Greetings!

It turns out I don’t write here much anymore. I will try to fix this, but even so I feel like it’s a bit silly to maintain my own domain name.

Hence I’ve moved everything over here to a free WordPress account. It’s less customizable and doesn’t come with all the storage space, but it’s OK for my small purposes. So far I’ve moved over all the entries and comments (which was easy), but barely any pictures (because I actually have to do those one by one and I’m lazy). So the old entries are less exciting, but I’ll fix that.

New stuff will go there from now on. So if you have me on your Google Reader or something, you should switch. Disclaimer: I have no idea how to do that, or if RSS even works with the new site.

(Photo taken one year ago.)

My family’s cat Shadow died peacefully at home on the night of December 30. He was approximately 15.5 years old. In recent months he had become incredibly thin, so that in the end he hardly resembled the giant cat in the photo above. I don’t have any more recent photos, though.

Shadow was a stray kitten in my neighborhood when I was in third grade. My mom found she liked him (possibly because of his interesting physical characteristics — he had thumbs but only an inch-long tail) and put out a heating pad in the garage for him to lie on in the winter. In February of 1995 we adopted him and he lived as an indoor/outdoor cat for the next ten years. In about 2005 he was chased into a neighborhood pond by evil, barking dogs and, after my mom rescued him, he didn’t mind being confined to the indoors anymore.

I named him. I was very creative in my youth!

He was aging extremely well (see the photo, age 14.5 or so) until last summer, when he began to lose weight. Last fall, after he turned fifteen, he lost his appetite and began to waste away. He became extremely cuddly (or at least as cuddly as an emaciated cat can be) in his last weeks, though, sitting on any lap he could find. This was quite charming, for he always resisted such contact before.

I visited my family’s house from December 22-29, so I was able to see Shadow one last time before he died. He was a very nice cat and I am glad he had a long and comfortable life with us.

Happy Birthday to my mom today!

Thanksgiving was great. The turkey was quite delicious; I enjoyed it without reservation, which is unusual for me. Usually when I eat meat I find it to be interesting and moderately good, but mostly just weird. Except for good salmon — I enjoy that completely. The turkey was like that too. I ended up eating turkey almost every day for six days, which is how long it took to get rid of the leftovers. But since then I have merely focused on consuming as many vegetables and apples per day as possible, in order that I use up the contents of one farm share box before getting another the next week.

Recently Toby and I went to a relatively fancy restaurant in Greenlake called Nell’s; Seattle does a Restaurant Week-esque thing that lasts for a month, twice a year, where many nice establishments offer low-priced prix fixe dinners and even cheaper lunches. We opted for dinner, and obtained a three-course meal.

For the first course, I chose a potato-leek soup. Toby got duck liver terrine, which he claims was good. I considered trying it, but didn’t know where Nell’s got their meat. My soup was quite delicious.

For the main course I chose a beet risotto, which continues my practice of always ordering risotto at relatively fancy restaurants. (I think this is the fourth time it has happened.) It was, as you’d except, a brilliant shade of fuchsia. It was tasty, despite its hilarious appearance. It also was completely loaded with Parmesan cheese (whence its tastiness). Toby’s main course was mackerel, which I did try. It was extremely fishy, of course. I didn’t really like it, but I guess I’m not completely used to fish yet. This particular serving of mackerel was wonderfully browned and crispy on the edges, so it was texturally great at least.

Dessert was good: I chose the pear cobbler with pear sorbet, and Toby got some sort of chocolate cake (I forget what distinguished it from other chocolate cakes) with brandy ice cream. The sorbet and ice cream were completely fantastic. We swapped desserts halfway through, because who wants to eat only one type of dessert?

With no warning the temperatures dropped below freezing here in Seattle, so that the overnight lows are now around 20° and in the day it only gets to 30° or so! I know this isn’t much by Midwestern standards, but a body gets comparatively wimpy after one Pacific Northwest winter. I find it cold indeed! I’ve continued to bike to school, though, because it’s still better than the bus in every way. I bundle up and don’t mind the cold while I’m pedaling, except for my poor thumbs. They felt as if they would freeze off this morning; they are separated from my fingers when I hold the handlebars and they get no warmth!

Today I had a spectacular trip to the market. We picked up our Thanksgiving turkey (10.3 lb) from Stokesberry Sustainable Farms, a wonderful vendor of poultry and eggs. It is a heritage breed, though I forgot which even though I made sure to ask today. Oh well. Anyway, I am quite excited for the meal: there will be a large crowd and it will be a potluck, so the selection will be excellent.

