Category Archives: Food

Birch Beer Cupcakes

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I made cupcakes. Recipe adapted from this one.

1/4c butter
1c white sugar
2 eggs
2c flour
1tsp baking powder
1/4tsp baking soda
1 1/4c birch beer

Melt butter, mix in sugar. Beat in eggs. Combine flour, baking soda, and baking powder, then mix into butter/sugar mixture with the birch beer.

Bake at 350 for 20 minutes. Makes 15 cupcakes.

I baked them in Pokemon cupcake liners, so I decorated them like Pokeballs with M&Ms as the centers.

Unrelatedly, Zeke linked me to this today. It’s SFW porn. It’s kind of amazing.
(Apparently the audio track is still present though, so mute your computer or something. I didn’t have sound on when I watched it.)

Life goes, still. Looking forward to the upcoming break. So much.

Apples and SF

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I am currently in San Francisco. If you want to do things with me, you should poke me soon, as I fly out on Saturday.

But that’s not what I want to talk about here. What I want to talk about here is apple picking this past Saturday with Ben, Simiao, and Greg at Simmons Farm (argh blargh where is the apostrophe?) followed by awesome dinner at Bado’s Cucina (yay apostrophe). And by “talk,” I mean “dump lots of photos of the awesomeness.”

Simmons Farm now has a $6-per-person-minimum for apple picking, which is crap. Perhaps that means I will not go next year. But it was good times anyway.






















Yay apples. Yay friends. Yay happiness.

Recovery

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Got back from San Francisco last night. Woke up this morning at 10:30 (!) and immediately felt like crap, so I decided to take the day off. Best idea ever. I managed to sleep in (some more), run KoL turns, process and tag all 1871 photos from the trip, and have meals on time. (Only 1871 photos? I’m getting more restrained with photos. Kind of. At least compared to my Carnival 2009 trip where I took 10840 photos and my Carnival 2010 trip where I took 6733 photos.)

As such, photos are now posted to photos. It was kind of an awesome week.
life has also been updated.


I owed Sharon some money. I decided to give it to her entirely in $1 bills (as per an earlier email conversation). It was awesome.

A couple photos also deserve a bit more explanation.


That’s the most oblivious cat ever. It always sits in exactly the same pose with a big goofy smile on its face. No wonder its owners left it behind.


San Francisco constructions sites cause cancer. Too bad there’s construction sites everywhere.


Poor Koyel. We didn’t think she would stop talking on the phone. Well, at least Shawn and Sharon didn’t. Or something. I was kind of out of it at the time.


It’s Andrew with Andrew! Afterwards, we tried to draw him in Crayon physics. It didn’t work nearly as well.


ZMONG best tofu ever :O

San Francisco

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I’m in SF for the week for work. If you want to do things, ping me soon, as the rest of my week is getting pretty booked.

It’s been a fun week. Dinner every night has been with someone… Local all-you-can-eat pizza with Mark and Ian on Sunday; Stone for tasty Bi Bim Bap with Mark, Andrew, Jeremy, and Ian on Monday; Ironside for mediocre mac and cheese with Sharon, Charles, and Ian on Tuesday; and Delancey Street Restaurant with Ian yesterday.


Yesterday was a dev team outing to Sonoma to go ziplining. It was actually pretty awesome despite my fear of heights. I think the knowledge that I was always tethered to *something* (even when we were walking up the spiral staircase in the trees and across the suspension bridges) helped a lot.



The weather here is also a really nice change from the horribly humidity and heat of Pittsburgh. Normally I’m not a fan of Bay Area weather, but summers I could get behind.

The rest of the week is filled with awesome plans, starting with games night tonight.
People are awesome. I wish there was this much to do in Pittsburgh. But still, as a whole, I am much happier in Pittsburgh. And the only reason I’m so busy is that I’m trying to cram in as much as I can during my week here.

Yay life.

More photos will appear on photos at some point. (Subscribe to the RSS feed!)

Whee

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Life has gotten much better since my last update. Work has calmed down, and I’m generally feeling more on top of my bugs and tasks. This is nice.

This past week was Tartan for the first time in a month (San Francisco trip, sick weekend, then two weekends without production), and it was nice… like going home again or something. It’s also been an interesting week for the Tartan. The Fence was vandalized this week, so we put together an article about the attack and a followup article about the campus reaction. As such, I’ve been taking photos of the unhappiness. It’s interesting to see the campus come together in a way that it never really does (and to see the haters hatin’, as they are wont to do).


People Wars has been going well. After some playtesting with Tim, Gabe, Krieger, and Kellie, some revamping, and some more playtesting with Kellie, Glisson, tbroman, and tvaughan, I feel fairly comfortable with where the game is at at this point, so I’ll probably release at some point in the near future.

Tonight I felt like splurging on food (as I often do), but I took the unusual step of actually doing so. It was actually a very nice experience that I would like to repeat… a bottle of wine (I’ve never had wine poured for me at a restaurant before!), an awesome slab of salmon, dessert, and very nice company (and conversation). It’s probably the first time I haven’t felt guilty about spending $50 on a meal, and I feel like it’s something I should allow myself more often. Good food is awesome.

In related news, I have gone vegetarian (lacto-ovo, or whatever it is, since I like cheese and eggs too much to give those up) and am seeing how long I can stick to it. I’ve never really been a fan of meat (I generally find it greasy), and ever since I’ve moved here, I’ve been making efforts to avoid it where possible. Seemed like a reasonable next step.