224934 Visitors and Counting

Okay, so as of late I have not been blogging nearly as much as I would have liked. In fact, it seems that it takes a lot of effort to come up with grammatically correct posts. No wonder people “tweet” so much. LOL. In fact, my last blog post was so long ago, I am sure some NY Times Best Sellers have published a book or two in the interim. 🙂

224934

The number of people I have interacted with during my various volunteer activities.

Breakdown

167664 Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
45132 Smithsonian National Zoological Park
4918 Washington Area Bicyclist Association
7150 National Park Service, etc.

88

The number of tours I have given at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park

1747.5

The number of hours spent volunteering. There are times when my volunteering does not involve interacting with visitors. For example, this past December, I got to be Panda Claws at the Smithsonian National Zoo.

24 March 2013

Will mark the 6th year of my volunteering in DC with the Smithsonian. I had originally thought it would take 35 years to make 1oooooo and it looks like it should take me 18 more years. Nothing like having a long term goal 🙂

Photos

Being Panda Claws was really fun and I thought I would include some photos. My friend Keith came to take photos of me and bought a panda hat to get into the spirit 🙂

2012-10-182021-01-26

Movie Review: Argo

So I decided not to spoil the movie for anyone, but I just wanted to make one comment…..

“So that is why there are so many bad Sci-Fi movies.”

Premise

Iranian Hostage Crisis in the late 1970s and early 1980s. While I was alive during that time, I don’t recall hearing much about it. Granted, how much would a 1 year old retain 🙂 As with any foreign hostage situation, I would hope the goal of the government would be to attempt to free the hostages and return them to their home country. This movie was no different.

Appreciation

Since I don’t recall much about the crisis, I don’t think we covered this in social studies in grade school, I lacked a real connection to the movie. Just like the landing on the moon, I believe if you were paying attention to those events on the news as they unfolded, you would enjoy this movie more.

However I have a weakness for “True Stories” or movies “Based on true events.” Granted hopefully movies are a little more aligned with true events than the songs “Inspired by the motion picture soundtrack.” 🙂

Overall Impression

From what I could tell the cinematography was accurate and very well done. It is always hard to do movies that take place during an earlier period since you need to get the props to match. There must be a stockpile in Hollywood of so much stuff since I really doub’t you can find new “vintage” Star War sheets 🙂

While websites say “Must Go,” I would say “Go” if you like a true story. It moves a little slowly, but unlike Titanic, I did not look at my watch in hopes it would end. Kudos that my attention was kept! Granted had I received a text message and the associated vibration in my pocket, I might have taken a minute to see who it was. Now, if you recall the events from that time period, probably would be a “Must Go” if not only for fact checking and accuracy of clothing style.

As far as Ben Affleck winning an award for the movie…..have to see what else it is up against. I don’t think I will be waiting for this movie to come out at the RedBox, since I already saw it in the theatre, and this is not the kind of movie that I will run out and buy. If you don’t see it in theatres and are a history buff, definitely worth looking renting it when it comes to your local video store, Redbox weeks later, or Netflix the following year 🙂

2012-07-232021-01-26

Old Eggs = Vegan Cookie Experiment #1

How many times have your brought baked good in to work only to find out that half of your colleagues are vegan? Vegetarian is pretty easy to accomodate, but there is just something about eggs and butter than you cannot easily replace. This weekend I decided to try out some vegan baking. Be on the lookout for additional posts!

Old Eggs & Prior Research

Let’s be perfectly clear, I am talking about baking and not reproduction 🙂 There are definitely references in some comic movies such as “Baby Mama” and “Get Smart” to “old eggs.”

Before this weekend I compiled a list of substitutes for various animal byproducts in an effort to just “replace” ingredients in my yummy baked goods. I also realized that my eggs were well past the expiration date and while they passed the “sink or swim” water test to indicate they were still edible, a month seemed a bit too old to trust, so I decided to dive in and try to make some vegan cookies!

Flax Seed Meal

Seemed to be a recommended replacement for eggs where binding was necessary. Tablespoon and 1/4 water per egg to replace.

Apple Sauce

Sounding more appetizing, 1/4 cup applesauce per egg when binding was not required.

Margarine

Seemed to be easy since I thought it was all vegetable oil. I was shocked to see “contains milk,soy” on the back of the store brand! There was talk about the “Lite” version of Smart Balance, but further research online and on the label revealed that “Palm Oil / Palm Fruit” was an ingredient. Most of us know that products using Palm Oil like Girl Scout Cookies are causing habitat for the Orangutan and other species of that region to be destroyed. Being the Zoo volunteer that I am, I can in no way knowingly consume products containing Palm Oil. So, the suggestion had to be tossed out.

