Winter – Page 3 – Into the West

Recipe Review: Calzones (4 stars)

Almost two weeks into the new year and we finally saw some snow. So, I spent the entire weekend doing indoor activities (except for that one time I went out and shoveled the heavy wet perfect-for-snowman-making white stuff off of my driveway). Oh, and I did have to make a trip to the grocery store Sunday morning to pickup some missing ingredient items for the calzones I planned to make that afternoon.

The recipe I worked from can be found on page 186 of my favorite bread cookbook: The King Arthur Flour 200th Anniversary Cookbook. But you can find an online version of it at the King Arthur Flour website here: Calzone

The dough part of the recipe is actually found on page 176 and is called “Hearth Bread Pizza.” I use half of that recipe every time I make home-made pizza crust. This time I did the whole recipe, all six cups of flour, and opted to use my Kitchen-aid mixer with a dough hook until I got beyond the five cup range. I also did a full rise, not the no-rise option, which I usually do for thin crust pizza dough. Continue reading “Recipe Review: Calzones (4 stars)”

Sunday Epiphanies

On any given Sunday, you’ll find me awake before sunrise. Old, very old, habits die-hard. I embrace being a morning person. Only causes an issue when I want to toast in the new year since I generally turn into a pumpkin around nine o’clock. Today was no different from any other weekend.

Yesterday was Twelfth Night, the official end to the Christmas season. When Dickens was a youth, Twelfth Night was ‘THE’ biggest day of the winter holiday in England. Between his Christmas Carol and Prince Albert’s importation of German Christmas traditions (namely the Christmas tree), Twelfth Night began to fade out of fashion during Dickens and Queen Victoria’s lifetimes.

I did not stay up late celebrating or hosting a Twelfth Night party. I had servers to upgrade and test bright and early on January 6th, also known as Epiphany.

I woke up before my alarm (I almost always do this; my alarm only woke me up once in the last six months) and got logged in and ready to upgrade a server. It went much smoother than the last time I tried, right before Christmas, and I was done within 20 minutes (leaving an hour forty minutes of my maintenance window unused). Server patch testing took another fifteen minutes so I was done ‘working’ before seven o’clock, still before sunrise.

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Let’s Do Lunch at the Library

Most Saturdays you can find me hanging out at my local library over the lunch hour. While it’s true I do devour books, I curb my appetite so that my favorite hard-working librarians can grab a bite to eat and catch up on their reading. I’ve been volunteering for four or five years now and I look forward to those two or three hours spent helping patrons find their next great book or movie.

Today, within five minutes of getting started at the circulation desk for the first half of my shift, a mother and a cute girl with a rainbow of flowers in her hair arrived to collect her gift basket. The girl had won one the baking basket, one of eight gift baskets donated as prizes for the winter reading program. I overheard one of the librarians mention that collectively adults and children read over two thousand books this winter. I only contributed twenty-two to that total.

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There’s a Star in the East

Long winter nights.

Crisp clear skies.

Denser colder atmosphere.

These are a few of my favorite things during the winter months and they add up to darker skies and brighter stars. This weekend also has a few things going for it, astronomically, and also happens to be Twelfth Night (tomorrow, January 5th) and Epiphany (the day after) commemorating the journey of the Three Wise Men guided by a Star in the East.

Observing Highlights for this Weekend (courtesy of “The Sky This Week” at Astronomy.com):

Friday, January 4
Although people in the Northern Hemisphere experienced the shortest day of the year two weeks ago (at the winter solstice December 21), the Sun has continued to rise slightly later with each passing day. That trend stops this morning for those at 40° north latitude†. Tomorrow’s sunrise will arrive at the same time as today’s, but the Sun will come up two seconds earlier Sunday morning. This turnover point depends on latitude. If you live farther north, the switch occurred a few days ago; closer to the equator, the change won’t happen until later in January.

