tells it like it is

Angela's Saturday afternoon paella recipe

Start with lots of fish broth and non-long-grain rice. (Rice not pictured.)

Heat some olive oil and grated garlic in a pan. Paella pan preferable. After a minute, add rice and fish broth. 1x rice to 2x broth. Med-high heat.


Add some tomato slices.


Add small prawns. (If you learn that rice takes 900 years to cook on your stove, as we have learned on ours, you can add these guys later so they don't get over-cooked.)

Add saffron.

Add frozen peas. Or regular ones.

Have a beer.

Like this.

Go do some laundry.

Keep adding fish broth and rotating the pan until the damn rice is almost ready. Add mussels. These are open because they were leftover from dinner the night before and are just being re-heated by the steam. Not sure how advisable that is.


Add cockles.



Cover and when your shelled items are open, it's ready!

Feed to undeserving but cute people.

Fin.

Loft bed

I've changed Lily's room...AGAIN.

This time, there's a loft bed involved.

See photos here:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=202282&id=659342526&l=46bab63edf

Like four seasons in one day

Or 3 blogs posts.

I was bored and googled myself and found out that The Chicago Flame did publish the angry letter I wrote them while working at UIC. Haha. I think I make the original article sound much more respectable than it was. It was pretty douchy, man.

http://media.www.chicagoflame.com/media/storage/paper519/news/2006/08/28/Opinions/Letter.To.The.Editor-2241675.shtml

Peace.

Take it back, Brad! Take back what you said about Thor.

Just watched L'auberge espagnole again and it was awesome. I take back what I said about it being shit. It's actually brilliant.

Highlights:
- Filming and writing are actually good.
- Xavier telling Anne-Sophie that it's racist of her to say Barcelona is dirty. Love the theme about certain people not seeing past Barcelona's scruffy crust to how great it is.
- Wendy's brother, clearly
- The pissing and puking in the street. It really is just like that.
- The American
- Xavier walking among tourists in Paris at the end. They perfectly captured that realization that you are no longer defined by your surroundings.
- Cheesy as it may seem, Xavi saying he doesn't want to disappoint his younger self, I love it. I've thought that so many times when wondering for what reason I'm doing the things I do.
- The film also gets points for geographical and airport accuracy.

So there you have it. It's actually really worth watching. Oh, and I forgot Audrie Tatou was in it.
Tonight I watch Russian Dolls.
~

Streamlining

The house has been needing some tackling: removal of junk we don't use and general washing of surfaces. Today I went at the family room and Lily's bedroom, hotbeds of straggling superfulous toys and craft materials. Surfaces were wiped, un- or mis-used things were recycled or binned. Furniture was rearranged. The end result was a much cooler room for Lil, I think.

Yesterday, before the cleaning began, Lily and I strung up some string and used mini wooden clips to hang some first-word flashcards all around her room. I stole this idea from Simon Hartrich's bedroom in the Kedzie apartment, where, if I remember correctly, the alphabet was strung around the room.


Anyway, it has taken away some of the bareness caused by the high ceiling in a room filled with small-person furniture.

Other new features include:

A revised kitchen area, that now has a baby's bed on the kitchen counter. Not sure about how that works, but....it does. Note the string with clips for Lily to hang artwork. That moon is her symbol at nursery school.


Bedside trinkets - IKEA lamp, souvenirs Georgia and Mircea brought Lily back from China, a Mentink original stencil, and a plant recovering from our time away at the holidays.


A closeup of the Mentink.


Fun hangy things: A felt mobile from IKEA and a wooden spinner found in a shop in the old section of town. Two faithful friends, Elmer the Elephant and Bouncy Black Sheep top the bookshelf. They're waiting for the right tallish lamp to come along to sit behind them.


A cleaned up Marmite jar to hold the marbles and bouncy balls that populate the corners of our home.


I quite like the boudoir I've created. Oli found that little chest of drawers in the street on his way home one evening. The mirror was left by the girls who lived in our apartment over the summer, the musical jewellery box came from Santa, and the dreamcatcher was purchased for one euro today in Barcelona. All-in-all, a good space for a Lil to get herself in order.



My favorite part of the room: the bookshelf flanked by a reading chair and baskets of bags, baby clothes, aprons, ballet slippers and tutus. Ask yourself why you don't currently have these things in your bedroom. Consider the improvement they might make.

Obama jokes about his identity

Here.

Go back in time

Follow the link and explore the internet January 2001 style.

De-bate! De-bate! De-bate!

At 1:27am we found out that the BBC would stream the Biden-Palin debate live at 2am, so we knew we'd be staying up later than usual. It's 1:53 and Oli's making tea.

~

The Great Global Warming Swindle

I've been teaching my students at Earth Team that man-made global warming is real, that it is pernicious, that there is scientific consensus, and that we have to act immediately. I also told them a cause of global warming is carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, which is produced by burning fossil fuels.



But, according to a British documentary called The Great Global Warming Swindle, I'm wrong.

It's not carbon dioxoide, stupid, it's the sun! Here are the main arguments:

- Records of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels since 1940 show a net increase, but during the period of greatest industrial growth 1940-1975, global temperature decreased steadily, and only began increasing again since the economic recession of the 1980s and thereafter.

- Theories of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas predict that the temperature in the troposphere should increase the fastest, but satellite and weather balloon data do not show this.

- Changes in solar activity match changes in global temperatures much more accurately than do changes in carbon dioxide levels (see chart above)

- Global temperature does not change due to changes in carbon dioxide levels, but rather, carbon dioxide levels change due to changes in global temperature. It is claimed that the Earth's oceans absorb carbon dioxide when they are cooler, and release it when they are warmer. When the Earth's average temperature increases over time, the oceans temperature also gradually increases and more CO2 is released into the atmosphere. Due to the large mass of the oceans, it takes a long time ("decades or centuries") for the reaction to temperature changes to occur. Thus, when a graph of the Earth's temperature change is compared to that of CO2 change, the CO2 chart mirrors the temperature one, on an 800-year delay.

- It is immoral for industrialised populations to demand that developing African nations ignore their reserves of cheap fossil fuels (coal and oil), and instead rely on expensive renewable power generation techniques, such as solar panels.

- The "2,500 top scientists" of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are not all scientists and do not all agree with the global warming report produced by the panel that points to CO2 as a cause of global warming.

See Wikipedia article from which most of the summary above was adapted :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Global_Warming_Swindle