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I finally made it to Disneyland yesterday! I got to help buzz lightyear save the galaxy! Disney was cool…more on that later.

So it seems Trader Joe’s is opening a store in Richmond (Short Pump, I think). Believe me when I say, that this is good news for any one in Richmond! You will now be able to go to TJ’s and purchase all the ingredients to make one of my favorite quick dinners:

What you need:

- Chicken Breasts, sliced into strips
- Some green pepper, sliced
- Can of sliced bamboo shoots
- Trader Joe’s Red Thai Curry Sauce
- Optionally, some chopped up garlic

That’s it. Just stir fry the chicken in a Wok or other such skillet with some peanut oil (or oil of your choice, and I like to season the oil with garlic prior to adding the chicken). Stir fry the Veggies, put the chicken back in (if you ever took it out!) , pour the sauce over it, and let it heat through. In the mean time, I hope, you’ve been cooking some rice. I also hope you’ve gotten the water content just right, and have a neat-o rice scoop so you can get that perfect restaurant looking ball of sticky rice to serve with it.

Enjoy! I’ve become a recipe blog, I guess. I had to add a new category for it! I have about as much topic focus as I have readers around here, it seems.

Oh the things that cross my desktop…

I present to you:  Dancing Parakeet (Courtesy of the Guitar Girl, who was nice enough to point it out to me)

These have got to be the coolest looking primates ever! And, altruistic: They were willing in experiments to give crickets to a friend!

Image from Science

What’s better than that, right?

If you know me, you could well be asking, “shouldn’t you be doing something more productive than playing with the Gimp?” The answer, of course, is yes. There are several more important things I should be accomplishing tonight. None the less, here I am. I was playing with the rapid fire mode on my camera a couple weeks ago, so I had the material. I thought it’d be cool in a filmstrip.

Simi Valley, where I work, is home to the Reagan Presidential Library where the republican debate was held this Wednesday. It seems Dr. Paul (or at least a large contigent of his supporters) was staying at the hotel down the street from my work, because in addition to several smaller vehicles, I saw the what was probably the longest limo I’ve ever seen plastered with Ron Paul propaganda. Of course, I don’t know this was actually the man’s limo; it could have been a really enthusiastic supporter, but I doubt it.

The license plate: “Big Star”. Unfortunately, it was dark, so the pictures didn’t come out so good, but here it is:

(Click thumbnail for full-size)

A seismologist trying to image the earth’s interior by measuring the propagation of seismic activity in Cameroon, was confused by some data collected in 2006 in which he measured a series of disturbances. Rather than moving across the area as expected, the disturbance was recorded at all of his sensors spread across several cities at the same time.

Turns out, the Cameroon football (soccer) team was playing in the African Cup of Nations that day. They scored eight goals, each of which corresponded to a seismic disturbance, apparently caused by the elated fans all over the country jumping up and down to celebrate.

This is according to the recent Science article, “Goals Rock Nation” (which, unfortunately, you can’t read unless you have a subscription).

A nation of soccer fans = small earthquake. Cool!

Update: I wasn’t going to reproduce the article here, but I found somebody who already did.

This is cool!

I love this show. Sometimes they do some really stupid things, I have to admit. But they do just as many really cool things, like in the episode I saw today. This makes me

Wordpress is being difficult. See youtube for the video.

At the very moment that humans discovered the scale of the universe and found that their most unconstrained fancies were in fact dwarfed by the true dimensions of even the Milk Way Galaxy, they took steps that ensured that their descendants would be unable to see the stars at all. For a million years humans had grown up with a personal daily knowledge of the vault of heaven. In the last few thousand years they began building and emigrating to the cities. In the last few decades, a major fraction of the human population had abandoned a rustic way of life. As technology developed and the cities grew polluted, the nights became starless. New generations grew to maturity wholly ignorant of the sky that had transfixed their ancestors and that had stimulated the modern age of science and technology. Without even noticing, just as astronomy entered a golden age most people cut themselves off from the sky, a cosmic isolationism that ended only with the dawn of space exploration.

-Carl Sagan, “Contact”

While driving across this remarkably huge country on our way to California, Marly and I stopped to spend an afternoon hiking along the rim of the Grand Canyon. Quite impressive, even on the second visit, and I still want to go back sometime when I’m not just rushing through and actually hike down into the canyon. But, what really impressed me came later that night while driving through the Arizona desert on the way back to I40. It was amazingly dark. I mean middle of nowhere, no moon, REALLY dark…and really clear. The first thing we noticed was how bright oncoming headlights were from so far away. Then we looked up.

The sky was impressive enough that we found a place to pull over, and climbed up onto our penske truck just to stare at it. I don’t remember ever seeing a sky like this one before. A whole lot more stars visible, and an amazingly bright milky way that looked like a glowing cloud. Not at ALL like what I can see looking up from my new neighborhood in Southern California.

To really top off the uniqueness of that day: in between our hiking and our star gazing, we cooked dinner on a camp stove in a gas station parking lot. Instant mashed potatoes with veggies and ham. Marly is a very well prepared traveler :).