Friday, 20 July 2012

Mission: Gingersnaps

Problematic Ingredients

Margarine
Eggs

Series of Events

Picked up some applesauce to replace eggs and was about to add margarine when I discovered that their was milk in the margarine! AHHH! So, I consulted my handy research page and thought, oh, I can just replace the margarine with applesauce too.

Mixing all the ingredients together, I did not have a very good consistency. In fact, I don’t think any amount of time in the frige or freezer would help my cookies be anything than complete flat blobs. So…I added some flour to help soak up some of the applesauce juice which I believe was the root cause of the issue. Granted there was 2 cups of apple sauce in the recipe to replace the 2 eggs and 1.5 cups of margarine.

They Are Cookies!

Baking commenced and they looked more like molasses cookies when I took them out. To my surprise they were hard to the touch! Success I thought. Taking one bite I discovered they were a bit chewy, and cake like, probably from the extra flour that I tossed in to help get a firmer consistency. Not impressed 🙁 I took them to the National Zoo that next day with the warning that they were experimental cookies. I had a few nice comments, no one complains about free food, but I was not around to check the trash can for partial cookies either.

Saturday, 21 July 2012

Mission: Gingersnaps and Chocolate Chip Cookies

A bit more ambitious to try out a few different combinations since the 100% applesauce route was not the way to go.

Problematic Ingredients

Margarine
Eggs

Series of Events

This time I made 3 batches of cookies trying out different substitutes. Sure, I could have found a vegan recipe online, but would that be fun? Also, if I could find out a general rule of substitution, then I could theoretically take any recipe and turn it vegan! That is much more exciting a prospect.

Gingersnap Batch 2

Substituted eggs with applesauce and found a vegetable spread which did not contain milk.

Results

Not bad. They were pretty flat, and very soft, but actually edible! They had a closer consistency to their non-vegan relatives.

Gingersnap Batch 3

Substituted eggs with flax seed meal/water and found a vegetable spread which did not contain milk.

Results

Not bad. They were pretty flat, and very soft, but actually edible! They had a closer consistency to their non-vegan relatives. I could not tell them apart from the ones with Applesauce in them.

Chocolate Chip Batch 1

Substituted eggs with applesauce and used vegetable shortening to replace the margarine. Also had to get more expensive Girardelli chocolate chips which did not contain milk or milk fat.

Results

Pretty darn good! They were again flat, but quite yummy and stayed together well.

Conclusion

Looks like the vegetable shortening came out in the end as having a harder consistency which helped the cookies stay together better. As much as I prefer the spread as it was lower in fat, those cookies seemed to be almost too soft, but again, I did not try to make the Chocolate Chip with the spread. That will be cookie batch 5 coming up this weekend! You can’t compare apples to oranges 🙂

2012-04-172021-01-26

Why are ebooks so expensive?

Why invest in eBooks?

Devices such as the Nook and Kindle have been around for a very long time. They offer convenience but have many limitations over paper backs.

Benefits

No paper used to produce the book. (Environment Benefit)
Can carry many normally heavy books in the palm of your hand.
No recurring production costs. Once made into an ebook, which I don’t think costs much or takes much time when computers are used to type books in this modern age.

Limitations

You cannot lend them. Sure you can lend some to others with the same book reader, but just for a limited time.
You cannot donate / sell them when done.
You cannot fill your library with them. Okay…so unless you are rich and have a library you need to fill with first editions of rare books, you may not see a real need for a physical book.

Why?

Back to the original question…..I don’t know. Perhaps it is because we are paying for the convenience? or more likely, the middle men are greedy. I hear that authors make very little on a paperback and likely don’t make any more on eBooks.

To make matters even worse, often times the paperback costs the same price as the eBook. For me, I want to go Green for the sake of the environment. This is the reason I bought my Kindle. Not to mention that the entire 7 book Harry Potter collection takes up virtually no space on a shelf or my Kindle.

The biggest hesitation I have is that I cannot lend the books to friends and family, or donate them when I am done reading. Resale value of eBooks is not very high. LOL. Now I did buy my mother a Nook for Mother’s Day which would have allowed me to share, but she promptly sold it and bought yarn with the proceeds. She also does not pay for any books and found the Nook worthless.

eBooks should be $2

I heard that an author gets only a small portion of a book sale. Since there is virtually no cost to make an eBook, why not get rid of the middle men and make eBooks economical as well as convenient!