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I approach request to make ethnic food with trepidation.  Not only may the food not match the palette of the others in my office with traditional preferences but a failed dish can become an affront to another culture or a modification I make can be seen as a sign of American cultural imperialism.  This concern went out the window when a pretty lady said she wished someone would make baklava.  I can be that someone.

So, I set to combining nuts, honey, and filo dough in alternating layers whose arrangement can induce a form of trance and threw it in the oven for 25 minutes.  What came out looked like baklava based on a Google image search and Max and I both found it palatable.  Pieces disappeared at a reasonable rate at work and I was pulled aside by a coworker.

Her: Terry, that’s pretty good baklava.  I’ve traveled around the middle east, and yours isn’t far off.
Me: Thank you.
Her: Well, it’s not as good as [other coworkers] but you know what they say about Egyptian bakers. *Winks at me*
Me: Yeah…

Looks like my concerns about subtle stereotyping were blown away by the actual kind.

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I went ice skating during my lunch break and listened to an audiobook for the 90 minutes I was there.  I attempted to do a few practice drills that Carl and Everett had showed me to mediocre success but otherwise worked up a sweat going around in circles.  When my time was done, I returned my skates and walked back to my car and smiled.  Ice skating will probably never be hard again.

Not to say that skating doesn’t hold legion challenges ahead for me.  It does, but the simple act of standing on skates and moving forward at a reasonable rate will never be a mystery box of physical coordination as it once was.  The difficulty will continually diminish barring injury or illness.  I like that.  I’ve been spending a lot of time with Objective-C and multi-variate calculus, two cases where there seems to be no permanence to retention as I am now remembering the rules of tabular integration for the fifth time.

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Mike and I went ice skating and while waiting to return my skates started talking with the rental person.

Me: So is this an after school gig or something you do full time?
Her: After school, you were here the other day, weren’t you?
Me: Yeah, now that I’ve overcome my fear of sawing a child in half on the ice, I enjoy skating.
Her: It’s not that bad, I once accidentally ran over my best friend’s finger and took off the tip of her pointer finger.
Me: And you’re still friends?
Her: No… no we aren’t, in fact we haven’t talked in the five years since then.

Way to help my case.

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OSR asks me to produce a promo video each year promotes the camp.  The first year I did this, Gary Marosy provided me with thousands of nice pictures of every area of camp and the program staff provided me with more pictures that campers had taken.  Each year it has dwindled until last year I receive 1600 pictures of either night volleyball or kids in tubes.

This year’s video was an exercise in austerity as I received no pictures of Ecology, any involving a bicycle, and only pictures of sailing containing people that had been fired.  On the plus side, I have a wonderful pictures of Todd Warner angrily pointing at a white board as children look on in rapt amazement.

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The first time I went ice skating I fell twice.  The next time, I fell once.  Today, I didn’t fall but did a questionable arm flail and stopped myself from falling by gripping the side of the rink, a half fall.  At this rate, I’ll reach homeopathic levels of falling after a few dozen more times out.

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I’ve worn my tiny hat a lot over the past few days and the charm is starting to wear off.  Joe and I hope to go to DragonCon in Atlanta in the late summer and I may try to create Tiny Hats for Reason.  I think if I offered notable Skeptics a $20 donation in their name to the Richard Dawkins foundation in exchange for them getting their picture taken wearing a Tiny Hat while holding a sign saying “I wear tiny hats AND I support reason” we can make the world a better place.

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Someone from Marketing asked me to print out a large number of Powerpoint slides at 30″ x 40″ scale.

Her: So, do you think you can have this done today?
Me: No, that’s almost physically impossible.
Her: What do you mean?
Me: You’ve asked for 24 slides each of which is 30″ x 40″ for  total of 720 inches that need to be printed and at a little over an inch a minute that’ll take 10 hours.  It’s 5 PM now and I doubt you’ll be here until 3 AM.
Her: Don’t you have anything better than that crappy printer?
Me:  It’s not exactly crappy.  The print head works by electrically charging a few hundred picoliters of ink, a few hundred trillionths of a gallon of ink, and then launching it from a moving target onto a paper surface with an accuracy of more than 1/500th of an inch.  Then it does it repeatedly in every color, all at the same time, continuously for hours at a time.
Her: But it’s so slow.
Me:  How about this, when you both gain the ability to submit work requests with a reasonable heads up time AND gain the ability to take a bullet train from New York to Los Angeles and hit a standard ISAAC bullseye located every 5 feet for the entire journey you can trash talk my printer.

I never thought I’d have to defend that shitty printer.

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The Mercer County Ice Center is a semi-outdoor (it’s in a barn-ish structure) rink that offers five hour skating windows for $10.  My lab monkey cohorts and I went there today over a long lunch break.

Joe had skated a few times prior and is generally good at things.  Everett had a lot of experience with roller hockey and was able to go quite fast but lacked a certain grace in stopping.  He’s a ginger and wore a pea coat with his brown trousers and looked like an English school boy on holiday as he’d dash at some ridiculous speed during a straight section and then arc into the rink wall.  Finally, Carl was the pro of the group having a decade of hockey experience under him.  He was wobbly at first but quickly was literally skating circles around me.

I ass-planted once, on the exact same spot I had ass-planted before and I took a moment to let the ice numb the area before rising.  My back was wet.  I returned to the benches at the end of the session and had a message from my boss.

Him: Any injuries?
Me: Yes.
Him: Will you all be back to work this afternoon?
Me: Yes.
Him: Glad it went well then.

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Suzie’s tiny hat had grown on me and I brought it into work to show people.  I did one of two things:

1) I’d walk into someone’s office with it on and see how long it took them to say something.
2) I’d leave it in the pocket of my lab coat and when talking to someone, slip it on when they turned away.

The second method seemed far more menacing as people would continue the conversation but sometimes glance at my head with the look that they were in a fugue state.  Was he always wearing the hat?  Is the hat really there?

I showed another two coworkers:
Coworker #1: You really like that tiny hat.
Me: Yes, it is a tiny hat.
Coworker #2: I say we put together a betting pool and see how much it’d cost to have Terry wear the tiny hat for a day.
Me: Look at how tiny it is!
Coworker #1: My guess, not much.

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Again I slept a good bit and rose for an early lunch.  I offered to drop off Ty and at his house had a back-and-forth with Amelia.  She is going to school for photography and mocked me for my usage of autofocus.  I stared at her stating “I use autofocus so I can do this”, and without lifting my gaze put my camera near the floor pointing away from me in the vague direction of Ty’s cat and got this shot:

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A Cat and a Point

I’ll take it.

With Ty dropped off, Suzie, Brooke, and I said our goodbyes to Ryan, Peter, Audrey, and Amelia and we set about unwinding the journey.  Suzie and I talked for most of the ride to Cincinnati while Brooke slept and I was glad for this time.  With Suzie dropped off, Brooke and I made the 600 mile trip back to her place and she took over about 400 miles out from home.  She drove the rest of the way admirably but was a bit on edge as she neared home.  The way we drive changes in interesting ways when we’ve not slept and Brooke veered towards jackrabbit starts and sudden breaking.  She had beaten her previous record for continuous driving by a factor of four but I was glad to make it back to home.