Hands

I was totally absorbed in the song Indecision Time by Husker Du that blared from our stereo, remembering the Minneapolis punk scene and days past of mosh pits and stage diving.  Then I looked down and saw my hands washing the evening dishes.  Things change indeed.  No regrets though, especially thinking back to 45 minutes ago and the wonderful shrimp pasta dinner that Aneta had created. 

Did we see the ivory woodpecker in the Fells?

This is the strange year for our woods.... It seems that all pine trees decided that it is the time for a renewal and dropped as many pine cones as they could. There is plenty of pine cones on the ground creating a thick carpet on our path. There have been also a lot of large trees coming down during the windy winter days. Very large old trees! The woods do not look healthy. Maybe this is just an impression I have because there is no snow and no leaves on the trees and you can see things better...

I  notices that there have been more woodpeckers working on the trees. Little ones, maybe 4-6in tall. However, on our afternoon dog walk yesterday we saw a large woodpecker! First I heard a strange bird call then when I look up the bird was just above on the tree. It was larger than the normal ones and had a crossed red crest, sort of skinner head and torso, and enough white on the sides to look quite similar to an ivory woodpecker that everybody is looking for... Was it really the ivory one? Of course I checked Wikipedia...

Ivory woodpeckers habitats are quite similar to our unhealthy woods. Apparently they do prefer dead pine trees and a pair could be leaving there. But of course there are other types of woodpeckers that could look similar. For example  Pileated Woodpeckers  are slightly smaller with black torso... I need to bring the camera on our morning walk today and start the hunt! There is an award of 50K for the successful hunt :-) And there is a  picture in the recent Nature magazine showing a group  bird watchers in the woods looking up into the woods with their binocular. Maybe I need to bring binoculars too...

Comments

I have been wondering why there are no comments on our blog posts. It looks like Tom and I are blogging to ourselves. Would it be easier to just talk?

Busy Blogging

February is short but we have already made 6 entries in our blog which was stagnant for so long....

and Tom is just spinning his arm now - one of the exercises the PT told him to do to cure his shoulder.
Yes, his shoulder is still causing him pain and it will take a few more weeks, I think,  to recover fully.
We've been climbing in the gym and he's doing o.k. The main problem is our climbing trip. It might be too early for his projects.

Celebrating!

I finally submitted the paper... I've been straggling with the paper for too long... I have written a draft
more than a year ago, then started talking to my collaborators. Of course they have good ideas and one needs to check and think about it... also there is all the other things I have to do in meantime. So the paper was on my plate for a long time... The results are exciting of course! no Nobel prize tho. I think for that you need to have a real breakthrough, a real discovery... But, as Tom has just pointed out we have detected and confirmed the highest redshift cooling core X-ray cluster. Also the cluster is associated with a very luminous bright quasar.. So it is the first of its kind... I hope it at least deserves the press release.
I submitted the paper. Now, I need to wait for the referee report, which I hope at this point should not be too horrible, as the paper went through so many iterations and spell checking....

Lentils - the perftect recipe

We had lentils for dinner last night and this evening. Tom said that this is a perfect recipe and requested a posting... This is based on Nigel Slater recipe, but modified to accommodate the content of our fridge. This is how it goes:

Cook 1 cup of Lentils for about 15-20 min in a salted water (add 1/2 spoon of salt and about 2 cups of water. I guess these amounts, as I usually measure by eye, so check that the water level is not too high - it should just be about an inch above the lentil's level). You need the French lentils, dark green, almost black - the red ones will just dissolve, while the French lentils will keep the shape.
In meantime in the other pan fry the cut onions with crushed garlic (1 to 3 little bits) in a bit of oil (I use olive oil here, but the original recipe calls for butter). At some point add a little bit of fresh ginger (size of your thumb) grated on a very small size grater tool. Add also the red pepper flakes at that time - just a little bit, as they are spicy (in original recipe you need to use one chili pepper). Cook for a bit and then add tomatoes - in the Nigel recipe you would use 2 fresh tomatoes. As we are out of the season I used a few table spoons of the canned tomatoes chunks - no salt, no spices added there. You need to have the amount of tomatoes that will cover the entire pan. Cook for about 5 min until you get a nice slushy paste which smells nice.
Now! you need to add heavy cream. Carefully. The amount of the cream also varies. The recipe calls for 100 ml. but you may need more or less of it. I look at the density of the sauce. You want something that is not too thin, or too thick. Pour heavy cream, add gahram masala spice - 1 teaspoon, mix and add more cream if necessary. You should avoid too thick sauce that will start
sticking to the pan. So add more cream if this happens. Cook the mixture for about 10 min. Add some black pepper at some point to taste.

Lentils - after 15-20 min drain the lentils. Put them into the sauce and heat together, mixing the sauce with lentils until it looks good.

Serve! I use this as a side dinner dish for scallops, or just green chard, or as tonight with the falafel and yogurt. Nan bread is good with it too...

There you go! Hope somebody there will try this and comment :-)

Sleepy Sunday after the parties

We had a very sleepy Sunday after these parties.... A walk with the dogs was also very slow. Well,
the icy path in the woods was slowing us quite a bit, but also our energy level was quite low.
We took a long almost 2 hours nap in the afternoon, tried to read, and Tom even watched some very bad TV show! Cooking was good. Spiced lentils with scallops, but no wine. We were out of wine.
Tomorrow is Monday and things will go back to normal state with no time for napping and plenty of time for getting stressed.

Party Hounds 2

The 3rd night party was good. We just got back and Tom had a good time apparently...
There was a mixture of old friends and new acquiantances to talk to, a grand piano, a lot of good wine and zubrowka. There was also some good art on the walls and an artist plus tango dancers!
they did not dance however, and nobody was playing on the baby grand piano. Only the cat was enjoying a little spot by the piano...
I think our great party hounds are over for a little bit.

Party hounds

Tonight Aneta and I are going out for dinner or party for the third night in a row.  This is madness!  At least I negotiated that she will be the driver...  - Tom