santa venn

peanut butter

i guess there is such thing as eating too much peanut butter.

neti pot, part iii

the neti pot is useless. a few swigs of dayquil is still better.

cuttlefish

super awesome flamboyant cuttlefish. too bad it's poisonous.

nautilus

chambered nautilus (Nautilus pompilious) looks like it might be quite delicious

snots

pandas

my gummy pandas look just like regular bears. what a gyp.

food

sometimes i like to go check out the lunchroom fridge, hoping i have food in there i forgot about. sadly, that has never been the case.

Istanbul

Within an hour of arriving in Istanbul someone already offered me tea so he can show me carpets in his family's big store. I felt so welcomed as I had been forewarned of this tradition. However, he thought I was Japanese, which everyone has been thinking since I started grad school. I think because my face got fat. i.e. the Turkish man welcomed me then called me fat. Does that sound like the beginning of a healthy relationship? I don't think so.

Also, my directions told me to walk next to the Blue Mosque and it wasn't blue. After white-balancing in my mind to make it blue, the Hagia Sophia looked blue as well. Needless to say, I took a very roundabout way to the hostel.

Anyway, we're going to try some street food today. Time to put that HepA immunoglobulin shot to use.

bbc - penguins

magic

"it's magic. and like science, you don't actually have to understand it. you just have to believe it."
-Amanda from Ugly Betty

kung fu baby

the fart propellant is the best part

fruit cups

i'm missing 6 mandarin orange fruit cups. where did they go?

i am so jealous of this guy

LEARN from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

EAT from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

funny baby

neti pot, part ii

over-salting a neti pot is much, much worse than not adding enough. instead of feeling like i was drowning, the entire front of my head burned in pain. i thought my eyeballs were going to fall out.

subsequently, my boogers were really salty for a couple of hours.

Echinacea

my brother (after i told him i'm getting sick): "Are you taking echinacea? I find it's a very effective placebo. Zinc & vitamin D, too."

happy koala

koala bears

oh, linnaeus. so judgemental...

“Reptiles are abhorrent because of their cold body, pale color, cartilaginous skeleton, filthy skin, fierce aspect, calculating eye, offensive smell, harsh voice, squalid habitation, and terrible venom; wherefore their Creator has not exerted his powers to make many of them.” - Linnaeus, 1797

art

anderson cooper on romance

peacock spider

bach

pendulum

boeuf

i noticed today, while i was heat styling my hair, that it smelled like boeuf. i must've inadvertently dunked it in french onion soup last night.

Switzerland

my sous vide experience

i've been curious about sous vide cooking, and when i saw some vacuum sealed, pre-seasoned turbot at trader joe's last week, i decided to buy some and make good use of the lab water baths. since it looked to be 15mm thick, i cooked it at 61 degrees for 40 minutes. i was happy/excited until the smell of yumminess started wafting throughout the lab and i thought the bag had exploded or melted. i couldn't smell it in the water bath though, and nothing seemed to have leaked. the juices in the pack was turbid but the bath water was still clear. meh.

the fish turned out quite delicious, despite having cooled during my trek home. my stomach hurt right after i ate it and at first i thought i had accidentally poisoned myself, but it turned out to just be gas. if i were to try again, i might use a lower temp with a longer cooking time.

milk

back in march, shaw's/star market did a promotion where if you bought 6 gallons of milk within a month, you can get one gallon free. since i have a secret love for garelick farms' chocolate milk, i decided to partake. i barely managed to eke by when the promotion ended, and i was so garelicked out by then that i held off on redeeming my free gallon. plus, there was no apparent expiration date on the vouchers, or so i thought. i recently decided to come out of my milk coma and was about to redeem my vouchers when i noticed in the blurry 0.5pt font print that they had expired a week after the promotion ended. what!! i guess that's what i get for drinking 6 gallons of milk and not reading the fine print...

ET

I lost a slice of pizza today because of the wind. Just blew it right off my plate.

Cerulean blue boogers. Must've accidentally inhaled some xylene cyanol...

Fat

Either my socks got tighter or my ankles got fat. Sympathy swelling?

neti pot

So, as people have said online, using a Neti pot was definitely weird at first. It didn't help that I didn't put in enough salt. I imagine that's what it feels like if you were trying to waterboard yourself. What was most disappointing though, was that I was hoping to flush out boogers of all sorts of colors and the best I got was a lot of clear slime and a little bit of yellow stuff. I was sick! I should've had lots of boogers! In varying hues of green and yellow!

cough-ccyx

I think I'm coming down with something because I'm really tired all the time and getting all mucusy and phlegmy and my throat is starting to hurt. It makes me want to cough all the time. But whenever I cough my tailbone hurts because I slipped on a patch of ice last week whilst scoping out some snacks in a shop window and fell on my ass. Argh, so sucks.

Hmmm...my half eaten turkey-on-rye (with mayo) has been sitting at the perfect bacteria-friendly temperature for the past few hours thanks to my computer AC adapter. It's still quite good though; I just hope I don't get sick. So many things to watch out for when one needs to hide a sandwich behind one's computer at work...