Thank you for the commiseration and movie recommendations in the comments for the last post! Kim, I really enjoyed Everything Is Illuminated, which I Netflixed after listening to the Fresh Air interview of Eugene Hutz, who plays Alex. The film has gorgeous cinematography and the extra scenes on the DVD are well worth watching. Karen, I saw Stranger Than Fiction in the theater, and now I want to see DVD special features! Maybe I'll go over to Blockbuster. Opal, at least other people can see the mistakes I made on Goddess. Not that I'm saying that lace error was all in your head, ha ha. May, my work schedule is changing next week, when I get it nailed down I'll get in touch so we can neglect sculpture and studying in favor of cake.
Earlier this week, my nephew wanted to view the lunar eclipse, so he went to bed early and I woke him up so that we could sit outside on beach chairs. It was cloudy and the view got obscured frequently, but we saw the moon disappear and become a blurry rusty peach orb.
I asked one of my co-workers for her shoyu chicken recipe and wound up getting a bunch of recipes from her, including one for creamed coconut tuna. I was a little skeptical (coconut tuna?) but we had a lot of canned tuna in the pantry and a package of frozen coconut milk that had been hanging out in the freezer for months, so I made it. I don't have any pictures, because we ate it all before I thought to take one.
Creamed Coconut Tuna
2 cans water-packed light tuna, drained
1 small onion, diced
1 bag frozen mixed vegetables (peas, carrots, etc.)
1 can coconut milk (Dian favors Mendonca's, I used Hawaiian Sun)
butter or oil
salt and pepper
Saute onion in oil until translucent. Add tuna, vegetables, and coconut milk. Simmer until vegetables are cooked. Serve over rice or toast.
I browned the onions and tuna together - I think it cuts down on the fishy canned taste a bit. I wasn't sure if the kids would like it, and thought about using cream of celery soup instead of the coconut milk, just to be safe, but then I figured that if they didn't like it, they could make themselves sandwiches. Even my nephew, Mr. Picky-Pants, ate it and liked it. If you like Vegemite, I recommend serving this over buttered toast and Vegemite.
Classes are fully underway now. We had a slow first week, but things are kicking into high gear. I was surprised that the first series of lectures for one of the courses has been, essentially, me seeing a semester of high school biology flash before my eyes. It is, after all, a 400-level Anthropology course, and one would think that everyone taking the course would have the basics by now. I know I needed the review (high school biology was, let me see, 15 years ago, and college botany was nearly as long ago). I still get meiosis and mitosis confused. I'm a bit appalled that I'm not the only one, not by a long shot. Clearly the instructors have been teaching this long enough to know that the best way for them to not waste their time is to hand the first two weeks of lectures over to a graduate student, thereby saving themselves some trouble and giving a grad student a solid experience in what it is like to be thrown to the wolves. The introduction to Darwin was interrupted by a student who wanted to know if this was "going to be about Christians are stupid and scientists know everything because that would really offend me." One does not need to believe the material. However, one really ought to be willing to understand the material, because everything taught in this course is based on the widely accepted empirical science theory of evolution, so if that would be a challenge to ones faith, and if one is would feel compelled to say things like "I heard Darwin ixnayed the whole theory at the end of his life," why take the course? For the record, I thought that the grad student was doing a good job of explaining the difference between the scientific theory of evolution and Creationism, and that the concerned student has clearly felt attacked before by others, and so was probably feeling a bit defensive.
I think that tonight I'm going to play it safe and make chili and tater tots, and then settle in with Goddess.