Author: alejna

Easy as pie

pi pie
My 2010 Pi Pie

Happy Pi Day! In celebration of Pi Day¹, and its auspicious landing on a Thursday, I offer to you this very large helping of pie-themed things. Mmmm, pie.

  • Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie: a line from the nursery rhyme Sing of song of sixpence²:

    Sing a song of sixpence
    a pocket full of rye
    four and twenty blackbirds
    baked in a pie

  • Little Jack Horner: Another nursery rhyme with pie.

    Little Jack Horner
    Sat in the corner,
    Eating a Christmas pie;
    He put in his thumb,
    And pulled out a plum,
    And said ‘What a good boy am I!

    • little jack horner wsatterlee 1882 king with pie 012

  • Can she make a cherry pie?: A line from the folk song Billy Boy.
  • pie in the sky: used to describe plans or hopes considered unrealistic and overly optimistic
  • “high apple pie in the sky hopes”: a line from the song High Hopes, a song sung by Frank Sinatra
  • as easy as pie: an expression meaning “very easy.” In my experience, pie is not the easiest thing in the world to make. It involves crust, an oven, preparation of ingredients.³
  • “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe,” a quote by Carl Sagan
  • As American as apple pie: an expression meant to describe something quintessentially American. Of course, many cultures have versions of apple pies.⁴ Apple pie has nevertheless achieved a place in American culture:

    Although apple pies have been eaten since long before the European colonisation of the Americas, “as American as apple pie” is a saying in the United States, meaning “typically American”.[14] In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, apple pie became a symbol of American prosperity and national pride. A newspaper article published in 1902 declared that “No pie-eating people can be permanently vanquished.”[15] The dish was also commemorated in the phrase “for Mom and apple pie” – supposedly the stock answer of American soldiers in World War II, whenever journalists asked why they were going to war.[16]

    (From the Apple Pie Wiki Page⁵.)

  • American Pie: Don McLean’s signature song, first released in 1971. Bye-bye Miss American Pie… (I’m quite fond of this large-scale lip dub video version of the song produced by the city of Grand Rapids Michigan.)
  • American Pie (1999): a movie that includes various analogies of sex and pie.
  • pie-eyed: drunk
  • piebald: having patches of black and white (or other colors), especially describing the coat of an animal.
  • pie chart: a type of graph in which proportions of a whole (such as a whole data set) are depicted as wedges of a circle
    pie-pie-chart
  • piece of the pie: an expression meaning a share in something, such as a reward or credit.
  • mud pie: a pattie-shaped blob of mud, commonly made when playing in the mud
  • sweetie pie: a common term of endearment
  • cow pie: Not actually a pie made of cow (that would would be a beef pot pie), but a lump of cow manure. (Definitely not a term of endearment)
  • pie in the face: a bit of slapstick comedy, usually involving a whipped cream pie. Just like it sounds, it involves someone getting a pie in the face.
  • 10 banana cream pies: Sesame Street once featured a rather clumsy baker who would stand at the top of a flight of stairs, and announce the number of some sort of dessert he was holding, before falling and spilling all of them. He may not actually have used banana cream pies for 10, but the phrase seems to have stuck. (cf. the use on the show The Family Guy.)

Have more pies to bring to the table? Throw ’em in the comments.

¹ So-called, as the date (at least as it is written here in the US) is 3-14, is reminiscent of the number Pi’s initial 3 digits: 3.14. My past celebrations of Pi Day have included easy as pi, my personal gallery of Pi Pies, and a Pi-themed list.
²I was surprised to learn that this nursery rhyme was actual used by pirates to convey messages. This is the sort of thing that would usually send me to Snopes to check, but in this case Snopes is where I found it.
³ Toast is much easier to make.
⁴ I love tarte aux pommes as made in France. You know what was hard to get in France when I lived there, though? Doritos.
⁵Really. Apple pie has a Wiki page. So do pumpkin pie, pecan pie and cherry pie.
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Images: Little Jack Horner and the king with the pie are both from Project Gutenberg.

photos of exclamation points

I happened to look at the search terms people used to find my blog today, and saw that someone had come seeking “exclamation point photos.” I found this rather surprising. Perplexing, even. For one thing, I haven’t posted (or hadn’t yet posted), to my knowledge, any actual photographs of exclamation points. (I did once compose and post a rather nice graphic of an exclamation point made of punctuation marks, but it’s not a photo.)

