February Updates

Not too much new going on in our neck of the woods this month. Here's the highlights:

Scott is putting the finishing touches on his dissertation. He's incorporated the suggestions his professors and colleagues gave him, and now he's just sweating the formatting details. He will defend his dissertation in spring quarter, which begins near the end of March.

After that, Scott will spend most of the summer teaching. He's been offered two classes to teach during the summer quarter here at the University of Washington. He'll probably finish here in August, after which we'll probably move wherever it is we'll know by then we are going to.

For everyone who is still wondering, the next round of academic job postings will start emerging in the spring. We don't know yet what schools will be looking to hire, but Scott will have a good shot at this round, which is usually full of starter academic positions.

Finally, you can send Scott your sympathies, as he recently was diagnosed with an ulcerated esophagus caused by taking his medicine too long past mealtime. He is currently on an ice cream diet as it hurts to swallow everything else. Try not to be too jealous.

As for me, I'm still plugging away at various writing projects in between kitchen experiments and assaults on the fruit flies and windowsill mold/mildew plaguing our apartment. Our unusually high February temperatures (in the 50s) and our still wet winter weather have combined to drive me insane by bringing the bugs out of hiding before the moisture has stopped collecting. Sigh.

I've been playing with a recipe for whole-wheat no-knead bread this month that's really very good. You keep the dough in the fridge until you want some bread, and when you do, you cut off a chunk and bake it on a pizza stone, baking sheet, or in a Dutch oven. You get a chewy crust and moist crumb without the bitterness whole wheat sometimes has, despite there being no sugar added. It makes dough enough to bake up four little one-pound loaves.
The recipe is from the book "Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day," if you're interested. All you need to make it are the ingredients, a six-quart bowl or bucket, a spoon to stir it all together, and something to bake it on. And room in your fridge for said bucket, of course -- sometimes that's the tough part.

We've been enjoying watching the Winter Olympics, though we haven't made the two- or three-hour drive to Vancouver to see the action in person. We've viewed a lot of curling and hockey (men's and women's), as those the only sports NBC deems fit to broadcast live to the coast where the Olympics are actually happening. Alas, they've started putting a few men's hockey games on NBC proper instead of on cable, which means they too are getting tape-delayed three hours. Perplexing and frustrating. We have to resort to watching on the web, which is dicey given how our internet service has been lately (which is also NBC's fault, come to think of it, what with the Comcast merger).

Hope that everyone's February was good. The sun just came out again here, so maybe it won't rain again today!

- Colleen

Posted via email from Colleen's posterous