† I’m just 68 miles south of the Kansas-Nebraska border, which juxtaposes with the 40th parallel. Weird fact discovered this morning via Google Maps: The Kansas Highway that is literally a block west of my house (K-7) ends at the border and turns into 666 Avenue (see map screenshot below).
Continue reading “There’s a Star in the East”

Just the Stats, Please

Yes, I’m still here. Sort of. I’ve been so busy since the first of the year, I just now came up for air, and only because I realized it had been nearly a month since I’d posted to my blog. A new year at work means a new budget cycle and all the projects that were on hold now have been given the green light and of course should have been completed yesterday. The ringing in my ears can be directly correlated to the number of hours per day I spend on conference calls. I spend so much time in fact on conference calls that the only time I have to accomplish actual work is at home during the evenings.

And for some reason, I thought it was a good idea, to take another online course, this time in Statistics. I needed one more course to finish my Associates Degree and I wanted to do something related to my core goal – Mathematics. Ironically, as I learned while reading and studying the first chapter of my textbook, Statistics is not technically considered a course in Mathematics. Math results in one right answer if you solve the problem correctly – and this is repeatable for anyone anytime. One problem = one right answer. This is not the case for Statistics.

For my commutes to and from work I switched from listening to audiobooks (for now) to following various podcasts as a sort of New Year’s resolution. Some of them are audio dramas, some of them are non-fiction, some are current tech news, some are short fiction (mostly fantasy and science fiction from various magazines) and some are just pure fun. Most of them I can complete in one day (two commutes = approximately 90 minutes) so I don’t have to worry about losing my place or losing track of the story in a long audiobook.

To prepare for last night’s Tolkien Society of Kansas City discussion of The Children of Hurin, I listened to nearly seven hours of amazing depth and insight on Chapter 21 of the Silmarillion thanks to the trilogy of episodes broadcast by the Prancing Pony Podcast. I plan a more in-depth post on my tumble down Tolkien’s tragic Turin tale. Our next group read at TSoKC is Unfinished Tales, but thankfully we’re skipping Part One (which would be yet another reading of Turin), but will start with Part Two and also read Letters 50-89 in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Check our Facebook page for the date of our next meeting in February and join us if you’re so inclined. All are welcome.

This weekend will be all too short between obligatory after-hours work (ah, the joys of information technology support and maintenance), volunteering at the library (now that is pure joy) and tonight’s General Meeting of the Astronomical Society of Kansas City.

It’s the 27th day of January, 2018. I’ve flown through 7.4 percent of the year in days, nearly 8.3 percent of the months and 11 percent of the first quarter.

Tepus fugit. Vita brevis.

Looking a Lot Like Christmas Around Here

As I promised earlier this month in my post about my building’s less than traditional holiday decorating, I managed to snap a few photos of some of my favorite things – and my that I mean Christmas lights, displays and decorations.

In roughly chronological order, starting with Thanksgiving weekend decorating the exterior of our home.

Followed by a drive by on Grand Avenue past one of the tallest Christmas trees in the country in the heart of Crown Center two days later:

I started off December right by stopping just before dawn on Broadway to snap this photo of the annual decorations hung at the Kansas City Life Insurance building:

A week later I made it to work very early, with the sun still below the horizon with the help of some cloud cover and took several photos of the Country Club Plaza Christmas lights from the top floor of my building (despite the reflections of interior lights on the window glass):

Another week passed by and on the ides of December the angel appeared in my landscaping. Due to unexpected altercations with local deer population, our lighted reindeer will be decidedly absent from our yard display:

And finally, and surely not least, as I returned home last night from work, I stopped at Union Station to marvel at their internal decoration bonanza:

20171220_154231 — Merry Christmas! (click this photo to see rest of album)

I hope you’ve enjoyed this trip around town, at least the parts of it I frequent on a daily and regular basis.

May all your Christmases be Bright and May God Bless Us, Everyone!

Merry Bowlingmas

Welcome to my annual roasting of my building’s attempts at modern art holiday decorating. When I showed my husband this year’s photo, his first words were: “Bowling pins?”

