I have a recipe blog, which I have entitled “The Casserole Blog”! It is currently located at: http://tonyhill.cheme.iastate.edu/recipes/
It will be a place to post recipes old and new and other cooking related tidbits. I hope that maintaining that site won’t diminish my posting productivity here too much…though it might for the next several days while I get a little bit more content uploaded to the recipe site.
By the way, I am very open to the recipe blog becoming something that is open to other contributors. Maybe it could become “The Rock Recipe Blog” or something like that if people are interested. Either email me or go to the “Casserole Blog” site and look for the “register” link in the lower right.
For everyone who’s interested, I passed my preliminary examination today!
That means that in about a year, I’ll be defending my dissertation during my final examination. If I pass that, I’ll be Dr. Hill.
Wow!
Today for Madeline’s 11-months-old birthday we went to Brookside park and took a few pictures. You can see them here in our photo gallery!
So, a few minutes ago I was looking for something in our bedroom, while Madeline was playing on the floor in the attached bathroom. I noticed I had acciedently left the toilet lid up, and that Madeline was sticking her hand in. Okay, that’s a little gross but not that out-of-the-ordinary for times I have forgotten to close the toilet lid. I walked over to the bathroom to close the toilet lid and wash Madeline’s hand off. When I looked into the toilet, I saw Madeline’s small frog bath toy floating in the water, and that’s what she was playing with! How smart of her to think to throw that in there to play with it that way! Oh, and a bit gross too. She seemed fairly disappointed when I ended her fun by washing her hand, and then pulling the frog out and washing it off too.
All in a day’s work around here!
Having now been an ipod shuffle owner for four days, I can definitely report it was well worth the money spent. I easily got it loaded up with songs the first night I brought it home (we already have our CD collection ripped to MP3). It seems to hold about 110-115 songs, which translates into a little over 8 hours of music. That very night I wore it around my neck using the included lanyard cap and listened to music while I printed and folded z37 newsletters at the church building.
Thanks to an input cord Tony already had plugged into our stereo for the purpose of being able to amplify the computer’s sound, I can easily play music on the shuffle and have it come out the speakers in the living room upstairs. Ditto using it to play music in the car, thanks to the fact that we have a cassette-deck stereo in the Neon. The shuffle can easily be used with one of those cassette adapters that are usually used with portable CD players to allow them to be used in the car. So it is truly a go-everywhere music device. So far, the battery life seems great and it is no big deal to just leave it plugged into the usb port on one of the computers to charge it overnight when the battery does get low.
For a variety of reasons I haven’t done much music listening in the past year, so my own music collection seems pretty fresh again. We’re looking forward to getting some new music though. One thing I discovered today is that there are a lot of sources for free, legal MP3s of many lesser-known and independent artists available on the web. Did you know that there are hundreds of free MP3s on amazon.com? I didn’t know that until today! Some of them are even from better-known artists. Grassroots music has several dozen free MP3s from Christian artists available for download. This page on about.com gives tips on finding other sites with legal and free music (just don’t fall for the ads on the page (”sponsored links”)…those take you to places where the music is of questionable legality!!!)
Of course the idea with all of this is to discover new artists you might like, and then purchase their Cd’s or attend their concerts. I am hoping I can find some new favorites while exploring some of these sites! A majority of my music collection is well over five years old, so it could use some updating!
I’ve thought of a lot of small, random things to blog about, and I’m not sure why I haven’t done it. I guess extra stress and busyness = I am less likely to sit and write about things??? Anyway, I certainly haven’t had time for a lot of deep thoughts (well, deep thoughts about anything other than the Ezekiel Project I guess!)
#1 Cool thing: I got an ipod shuffle using some of my birthday money (I will write more about this later…right now, I will say that it is so…cute and functional all at the same time!)
Teething action: Madeline is teething her way to tooth #6 as of today.
New stuff in Ames: Last week I noticed we are getting an Old Chicago Pizza, and a day or two ago I noticed we are finally getting a new Salvation Army Thrift store. Hopefully the new one will have lower prices than the old one did! For a thrift store, they were kind of pricey.
Interesting Stuff to Read: I love running across random interesting blogs and adding them to my bloglines feed reader. Recent additions include the Starbucks Gossip Blog and The Coffee Blog (which doesn’t seem to get updated very frequently, but has a lot of potential).
