Snips and Snails

I was going to post this on facebook, but I decided it's been too long since I updated my blog.  I bought chicken this week and took a stab at making curry, since my chicken was dangerously close to expiring.  Some may remember the mango shrimp curry that went really really well.  But that was made following very specific instructions, using lots of uppity spices like coriander and cinnamon and I actually didn't do that much of it, I was working more on the naan.  This time I sort of just freestyled it after reading what my cooks illustrated book says about curry.  So far, it doesn't look nearly as good as our mango shrimp masterpiece, but it does smell like curry.   I timed it all perfectly so that the rice would be finished right as the curry was ready, but then i pushed the wrong button, and thirty minutes later as I was finishing the curry, I realized the rice was only warming.  That was unfortunate.

Yesterday I was feeling impulsive and trendy, so I went and bought clipless pedals for my bike.  I can't wait for a sunny day, a few hours and a wrench (i still need to tighten them a bit more) so that I can go somewhere cool at new, exciting speeds.  Between that and the bigger ring they put on, it's going to be intense.  I still need to either fix or replace the seat, which got a bit bent in the great bike accident of 2011, but we're close.

By the way, the curry ended up just a little bitter, and pretty spicy, but it was still good.  Our house smells like curry and probably will for a while.  So that's fun stuff.


Otherwise, life's been good for the past couple months since I've written last.  Christmas came and went, new years came and I made some goals, but not resolutions, which is good, because I would have failed by now.  I think resolutions are silly.  But I still have some goals that I'm slowly working on.  I'm exercising more (and playing soccer!), I've got a date on friday, and I'm managing to read scriptures effectively and consistently, most of the time.  I lost my keys, which just recently turned up.  I also lost my jacket, which sort of perplexes me, so hopefully that will turn up soon.  I made one of my favorite made gifts I've made to date, a homemade Carcassonne, hopefully Dylan's gotten it by now so it won't ruin the month late surprise.  It turned out really well, one of my rare crafty moments.  School is deceptively easy so far, I'm pretty sure they're luring me into a false sense of security.  Work's been good, I get to set all my own hours and work more or less, depending on how much time I have.  So yes, life is great.

Hiatus is a good word

So following my recent resolution to not be a bum, life has been great.  I'm on track to get A's in all my classes.  I read the unabridged Count of Monte Cristo, sleep has improved slightly (although I definitely stayed up until 2:30 one night finishing my book when I had to wake up at 9), I bought a piano, I've even been writing in my journal consistently, which is wonderful but has a noticeable negative impact on my blogging; this is sad, because a lot of noteworthy things have happened to me over the past month or so.  For example:

I got stitches.  I've recently commented several times on how, despite my best efforts, I've never seriously injured myself while on a bike.  This is surprising not just because of how much time I spend on bikes, but more how often I've injured myself doing other reasonably safe things things (i.e. - snowboarding, playing hide-and-seek, jumping on couches, going in the backyard, jumping off of playground equipment, playing baseball in the backyard, all of these together have accounted for three broken bones, two lost teeth, a few stitches, and a nail in my foot.)  So I've decided that biking is the right outlet for adventure.  Incidentally, Provo's winter has been surprisingly mild so far, with mostly warm sunny days and still no real snow, but the friday before thanksgiving it finally snowed.  I walked out from work with the whole friday night ahead of me to find beautiful, picturesque snow flakes falling gently on the MTC.  Some of the missionaries around were running around playing in it and taking pictures, and I thought I ought to go home, find some people, and go sledding or something like that.  So I hop on my bike as I'm leaving I think, "This could be dangerous, maybe i should take my mountain bike [which was coincidentally at the MTC also] so as to avoid slipping"  But then I figured the roads would be fine, they're only wet, and my road bike does fine on wet roads.  So I head off, and as I start heading down hill I realize that snow, while beautiful, is sort of a hassle when it flies into your eyes at twenty miles an hour.  So I decided the best thing to do would be to keep my head down, glancing up occasionally to make sure I was on track.  There's a nice bike lane all the way down the hill, and there was really no reason to worry, so off I went.  As I was cruising down the hill, I noticed I was gathering a comical amount of snow on the front of my jacket and pants.  It was about this moment that I hit something surprisingly solid.  As I was flying over the handle bars of my bike I thought to myself, "Why is there a car in the bike lane??  How dare they!?" I might have had other thoughts as I was sailing over the car, but they didn't quite stick, and very shortly after I was picking myself up off the road, slightly dazed.  I looked back to see some cars coming, so I grabbed my bike and pulled it to the side of the road, noticing the my front tire was still back by the car, and I was worried it was going to get run over.  Some people ran over and asked me if I was ok.  As far as I could tell I was, although I was having a little trouble standing, so I leaned on the guy for support.  They told me I was bleeding a lot, and my mouth hurt, but I was happy to discover that I still had all my teeth and nothing was broken.  The first thing I asked was if my bike was ok, and they said the fork was broken.  A guy had me sit down in his car, while he called 911.  A little bit afterwards I saw a firetruck pull up, I remember saying that that was lucky, in case my bike caught on fire (I said this sarcastically, not deliriously).  Anyway, so then I hopped into the ambulance and the guy was checking that I was ok.  Everyone I talked to had about the same conversation with me,