We got the best box of food this week for our CSA. There was twice as much food as usual in it, so that we would have maximal selection for Thanksgiving. It contained a giant pile of beautiful vegetables, including a fennel bulb, several carrots, a large quantity of brussels sprouts, lots of purple potatoes, some kale (which I will eat with peanut sauce!), a bunch of parsley, a delicata squash, onions, and lots of apples that are apparently well-suited to pies. YUM.

Then I bought over twenty pears and a few Braeburn apples for eating. I felt almost as ridiculous as I did after a huge market trip in the summer, when I’d come away with baskets and bags full of peaches, nectarines, cherries and plums, but not quite. I made sure to stock up on the shockingly good rum pears and bosc pears from last week, and I found some red pears at another stand. I expect them to become impossibly creamy and sweet as they ripen.

I also splurged on .3 lb of delicious cheese from Estrella Family Creamery. This time I got Dominoes cheese, which is a mild yet flavorful cow milk cheese. This particular round was covered in lavender, and is great!

Three weeks of school left until I get a big break! But I get a little break this week, and that will help.

I’m sort of sad that there’s still an entire month of increasingly short days to go until December 21. At this point if I don’t leave school by 4:30 PM I bike home in the dark (safely; I have lights), and I never leave school by 4:30 PM. It also rains almost constantly, unlike last year, which means I get soaking wet twice a day. It feels like dinnertime at 3:30 departmental tea because of the dimming, cloudy sky, and I feel sleepy by 8 or 9! I don’t remember caring about the darkness last year. I don’t actually care all that much even now, but I was spoiled for all of last summer with incredible weather.

On the plus side, I had a great trip to the market last week. I bought a cup of hot apple cider from a stand selling several apple beverages; Toby and I got hard cider there once last year, and it was very good. They let me have a free refill of my hot cider when it ran out, and then they offered me a sample of a type of Asian pear they were selling. It was shockingly good and more flavorful than any Asian pear I’d tried before, and apparently it’s called a “rum pear”. I bought several, and also a bosc pear that looked good. It was, and in an interesting way: it had the flavor of a bosc pear, except stronger than usual, but it had the creamy texture of a slightly less juicy Bartlett. It was not remotely crunchy. Anyway, I will stock up on fruit from this stand again on Saturday, and probably enjoy another cup of hot cider. I must stuff myself with pears until the sad day when all that’s left is apples! Not that I dislike apples. But they’re less interesting than most fruits to me.

Toby and I keep getting leaves from our CSA, to the point that even Toby is a little leaved-out (and he loves leaves more than anyone else I know). I was leaved-out a long time ago. But it turns out there is a wonderful new way to prepare collard greens and, presumably, kale: sauteed with chiles and then covered in peanut sauce. The recipe comes from a Mennonite cookbook that Lisa gave me before I moved to Seattle. I no longer shrink in fear when confronted with tough, bitter winter greens!

All I want to do is make lasagna (with homemade egg pasta) and crème brûlée (with a vanilla bean). In December I will!

My birthday was yesterday, and it was pretty nice. Toby made me an almond-orange cake with cloudberry jam glaze. I made the jam in August 2008, from berries that grew in the landscaping at North Seattle Community College. We cut off a large piece for ourselves and then put out the cake for the daily departmental tea and snacks, and it was instantly devoured.

On Friday I celebrated my birthday, even though it was three days early. No one wants to go out on a Monday, after all. After attending a colloquium, I worked on algebraic geometry problems for a bit and then stopped by the Solstice cafe, where a popular happy hour transpires every week, to pick up anyone who wanted to come out to dinner with me. It turned out that everyone wanted to come, so fourteen of us lumbered up the Ave as it rained steadily. We arrived at Araya’s, a vegan Thai restaurant on 45 st., in a group of fourteen sopping wet people with no reservation on a Friday evening. Amazingly, they seated us instantly at a long table! They were very nice to us. We gave them a list of fourteen dishes and they brought them out as they became ready. This is undoubtedly the best way to eat in a large group: we shared them all randomly, passing the plates up and down the table until they became empty. All the food was excellent, though many of the noodle dishes were very similar. For future reference, the “tofu larb” was particularly great.

Someone let slip that it was my birthday (or close to it), so our server brought out a large bowl of black rice and coconut milk with a candle stuck in it. Then everyone sang to me. (I’m not sure what exactly was in the rice, or if it was just a strange kind of rice, but it was black and somewhat gelled, yet runny.) It was an excellent dessert; I know I made it sound kind of weird, and it was odd, but it was also tasty and pleasantly textured.

