Chris's Life

I just finished my fourth and final Kaplan training session. It went well, I think. My teachback was a little long winded (I spent too much time on too few problems), but apparently the other people didn't think so. Amusingly, when I was done the trainer, in her role as a student, asked me the question, "That took a long time. Why don't we just plug the answers in?" However, since she had already called time, and since I was already thinking that I had taken too long, I started thinking about it in the context of the feedback section. It took me a moment to process that she was still in the student role. I recovered, but stumbled through the answer to her question because I had to quickly switch back into teacher mode.

Anyhow, we all graduated from training, and now I have a course to teach. It starts this saturday. 10am saturday, to be specific. Fortunately, this saturday is proctoring the initial diagnostic exam, and the first real session starts on monday. After that, the class is mondays and wednesdays from 6:00-8:30 (PM), and proctoring on saturdays. They're flexible, though, so I will get someone to cover for me so that I can go visit Mom on a weekend before her knee surgery comes around.

Also, Michael is going to come visit me some time soon, which I'm really looking forward to. It's been too long since I've seen him.

Well, I need to get some stuff cleaned up around this apartment. In particular I need to get my 125 gallon tank cleaned up so I can take pictures of it and sell it on ebay. As long as I get about $400 for it, I can use the money to buy a platform bet and then move my futon out to where my bed used to be. This will be a heck of a lot better for having people over. There will still be the issue of the reptile enclosures right next to it, but I'm going to work on that. I might just housebreak Niels, then give him a much smaller sleeping quarters rather than a full enclosure. It would give both him and me more room.

In fact, if I also housebreak the iguana, he can stay out permanently too. He's large enough at this point that no one is going to try to eat him, and frankly he's way too fast for either of the tegus anyway. Now, it may seem crazy to talk about house-breaking lizards, but I suspect that the process is very similar to cats. Cats apparently come housebroken, but that's only because they have a strong instinct to bury their wastes and the only diggable place in a house is typically the litter box. Lizards don't have any instinct to dig this way, but they definitely have an instinct to release their wastes in water. It's one of the problems of bathing lizards that as soon as you put them in they'll relieve themselves. You have to drain the bath and fill it again when they do.

However, this should allow me to housebreak the lizards by leaving around a litter-box sized tub of water that's easily accessible. Once the lizards learn where it is, they should just use it when they want to go (which, thankfully, is far less frequently than cats). Then all I have to do is dump the water into the toilet, which is the proper place for bodily wastes anyway. When you think about it, house-broken lizards are far more sanitary than house-broken cats or especially house-broken dogs.

If I can house-break all of the lizards, I can drastically reduce the space that I keep them in and consequently make my apartment far more people-friendly. It's worth a try, at least.

For those who are curious about the cookie crust pie that I made a few days ago, here's a picture of it before I started eating it.

Conclusions about the pie:

1. The crust is way too thick.
2. The filling tastes really good.
3. There is no point to using golden delicious apples, just use granny smith.

I just finished my third Kaplan training session. This one went better than the last one. I made a point of eating during the day and right before training, so this time I had energy to think and to do my presentations. I also got there early and had the forsight to buy a bottle of water (they don't have any water cooler with free water, unfortunately). For once I wasn't really thirsty during the first half of the evening.

In general I got pretty good feedback on my teachbacks. I was definitely feeling more comfortable this time around. Also, they were about math, so they were easier. The other thing is that there wasn't the pressure to nearly have several 5-paragraph essays nearly memorized.

I'm not sure how the next one is going to go, but the trainer said that unless one of us really tanks next time, we're all going to make it to classes. Which begin next week. Fun fun fun. I'm looking forward to it, though. The kaplan methods are interesting and look like they really work. Especially the math strategies. I think that the class will be fun.

I never used to understand pie. It tasted good enough, but it never made much sense to me why one would make such a thing. Fruit stuck inside some bad-tasting bread just doesn't sound like the sort of thing that should come into being except as a practical joke. Yet it came.

It's only now that I'm poor and struggling to make ends meet that I've finally understood pie. Pie is a cheap way to make calories taste good. Apples (or whatever other fruit is handy) are cheap enough, but probably don't taste very good. In modern times our fruit is very sweet compared to wild fruits, and there is a comparatively rigorous selection process which brings us fruit which is free of insects and bruises. Fruit plucked from the local fruit tree would have no such advantages (though I think that the fruit of even a thousand years ago was pretty different than its wild counterparts). Baking the fruit into a semi-soup both makes the fruit taste better and also helps to cover over the flavor of insects, bruises, and other imperfections. The dough surrounding the fruit is a good way to keep the fruit from drying out during the baking process.

I suspect that another benefit is that pie keeps fairly well without refrigeration (though I refrigerate mine). Sufficiently sugary food won't go bad because it desicates all of the critters which try to eat it.

So pie makes sense as a poor person's food. I can make a fairly large apple pie for about $6 in ingredients (let's disregard the cost of electricity to cook it for an hour at 325F). It tastes good enough and will serve as breakfast or a light lunch. (When I remember to put cinamon in the apple mixture, it even tastes good.) A single pie will last about four days, making it very economical (if you don't include the cost of labor to make it, or alternatively if I charge myself illegal immigrant style wages).

What I don't understand is how pie became an affluent person's desert.

Incidentally, these reflections are occasioned by my making another pie today. This one is made with 4 grannie smith apples and 1 golden delicious. I think that I agree with Beth that Grannie Smith apples are the tastiest in a pie, but I'd like to see if golden delicious adds any flavor if it's a minor ingredient. I haven't tried this pie yet, but I think that it's going to be my best one yet. I'm getting better at the crust (I really like my cookie crust) and I used less flower in the mixture, which should mean a less gooie pie. I'm looking forward to it.