still coming up with lint

My mania reached a peak:



But as is often the case when you reach a peak, you find that it's actually just a rest before a bigger peak. So, then I got to making caramel and caramel ice cream. Caramel is a finicky sticky little critter. It does not want to be touched, no stirring involved. Yet it does not abide to abandonment- you have to babysit it vigilantly, and even then, hesitate for a moment, and you will wind up with a burnt mess. This was probably not the right way to experiment. Cream is expensive these days, and besides which, adding cream to caramelized sugar causes something suspiciously reminiscent of Hiroshima. So I probably should have just fooled around with caramelizing sugar instead of diving blindly into making ice cream. Truth be told, I am pretty sure this first batch of ice cream is going to be a stinker- the caramel did smoke a bit, and because of that, I think this batch will have a bit of a burnt, bitter flavor to it.

However, what I do have, refreshingly, is a lot of time. So tomorrow morning, I shall see if I can get the hang of it. Of course, in the meanwhile, an enabler a friend gave me a bag of cherries. I do not eat cherries, never much liked the taste of them. So of course, now I am trying to figure out what I can bake with cherries (that is, if I can first figure out how to remove the pits without losing my mind). Also, the heat may return by the end of the week, so suddenly, I'm even more frantic about baking as much as I can.

Luckily, I did spend quite a bit of time outside yesterday. AG and I did some exploring and found ourselves a trail. It wasn't much of a hike, because I live sort of in a valley, but we walked along the river for miles. I forgot how nice it was to just be outdoors and close to something not resembling buildings, pavement and concrete. After the 'hike', we met up with some other people and watched the new Indiana Jones movie. The less I write about that, the better- my review of the movie is: go watch Iron Man instead.

Being rather disconnected from everything was nice, especially since I was subjected to more Gunner-ific characters in the morning. I have decided that the only way to tolerate it all is to acknowledge it, to myself. I really think that half the trouble I have stems from falling victim to the hype every so often and actually believing that med school is populated with calm, non-competitive people. Those people do exist, in fact, but they keep so to themselves that one will never encounter them. Which got me to thinking that perhaps that is the answer- keeping to myself whenever possible.

And successfully making caramel.