Some Good News For A Change
thusspakezuska | June 12, 2010Just because I need a change of pace once in awhile.
Once when I was home visiting mom, I took her to a church spaghetti supper where we met up with her sister, my beloved Aunt Betty. This was at a time when I still couldn't really eat anything with onion in it, without immediately getting a migraine. Of course, the spaghetti sauce for the church dinners was chock full of onion. No problem, I said, you ladies enjoy your dinners and I will get something to eat later.
This was not acceptable to Aunt Betty.
She went into the church kitchen and whipped up a spaghetti sauce just for me.…
thusspakezuska | June 9, 2010oh. my. fucking. god.
I sooooooo wish I had thought of inventing FEMINIST HULK!!!!!!!!!!!!
I am in love with Feminist Hulk. In love. LOVE! Love, I say!
Hat tip Rebecca of Adventures in Applied Math.
UPDATE: Ms. Magazine interview with my new love!
thusspakezuska | June 7, 2010I made myself a nice lunch. Diced two small yellow squash, sauteed them in butter till just tender, plated and topped with some minced parsley from my herb garden...mmmm. Sliced up a kohlrabi and ate that too. Iced decaf coffee. Ate outside on the back patio, cats lolling about with Papa Cardinal chirping fiercely at them (because Mama Cardinal and, I think, babies are in the nest in the nearby arborvitae. Don't worry, Papa - I keep an eye on the kitties, too, and never leave them unsupervised.) Took out the spent flower stalks from all the iris in the garden bed by the street. (Really am…
thusspakezuska | June 6, 2010Because sometimes I need to take a breather, here's this post about fun stuff.
(with apologies to Carl Sandburg...)
Delfest jams on little mud feet.
It dances looking
over mountain and meadow
on singing multitudes
and then moves on.
I can't believe I have to wait a whole nother year for Delfest 2011.
What is Delfest, you ask?
The third annual eponymous bluegrass festival founded by bluegrass legend Del McCoury was held this year, as in the previous two years, at the Allegany County Fairgrounds in Cumberland, MD. But it's more than "just" bluegrass, and more than just a music festival…
thusspakezuska | February 15, 2010Philagrafika 2010 is happening now, all over Philadelphia.
Involving more than 300 artists at more than 80 venues throughout the city, Philagrafika 2010 will be one of the largest art events in the United States and the world's most important print-related exposition. Prominent museums and cultural institutions across Philadelphia are participating in Philagrafika 2010, offering regional, national and international audiences the opportunity to see contemporary art that references printmaking in dynamic, unexpected ways and to experience the rich cultural life of the city in the process.
If…
thusspakezuska | February 5, 2010Penny Richards has created a new purse, available on her Etsy site. Here's some info about it she shared with me (details about the purse construction available on the site):
[the purse honors] Melba Roy, a Howard University graduate (undergrad and masters) who was a mathematician at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in the 1960s. She led a team (four women, seven men) who did computations to track the movements of satellites. I wish I could find more about her, but there's nothing much online--can't even find a birth year (or death date, but she might still be alive).
Get it while it's…
thusspakezuska | January 19, 2010Over at A Blog Around the Clock there are a series of posts with great video interviews from ScienceOnline2010, but I'd like to especially point your attention to this one with David Kroll and Damond Nollan, both of North Carolina Central University. It was filmed shortly after their session on "Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial Session: Engaging underrepresented groups in online science media".
I missed this session due to a combination of sleep deprivation and headache, and am really regretting it. Isis has a good post based on her attendance at the session, however - you should read it…
thusspakezuska | September 3, 2009Two years ago I wrote about taking my mother to Cape Hatteras, and how great it was to have the use of a beach wheelchair that allowed my sister and I to take her right onto the beach. I wanted to call your attention to a comment recently left on that post by Jerry Nasello:
We thought you might like to know about how our little motorized beach wheelchair company is doing. We opened for business in April of this year. We rented a grand total of one motorized beach wheelchair in the month of April.
However, in the month of May we were booked solid for almost the entire month. In April we had a…
thusspakezuska | August 26, 2009The other night I made a chive sauce from a recipe off the internet (I regret that I did not keep track of the source) that was just beautiful.
One cup minced chives. Saute in some olive oil. I sauteed them until they were starting to get just on the verge of crispy, almost like frizzled leeks, but not that far gone. Just nicely sauteed. Add one quarter cup chicken broth. Then the recipe called for 1.5 cups cream but I only used one cup. I just couldn't imagine pouring in 1.5 cups of cream...anyway, I added it slowly, a little at time, with much stirring, over a lowish heat. Then stirred and…
thusspakezuska | May 16, 2009Isis has a post about the secret life of scientists - an important topic, lest the young 'uns think that grown-up scientists have no lives and just sit around in their labcoats all day reading journal articles, plotting experiments, and analyzing data. Go forth, read, and be amazed by the musical stylings of one David Kroll - scientist, mentor, administrator, and guitar hero.
thusspakezuska | March 22, 2009Text and title shamelessly stolen from Sciencewomen, I have no time to write, am at mom's again.