So I enthusiastically recommend Araya’s restaurant if you are in Seattle; it is delicious, it is not expensive, and the staff are very friendly.

Then we went to the College Inn pub. Several other mathematicians braved the rain to join us, and it was very nice!

“November festivities, part two” will be a raucous Thanksgiving at my Wallingford home.

I’ve been thinking lately about which classes to take and teach next quarter. Currently I’m leaning towards the following schedule: real analysis + two reading classes, one in algebraic groups (which are groups that also happen to be algebraic varieties) and the other solely for doing problems from chapters I and II of Hartshorne’s Algebraic Geometry book. I requested to teach the UW equivalents of Calculus II or III, but ranked Calc I highly too. That’s what I’m teaching this quarter, and I like it.

Last week Toby and Greg and I went to Tutta Bella Pizzeria, which is practically next door to my house but which I’ve never visited before. It turned out to be a weirdly gigantic restaurant with the vibe of a giant chain like Applebees or something, even though it is not in fact a giant chain. (I think that in fact it is a pair.) We ordered a margherita pizza and a pizza with, among other things, eggplant, goat cheese and capers. The margherita pizza was actually quite fantastic. The other one was too full of toppings, but tasty nonetheless. I appreciated the black, burned bubbles on the incredibly thin yet flexible crust. Would that I could make such a pizza in my weak, 500-degree oven!

Aside from that, I have been dining on potatoes, rice noodles and cabbage. How autumnal.

After having two minor, low-speed bicycle accidents in as many weeks, I have resolved to be more careful on wheels. In the first accident, I tried to bump up onto an exceedingly low curb on 45 st, but took it at far too small of an angle and toppled over onto the sidewalk. No one was injured. The second was a little worse, but still not bad. I coasted slowly towards a red light and, inexplicably, squeezed the left brake. Of course this launched me lightly over the handlebars, and I flopped ungracefully onto the road (again, on 45 st). This was nearly a week ago. I have a giant bruise on my right leg from where it collided with the handlebar, to remind me never to abruptly squeeze the front brake again!

At least I own the bike now (yay!), so I don’t need to feel too terrible about scratching it a bit. This will only make it look less desirable to a thief!

School has been pretty good. I spend my weekends solving measure theory problems from the real analysis textbook, and I spend my weeks attempting (and occasionally solving) problems from books by Hatcher and Hartshorne. I think I aspire to be an algebraic geometer.

I’ve come full circle in my diet since last autumn: back then I purchased a quarter pound of astoundingly good cheese per week at the market, to eat on homemade bread for lunch at school. I also bought large bags of apples to eat throughout the week, and I made squashy lentilly dishes for dinner to eat with rice. I went through many phases since then, and actually did not believe that I would want the predominantly bread/cheese/apple diet again, but in fact I do and it’s what I’m eating now. It’s kind of nice. Cheese from the market is amazing.

On Saturday Toby and I bought a fresh fillet of wild keta salmon (also known as “chum”). We soaked it in a marinade of soy sauce, chiles and various other delicious substances for a few hours, and then cooked it in a pan with the sauce. The result was completely delicious and wonderfully textured, probably the second best fish I’ve had since becoming a nonvegetarian. (The best was sockeye salmon at a barbecue at my house last summer; it was unsurpassable.) Mmm, salmon.

Yesterday we made an apple pie with a lard/butter crust. The lard was from a giant tub that Toby bought at the market on a whim. It’s from Mangalitsa pigs, a Hungarian breed renowned for their delicious and abundant fat. I have wanted to cook with lard since the instant I became a nonvegetarian, so this was pretty exciting. The next thing I want to make is a batch of tortillas!

Summer is definitely over here. It rains on most days, and has become Seattle-cold. Occasional days are almost crisp, and that’s nice. The leaves are gorgeous, much more colorful than I remember last year. On Saturday, late afternoon, I biked along the Burke Gilman trail and saw that the orangey, evening sunlight exactly illuminated the leaves that had turned color. It looked as if the sun had just turned the green leaves yellow.

Lately the excellent Seattle Transit Blog has been especially interesting, for two reasons: first, light rail service is new in Seattle, and second, there’s a mayoral race going on now between a candidate who’s pretty good with transit and a candidate who’s pretty terrible with transit. Anyway, a recent post discussed a policy goal of Mike McGinn’s (he’s the candidate who bikes and wants to make transit better): he thinks transit options (taxis, light rail, buses) should be available until 3 AM, instead of the usual midnight or 1 AM, to help get people home safely in the early morning. Of course this is completely correct and in fact any reasonable city would have night buses running every half hour or so, but for some reason people are resistant.