For another thing, I was surprised that someone out there would actually be looking for “exclamation point photos.” That is, someone out there who is not me. As it happens, I have found myself noticing exclamation points in the wild for the past several years. They are elusive and rare creatures, but happily, once spotted, they tend not to run away. Many of them will even consent to having their photos taken.

First, my earliest wild exclamation point sighting. This little guy was seen at the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in March of 2009.

It seemed to be made out of green tea, which is common for wild punctuation marks in the area. Sadly, shortly after this photo was taken, the little exclamation point was squished and smeared across the table by the fingers of a curious nearby preschooler.

This rather startled looking specimen was seen on the ceiling tiles in a lab at MIT. I think it was trying to run away. (Spotted March, 2011.)

This cute little guy was on some steps of the Great Wall of China, near Mutianyu. It posed for me in May, 2012.

And most recently, this timid creature was seen at a zoo in Massachusetts in August, 2012. It was trying to hide under a few leaves, possibly out of concern that it would be stomped on. (And it may have had some reason for concern, as I believe that the feet in the photo belong to the same individual who smushed the green tea exclamation point of the first 2 photos back in 2009.)

As you can see, my blog will now be THE go-to place for photos of exclamation points. Perhaps one day I will write a guide book on the subject.

twisted mystery tree (friday foto finder: tree)

This remarkable tree is in Golden Gate Park, in San Francisco.

I took this photo on a visit there in March of 2009. (The lovely greenness and sunshine are a far cry from the weather we had today here in Massachusetts.)

I have no idea what kind of tree this is, but I love the way it twists around itself.Anyone have an idea of what sort of tree it is?

This week’s friday foto finder theme is “tree,” and I have successfully found a tree photo. On a Friday, even. (Actually, I have oodles of tree photos. It was once again hard to choose. ) To see what other trees have been found, pay a visit to the fff blog.

And since today happens to be International Women’s Day, it seems an appropriate time to share Shaking the Tree by Peter Gabriel and Youssou N’Dour:

There’s nothing to gain when there’s nothing to be lost
There’s nothing to gain if you stay behind and count the cost
Make the decision that you can be who you can be
You can be
Tasting the fruit come to the Liberty Tree
It’s your day – a woman’s day
It’s your day – a woman’s day

Happy International Women’s Day! Go shake some trees.

Note: if you were to shake the trees outside my house right now, you would end up with a lot of snow dumped on your head.

rainbow cupcakes


Over the last couple of years, and several cupcake productions, I came up with a method for making rainbow-topped cupcakes that is easy, fun, and very colorful. (Did I mention they have rainbows? We’re big fans of rainbows in this house.)

What you’ll need:

  • cupcakes (duh)
  • frosting, preferably in a light color (I make the standard butter cream frosting based on the recipe on a package of powdered sugar)
  • decorating sugar in a range of rainbow colors (also called sugar crystals or sugar sprinkles) I used bright pink, orange, yellow, light green, light blue and purple
  • (optional) other candy decorations
  • one or more small round dishes (soy sauce dishes are ideal, as they are the right size for cupcakes, and have a slight curvature)

What to do:
1. Pour out a small amount (about 1 teaspoon) of single color of sugar into the soy sauce dish.
2. With a finger, nudge the sugar over to one side of the dish, making a thick line. Don’t worry too much about shaping it.

3. Pour in your next color, and again nudge the sugar. The sugar will start to look like stripes.

4. Repeat with each of your next colors until either you have no more room, or until you have put in as many stripes as you like.

Repeat with multiple dishes if you want to make a production line.

5. Frost a cupcake, or a few cupcakes.

6. Invert the cupcake, and carefully lower onto the sugar stripes. Gently roll it around, pressing lightly, so that the whole top of the cupcake makes contact with the sugar.