Dr. Isis has decided to donate the funds from her blog traffic to fund a scholarship for undergraduate research, and has gotten the American Physiological Society to match her donation up to $500. And all you have to do is click on her site - no $$ donations required. So cool!
Go visit her announcement, and her site through teh browser not the RSS feed reader for this month. :-)
thusspakezuska | March 12, 2009Some of us at Scienceblogs have been baking pies and posting pictures and recipes in anticipation of Pi Day (3.14) and in the hopes of winning the Pi Day contest. As I have previously mentioned, I am no pie baker. But why should that stop me from entering the contest? You're right, it shouldn't!
So I went ahead and made Bird Pie. And no, it's not made out of birds. Recipe and photos after the jump.
How To Make Bird Pie
First, get yourself one of those Gladware-type dinner-plate-sized leftover dishes. Take the bottom and either lose it or ruin it in your dishwasher or oven. Now, take…
thusspakezuska | February 28, 2009Mr. Zuska and I went to the Philadelphia Flower Show today. It's always wonderful to enter the show on a dull winter day and be struck with the glory of a giant convention center in full bloom. The show officially opens tomorrow, but today was the preview for Pennsylvania Horticultural Society members - of which there must be a zillion, because the show floor was mobbed.
One of the biggest - certainly one of the most excited - mobs was around this exhibit:
Yes: shoes! Made out of flowers 'n' stuff! Close ups after the jump.
I liked these:
These looked like they'd tickle:
Elegant,…
thusspakezuska | February 26, 2009Over at Sciencewomen, Alice has a post up on the topic of colleagiality that includes the story of a casual encounter with a very nice outcome:
...my seatmate was Jamie Comstock, provost of Butler University. She saw I was editing a student's paper, and asked "Faculty or student?" That was nice that she didn't presume I was a student. :-) She introduced herself, and then did I, and mentioned I was in my second year of tenure-track at Purdue. She went back to reading her book, and I went back to my paper; and then she said, "Can I interrupt you for a second?" She said she was very curious to…
thusspakezuska | January 20, 2009I'm watching the inauguration on tv...all the bigwigs are walking in...and here comes Malia and Sasha. Could those girls possibly be any cuter?
Every time they show a shot of the sea of humanity on the Mall I am just overwhelmed.
I've never had a sense of living through anything so momentous before.*
Yay for us! The Bush years are over!
*except the election, of course. Well, and 9/11. But that was a very different sense of momentous.
UPDATE: Feinstein just gave her speech and tears are rolling down my cheeks. That line about the dream begun at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial…
thusspakezuska | November 26, 2008Tonight I watched the Barbara Walters interview with Barack and Michelle Obama. They were talking about their daughters' reactions to the White House, and shared a story about Malia. She said that she had thought that the White House would be an untouchable place, where you would be afraid to touch anything, but it wasn't like that. And that when she had some long papers to write for her classes, she thought she might work on them at the desk with that thing signed by Lincoln - meaning, the draft of the Gettysburg address. She said she thought it would inspire her to think big thoughts…
thusspakezuska | November 7, 2008Zuska is thrilled to announce that Dr. Isis the Scientist, Domestic and Laboratory Goddess, has joined ScienceBlogs! Yay! Another kick-ass woman blogger in the neighborhood! And a well-shod one, too! Stop on over and say hi as she gets settled in to her new digs. Welcome, Dr. Isis!
thusspakezuska | October 1, 2008
That would be Ronnie, Becca, Clare, and Andre, who joined me at Farmacia in Philadelphia this past Sunday for a delightful brunch and lots and lots of good talk. Many thanks to the benevolent Seed overlords for subsidizing our little get-together.
I had the frittata.
.
The food was wonderful. I had a blueberry-pomegranate sorbet that was unbelievably delicious - intensely flavorful and silky smooth, not at all grainy or icy. They make their own ice creams and sorbets. Nice job! We sat in our booth throughout the brunching hour and well into mid-afternoon; the waitstaff was gracious…
thusspakezuska | June 16, 2008Some time ago I posted info about the Seed lab photo contest. The deadline is long since past, but in the comments on my post I offered to post lab photos that you submitted but that didn't get selected. Barn Owl took me up on my offer. Here's her lab photo followed by her comments. That photo really takes me back to my tissue culture days.
Mine is a standard workspace for microdissecting groups of neurons from mouse or chicken embryos, to establish cell cultures; I've got a Zeiss stereomicroscope, with fiber optics illumination from above or below the stage. Everything sits in a…
thusspakezuska | May 7, 2008I actually had to create a new category for this post. That says something about how infrequently I have something good to celebrate on the gender and science front.
Anyway, this year's Albany Medical Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research was awarded to two women! All previous recipients have been old white guys. But this year, Elizabeth Blackburn and Joan Steitz are the winners. Grrl has a nice post up here with background on the winners and some info on what they plan to do with the prize money. Peggy has a post up, too.
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