Chocolate & Whisky Cheesecake Brownies!

I have made them! On Tuesday evening, I went round to Ed's, and we made brownies - actually we made two batches, one with whisky in and one without. The recipe I use is essentially the same as this one. For the whisky, I added about 30ml, and then also added about 2T of flour to try to balance it out. Looking at how the mixture marbled, I think that was actually a bit too much flour to add (consider that the recipe only has 1/2 cup of flour in it at all to start off with) and think that you might be okay without adding any additional flour at all. I'll try it next time*.

 Ingredients. Note the fair trade chocolate and sugar, and the happy eggs :)

Chocolate and butter - melted these in the microwave.

Chocolate batter mixture ... mmmmmm.

... aaand cheesecake mixture. That's my hand, and Ed's foot in the background ...

Preparing to marble the mixture

Yaaaay brownie! The one on the left is the chocolate only one, the one on the right is the chocolate and whisky. You can see that it hasn't marbled as well - the flour I added changed the consistency of the chocolate brownie mix a little bit too much. But it did taste delicious.

Mmmmmm brownie!

*I don't think I'm likely to make the version with whisky again - it was very nice, and a good balance of chocolate and whisky, but I didn't prefer it to the chocolate-only version. I'd be interested in trying a Baileys version and a Tia Maria version, though. No doubt people will tell me this is because I have awful taste in drinks (I like very, very sweet things).

In Praise of Saturday Mornings*

*This was going to be called 'An Ode to Saturday Mornings' but I decided that that would be abuse, since I'm not going to make an effort with stanzas.

Oh Saturday morning, how I have missed you ...

sunlight on seedlings

Radio 4

novels for reading

... laid-back revision

phoning my parents

it's a good day.

... and now for something completely different: chocolate and whiskey

Hey hey people :)

Things have been pretty heavy around here lately so I figured it was time for a light and fluffy post ... following on from recent facebook exchanges, I ask you: what is the best way to combine chocolate and whiskey?

My suggestions:

1.  Chocolate Cheesecake Brownies with added Whiskey:
   I've made these brownies before (or at least a recipe which looks almost identical, I haven't dug out my recipe book to check, but the quantities and method all seem right) and although they don't quite engender offers of marriage (mind you, those have dropped off now I'm actually married ... chocolate-cake-inspired proposals did figure multiple times in my single life) they are always very very much appreciated. I'm thinking that you could add some whiskey to the brownie mixture, possibly taking out the egg whites (to balance out the liquid), or else adding some flour. I'm thinking that I'm going to try this sometime in the next week.
   
2. Profiteroles topped with chocolate and filled with whiskey cream:
   I've been planning to make profiteroles for ages and it hasn't quite happened - again, sometime next week perhaps. This would work really well, I feel. This should happen. I've made profiteroles before and they worked really well and were very lovely, and whiskey cream can't really go far wrong.
   
3. Whiskey truffles:
   This is bound to be a good idea. I haven't made precisely these before but I've made Baileys truffles / Tia Maria truffles before.

Anybody got any other suggestions? Clamorous applause and/or comments encouraged. I'd be interested in making all 3 of these this term sometime, and if people around me talk about how lovely it would be if I did and how much they want me to do so I might do it more quickly ...

For Tricia

This is for Tricia.
Now I just need to find out where she lives so I can post it to her. If she's okay about giving her address to a random stranger from the internet.

(Pattern here)

Consume Me

Yesterday, during the Eucharist, this song unfolded in my head.
(Full lyrics here)

It's another one of the songs that I remember strongly - almost viscerally - from my early teens, when I was continuing to appropriate faith in Jesus as my own, not just as a familial/upbringing thing.

And it contains images that stick, that grow with me ... the Spirit as fire. Being consumed. Devotion.

I'm praying that I can live up to those this exam term.

Women in Mathematics (a complaint, and then some data)

(Apologies for the lack of updates recently. I'll try to do better this week.)

Later this term, I and a friend are going to be giving a lecure on the History of Women in Mathematics. I am, as a starting point, scouring the internet for useful sources.

Unfortunately (and this is the complaint): reasonable sources are really, really hard to find. The vast majority of them are completely uncritical of women mathematicians, and drool all over the merest hint of intelligence.

