A Dismaying Lack of Kitchen Accoutrements Offset by an Abundance of Trees

I'm writing this while listening to "The Goat Rodeo Sessions." Strange name, I know, but it's an awesome classical/bluegrass/folk fusion album, brand spanking' new, and you should give it a listen. Yo-Yo Ma and Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile from Nickel Creek (and Stuart Duncan, a fiddler I'd never heard of, but still)… what more do you need?

Rhetorical question, but of course the answer is: science and cookies!

Unfortunately, I'm having a difficult time producing cookies at the moment owing to the fact that I'm in a temporary apartment and don't have my customary retinue of baking implements. Baking is an adventure in estimation and improvisation when all you've got to work with are a set of measuring spoons, a one-cup Pyrex liquid measure, and… that's pretty much it.

I did manage to throw together a relatively successful banana bread last night for a book club meeting. Granted, I had to bake it in a casserole dish, but it worked out alright.

The reason I'm sans cooking supplies at the moment? I finally escaped Phoenix in favor of the San Francisco Bay Area. They have real trees here! Forests, even! It's amazing! I don't think I have the words to properly express how intensely I missed trees and the color green during my tenure in Arizona.

On the science end of things, I wanted to write about an article that came out in the journal Science today entitled "Laundry Lint Collecting in Oceans," since I'm now near the ocean myself… but the article is so newly hatched that I can't get ahold of it yet. I'll let you know all about the catastrophe of dryer fluff collecting in the briny as soon as I can. In the meantime, consider drying your clothes the old-fashioned way!