The comments that follow this post are quite scary to me. I’ll summarize so that you don’t need to read all 108 of them, but you can if you wish. First, a bunch of people declare that they don’t want their tax dollars to be used to ferry drunks around between bars. Then someone claims that visibly intoxicated people aren’t allowed to ride the bus anyway. This plan isn’t for those people who like to enjoy a beer at night, argues another, but for those who are too drunk to drive!

Now that scares me. Do people really drive after having a beer? Is this normal? I am certainly in no condition to drive after having one drink. But I’m not “visibly intoxicated” either, and I’m definitely allowed on a bus! I think the following claim is consistent with what the aforementioned commenters were saying: one who is too drunk to drive is too drunk to get on a bus. And that is ridiculous, of course.

I think it’s important to have reasonably frequent transit available for things other than commuting to work. I am lucky to live in a neighborhood that’s kind of well-connected (though really not well-connected at all by dense-city standards), but many who live just a couple miles north or to the west of me have far fewer transit options. I guess I just find it annoying that people don’t want to invest in transit, and wanted to complain. And what’s up with people thinking that only the visibly intoxicated are unfit to drive? This makes me never want to bike after sunset again!

After the real analysis exam (which I did not take), several of us went out to a Korean restaurant on the Ave near campus. I had been there once before and, although my server at the time was exceptionally nice and the space was pleasant, I was not so impressed by my food. It tasted fine, but was surprisingly boring. It was some tofu and vegetable dish. Anyway, it turns out I’d made a grievous error that time: I had failed to order from the “Korean dishes” section of the menu, choosing something from the “Vegetarian” section instead. (At least one dish in the Korean section is in fact vegetarian, so I didn’t need to shy away from that section. I was vegetarian at the time.)

This time, though, I made no such error. I ordered a dish called “sauteed squid” from the Korean section of the menu and it was astonishingly great! I had squid once before and thought it was weirdly chewy and not so pleasant, so I was surprised by how tasty and nicely textured this squid was. Anyway, I have become an enthusiastic champion of this restaurant. Just order from the Korean section if you go.

Today was the second-to-last Wallingford farmer’s market. Alas! My favorite fruit stand of all is there, and I don’t know where else they sell. I must ask them next week. Today they gave me a free peach, and I was incredibly charmed. They know me well because every week for months now I have shown up with a large basket to purchase $10-12 worth of peaches and nectarines. Once a few weeks ago they gave me $2 off for being a frequent customer. They are really nice. They also have the best nectarines that I know of, and I will be really sad when my Wednesdays don’t include them anymore.

I attended the Fremont Oktoberfest last weekend, which is a large beer tasting event. It’s pretty neat. You pay for admission and receive a certain number of tasting tokens and a little cup; then you redeem the tokens by filling your cup at various booths with beers to sample. It’s actually quite recent that I like beer, you know. But I have learned to now and the Northwest has amazing beer. Not all the festival samples were from the area, but I think most were. Anyway, I was proud to correctly identify the main taste in one of Toby’s samples (coffee — actually, I thought it was coffee or licorice, but I count that as correct) and also enjoyed an extremely fruity sample of Leinenkugel’s Oktoberfest. It tasted like orange juice, but in a good way. The best was probably the golden ale by Lazy Boy; it was completely delicious.

Then I stopped by Theo Chocolate, which was practically across the street, to sample every bar in the store and choose a couple to take home. I did something I have never done before: I chose milk chocolate over dark. It was weird. But the milk chocolate at Theo is not only acceptable, but actually amazing.

In other news, Toby and I made a chocolate almond cake recently (the Julia Child recipe) and it came out quite well. There were leftovers the next day and I had cake for breakfast. I want to make several more cakes now that the exams are over.

I think I’m taking the following classes: algebraic topology, algebraic geometry, homological algebra. I might switch in real analysis for the last, though, depending on the situation in a week. I ordered my textbooks for the first two classes and have already received one.

Classes start next Wednesday, and I start to teach next Thursday. That should be fun. I am a little apprehensive about presenting calculus problems to impressionable young adults because I forgot everything about calculus and might lead them astray (”no, you don’t actually have to compute the solution; all that matters is that a solution exists!”), but I’ll probably be fine.

Oh, and I made cookies today. With chocolate frosting and almonds on top, though!