(In particular: Ada Lovelace was not a genius, but unreasonable flattery of her started even during her own lifetime (hey, she was a noble lady to suck up to, I guess (citation: 'Ada: a life and legacy' by Dorothy Stein)) and so it's not surprising that it's continued ... similarly we don't know enough about Hypatia to claim that she was a genius ...)

Ugh. Hyping early women mathematicians doesn't do us any favours - as though it were astonishing that a woman could do any mathematics at all, so she should be praised to the heavens for taking a course in calculus (Ada Lovelace again, I'm thinking of).

Most of the first women mathematicians probably weren't amazing mathematicians; after all, a lot of their training was very haphazard and they had all sorts of other barriers to fight against, they certainly weren't able to give their studies free rein. This is fine and expected and not their fault. They were successful enough that it became clear that women were capable of doing mathematics, which has gradually led to where we are today, when equality has come a long way (although still has a long way to go). This is good. We should not expect to have come across enormous numbers of amazing women mathematicians given that mathematical education wasn't really open to women prior to the last 100 years, and given that there is still widespread residual "girls can't do maths".

So it's not in any way dishonouring to women if I say I doubt that there have yet been many truly 'great' female mathematicians (although quite how I'd define 'great' I'm not sure). Emmy Noether I have heard about enough in non-sycophantic ways that maybe she was one.

Another really annoying thing is that most sources of women in mathematics don't attempt to take a proper account of the sociological circumstances these women were in. If it's mentioned at all, it's in a "OMG we've, like, IGNORED women for SO MANY YEARS but they were FAB and contributed LOTS, JUST LIKE MEN" way, and nothing more is said (okay, yeah, I'm paraphrasing there). This is not just unhelpful, but also patently untrue: women did not contribute 'just like men', women when they did manage to contribute usually contributed in spite of a system that was set up to believe their only value was in their womb and not in their brain.

I have found one excellent article: Women communicating mathematics: The historical role of women. I recommend it. It's pretty short, but actually does genuinely reasonable things with the data.

Basically, having looked at the lives of many female mathematicians, they tended to be in rich, scientific families (hence having access to books and such, or maybe being able to listen in on their brothers' education - tutoring at home, of course). This doesn't mean that their families were supportive, often there were not (Sophie Germain's parents apparently stole her clothes so that she would be too cold to study - she was sneaking out of bed in the middle of the night to do maths, tsk tsk). They tended to be women who really pursued maths (not surprising that those are the only ones that made it far enough that we hear about them) - e.g. again Sophie Germain going against her parents, who forbade her to do maths.

Later, they tended to gain an alliance with a male mathematician who helped to direct their career; a few of them managed to lecture sort of under the name of a male mathematician (standing in for a husband / father for a few lectures, for example, or Emmy Noether being able to lecture under Hilbert's name, as his assistant). They tended to be submissive to this person, but it meant that they had access to mathematical papers and so on, and had someone to advise them (and for the guy, he had someone to pass work he didn't think was very interesting on to ...). This seemed to be generally symbiotic.

There's also a good paper here: it's called "Why So Few?" and is about women in the US in STEM (Science, Tech, Engineering, Maths) subjects. You can download it for free if you give them your email address. Again a good, scholarly report. I think I'll be coming back to AAUW to look at more of their resources.

(But for now, bed.)

Recently I have been reading ...

http://disabledfeminists.com/

I'm not going to try to sum them up, because I won't be able to do it. But I have been spending quite a lot of time on this site, and learning so, so, so much.

Here's the beginning of their mission statement:

"FWD/Forward: Feminists With Disabilities For A Way Forward Mission Statement:
FWD/Forward is a group blog written by feminists with disabilities. It is a place to discuss disability issues and the intersection between feminism and disability rights activism. The content here ranges from basic information which is designed to introduce people who are new to disability issues or feminism to some core concepts, to more advanced topics, with the goal of promoting discussion, conversation, fellowship, and education."

I don't identify as disabled, but this place really makes me think, and in particular makes me start to realise where I am unconsciously being ablist or heterosexist. (That last sentence feels grammatically wrong, but I'm not sure how to fix it ...)

