Thursday, July 31, 2014

Happee Birthdae Harry + garden update #3


Pretty much anyone acquainted with me knows that I am a huge Harry Potter fan. I was a late bloomer with the books, reading them all in the span of a week in grade six, but I made up for my lateness with my enthusiasm. I held viewing parties of the movies with friends, making cauldron cakes and pumpkin pasties. I went to the exhibition twice when it came to Toronto. I've watched all three of the Potter musicals no less than five times and have all the music on my ipod. I've knit hats that look like the ones Hermione wears in the movies. One time I greeted my new flute section in a Canada wide wind ensemble by saying, "Hey! I'm E! What's your Hogwarts house?". When I really want to veg out and relax, I giggle at bad HPotts fanfiction on the internet.

Yes friends, I am a nerd.

However, I do not regret nor try to deny this fact. I think there are plenty of wonderful reasons why everyone should be a Harry Potter fanatic. The books are wonderfully written, and teach us important lessons about friendship, love, and courage. They foster community, and have encouraged a generation of kids to get their noses in a book.

So, I try every year to celebrate Harry's birthday in a quiet thanks to JK Rowling and her brilliance. This year I made a chocolate fudge pudding that I think that Molly Weasley would be proud of.

I got the recipe from a cookbook my Gramma gave to me a few years ago from one of her trips to Scotland:


Monday, July 21, 2014

Potato Salad Math

The other day I discovered the funniest thing I've seen on the internet in a very long time. This guy Zack 'Danger' Brown on kickstarter has raised $61,186 (as of 8:00 PM on 21/07/14) to make potato salad (Link). I have no clue what he's going to do with all the money - hopefully some will go to charity as he proposed in an interview. However, it got me thinking. How much potato salad could you make with that amount of money? Naturally I had to put my grade 11 university math skills to the test.

First, I found a good potato salad recipe. I picked this one, since it calls itself the world's best, and has a ton of good reviews backing up that claim. Then I did some research and tried to figure out the price of making said recipe. Here's how it seemed to break down:

6 potatoes - $2
1 small onion - $0.17
1 cup of celery - $0.33
1 tsp salt - $0.0026
8 eggs - $1.33
1/2 cup sugar - $0.23
1 tsp cornstartch - $0.02
1/2 cup vinegar - $0.07
1 can evaporated milk - $1
1/4 cup butter - $0.3
1 cup mayonnaise - $1.50
1 tsp mustard - $0.2 (if you use the really good stuff)

That totals up to about $7.15. One recipe of this stuff serves 6 people, assuming each person eats about one potato's worth.

$61,186/$7.15= 8557.5 recipes of potato salad.
8557.5 x 6 servings =  51,344.9 servings.

So in theory this guy has enough money to feed 51,345 people. That's 20,000 more people than the entire population of Nunavut. You could feed every resident of Monaco. Madness.

So yeah this is how I'm spending my time lately. Summer is great.

Hope you're all being as productive as I am,

E

Thursday, July 10, 2014

Two things

Hello! I am about to go on vacation so I will be disappearing for a while. Before I go, I will leave you with some things.

Thing #1 - My garden 

Mission vegetable garden is going s'well so far. Here is an update:



Basil plant has doubled in size! Huzzah. I removed aphids with the help of a bottle of soap and water. 

Tomato plants are getting tall!

Red lettuce is beautiful. Head lettuce looks confused. 

Cucumber flowers!

WATERMELON!!?

Swiss chard is also lookin' fine damn


probably not edible

Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Where the ladies at?




Lately I've been thinking a lot about my future in a field that is pretty male dominated. Historically, music has been a man's business in almost every aspect. In the past century or so women have made large advances in this respect, but in a lot of music related careers we are still vastly outnumbered.

Thanks to blind auditions, female participation in orchestras has greatly risen over the last few decades. However, there is still a large gap between the number of males and females on the podium (according to this article, American orchestral conductors are 80% male).

In composition as well it seems that we are outnumbered. I recently discovered that I've never played a piece in band written by a woman. After a search on the wind repertory project, I found a total of 29 female composers of band music, versus 706 men. Perhaps this is because historically there haven't been a lot of women trained in composition, and that wind ensembles were very male exclusive for most of their history.

What I think we should do is celebrate the few women who do advance in these male dominated fields, and hopefully they will inspire the next generation of girls to pick up a baton, or try out their school's copy of Sibelius. So today I'm going to list a couple of the cool female composers of band music that I've recently discovered.