My bike(s), the day after

"How's it going?"
"So you're coming down from the MTC?  What do you teach there?"
"That's cool, I know so and so who is somehow related to missionary work"

The ambulance guy also asked me some concussion related questions, like "do you know what the date is?"  I didn't, but I'm pretty sure I couldn't have told him the date before crashing either, I did know it was friday, and I was still planning to swing by the hospital, grab some stitches, and get on with my life.   So eventually we got to the hospital, they checked me out, gave me a cat scan (turns out my now was broken too) and cleaned me up.  They put some lidocane on me to numb it up a bit, and then gave me shots to numb it some more in preparation for stitches.  Then I waited for two hours.  Then the doctor finally was free, and so he came by, but by then I was no longer numb, so they had to give me some more shots of lidocane. I'm not sure if you've ever had a needle in your lip (I hadn't) but it is quite possibly one of the most painful experiences possible.  Easily the most painful thing that's ever happened to me.  So then i got stitches and then I went home.

My face, the day after

So that was exciting, I still feel fairly fortunate to be alive and without any serious, permanent damage (I wasn't wearing a helmet, although my beanie was fairly thick), my bike is in the shop and should be good as new on saturday.  I talked to the owner of the car and she's not making me pay for anything, and it turns out she's roommates with someone from my mission, that's provo for you.

Other than that, Thanksgiving happened, that was nice.   I got my stitches out and went up to Logan to Lisa and Vic's house, I learned to drive stick shift, one more step towards becoming a man, I did all sorts of school things, made all sorts of exciting foods, carved a turkey, dissected a pig, got lots off pity, and had an all around good time.


Now I need to stop putting off my school stuff so that I can make good grades so that next year I don't have to pay for college, so that I can support my extravagant lifestyle of wrecking bikes and buying pianos.

Ammon's Three Step Plan for good grades, less stress, and a more meaningful life:

Step 1: Stop mindlessly surfing the internet after 10p.m.  I manage to kill way too much time doing nothing and then I don't sleep enough.  Use time to do more worthwhile things.
Step 2: Bring lunch to school.  Use extra time on campus to study something.
Step 3: Buy Piano.  Play it.

So that's the plan, we'll see how this goes.

Something wicked this way came.

Allons-y!

 It's been a little while, life's been going strong.  Here's some exciting things from my life.  School's been going well, I had a bit of an epiphany this week and realized I care too much about grades and not enough about actually learning the material and so i'm not really studying like I should.  So I've been working a bit on that this week.  Halloween came and finally went according to plan, with the Doctor Who costume going exceptionally well.  I didn't quite plan on what I was going to do for Halloween well enough, but at least I looked amazing while not doing anything all that exciting.  BYU campus gets pretty excited about halloween.  I should have brought my camera, there was some pretty great costumes, including the Kool-aid man (complete with cups and kool-aid for passersby) and the sexy saxophone guy of youtube fame. I helped batman with some chemistry work, and saw no fewer than 4 Links.  That night I set up a sort of live clue in the library for FHE which turned out to be a lot of fun, there were clues and murder and everything else great.  Fhe planning has definitely been a lot of fun, it's looking like I'll be working monday nights next semester.

I've found myself somewhat motivated to play piano again this week for some reason, and I'm seriously considering buying a real piano.  I found a little upright on craigslist for $100, and I'm probably going to end up buying it this week.  It's just not as satisfying playing a keyboard, plus it would make me the classiest person at byu if I had my own piano in my apartment.  It's also a bit in retaliation to our upstairs neighbor who liked to play his guitar all the time.  I admire his dedication, but I don't really admire his taste in music.  Waking up to backstreet boys just isn't something I aspire to.