If you have a bit of time to spend, check them out. It's a wonderful place, full of fascinating people with so much to say, and they say it articulately and rationally. It's brilliant.

So, I'm back

It feels a little odd. But manageably so.

Had a good last-day-with-Chris today. Drove up, unpacked things, went to the supermarket to stock up on essentials like ice cream and fried chicken (well, and frozen peas and milk and bread), came back and bunged things into the fridge/freezer and had lunch, then went off and watched Alice in Wonderland in the afternoon. I know, I'm so behind ... everybody else saw Alice weeks and weeks ago. But at least we got round to it :) it was a very well-done film, although I didn't really empathise with Alice at all so I didn't feel that I really got into the film as much as I'd have liked to. She seemed a bit too detached, and I didn't believe her very much. She didn't appear to actually care about anything.

Having said that, everyone else in the film was great, and she wasn't terrible. Oh, though Anne Hathaway as the white queen was really anaemic - I get that she was supposed to be like that and was playing up to it, but it was a shame, because I usually love Anne Hathaway, and here I quite liked her but I didn't love her. Loved the Cheshire Cat, though.

So. I'm here again. The work has begun.

Excogitation #05 - dealing with deadlines

In all of my life before University, I was very organised. I was never working on a piece the day before it was due - unless it was something completely routine (like maths homework - A level and below maths homework usually essentially being recipe-following). Essays were started when they were handed out, and usually finished a couple of days early - plenty of time to look them over before handing in. So I never had any trouble with deadlines; I was always given reasonable deadlines, I always finished work early.

Oh, how that has changed. My deadlines are still reasonable ... although 'reasonable' has been completely redefined, to require a LOT more work in a much shorter space of time. But still you know, physically doable, and not only that - doable even once you've factored in time to sleep and eat and exercise and go to lectures (mind, this is not everyone's experience - I've been lucky enough to be able to schedule things spaced out by a day or two between each deadline, some people haven't been able to do that). But finishing things two days in advange? Hah.

Anyway. I was going to try to say something useful about deadlines. One measure that I've seen used and that I think is quite useful is assessing things based on urgency and importance (at this point I should draw a little graph thing, but I'm not going to bother).

The idea is that if something is urgent and important, you should do it immediately. If something is important but not urgent, you should get on with it anyway (these are often the things that get pushed to the end of the queue, and then come back to bite you in the ass, because they were important). If something is urgent but not important, do it if you have time / try to pass it on to someone else ... and if something is neither urgent nor important, put it very bottom of your list. Doing this ought to keep you on top of your deadlines.

This is a pretty good way to organise things ... when all your items don't fall into the same category. At the moment, I need to do revision and past papers, plus some more routine work left over from last term (for 'routine' read 'not exam questions, just bloody hard tricky ones'). I guess the latter are more urgent as I'll have to have them done in about 2 weeks' time. All are very important.

The other main issues, as I see them, are motivation and fear. Motivation isn't usually a problem for me, so I don't have much to say about that I guess, except that the fear of missing deadlines is motivation enough, usually. Sometimes I'll want to do questions because they seem interesting - sadly, nowhere near often enough. This term I won't have lectures, so I'm hoping that that might help me to have a bit more freedom to do maths that I enjoy and want to revise, not just the next thing that has to be on the list. Also, there's been complete course choice this term, so the maths I'm doing is more of the maths I enjoy.

Fear ... fear I can talk about. Doing maths at a top university has forced me to confront myself, my fear of failing, and my fear of risk, sometimes it seems on a daily basis. Certainly on a weekly one.

I wish that wasn't the case. I wish I didn't fear failing anywhere near as much as I do, and I wish I didn't fear risk, because risk is often necessary. I tend to listen to too many people and not to trust myself or push for my own way enough. These are things I've learnt about myself, and that I've become better at over the past few years, but they are very much here (come for tea, you can meet them ...).

Advice for dealing with fear, especially over deadlines ... well, the only thing I find actually has a chance of dealing with semi-paralysing fear is just to get on and do the thing you're dreading. Note 'only thing ... has a chance' - it doesn't cure it. It doesn't stop it. Sometimes I end up working through everything, still feeling the same as before I started ... but at least in those cases sure, I feel awful, but it's done. And that's something, right? And sometimes I get absorbed in what I'm doing, and half an hour later, I realise that it has gone away, and can breathe a sigh of relief.

