Many of you know that I’ve spent the past month and a half stressing out about a paper I’ve been trying to write. The goal was to get it written in time to submit April 18th, but it didn’t happen. Contrary to some of the worries I had about this when I started working on the paper, my failure to submit it on the 18th will not end my graduate school career. Phew! Several conversations I’ve had with my advisers have assured me of this. But even though I missed the submission deadline, I still put in long hours last week. I wanted to get a draft of the paper to one of my advisers so that I could get some feedback on it and so that I could take care of some other business I need to look after before the semester ended in May. Finally, after staying up till 4AM on Friday, I finished the draft, attached the paper to an email, and sent it to my adviser.
I celebrated the finished draft by taking the weekend off–sort of. On a mere 4 hours of sleep, I joined a quartet of singers from church to sight-read some madrigals and perform them at a birthday party for one of the parishioners. Then I spent some quality time with Pam and L in the mall. Pam and I each needed to buy a pair of sandals for the summer. We also wanted to buy something to treat ourselves with, so we bought the ice cream maker attachment for our Kitchenaid mixer. (After the bowl spent the night in the freezer, we made some raspberry ice cream with it. Wow! Can’t wait to try some of the other recipes.) On Sunday afternoon, I sang in the second of the three concerts I’ll perform with Novi Cantori. We got a sitter so Pam could come to it. It was L’s first time with a sitter, and he was a very good boy.
I’m looking forward to a slower pace over the next few weeks. This will make it possible to see my family again. Woohoo!
AWESOME, congratulations. Can you send me the paper?
Jen and I have been eying that mixer attachment… you’ll definitely have to let us know how well it works.
We’re still working on the first batch of ice cream we made with the attachment, so we’ve only had limited experience with it so far.
The attachment came with some recipes but we opted to go with a simpler recipe we found online–it was simpler in that it required fewer ingredients and didn’t require any of them to be cooked (and then cooled) beforehand. If I remember correctly, it took Pam about 5 minutes to whip a combination of eggs, milk, cream, raspberries, and sugar till it was frothy. Then we put the frozen bowl on the mixer, started it up, and poured in the ingredients. After about 20 minutes on the slowest speed, the ice cream was ready.
When it came out of the mixer, the consistency of the ice cream was slightly softer than soft-serve. After a day in the freezer, it was just like any ice cream you take out of the freezer in the supermarket. Because it was our first use of the attachment, and because we didn’t use one of the recipes that came with it, we didn’t quite get the volume right. The ingredients expand significantly as they freeze. Our first batch was in danger of spilling over the side of the bowl during the last minutes. You can make about 1.5 to 2 liters of ice cream in a single batch.
Cool. I’m going to expect some home-made ice cream when I get out there, that’s for sure.