Temper, Temper

I have a temper. A bad one. It gets in the way of my personal life far too often.

Oh, I have tried to control it, many times. The problem is that typically suggested methods, such as counting to ten, require one to have the presence of mind to stop and count to ten. My fuse burns out too many fractions of a second too early before I can gather that presence of mind. Currently I simply try to avoid getting angry in the first place, but some things are simply too infuriating.

Someday I'm going to get into real trouble, I just know it.

Nails

I have come to the sad realisation that I have no idea how to cut my fingernails with nail-clippers or scissors.. This realisation arose some days after I resolved to end my two decade-old habit of biting my nails.

I filed them down instead, using the file on the back of my nail-clippers which I ironically have been using as a keychain for some time.

My fingers feel funny with long nails. Like there's something stuck to them.

Wow, I really am quite pathetic.

Singles' Grumbling Day

I forgot about it. I also forgot about Discount Chocolate Day.

I did, however, find a recipe for chocolate-dipped fudge brownies. Yes. This is a thing which must be made, and subsequently eaten.

Homestuck is rocking so hard on two fronts. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly reference rocks almost as much as that sweet Bro versus Jack image which is right now lending some of its awesome to my desktop. Oh, and the music. THE MUSIC. I can't stop listening to it!

So anyway. Why did they take Pattern Fills out of PowerPoint 2007? And when they put it back in PowerPoint 2010, why did they take away the ability to adjust their transparency?
It's going to take a while to get used to this program.

Stove Rules

I have a few rules for dealing with the kitchen stove, to make sure that I never set the house on fire, burn my housemates, etc. The rules are as follows:

1. If leaving the house for any reason and for any expected duration, both stove and oven must be turned off. No exceptions.
2. When cooking anything on the stove, I must remain in the kitchen at all times. This applies even if the power is off, as the stove is electric and retains heat for some time.
3. Boiling milk must be watched with especial caution.
4. If baking something in the oven, I must set a timer if I want to leave the kitchen. The oven light should also be turned on as a warning to others that it is hot. Leaving the house is not permitted.
5. The heat on the stove should be set to the minimal level required (generally not more than medium heat). 

I've found that, with these personal rules in place, I've never had anything worse than the pot of spaghetti spilling over and hissing, and since I was always within earshot I could take care of it immediately.

What brought this on? Well, this morning, I found a kettle on the stove, with the heat up. The transparent lid of the kettle had no condensation; suspicious, I lifted the lid to check.

Bone dry.

This is, in fact, how many kitchen fires happen. The presence of water keeps the temperature of the pot at 100 degrees C, since at any higher temperature the water undergoes a change of state to steam, dissipating the latent heat. Once the water is all gone, the pot is able to reach a higher temperature, until some part of it, or even some leftover food residue, reaches its ignition temperature. 

Of course, it might not ignite at all. It might just sit there for hours getting hotter and hotter, until someone decides to touch the handle. Either way, it isn't safe.

I turned off the stove, of course, and warned my housemate as to what happened. She was very apologetic, and explained that she is quite forgetful over such matters. I left it at that.

This afternoon, I went to the kitchen and found the same kettle, steaming away unattended on the stove. There was at least some water inside, but it was only up to an inch in depth and rapidly diminishing. It was quite clear that this was what had happened the first time, only I caught it at an earlier stage.

This isn't the worst I've seen. A few years back, I was living with some different housemates, all boys. Sometimes I'd wake up early in the morning and find a very warm pot on the stove, empty and clearly left there from the previous night, the temperature control turned up to the highest heat level.

Do these people... not have any sense of safety? Have they done this a million times without consequence? Does the prospect of a fiery demise simply not bother them? Does the prospect of massive property damage and killing goodness-knows-how-many-others living in nearby apartments simply not bother them?

There was an article recently on BBC News, about car-manufacturing companies which were confident that they would be able to built a completely accident-proof vehicle someday. When I saw that article - when I had only gotten as far as the title - I laughed.

Nothing will be completely safe so long as irresponsibility exists in this world.

Blackberries

Let me take a moment to mention how enthralled I am with the latest Google Doodles.

This post is titled "Blackberries" because that was what I was eating just now. I've never had fresh ones before, but Coles was offering two punnets for $4, which was far too good an offer to pass up. And so I came face-to-face with my first real blackberry.

These things are weird. At first I thought they were like grapes, little clusters of smaller fruit gathered up in a bundle, but it quickly became apparent that they have something different going on. The little spheres, or "drupelets", do not hang on a stem independently, but are rather more like little protrusions attached to a central mass. Each drupelet contains a small seed, so the structure is somewhat similar to a strawberry, if strawberries had fleshy lobes cushioning each seed. (Both blackberries and strawberries are classified as aggregate fruits.) The central mass is firmer than the surrounding drupelets, and a little sweeter.

It's rather intriguing to note that blackberries have a distinct flavour - I doubt it would be possible to substitute them in a recipe, not even with the closely-related raspberries. All of which means I'll have to try out some blackberry-based recipes while I'm still in a country which grows them.

Hmm... Blackberry pie for Pi Day, perhaps?

I Have Decided

When I grow up, I want to be an internaut!

P.S.: Sick sick sick sick

Should farting in public be banned?

So this is apparently an issue now.

If that law does get passed, it will probably warrant an Ig Nobel prize.

Switch

I read somewhere (Reader's Digest?) that the body becomes more alert for a period in the afternoon. So even  if you didn't have enough sleep the previous night, or have done something tiring, you would feel awake and active at around 3-4 pm. Of course, once the active period ends, you go back to being exhausted.

I don't know if this is true, but what I do know is that at around 6 pm today, something seemed to click off and I almost collapsed in exhaustion. Not quite sure how I managed to drag Magellan and myself home.

Now I have to switch on my hardworking mode and get my report done. The switch appears to be stuck.