Two done, several to go: My second big z37 project (a newsletter) left my hands today and went to the person responsible for getting the mailings out. Look for it in your mailbox in the next day or two if you are on the Stonebrook mailing list. Luckily, I have a few days before my next item is due, so I can try to relax a bit and catch up around the house!
Look for a post soon in praise of my new ipod! 
Now that another crazy week of working on Ezekiel Project campaign stuff is out of the way, I get to have fun on the weekend doing one of my favorite things — going to garage sales.
In a sure sign that spring has arrived, the Advertiser contained about a dozen garage sales. My first venture out to a sale was actually Thursday night, to check out the quarterly sale at the Presbyterian church down the street. I found a few clothing items for Madeline, a couple of books that looked interesting, and I indulged myself in a fifty-cent guilty pleasure — an Indigo Girls cassette tape circa 1989. Ah, the memories. I know, not very edifying, but oh so fun to drive down the road and sing along to!
This morning found me rising at 7am (well, that’s when my alarm went off, anyway), to go to one garage sale in west Ames, then coming home to feed Madeline and give Tony a ride to his haircut appointment. Then it was off to get a cup of coffee and drive to Huxley for a neighborhood sale there. Even though my goal is to get summer clothes for Madeline at a cheap price, I also found two pairs of shoes for myself in almost perfect condition (total for the two pairs — $1.50) and a pair of Abercrombie jeans for a buck. The jeans turned out to be a little large, but nothing a belt won’t fix. I did find a few cute things for Madeline, though not all of them for this summer…some probably won’t fit until next fall or winter or maybe even spring/summer ‘06. But whatever the case, they will all come in handy eventually.
This was just the first weekend of the 2005 garage sale season…and I can’t wait for more! It is such an adventure to see the huge stack of items I can come home with having spent only a few bucks. And it sure beats buying things at store prices. Even clearance prices and consignment store prices can’t compare with buying items at garage sales for 25 cents or 50 cents each. The only thing better is free hand-me-downs!
I uploaded our pictures from Easter weekend…
Madeline playing with Jake Bovenmyer
Easter with Tony’s family
The second album also contains a traditional picture we hadn’t gotten around to taking before…a “naked baby in the bathtub” picture… Perfect for embarrassment in the years to come!
My all-time-favorite April Fool’s Day incident happened my freshman year at Iowa State. I had a work-study job in the Band Office in the music building, and our office had a great view of Lake LaVerne out the window. That April 1st when I came into work in the mid-afternoon I looked out the window and did a double take. The lake was a bright emerald green color! Apparently some prankster had dyed it overnight.
The bright green color didn’t last for long though — an alumnus donated blue dye to chage lake to a tropical-looking hue, mainly so that it wouldn’t look awful for everyone visiting campus for Veishea. You can read more about it and see a picture of the green lake here.
As far as I know, they never figured out who turned the lake green. And for the six or seven weeks the blue dye remained in the lake before fading, Lake LaVerne looked more beautiful than it ever has before or since. That year really got my expectations up for April Fools Day, so every year I hope that something equally cool will happen…and so far I have been disappointed! Crazy pranks for everyone to see just aren’t really a tradition around here, I guess!
So, I haven’t posted here in a while. I should probably change that, because there’s been a lot happening in my life.
Everyone asks what I’m going to do after I graduate in May of 2006, with my Ph.D. Today, I can finally tell you the answer!
Through Kirsten, you heard that we were in San Diego for the 229th meeting of the American Chemical Society. I was there to present some of the research that I’ve been doing the last few years. What you didn’t hear (mostly because it was a secret) was that on Sunday, while we were in Los Angeles, I met with a couple of representatives from Google Labs in northern LA. Earlier this fall I took (and did well on!) the Google Labs Aptitude Test (GLAT). So, we set up the interview for Spring Break in northern LA. The interview was hard, but I thought that I did pretty well.
Then this week, I got an offer letter in the mail! I scanned it so all of you could see it. The link is at the bottom of this post. The letter said that I had to keep quiet about the offer until today. Here’s why; Google launched a beverage line today, Google Gulp, a line of “smart drinks” designed to maximize your surfing efficiency. I’ll be working on Google Gulp, so I couldn’t leak that secret until today. Apparently, they need Chemical Engineers to scale up the process. Cool!
My job starts after I graduate, but it’s looking like I’ll be able to do some of the Google Gulp research as a part of my thesis! So, in May of 2006, we’ll be moving to the San Francisco area, and I’ll be working at Google!
Here’s the link to my scan of the offer letter.
Cool, huh?
