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One of my most favorite, simple little pleasures in life is when you're either doing the dishes or dispensing shampoo, and a spree of tiny soap bubbles comes whistfully darting out.

You just kind of stand there and watch their playful descent upon the tile. It always makes me smile.

Happy thought of the day.

EDIT: Sorry about the large photo size screwing around with the layout. I'm a bit too busy to fix it.

While We're At It...

While on the subject of alcohol, I'd like to mention one of my better culinary explorations. As I was going through my camera's memory card, I came upon these:



Over Spring Break, I went skiing in Vermont, with my roommate Sandy. Being the conscientious college students we are, we chose to bring some of our beverages with us instead of spending more money. This resulted in me transporting Bailey's in a water bottle. Turns out, having Bailey's in a water bottle makes it much easier to have fun pouring into cookies.

Above are my concoction of dark chocolate Bailey's cookies. Take a basic cookie dough base, add in smashed Dove dark chocolate squares, squirt a very (read very very) generous amount of Bailey's, stir, bake and enjoy. To quote my friend Steph, the result is delicious and "BAM! Bailey's!"

Can one ever have too much Bailey's?

Cliché

While this blog is not a food blog, I do occasionally visit that topic. If anything, it's trying to be a blog incorporating alcoholic drinks, however, the frequency of that is irregular and questionable. This blog is about my life and the adventures in between. Being a generally happy person, I stop and smell the roses in life. And the daisies, the dafodills, the tiger lilies and the violets. So while I find it a bit cliché to do food posts, I cannot argue that a lot of my simple little pleasures in life involve sources of nutrients.

Last night, I ordered the sausage, peppers and onions pizza with added mushrooms from DeFazio's, which is my personal favorite place to get pizza in Troy. While they are a bit pricier than Bella's, DaVinci's or I Love's, the quality is incomparable. DeFazio's is in a league of their own. Check 'em out.

In addition, my good friend Erin and I had some long overdue Erin and Katie/girl time together over a bottle of Chianti. A nice break in the chaos that is this week for me, having only a few days before my last Spring Break and a mathematical statistics midterm is a bit intimidating. Pizza, wine, and good company. What beats that?

You Might be a Mathematician....

You might be a mathematician if one of the greatest simple little pleasures you get in a day is from writing the notation for sets of numbers, aka the set of integers, rational, real numbers etc.

Adventures into the Unknown

2010-2011 R.P.I. Women's Water Polo Team

As promised in the discussion of my epic weekend, a post dedicated to the RPI Women's Water Polo team. For some brief history with my involvement with the team, my friend Alex has been bugging me to join since sophomore year. I met her through swim club, a mutual friend, and a general love of being covered in chlorine. Sophomore year, I went to one practice. I tried again Junior year and became more accomplished by going to two. Senior year, I promised myself that I would stick with water polo. While I may dabble in many things, once I commit to something, I stick with it 110%. This year, the only practices I have missed have been due to illness or job interviews.

Apparently in previous years, we have not had enough girls on the team to compete on our own. In the fall, the Water Polo Team competed as a whole in a co-ed tournament at West Point. Our team has varying skill levels from hard-core kids who have played for years to some who just picked up the ball for the first time this year. This really adds to the accomplishment that I feel we have as a team. It is a challenge to get individuals to work well as a group; it is even harder if you are starting from scratch.

The chronicle of the tournament started on Saturday. We all met around 8 a.m. at the Union, which is a bit of an accomplishment to begin with since there were birthday parties and the 100 Days' Party the night before. Now, we left on time. It should have taken us around three hours to drive from Troy, NY to Syracuse. That estimate, however, is under normal weather and road conditions. That does not account for 40 mile per hour winds, blizzard white-out conditions, black ice, and the length of three exits being closed on the I-90. Needless to say, our voyage was epic, fitting with an epic weekend.

Heading westbound on the I-90, we had to take a long detour on Route 5 to get to Utica to join up with the highway again. Sometime when I was sleeping (14 hours of sleep for three days is not advisable), all traffic was forced off the I-90. Apparently, coupled with the conditions, a tractor trailer collided with a snowplow on the road. To quote my teammate Anna,

‎"A tractor trailer verses a snow plow?! Who wins? It's like a bear verses a tiger"

Who wins indeed? The answer, my friends, is no one.

