My brothers and I decided to use our spare time on Christmas break to make some unhealthy culinary decisions and ended up with some tasty results.
The first five photos are of Andrew’s bacon wrapped hot dogs. The following photos document “The Great Barna Chicken Fry.”
The busyness of the week has finally given way to the nine day academic hiatus of Thanksgiving Break. My school gives us the whole week off, and, from the looks of it, the University of California may be regretting their decision not to. My family chooses to spend their Thanksgiving in the perennially temperate City of Roses where it is currently 48F. The plans for this week are eating street food and turkey.
After the jump, there are some highlights of my week. Read more
Hey Andrew, do they have these in your state? Read more
The on-campus market started selling organic-noodle ramen this year. I’ve slowly been working through the variety. Today’s was tofu and miso. Stay tuned, dropping a bomb on my brother later today.
If it rains in San Diego this weekend, it will be the most precipitation this three-day period has gotten in the last 160 years.
There appears to be a blog here. Wow. Spent some serious time today clearing out comment spam and changing the theme. Most new posts will just be interesting news articles I find. Generally, they will relate to classes I’m taking. Ain’t synchronicity a bitch?
The Tetris effect is the ability of any activity to which people devote sufficient time and attention to begin to dominate their thoughts, mental images, and dreams. It is named after the video game Tetris. (From Tetris effect – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
Going to a school that is dominated by technology, it is easy for my classmates and I to be distracted by the twenty-four hour entertainment that can be had on the World Wide Web. For the first few years, we heard stories about people getting their accounts revoked for going on Myspace or describing to their parents (with visuals) exactly what was going on at the “mature” websites they chose to browse during humanities class. By senior year, the fear pretty much wore off. The school proxies have been tightened down and people are figuring out that if a site isn’t already blocked, there is not a very likely chance of them getting in trouble looking at it.
These were the set of circumstances that brought on the Tetris craze that is still going on at my school. A few months ago, all anybody would do when they got on a computer would be play Tetris. Rumors were going around of who had the top score and a mental scoreboard was kept of who the top three Tetris players in the school were. Teachers were having discussions in the hallways about how Tetris needed to be blocked and about how they wished they could partake in the fun.
It was at this peak of 8-bit popularity that some of the students in the senior class realized that there were some unexpected side effects of playing Tetris. I was among them. Whenever I closed my eyes, I could see the blocks falling. I would play out different scenarios in my head, always thinking about how my brain could not randomize the blocks enough for the game to be fair. Then I would mentally clear the board and then start all over again. I had trouble sleeping and woke up with the desire to top my high score.
I had to kick my habit. A group of us joked that we start a self help group like Alcoholics Anonymous, accept that we were powerless against our addiction and help others who had similar struggles. Then, I just lost the desire to play. It took so long to get a high score and I didn’t have the patience to try over and over. I didn’t quite go cold turkey, I occasionally play to help myself refocus but that is about it. I no longer dream in arrangements of four squares, no longer think about clearing rows and I hope my senioritis is more productive because of it.
The picture above is not a cake. Neither is it deep fried. The picture above is a gigantic cookie. Bored by the fires around the county, I was inspired to make cookies. My crack team of sous chefs (3 in all) and I decided to try something special and recreate BJ’s Pizookie. We took the recipe straight from the back of the chocolate chip bag and we dumped the dough into two small cake pans.
The two cookies we made took about 30 minutes to bake in all and looked amazing when we took them out of the oven. I wanted to eat the cookies straight out of the pan (they would look more cookie-like that way) but I was overruled by my three partners. We flipped the cookies onto plates and put ice cream and chocolate syrup on the top and then dug in. The finished product was the most amazing piece of culinary work that I have ever created, simply beyond words.
I spent a few days earlier this week up in San Francisco looking at colleges with the amazing new $39 Southwest Airlines fare from SAN to SFO. As I reached the San Diego airport, my mother noticed that I had my climbing chalk bag on the side of my backpack. Not wanting to get busted by obviously placing a bag filled with white powder on the side of my backpack, I hastily stashed the chalk into the main compartment and prayed that it wouldn’t make too much trouble.