20171127_160137 — unHoliday Lobby Decorations (2017)

I had to concede his point. At least this year the dominant color is red with a swash of green.

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On Human Nature and Political Ideologies

This paragraph in the “Human Nature” chapter of my Introduction to Philosophy textbook speared me, considering the turmoil before, during and continuing after our most recent elections. It’s a long paragraph so bear with me. I’ll split it at points to add more white space for emphasis and where my mind flipped thoughts from ‘right’ to ‘left’ instead of its usual on-edge position:

Your perception of human nature determines even how you think we should set up our society. Ask yourself this, for example: Should our society be based on capitalism or socialism?

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Defining Philosophy Survey Results

As I promised in yesterday’s post on my Brain Upgrade Project, the following are excerpts from the email responses I received to the following question:

“Ask six friends what they think philosophy is.”

The study of critical thinking.

∞ ∞ ∞

. . . philosophy is the contemplation of our existence, sentience, and interaction with the universe and its inhabitants. I believe we as humans agree that our capacity to reflect upon our existence is unique. And that we are seeking elusive knowledge for our propose through this process.

∞ ∞ ∞

Narrowly, philosophy is the love of knowledge. Broadly, it’s the inquiry into what is real, true, valuable; how we know it and what difference it makes; what is man, who am I, why am I here, what am I to do? It is the search of meaning and purpose in life.

∞ ∞ ∞

Philosophy to me is a general moral framework to help determine one’s actions and explain how the world works (or should work).

∞ ∞ ∞

After taking two required philosophy courses in college many moons ago, I decided philosophy is the opportunity for a professor to put forward his/her agenda and give you poor grades if you don’t agree with it-no matter how much you support your point of view.

∞ ∞ ∞

I guess I would define philosophy as the study/search for answers regarding, well, existence: who we are, what things are, why things are the way they are, and how things should be (i.e. ethics and morality). I believe (although I could be wrong) a lot of science has it’s roots in philosophy (if I remember correctly, it was one of the very early philosophers that theorized the existence of atoms). You could almost say that philosophy is the study of questions.

∞ ∞ ∞

I would say philosophy is the study of thinking, the why we think, that we can think, the how we think ~ leading to our conclusions ~ which remain in a state of flux, to a point!!

The importance of this should be that we understand the decisions we make, there is a trail or should be of how we got to that point.

∞ ∞ ∞

My answer to the similar question posed to my Philosophy class by our professor:

“How philosophy is defined? How would your define it?”

Philosophy means the love of wisdom with a goal to help us achieve autonomy, by making us more aware of our own beliefs and encouraging us to think through issues for ourselves. Philosophy is also an activity, and not an easy one, but the struggle for freedom never is, especially when we examine our most basic beliefs and assumptions under the microscope of reason. I would define philosophy as unrelenting curiosity and drive to ask, and attempt to answer for ourselves, the hard questions about our purpose, our place in the world and the universe, our mortality and our morality

Next post I’ll ruminate about my reading of the second chapter of my Introduction to Philosophy textbook: Human Nature

My Brain Upgrade Project

Back in the mid 90s, I resigned myself to not finishing my undergraduate degree in mathematics/computer science. Life happened (I’ll spare you the stressful, depressing details). Fast forward to the present, nearly two decades into the second millennium, where my life seemed to be stable and my faculties ready to take on a return to college. I jumped through the various academic and bureaucratic hoops last year to get my college credits transferred to a local university. I pre-enrolled at two different institutions, one where I planned to complete my undergraduate, but also at a local community college that offered many online courses that could better accommodate my schedule as a full-time employee.

Then Fate, Chance, the Devil or all three, decided my life wasn’t complicated or challenging enough. Over Thanksgiving, a co-worker resigned, one who was responsible for the enterprise-wide document management system for the large law firm where I’ve worked for the last twenty years. Fortunately for the firm, but not so much for me, from 1997 until 2009, I performed those same duties. Can you see the writing on the wall?

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