With conditions being a death trap, we somehow arrived in Syracuse only to find that it's horrible in the winter. I can understand Portland being unprepared to deal with snow and ice, and subsequently, have horrible road conditions. We don't get either conditions a lot, but Syracuse? Your city is in upstate New York. In the winter. It's not like it hasn't been an established city since 1847 or anything. Apparently, Syracuse does not know how to plow their roads in a timely manner, despite it having some massive hills. Again to quote Anna,

Syracuse: the virgin city. It's never been plowed.

Ah the fair virgin indeed. Our driver, Heather, lives in Buffalo. She's been to the Midwest. I do not question her driving skills whatsoever, so if she can't navigate the roads, I don't really know who can. While attempting to find Syracuse University, we slipped and slid around many roads and somehow did not hit anything. We didn't even hit anything once we found the campus, got lost, and headed down a utility road.

At this point, I would just like to mention the image I have of Syracuse now. There is a spot on their campus, that in the winter, with snow coming down and 30 mph winds, looks exactly like what I picture the aftermath of a nuclear fall out to be.

Due to our late arrival, the game schedule had to be redone, which caused us to end up playing our first two games back to back. That is 56 straight minutes of polo if you don't have a sub. I ended up playing about 50 minutes. Go try sprinting in a pool for that long after being sleep deprived. It's hard. Needless to say, much of the team was exhausted after that ordeal, and the exhaustion resulted in trips into the cold for food, caffeine, and then naps. Never has a concrete bleacher been so comfy.

Our last game on Saturday was at 8 p.m. against Colgate. I can not go into extreme detail about this game since, well I find it difficult to reflect when you are sprinting. I will say that we did win. That was the Women's Water Polo Team's first ever victory and boy did it taste sweet.

Actually, victory tastes more like bread sticks, salad, lasagna and a pomegranate margarita martini. Victory dinner was at the classy establishment of Olive Garden. If I die tomorrow and am fortunate enough to step through the pearly gates of heaven, I hope it's filled bread sticks. I don't think I've eaten that quantity of bread since District's for Swim Team at Jesuit. Despite our team's five-year-old maturity level, our coach was proud, our hearts were happy and our stomachs were very glad most of us wore sweat pants.

Sunday, the second and last day of the tournament, we played our last game against Syracuse. While we lost, it was a very close game. It served a greater goal of team unity and a sense of how to play with one another. In addition, it gave us another excuse to gorge on food, this time at a second breakfast at Denny's. Our ride home was fairly smooth and uneventful, filled with scenic views and loud music from the 90s. An epic end to an epic weekend.

19% of My Life is Dancing in My Underwear

The title of this post says it all. If you are not my roommate, don't know me intensely well, or do not follow me online, you may not know this fact. I dance a lot in life. I sometimes dance well, I sometimes dance with uncontrollable angst, but a lot of the time, I dance like a dork: a cute dork, but definitely a dork. A lot of that dorky dancing occurs in my apartment in my under garments.

With that introduction in mind, due to my StumbleUpon habits, I have been on 8Tracks a lot. This post is then my gift to you: music that I sway to, that makes my heart smile, and that I dance to in my undies.

Enjoy.


Ingrid Michaelson "Be OK": This song is actually a bit depressing if you listen to the lyrics, however, I think that's why I like it.


Florence and the Machine "Kiss with a Fist": One more reason I love 94.7 for finding this for me ages ago.


Cobra Starship "Guilty Pleasure": From my sisters' 18th birthday present CD to me.


The Strokes "Reptilia": Because I am a dork.


Franz Ferdinand "Michael": Because I am a sexy dork.


Vengaboys "Boom Boom Boom Boom": Feel free to judge me. I'm aware of it. Let the judgement commence, but doesn't everyone get some crappy pop from their high school dances stuck in their heads at some point?


David Guetta ft Akon "Sexy Bitch": Once again, I enjoy pop/hiphop for the beats. Get over it.


Ke$ha "Kiss N Tell": I am not a fan of her wardrobe choices, or blatant product placement, but girl makes some catchy pop.

Eight songs from me to...me, well myself and whoever reads this blog or checks facebook. Go strip and dance in your undies!

Pierogies

Warning: This is a highly visual post.

On Halloween weekend, my good friend Erin and I attempted to make pierogies by scratch. With two people working, which includes talking about it, chatting about life and other things and attempting to figure out what exactly we were supposed to do, it took us around five hours to make a double batch. For reference, a double batch made about 150 pierogies, which sounds like a lot. It's actually not when you volunteer to gift pierogies to male friends who look to pierogies as childhood comfort.

