28.4.08
doc decadence
for the past week, my favourite of the many many toronto film festivals has been going on. hotdocs - all documentaries for 10 full days. luckily, the festival coincided with me being finished courses and having a flexible pre-summer-experiment schedule, and i managed to make it to 13 screenings. it was hard not to keep going, when every show before 6:00 pm is free for students, and when you show up for evening screenings and nice people happen to offer you their extra industry tickets out of the kindness of their movie-loving hearts.
23.4.08
figs
winter is over, summer is here, i'm feeling like keeping my hands busy in the kitchen.
these are delicious for dessert. sliced in half, drizzled with balsamic vinegar, roasted very briefly in a medium oven, eaten in one bite with a tiny spoonful of milanese vanilla gelato.
these are delicious for dessert. sliced in half, drizzled with balsamic vinegar, roasted very briefly in a medium oven, eaten in one bite with a tiny spoonful of milanese vanilla gelato.
poor them, the taste-blind
after reading ruth reichl's 3 books of memoirs in a blink, i was trying to decide which food author to devote myself to next. should i pick the politically-conscious, eco-minded michael pollan, who i abandoned a couple of years ago because it felt a bit too much like reading science, or should i opt for something a little more pithy, a little more romantic. seemed the right time to make my way through m.f.k. fisher's body of work (spanning 1930 through 1978). should keep me busy for a while. at least through the summer.
for those not familiar, m.f.k. fisher is 'la grande dame' of food writing. lover of good foods, good wines, good conversation, and great men. ruth reichl describes meeting her in the second of her books (Comfort Me With Apples), and it sounds as though she kept these passions alive well into her later days.
here's my favourite snippet so far, from fisher's essay Pity the Blind in Palate:
think i've stumbled upon the margaret atwood of food writing. hallelujah!
this particular essay is one of twenty-five included in Serve It Forth, 1937.
for those not familiar, m.f.k. fisher is 'la grande dame' of food writing. lover of good foods, good wines, good conversation, and great men. ruth reichl describes meeting her in the second of her books (Comfort Me With Apples), and it sounds as though she kept these passions alive well into her later days.
here's my favourite snippet so far, from fisher's essay Pity the Blind in Palate:
Almost all people are born unconscious of the nuances of flavour. Many die so. Some of these unfortunates are physically deformed, and remain all their lives as truly taste-blind as their brother sufferers are blind to colour. Others never taste because they are stupid, or, more often, because they have never been taught to search for differentiations of flavour.
They like hot coffee, a fried steak with plenty of salt and pepper and meat sauce upon it, a piece of apple pie and a chunk of cheese. They like the feeling of a full stomach. They resemble those myriad souls who say, "I don't know anything about music, but I love a good rousing military band."
think i've stumbled upon the margaret atwood of food writing. hallelujah!
this particular essay is one of twenty-five included in Serve It Forth, 1937.
4.4.08
daily dose
in the spirit of frequent posting, another look through the microscope:
pyramidal neurons in the rat somatosensory cortex.
pyramidal neurons in the rat somatosensory cortex.
2.4.08
neuron-gazing
oops, there went two months.
...
it's been a bit of a course work frenzy, all stats assignments and reaction papers and readings and seminars. but i will be finished all (save 1/2 a credit) of my PhD course requirements in exactly one week! this is undeniably exciting, as it means i can go back to doing actual research on a full time basis. which is, you know, what grad students are supposed to do.
i guess there are a few exciting things that have happened since february 4th. i found a new apartment into which i will be moving with 2 grad student friends at the beginning of may. it is the most beautiful apartment i have ever seen in toronto, almost as beautiful as some of the apartments i've seen in montreal. very cute old little walk-up, well-kept, new track lighting on ceilings, little glass-doored cabinets in pantry area between dining room and kitchen, front balcony, wood-burning fireplace. i could go on. counting down the days til move-in, as i sit here listening to the house mouse scurry around in the ceiling over my desk.
second excitement is that an undergrad student from my neuroanatomy lab in the fall has secured herself some funding to come and do research with me this summer. reasons for my excitement include: (1) my first experiences with research took place around the same time of my undergrad under the guidance of some very enthusiastic and fun grad students, and i am looking forward to picking up the supervisory torch, (2) one of my favourite parts of doing scientific research is sharing the process with other students, and hopefully getting them excited about spending hours in front of a microscope, and (3) i was not in a position to supervise undergrad students in my previous lab, since the departments with which i was affiliated didn't offer any undergrad programs. and i guess, admittedly, (4) it will be nice to have someone around to help out with all the menial day-to-day tasks that comprise the types of experiments that i do. i am interested to see how i evolve as a teacher and mentor in my first *official* supervisory role. will update on this as it happens.
for now, i will go back to writing the first of two term papers, while occasionally glancing out the window at the for-now-still bare trees behind the houses across the street. since i started studying neuronal morphology in earnest (think back to that trip to india), i can't look at bare branches without automatically tracing them out in my mind like this:
...
it's been a bit of a course work frenzy, all stats assignments and reaction papers and readings and seminars. but i will be finished all (save 1/2 a credit) of my PhD course requirements in exactly one week! this is undeniably exciting, as it means i can go back to doing actual research on a full time basis. which is, you know, what grad students are supposed to do.
i guess there are a few exciting things that have happened since february 4th. i found a new apartment into which i will be moving with 2 grad student friends at the beginning of may. it is the most beautiful apartment i have ever seen in toronto, almost as beautiful as some of the apartments i've seen in montreal. very cute old little walk-up, well-kept, new track lighting on ceilings, little glass-doored cabinets in pantry area between dining room and kitchen, front balcony, wood-burning fireplace. i could go on. counting down the days til move-in, as i sit here listening to the house mouse scurry around in the ceiling over my desk.
second excitement is that an undergrad student from my neuroanatomy lab in the fall has secured herself some funding to come and do research with me this summer. reasons for my excitement include: (1) my first experiences with research took place around the same time of my undergrad under the guidance of some very enthusiastic and fun grad students, and i am looking forward to picking up the supervisory torch, (2) one of my favourite parts of doing scientific research is sharing the process with other students, and hopefully getting them excited about spending hours in front of a microscope, and (3) i was not in a position to supervise undergrad students in my previous lab, since the departments with which i was affiliated didn't offer any undergrad programs. and i guess, admittedly, (4) it will be nice to have someone around to help out with all the menial day-to-day tasks that comprise the types of experiments that i do. i am interested to see how i evolve as a teacher and mentor in my first *official* supervisory role. will update on this as it happens.
for now, i will go back to writing the first of two term papers, while occasionally glancing out the window at the for-now-still bare trees behind the houses across the street. since i started studying neuronal morphology in earnest (think back to that trip to india), i can't look at bare branches without automatically tracing them out in my mind like this:
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