Sadly, it (and a few undeclared liquids or gels that I didn’t know about) got me sent to secondary. I knew it was coming but the peculiar part about it was that the screener just sat their talking to me and pointing at things on her screen as if I knew what she was talking about. “There are a few things wrong here,” she said. “I’m very concerned about this… and this as well.” She handed the bag over to another man without giving him any descriptions of the items that worried her and we proceeded over to a side desk for further inspection.
As he went through the backpack, he did not look twice at the chalk bag but instead happened upon two very small tubes of sunscreen and lip balm. He then decided to rate my book choices, which happened to be The Collected Stories of William Faulkner and Americana by Don Delillo. He approved and I didn’t have too much more trouble. The thing is, I was extremely close to bringing a Hunter S. Thompson book which, I believe, would’ve put me in a worse light and possibly subjected me to more questioning. So thanks Faulkner, for making me look smarter and less like a crazy druggie.
Well friends, the time has come. It is the fall of my senior year of high school and it is only fitting that I begin to plan my future. I am currently in the middle of applying for colleges and, right now, I’m not too stressed (ask me in two weeks). Of course, I am not going to speak about the specific colleges that I’m applying to so as not to mess up the application process but I am very excited for the next couple months and years. I will also be turning 18 in two days, very scary.
I’m going camping for a week so there won’t be updates until friday. Have fun, change the world.
Highway S22 goes through Borrego Springs in San Diego County and on through Anza Borrego Desert State Park until it reaches the Salton Sea. On Saturday, my brother decided to take the long way to Palm Desert and head out this leisurely to see what he could find. I tagged along with my other brother.
Before even reaching Borrego Springs, my older brother had decided to go on a hike into “Hell Hole Canyon”. He heard that it was the only place you could actually see bighorn sheep in San Diego. It wasn’t a bad hike and there was actually a small creek that ran through part of the canyon which was pretty cool.
Right now, I am sitting at school waiting for my brother to get done with what he is doing but about five minutes ago I got this call on my cell phone from a 602 number. I pick it up and it says, “Hi guys, this is Dorothy from the mortgage company…” I quickly hung up thinking it was a scam or they had a wrong number. I deduced that it was a scam because of the lack of pauses that “Dorothy” took.
Two thoughts went through my head right then. The first was, “Damn, if this is a computer, they did a pretty good job with it. This sounds real.” The other was me wishing there was a whois type database for phone numbers so I could figure out what was going on.
I did a quick google search on the number to reveal just the service I was looking for. whocalled.us is a place where people go and record their experiences with calls from a certain number.
I found out that the number I was called from is in Arizona and that everybody has had the same “Hi guys…” message. I also learned that if you listen long enough and press 1, you can actually talk to one of these people. Finally, this number has been known to call back many times so I think I may mess with them next time they call.
I had the most peculiar seatmate on the bus today. I’m sitting in a seat next to the window and this woman gets on with an armful of laundry and copies of blueprints. She stops next to me and I’m thinking, “Great, my stop is just three away and I’m going to have this woman sitting next to me holding laundry and blueprints. It’s going to be impossible to get out.” However, instead of her sitting next to me, she placed her laundry on the seat along with the blueprints and stood next to it. Could this win some award for the weirdest thing sat next to on the bus?
Since I’m not allowed to talk about the actual test, I will instead talk about my experiences taking the SAT. The SAT is a test with no face. This is kind of a hard concept for me to explain but I will try.
I took the SAT this morning at the University of San Diego. I walked into the hall where the exam was supposed to be. There was nobody there to greet me. Instead, there were pieces of paper with room assignments based on last name. There was a “barrier” of desks that said things like “Show your ID” and “No cell phones beyond this point” but nobody sitting in the desks to enforce these rules.
I walked past the barrier and turn off my cell phone, expecting some sort of penalty for refusing. However, the only people beyond the barrier were high school students. I expected some sort of SAT administrator to be directing us but no, we had to find our rooms by ourselves.
It ended up that my room was towards the end of a narrow hallway filled with high school students. I cannot stress enough how much there was not somebody from the SAT telling us what to do. We were just forced to wait. Finally, after a few minutes of waiting, some students from USD showed up and let us into the room. For all of the stringent rules that are given to you before you take the test, you would expect it to be more structured but I guess finding your room is part of the first test.
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