadcetera (2). Unfortunately, however, I like really thin pizza crust. Once I have perfected the thicker crust maybe we'll alternate between making thin and thick.

On a different note, my thesis draft is due tomorrow at noon. I still have a lot of work to do on it, although I am certainly getting to the place I want to be with it (the draft is around 65 pages and all three chapters appear-- although no introduction and conclusion as of yet).

The Bread of Life

I have not posted in a while. The reason is, I've been getting a bit depressed.

Canada was great-- I got an award for being the runner up (there called "honorable mention") in the best overall presentation at the conference and I got a little bit of valuable feedback. However, when I got back to school, there was a huge amount of work that had piled up. It was hard. Plus, I began to have real problems sleeping. I thought at first it was the change in time zone, but now I'm not sure what it was. The sleep problems lasted for over a month.

During that month or so, I began to go crazier and crazier. Mood swings, overeating to stay awake, overeating because I was starving all the time, no energy to exercise, the desire to stay in bed all the time. I was beginning to feel like I was stuck in sophomore year.

Even worse, two of my friends died, as did another vague acquaintance from my class. The closest of the friends, whom I shall call Iris because of her bright personality and lightness of spirit (1), ran the community service project that I work for and was the shining light that made it happen and the glue that held it together. I miss her terribly. This also caused a rupture in my world.

In the last week, I have tried to get myself back on track. I'm still overeating a little bit, but I've significantly curbed it. The night before last I finally got some decent sleep, as I did last night. My mood swings are a little better. I've started running again-- there's a half marathon I like the sound of happening in September and I'm hoping to run it! I went to Iris's memorial yesterday. The school community service coordinator asked me to say a few words, since I was the one on the project of whom Iris spoke most highly. So I did. They were short, and not as personal as I would have liked them to be, but I was commended by quite a few people for them, which was nice to hear. I want to honor her memory.

However, the real thing that seems to be saving me is bread. I have started making my own bread. I know-- this sounds like a recipe for disaster, espeically because of my problems with overeating. However, the one time I stayed up late doing work without overeating was because I was making bread. I had to stay awake because the bread needed to rise, be kneaded, bake, etc. In between, I worked on my thesis. It was pretty awesome. At the end, I had two mini loaves of bread, one completed thesis chapter and the beginnings of another. Yay me.

I started off with two different recipes. The first was Original 100% Whole Wheat Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day (2). I have to admit, I don't have any white whole wheat flour, so I just used a half-and-half mixture of white and whole wheat. This bread was ok, but not great. It was a little like normal homemade bread-- i.e. slightly too dense. It also didn't rise very much and turned out kind of pancake like-- although it rose outward a lot. I'm going to try with the other half batch of this that I have in the refrigerator and see if I can get it to turn out any better. I did not take pictures of it, sadly, having been up most of the night and very strung out, but I will take pictures of the second batch. The first batch had begun to stale a bit, so I turned it into croutons last night. They're pretty good. I don't make much salad because I'm so ridiculously picky about the lettuce, so I am going to send it to my mother, who makes salads a lot.

The second was Whole Wheat Artisan Bread (3). It turned out quite well, although the loaf spread a bit. The best thing about this bread was that when Cerinthus tried it in the morning, he liked it! Although, he did say he thought it tasted like good sandwich bread rather than good artisan bread, which, in reality, is probably true. The reason that Cerinthus' approval is such a victory is that he discouraged me from baking bread in the first place because he is convinced that only commercial bakeries can bake the bread he likes because the bread his mother and sister made when he was a kid always turned out to be really heavy. However, although this bread looked a little bit hockey-puck like, it turned out really well.



The inside (or I think the bread-making term is the "crumb") looks like this:


Close up:



Anyway, I originally thought the shape of the bread was due to not having a loaf pan, but later I found the reason for this spreading was inadequate gluten development (4).

Bread has given me a reason to be excited about research and thesis. I have something to look forward to. Although Cerinthus is a light and a joy in my life, he too is less active and bright recently from all of the work he has to endure. But bread is life, and as long as I don't over indulge (either by giving it away or sending it off as croutons) I get to have the joy of baking bread.

Endnotes:

1. Iris, Greek Goddess of the rainbow and messenger of the gods. See http://www.theoi.com/Pontios/Iris.html
2. For recipe, see http://www.kitchenstewardship.com/2010/02/24/whole-wheat-artisan-bread-in-5-minutes-a-day-reviewand-soaked/
   
3. For recipe, see http://turmericnspice.blogspot.com/2010/02/whole-wheat-artisan-bread.html
4. Comment 26, http://www.breadcetera.com/?p=155#comment-2098

The Beginning of Classes

I was so concerned with the conference that I have not blogged at all about the beginning of classes. My classes are fascinating.

The only one I don't like so far is my Latin class on the civil war in Rome, reading Caesar and Lucan. The professor is a wonderful young woman with a sly sense of humor (and no sense of fashion) and a cheerfulness not often associated with a military historian. However, the subject matter is just not my usual fare, sadly, and I'm having trouble getting into it.

I'm also taking two political science courses. The first is called Political Theory and Empire. I'm taking it for a half credit because otherwise I would have way too much work, between thesis and my other classes. The class is great. It's being taught by a smart and spunky female professor whose specialty involves looking at the contradictions between the imperial/paternalistic politics of (often liberal) political philosophers and their grand theories of government. The class is small, only seven people, and the discussions are lively. My favorite person in it is a history major (who happens to be dating a friend of mine) and who provides incisive commentary alongside an incredible sense of style that might have been more appropriate in some bygone era (although her clothing is fairly awesome in the present, it certainly has an anachronistic quality to it). The class is so fabulous that we have gotten out up to half an hour late because the discussions were so passionate and interesting.

My final class (other than thesis) is a political science course designed as a "research seminar," or, at least that is what my professor calls it. The class, called "What is Freedom?" is meant to culminate in a term paper that answers that question by discussing a particular point of view on freedom of some theorist. I am, obviously, going to write my term paper on Plato. However, the course is also designed around making sure that we cover a number of different critical approaches to freedom and discuss and debate them in class. However, we are also required to do a lot of outside reading as "backgroung" not technically on the syllabus, which is kind of problematic because it means that the class takes up much more time than a normal class. The professor is great-- I'm partially taking her class in the hope that she will write me a graduate school recommendation when the time comes.

The Rules of Engagement

I never intended to start blogging. Outside it's below freezing. I've got a cold. It's finals week and I have two papers to finish as well as two finals exams. Most importantly, I have written about 25 pages of an undergraduate thesis on Plato's critique of tragedy in the Laws and the Republic, which has to be complete at a grand total of 60-80 pages by April 30th, 2010. The health and counseling center says that thesising seniors need some balance in their lives. I agree. So I started a blog.

The project is simple: stay sane while writing a senior thesis. The rules are as follows:

1. No mention of my thesis or thesis topic except in an entry on the date of an actual thesis deadline.
2. Minimal discussion of work from classes other than my thesis.
3. Discussion of those things I do not get to creatively or analytically examine in my everyday life due to the general chaos of school, job, etc.
4. Entries at least once a week to detail my progress in staying sane.
   

I do not want to be a stressed out ball of frenetic energy. I want to enjoy my life, especially given that this is my last year in college. Ultimately, I think that my thesis will benefit from my decreased stress level.

Thus, the implementation of the rules begins...