Anywho, my Dad loves pierogies. They were also a comfort from childhood, as I found out when he told my mom he remembered making them with his baba. Thus, I volunteered to make pierogies for my family on Wednesday. The whole process took me about four hours. This shortened time horizon can be explained by not having anyone to converse with, more wine, and only making a single batch (75 pierogies).

For those of you who are not aware of what a pierogie is, it's pretty much a dumpling of Slavic origins. The most common filling is a potato cheese filling--you're probably seen Mrs. T's frozen kinds in the grocery store. Now that you have that bit of knowledge, do you actually know what it takes to make them?

Well I'll show you through pictures! Yay pictures!



The first photo shows the pork filling I made, the initial dough, and in the background there is a pot with potato cheese filling. Honestly, each component is relatively simple, just very time consuming.

After making both the fillings and starting on the dough,



(Potato filling)



Yay dough!

I then floured the dough a bit more and transfered it to an area to roll it out, kneaded it, and rolled it out.



After rolling out, really really really really really thin,



Seriously, it needs to be thin dough. It gets folded over upon itself and to make that amount of dough do that, you need to make sure it's both thin and elastic. Erin and I found this out the first time around and had to do some extra work accordingly. Yes, you might say well why not make more dough per pierogie? Well, that would make them too doughy, especially since you are putting carb inside more carb. It's just overkill that way.

Anyway, after rolling out and cutting into the right shape you can now fill the circles of dough with the filling and fold over to get something that looks like this:



The remaining steps are to cook the pierogies. First, you boil them, and when they float to the top, you can remove them from the water.



To finish, take the boiled pierogies, and sautee them. It gives them a nice finish.



And voila! Finished pierogies in all their pretty perfection for pleasurable dining experiences.



Om nom nom! Traditionally, pierogies are also then served with sour cream, fried bacon and sauteed onions. Many other fillings exist besides the classic potato and cheese, and my pork, such as lamb, just a cheese filling, and buttery cabbage.

Comfy Pants

Growing up, I have acquired and stored a lot of peculiar memories that I do not quite appreciate or seem to understand until later points in life. My Dad normally dresses in regular business attire with the occasional break into business casual. When he arrives home from work, he says hello to everyone, goes and looks at the mail, makes idle chit chat with my Mother, and then normally goes upstairs to the bedroom. When my Dad returns shortly after, he is still wearing whatever tailored shirt he had on that morning, but his tie is off, his birkenstocks are on, and he is wearing some pair of sweatpants.

For many years I did not really understand why my Dad had to change his pants to come back down, read the Wall Street Journal, watch t.v. and eat dinner. Between strict dress codes, fashion trends, and my Mother's shopping influences I did not own a pair of sweatpants myself until a pair for Jesuit's swim in my junior year of high school. Even today, I have three pairs in my possession: a pair of RPI sweatpants purchased freshman year, a pair from swim team senior year of high school, and a loving pair of Victoria's Secret pants that I keep meaning to give back to Chelsea. I sadly lost that pair from junior year during my first year at RPI.

Tonight after a long day of errands, cleaning, studying, work and water polo practice it clicked. While I have been wearing sweatpants much more frequently in college, it is normally on the way to the gym or to bed. If you ever see me wear sweatpants to class or on campus, it's a pretty good indicator that some combination of my mental, academic or social well-being is in chaos. Jesuit's dress code is still ingrained in me a bit to this day. Despite my outer standards, I do enjoy sweatpants in my own home. I have changed into sweatpants before in the evening, but it finally clicked tonight as I changed into my senior year pair. Comfy pants are a hidden comfort in life.


I have known others who practice the comfy pant phenomenon. A good companion always changed into a pair of comfy Adidas soccer shorts. My Dad has a gray pair and a dark blue pair that he also sometimes wears when coaching soccer practices. My ultimate comfy pair is the one I am currently wearing. The sweats from senior year swim team, I somehow mistakenly ordered a size medium, which wouldn't be such an issue, if it wasn't for the fact that my waist is fairly small, and that it's a men's medium. Despite the fitting flaws, they are the comfiest things alive. Thick, gray, and possessing pockets, pairing these sweatpants with the same shirt I wore during the day with jeans makes my legs a bit happier. Also my stomach for that matter. I just got out of water polo and my abs could use a rest.

While I know that not many people comment on my posts, I do know that people read them. So what say you folks? Do you have a pair of comfy pants? If so, what are they?