This stuff. It's hard. And it's really easy to come down on myself because everybody around me is working really hard at their degrees too, and I should stop whining because it can't be that hard, surely? And I'll be fine, and I'm just being silly (see number 2 for related thoughts). But that's not actually true. It is actually hard. I need to remember that one. And they ask us hard things on near-impossible deadlines and somehow we do it. That's pretty impressive. We can do hard things.*

*that's a bit of a catchphrase from Momastery. And I love Glennon for it. But I do always want to add "that's what she said".

Preparing for the term ahead

It's funny ... over the last couple of days, I've started feeling like I'm getting ready to go into battle.
This is it. This time, everything counts. The exam term of my last year; the exams that everything rides on, no lectures ... just me and the maths*.

At the moment, I'm feeling brave.


I'm preparing to enter the fray, as it were ... and I have more photos for you :)

Yesterday, I realised that my sniffles over the last couple of days weren't because of a cold coming on, they were the start of hayfever season ... so I went into Boots to pick up some hayfever meds, and then got distracted by their 3-for-2 on vitamins and herbal remedies.Now, I've always believed that with a proper balanced diet you don't need any supplements, but I've also had to face the fact over the past couple of weeks that I'm getting worse at this proper diet thing - well, my diet's fine, I'm just bad at getting round to eating properly. I keep thinking "It's only 12:45, I'll just finish this and have lunch later ..." and then an hour and a half later I'm starving and irritable and finding it hard to concentrate ... guess why?

So. I was looking for a multivitamin, and the teen one looked approachable somehow (besides which, I don't think my body's requirements have changed compared to being in my teens). So then I was looking for another 2 things, possibly ... looked at extra B vitamins for energy, and omega-3 for braininess, but I really don't like popping lots of pills ... so when I walked round the end of the aisle and found more herbal and aromatherapy things, I was happy. Rescue Remedy, because rescue may be needed at moments when other methods (like phone-a-friend) are unavailable ... and Tisserand's 'Concentrate' essential oil blend because it looks like it'll be useful. I've just opened it up and it does smell lovely and energising.

Today I went and bought another of these hair-comb thingies - this one for rather more everyday wear (the enormous bits of plastic on the ends of the combs preclude it from fancy-wear, I feel). These things are brilliant - perfect for times when you really should wash your hair but have another 17 things to do that are more important ...

(Also, it is really quite difficult to take a picture of the back of your own head)

Lastly - baby herbs! Or a baby herb factory, anyway. I have enormous sunny windowsills, and so I'm going to take advantage of that to try and grow my own herbs ... I'm not sure whether I'll actually get much out of it in the way of supplying herbs for cooking, although it'll be brilliant if I do, but the main point of it is to have some green, growing, hopeful things in my room.

So from this post I guess my defense against this term consists of multivitamins, good hair, and growing things ... hm. Not a terrible summary :) and of course things like exercise, sleep, and so on will also be deployed ... it should be a good term. I'm looking forward to it. I think.

*(Actually, okay, "just me and the maths" isn't at all true. I'm surrounded by other people doing the same thing, which is sometimes the most amazing blessing in the world - because you can just be understood and not have to explain - and sometimes really hard, because I can panic and respond to other people doing things differently by second-guessing myself and worrying and losing confidence, because they seem to have it all together and should I emulate them? (Of course, sometimes I should. But sometimes I shouldn't. Keeping a clear head is the important thing ...))

Finished!

At about lunchtime today, I FINALLY finished my last piece of coursework. There are 4 projects I've been doing, and I've been working 9-10 hour days with some regularity since Monday the 22nd of March. Not actually every day, but ... a large proportion of them.

This is good. I reckon I've finished just in the nick of time - the projects aren't actually due until the end of the month, but if it had taken longer, I would've started to feel awful about spending time just working on them and not revising - I've been only doing coursework and not revision (except that of course doing the coursework involves maths so does revise a few things), deciding that it's better to do one thing and get it Done and Finished and Done Properly than to try to balance both. If I'd decided to try and balance them I'm pretty sure I would've ended up going "there's no end in sight ..." and collapsing, whereas this way round although the end was "only a couple of hours away" for about 20 hours' worth of work (that's the trouble with programming, you can't predict when things will break - or at least I can't yet), at least it was in sight.

