Love alters not...

...when it alteration finds...O no, it is an ever fixed mark, that looks on tempests and is not shaken...

So, for valentines day, I had this great idea that I would make fortune cookies with love quotes from the bible and, yes, Shakespeare, in them. I thought, well, it'll be difficult, but really cool, right? So I looked up a recipe online, wrote down some selected quotes on little tiny pieces of paper in hopefully legible cursive, and mixed up the first batch. 

 So there's the batter, and I'm wearing gloves because I'd read that you have very little time to work with the cookies after they've baked so they're really hot. And just ignore the box of Triscuts in the backround. And whatever that random bowl is.

 So I popped those in the oven, and waited for them to get, "crispy golden half an inch all the way around the edges, but still light in the center."

 Yes, those are the cookies in the oven, and no, it isn't really necessary to have a picture of that. I just managed to take the picture with my computer camera and wanted to see if I could load them on here.

Well, after the alloted time they didn't look crispy golden anywhere. So I left them in for five more minutes, then five more minutes, and they still were pretty white so I just took them out and tried very hard to get them to do what all well-behaving fortune cookies do, but they wouldn't.

 Those are just the ones that wouldn't come off the baking sheet. If you look at the right, no left, you can see a few of the pieces of the others.

 Moving on...

With the progression of my classes, a few more interesting things have popped up. Yeah, most of the time its still just trying to get through and not fall asleep, but sometimes things happen that kind of make you go hmm. For instance, yesterday in my zoology class, we convinced the professor, who happens to be an ornithologist, to do the bird call of a bard owl. It was something like a mixture between your typical hooting owl, one of those whooping monkeys you hear in the zoo, and a songbird. He said that it was accurate enough to actually call the owls to him, so he wouldn't have to go out and search for them himself, and I was almost impressed.  Then he pulled a dead yellow belly sapsucker out of his bag and was like, "And this is a dead yellow belly sapsucker!" I went up and looked at it after, it was pretty cool, and thought that that class had been much more interesting and that all periods of instruction should include at least one dead specimen and a bird call. On the downside of the professor, he's so humanistic that its scary sometimes. That is, he really doesn't just teach evolution, he deeply believes it, and you can definitely tell. Like, once when he was talking about some theory about some other thing, and was saying how a new mode of thought was taking over, he said something to the effect of, "Those who believed that are all mostly old, so they won't be around much longer...so those who followed the old way are gradually dying off as mostly everyone now realizes the new way is much better..." but it was just the way he was saying it that creeped me out. Like, he really thought it was better, and these old guys just needed to hurry up and die because they were slowing down the progress. But anyways.

Lets see, in drawing with charcoal earlier today, we were doing self portraits. One kid accidently dropped his mirror, really loudly and suddenly, and the professor, Gene, walked over and was really quiet for a few seconds, then was like, "EVERYBODY SEE THIS? This is exactly what I don't want happening! I haven't had a broken mirror in here for 6 years!" Then he just walked away and went back to what he was doing. I had a hard time not laughing. Poor kid. And he (Gene) also finally said the inevitable words of all art teachers: "Just really feel the drawing, put your soul into it, do it with passion!" I had a hard time not laughing then, too. Everyone who does art of any kind must be very dramatic, I think. 

I started reading Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett, its pretty good. I like some of the things he writes, they're pretty funny:

"He wasn't sure he liked everything that was happening, but a lot of it was "cultural," apparently, and you couldn't object to that, so he didn't. "Cultural" sort of solved problems by explaining that they weren't really there."

"She has told me everything," Wen went on. "I know that time was made for men, not that other way around. I have learned how to shape it and bend it. I know how to make a moment last forever, because it already has. And I can teach these skills even to you, Clodpool. I have heard the heartbeat of the universe. I know the answers to many questions. Ask me." The apprentice gave him a bleary look. It was too early in the morning for it to be early in the morning. That was the only thing that he currently knew for sure. "Er...what does master want for breakfast?" he said. Wen looked down from their camp, and across the snowfields and purple mountains to the golden daylight creating the world, and mused upon certain aspects of humanity. "Ah," he said. "One of the difficult ones."

Well, I think this post is quite long enough.