7. Turn it back right-side up and admire the rainbow. (Here’s where I seem not to have taken a photo.)

If you want to add other candy sprinkles (like these stars), sprinkle a handful onto the top of the sugar stripes. (You’ll need to put the candy sprinkles again each time you dip a cupcake, but the rainbow stripes will last a few dips.)


This time I remembered to take a photo.

8. Frost another cupcake and dip it. With each dipping, the sugar stripes will shrink a bit. You can experiment with rolling the cupcake top around to make different patterns with the stripes. When the sugar gets low, push the stripes aside and start adding more stripes (like in steps 1 through 4.) Or, if you want to keep the stripes more even, you could dump out your sugar and start fresh in your dish. As for me, I enjoyed seeing the way the stripes shifted with each cupcake, and the patterns that emerged from adding additional stripes as the sugar in a dish ran low.

You can see here that the stripes vary, with the colors being more curvy in some parts, or more tightly spaced.

9. I also added white chocolate unicorns to the tops, after the sugaring. (I made these in advance with one of these unicorn candy molds. They were probably more trouble than they were worth, but I am a glutton for punishment. Unicorn-shaped sugary sweet punishment.) These needed a dab of frosting to stick to the cupcakes.

Notes:

  • I don’t know how long it takes to do this project. It’s probably faster if you don’t stop to take pictures a gazillion times. I think it took a good hour, but it was fun.
  • I could imagine doing this as a project with kids, especially if you are flexible about how the stripes will turn out. (And also if you anticipate needing to clean up a lot of spilt sugar.)
  • You could also experiment with making other stripe-based patterns with the sugar, such as for holiday themes (eg. red, white and blue or whatnot) or just in some favorite colors
  • While I’m not super thrilled about using all this artificial color, it does strike me that the sugar-sprinkle topping probably has less food coloring than you’d use to make saturated color frosting, or that you might use to make, e.g., rainbow cake batter. You might also try using natural dye colored sugars, such as those from India Tree.

Other Tips:

  • Wait to frost the cupcakes until you have the sugar ready. You’ll need the frosting to be freshly spread to get the sugar to stick. (If you do frost the cupcakes earlier, or use pre-fosted ones, try giving the frosting a bid of spreading with a knife.)
  • If your sugar came in a container with a shaker top (with little holes), remove the shaker insert to pour. (Or, if you have the kind of container that has the shaker built in, you might want to make the holes bigger using a knife or kitchen scissors. Shaking it out will be tedious and you will feel like stabbing something anyhow. If you do not want to mess with the integrity of your shaker, or if the hole is still too small to really pour, shake your sugar into a separate bowl, and then pour into your soy sauce dish when you have a good amount. If you shake into the soy sauce dish directly, the sugar will fly everywhere, and the integrity of your stripes will be breached.)


    • Why do they do this?


    I was lucky not to have injured myself in this step. They also make sugar that comes in separate jars, which is easier to pour.


These were some that I made a couple of years ago. At the time, I was attempting tie-dye cupcakes. They evolved into rainbows.

another rain-streaked window (friday foto finder: rain)

This watery photo is one I fished out of my photo archives from October, 2011. I love the splash of color in the background from the fall foliage, and the splash of … splash from the rain.

As you might guess, this photo was taken when I was a passenger in the car.

I have loads of rain-related photos in my photo library, so it was a tough choice what to post for this week’s friday foto finder theme of rain. Of course, I have already posted rain photos many times, such as:

It would seem that I enjoy taking photos of raindrops, at least as much as I enjoy taking photos of snow. What can I say? Rain drops and rivulets offer such intriguing examples of refraction and distorted reflections.

the longest shortest month

Even for those of us who love a bit of winter, the season can get a bit old come February. The cold, the gray, the cold, the gray. The snow, the slush, the ice. Gray skies. Bare trees. Cold hands. The bright lights and festivities of the winter holidays seem like ages in the past, and spring remains stubbornly out of reach. February may be the shortest month, but it certainly feels like a long one where I live.

It was a packed month for me, too, and it’s hard to believe how much happened: concert, blizzard, visit from my mother, school vacation. A birthday for one child, and kindergarten registration for the other. I posted every day of the month, and I reached my thousandth post. I posted a lot of photos, and worked through some nervous energy. (But I still didn’t manage to post a bunch of the things I’ve had in mind to post. Will I ever?)