A Picture Post

Things that have been going on ... mostly coursework, which is taking longer than I thought it would, and generally being a pain. I think I've just sorted out the last actual problem with my programming/maths, though. Now I just have to process lots of data and write up - hah, 'just' ... well, it should go okay from here on in. Fingers crossed.

There's been lots I want to blog about or feel I should blog about, but I should be programming, so I'm going to let the pictures do the talking. Here goes:

I've had this on my desk for the last few days. It helps.

My new laptop battery arrived today ... I'd been putting off buying one for ages, but last week, after about a year of saying 'Your battery is getting near the end of its life, and needs replacing soon' the message changed to 'Your battery is dead. Please buy a new one' so I did. Pricey stuff, but necessary, and nice to have it sorted.

Also today, I bought a new hair-combs-thingy. Pretty, isn't it?

I've been reading 4 Maccabees. It's a bit odd. I mean, it's a perfectly normal, reasonable, philosophical text ... which feels odd for a book of the Bible. (I should clarify that this is in the Apocrypha, not the 66-book Bible).

And last but not least ...

Ladybird Kitteh looks after my coursework.

More thoughts on jobhunting

Situation: I graduate this summer. If I get a first, I may do a one-year master's course (staying at the same University). But I'm certainly not counting on that. So far I have submitted one job application and done some work on a second one (by 'work' I mean things like 'organised volunteering opportunities to gain relevant experience' and 'went to visit them' and things), and I've collected information on other places I might want to work, mostly through Careers' service events and things. It's a start, but I need to keep going.

Current thoughts:

1. It's still scary.
2. But it's not the end of the world (although if it was, I wouldn't have to look for a job. But I feel causing the world to end is not the answer.)
3. Baby steps. 
4.  I should probably try to network a bit more - talk to family and friends for advice, see if people I know can help me find out what jobs are out there, that sort of thing. 

I'm going to try to set aside X amount of time every few days to work on things. At the moment I can't really focus on more than picking one task (e.g. "I'll look on the Uni Careers website to see whether I can go in and talk to someone for advice, and then I might email them for an appointment") and getting that done, then peeking out from behind my hands to pick another task, and going for that. I'm finding this tough. And that's okay. But that's not a reason not to do it.

Alleluia - Christ is risen!

Wishing you all a happy and blessed Easter.

(He wins. At life.)

Holy Saturday

I seem to have left my copy of God on Mute: Engaging the silence of Unanswered Prayer (Pete Grieg) at Uni, which is a shame. Pete gives a really good treatment of Holy Saturday (the whole book is great, and I would really recommend it) ... luckily for me, the internet can stand in for the book a little bit - see links below, and this quotation:

"I guess it’s the one day in the entire year when the Church has nothing to say. And yet, although we know so little about it, Holy Saturday seems to me to describe the place in which many of us live our lives: waiting for God to speak. We know that Jesus died for us yesterday. We trust that there may be miracles tomorrow. But what of today – this eternal Sabbath when heaven is silent? Where, we wonder, is God now?"

As I've mentioned many times before, the Church I grew up in didn't really do the liturgical year at all, and also kiwis don't do Lent. So one of the cool things about coming to England and attending an Anglican church has been finding the rhythm of the Church year, and it's something that has started to speak to me. In particular, today, I think of waiting. In Advent, and in Lent, we wait, and prepare for what we know is coming ... and I think that the idea of Holy Saturday as a metaphor for life (between Jesus' death and the ultimate Resurrection) is a really powerful one.

Because yeah, life is messy, and we don't have all the answers. And within faith there is a place to be unsure and scared and lost and grieving and not knowing how it will all work out, despite the fact that people might try to jump up and stick a platitude over the darkness ... sometimes God is there and tangibly present, and sometimes you have to wait. Keep the faith. (Or if you can't do that, 'Carry on, and faith will follow' as d'Alembert wrote - although he was writing about infinitesimals).