Lasagne

On Cooking:

Banana Muffins, for our muffin brunch.  Delicious

Pineapple Upside-down Cake, Based on Psych

The other day, my friend Dan pointed out that my blog was quickly becoming a cooking blog, which is somewhat true.  I don't share my recipes* though, so it's really more of a "showing off what I do" Blog, or maybe an Eating Blog.  I find it's interesting when people tell me that I'm good at cooking, because most of what I call cooking (especially baking) is just following simple instruction carefully.  I guess that's a skill, but I don't find it all that impressive.  Really it just requires some desire to do it and willingness to spend a little bit of money on having the right ingredients.  I think one of these days I'll figure out how much money I spend making food for other people.   This week I'm planning on making lasagna, and that was not the cheapest thing I've ever shopped for, hopefully it'll turn out well.

I think actually being good at cooking requires more skill and creativity than instruction following.  A while ago I planned on buying a new vegetable every week and cooking something good with it in order to become more versatile in my cooking ability.  Due to financial and time constraints, this hasn't quite happened, and most time I end up eating sandwiches and cereal every day but sunday.  It's going though, I bought carrots this week and I'm planning on doing fun stuff with that.  I know carrots aren't all that exotic, but i've never really cooked with them, so that makes it fun.

*It's worth mentioning that these two and almost all my recipes end up coming from this book, by Cook's Illustrated.  I got it last Christmas and I've used it extensively.  It's the only cook book I've ever owned, and probably the only one I will ever own, so when I say it's the best cook book you could buy, it comes from extensive personal experience.

Further Adventures in Cooking

Apple Pancakes

I've done a lot of cooking so far this week, and it's only wednesday.  I think I'm making up for the disappointing lack of both brunch and my typical extravagant dinner.  For Fhe on monday we had a sort of cooking challenge. Each team got 3 dollars and 45 minutes to go shopping and make food.  In addition to what they bought, we said flour, sugar, milk, eggs, and half a stick of butter were all fair game.  Our group made pancakes, with sort of caramelized apples on top.  They were really good, but could have been a lot better.  Definitely something to try in the future when I have more than 10 minutes to make something for pancakes.

Fries Quatro Queso Dos Fritos

Cheese Fries

Today in celebration of Psych's fantastic return, we made the Fries Quatro Queso dos Fritos.  They were really good, but the recipe we found was not very practical.  We have a lot of ideas for how to make it better, but it is a ton of work for what is basically just a deep fried baked potato with cheese, so it'll probably be a while before we try it again.  Actually, half way in we decided to just turn out potatoes into cheesy fries.  And those were really really good.  So that's how it went.  Now I feel all greasy, i need to take a shower and eat some yogurt.

Octo-bernation

 I love the fall, it's wonderful, but recently Provo decided to skip fall and go on to winter, and I've found myself very lethargic.  Yesterday i just ended up in bed till noon.  That probably also had a bit to do with the fact that I was out till 1:30 playing games and then stayed up another little while doing nothing in particular.  It's just tough feel motivated to go outside on cold rainy days when I'm going to be biking all over.  But life's been fine.  I made keylime pie this week, and that was more or less spectacular. I don't know if I like the work to eating ratio on pie though.  It takes quite a long time, and I only ended up with a few pieces.  But giving people pie gets you crazy brownie points.  Ironically, more than making brownies.

 I happened to run into my last district from the mtc at conference.  And they were all grown up, still waiting on their visas in salt lake city.  It was pretty cool to see them as missionaries in the field. In other news, life shuffles on.  I discovered that bike polo is one of the funnest and hardest things I've ever tried.  I'm finding that bikes are taking up more and more of my life.  I just spent around 75 dollars on a bunch of bike stuff that i've needed to buy for a long time, and admittedly some stuff I don't need per se, like two jerseys, one for warm and one for cold, but most of the other stuff (a small bike pump, a little saddle bag, a front light) are necessary.   I'm planning on doing a 100 miler with cami this weekend around utah lake.  Basically all that's left for me to buy is clipless pedals, but I'm putting that off for a little bit, I want to buy another little bike first to ride around campus this winter without getting my road bike all torn up and/or stolen.
Other than bike stuff, cooking is becoming a legitimate hobby.  I realize that popcorn making doesn't really count as cooking, but I definitely bought a popcorn popper from DI for 3 dollars.  Best purchase ever.  I actually bought two, but the first one smelled horrible.  You should always smell DI purchases before committing to them.  I also bought beaters (which made keylime pie possible) and a waffle/pancake iron.  DI appliances are wonderful.

P.s. - It's been one year (and two days) since I started this blog.  Hooray!