And here is one last photo for the month. For Annette, who finds herself taking too many photos of bare trees. (Though they are lovely bare tree photos.) Look! I got you another photo of bare trees. And for Sarah, whose words about the many grays of February brought a bit of light into the end of my month. (You see? This photo only looks slightly different in black and white.)

There are subtle hints of muddy brown and the barest hint of bluishness in the sky and snow. But mostly we have black and white and gray. No need for the box of 64 crayons to color this scene.


And here we are with the that last bit of color drained out.

3 photos of melting snow


These salt crystals on the road look like rough gemstones.


We had a night of mixed snow and rain. In the bright sun of the next morning, slushy snow fell from the trees with lots of little plops, some of which made patterns like barnacles.


The stones of our front walk must have been warmer than the surrounding ground. I like the way the spaces between the stones filled with snow.

high strung


John and I sometimes joke that the violin is the right instrument for me, being that I can be a little high strung.


When I get too tightly wound, I do sometimes snap.


It should also be noted that I have a tendency to fine tune things.

In case you didn’t see yesterday’s post, I wanted to draw attention to it. (It was the Big Thing I mentioned a couple of weeks ago.) These are some portraits of my collaborator in that endeavor.

Hey diddle diddle

It was the day before the big blizzard was expected to hit Massachusetts, and people all over the state were scrambling to buy their eggs and milk and bread and wine. I found myself in a school, in front of a crowd of several hundred people. And I played the fiddle.

I wasn’t wearing my pajamas, and I wasn’t late for a final. It was not, in fact, a nightmare. It was real, and I was actually supposed to be there. I was one of a small group of parent musicians accompanying the elementary school concert.

Flash back to December. Phoebe mentioned that her school music teacher was looking for an adult to play small violin part in the upcoming February concert. I was intrigued. I’ve been taking violin lessons for a few years, but I have never labeled myself as a violinist. I mean, I take lessons. I am, if anything, a student violinist. The only performances I had ever done with violin were a handful of recitals with my violin teacher and her other students, playing a single song in front of a moderately small audience composed mainly of the parents of the other students. (Who were mostly kids.) And the last of these was 5 years ago.

After some rather fruitless efforts trying to communicate with the teacher via Phoebe, I tracked down the teacher’s email address, and let her know I was interested in learning more about what she needed. She wrote back that another parent had already responded, and she was waiting to hear back. She decided to send me the music to look over, anyhow, in case the first parent decided not to participate. It turned out that there were more violin parts than I had expected, with violin parts to accompany 9 of the songs that the kids would be singing. Nine. On the bright side, they were fairly straight-forward. They were American folk songs, including “She’ll Be Comin’ ‘Round the Mountain” and “Skip to My Lou.” Phoebe really wanted me to play the violin part of “Fiddle-I-Fee,” one of the songs her grade would be singing, and which featured a prominent fiddle part. I started to learn the music, and became really taken with the idea of playing in the concert.

In the end (and there was a lot of back and forth and waiting and anxiety on my part in the meantime), we worked it out that the other parent and I would both participate, and we’d split the songs. We each took on the violin parts for 4 songs, which were grouped by grade, and then both learned the final song, which was a number sung by all the grades.

I spent a lot of time practicing, and worked on the music with my violin teacher during my lessons, in place of the classical music I usually play with her. I pretty well immersed myself in those songs. I played the CD, provided by the school teacher, of computer-generated instrumental versions of the songs in my car for a month straight. (I mean, when I was driving. I didn’t go out of my way to sit in the car to listen.) I played along with the CD. I played without the CD. I watched YouTube instructional videos on fiddling techniques. I worked myself up. I talked myself down. I played till my fingers were sore.

The concert came, with its two performances to accommodate the crowds of family members of the 400 students of the school, and felt I did pretty well. At the very least, I didn’t embarrass myself (or Phoebe).

I had a great time.

I could write loads more about the whole experience, but I should probably just move along. But I will say that I’d love to find more opportunities to perform.

Anyone need a fiddler?

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The Hey diddle diddle image is from wpclipart.com.