I don't understand this waiting thing very deeply, because I'm very, very blessed that in general my experience has been very much God being tangibly present, and very little God being absent, or unfindable. That doesn't make my faith any better than anyone else's (it really, really doesn't, and I would hate for anyone to read that sentence and assume it did), doesn't mean that I'm a better person that anyone else, or that I do things right, or anything like that, but for whatever reason I haven't really experienced God's silence. I'm sure I will, at some point. And I hope that thinking through things like this will help me to be more empathic towards people who've had different experiences from mine, and will help me to be more prepared when that time comes.

So. Holy Saturday. We've seen the crucifixion, in all its baffling horror. We remember glimmers of the promises that there's more to come. But today ... today reminds me that it's okay to be lost. Confused. Doubting. Afraid. Maybe questioning the existence of God, whether it's true or it was all a delusion or maybe something in between ... there is space for that. And shortcut-ing to the answers you know you're supposed to give is no substitute for grappling with the issues. Grappling is painful, but it's honest.

Another Pete Grieg quotation:

"I realize that God is present in the midst of suffering because we are present in it. We are God's presence. Holy Saturday is the day on which we wonder, where is God? Yet the answer might be that He is right there with us in the muck. When we are present in a situation--no matter how terrible it may be--He cannot be absent."

(Additional links:
Pete Grieg blogging on 24-7 gives an excerpt:
http://www.24-7prayer.com/blog/1213
Several more quotations on someone's personal blog:
http://lynnslittlelessons.blogspot.com/2008/05/another-god-on-mute-chapter.html)

Easter Thoughts

I went to Church yesterday - they had modern stations of the cross - esque displays all around the room. Spent an hour or so wandering around and thinking and reading and praying. It was good.

As I've mentioned before, this year I'm trying to understand the humanity of Christ a little more. Although I've always known in an intellectual sense that of course, Christ understands all our emotions and griefs and struggles, there's always been a voice in the back of my head that whispers 'yeah, but he was the son of God so he had a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card, it was different for him'.

A similar issue is that I've never really empathised with any of the Bible characters - when people say 'The Bible, it's full of such wonderful stories, about real people and their loves and hates and lives and ...' I nod and smile but I don't feel it.

Part of the reason is you know, the fact that it's only in the last 7 or so years that I've started to actually learn about what people are like, and have emotions, and stuff. I mean, sure, I felt things when I was younger, but I was very much the detached academic kid who didn't see why you'd want emotions when you could have facts.

I think the real reason is that I don't remember a time when I didn't know all these stories - I don't even remember a time when other people were telling me these stories; as far back as I can remember I've had my own copy of the Bible (starting off with the ICB translation, which I think is the same thing as the CEV, and then the NIV) and I've been reading them for myself and thinking about them. And it's different once you know the ending, it really is. And maybe because I've known the stories since I was tiny (I honestly don't remember how young I was when I was starting to read them, I know I was reading random signs and things age 3, so maybe I had a beginner's Bible at 3 or 4? - I should ask my parents) I tend to see the people in the stories as Other. And I don't empathise with them along the way (like I do with other stories I read) because I know what happens at the end.

It's been kind of exciting reading bits of the Apocrypha because these are Bible stories (let's leave the 'how do you regard the Apocrypha' issue for a moment) and I don't know what happens next. I've only read Tobit and Judith so far (one-line summaries: Tobit: a story, but main message is 'Give Alms, no really, DO!'. Judith: Judith was a sexy sexy lady who used her sexy sexy ways to beguile and then kill the enemy leader, but it was okay - HONEST - because she didn't go all the way. I have my doubts about some of the moral messages in Judith.)

So anyway. Back to the point. This Easter - or this Holy Week, rather - I'm trying to see if I can put myself in Jesus' / the disciples' shoes, before the crucifixion. What were they thinking and feeling - the disciples, for the most part unaware of what was coming; Christ, knowing it and surely dreading it, but choosing it anyway. What would it have been like, in first-century Jerusalem? What was the atmosphere like, the scenery? I spent quite a while yesterday thinking about all this ... and I think starting to get glimpses of understanding what small bits of it might have been like. One thing's for sure: I know they weren't all feeling 'Oh, it's okay, it turns out all right in the end'.