Hello old friends.

Hi there. Are you still there? Anyone? Have you missed me? Probably not. I’m afraid you’ve all given up permanently on reading anything here.

But, as my good friend Tim pointed out when I was home for Christmas and mentioned that I was giving up on the blog and even considering deleting it, “But Chelsea. Then the least thing people would ever see would be you coming out of a portapotty. Is that how you want to be remembered?”

Well, now that you mention it, not particularly. So now, only one cover letter away from the grad school application finish line, I’m coming back and offering you a picture of me skiing, inside a giant inflatable snowman lawn ornament with armholes and eyeholes cut out of it.

This didn’t happen recently. I flew home for Christmas and was so happy to be back in New England, seeing my family and my dog (who was recovering from surgery like a champ) and many old friends. And then all too soon I had to come back to Oregon to do some fieldwork – we have weekly tasks, and while I could skip out on one week, I couldn’t miss two in a row. So I arrived on a Monday night, worked three days, and then took advantage of our New Year’s vacation and headed over to Bend with the South Eugene High School nordic ski team.

The team is surprisingly large considering that there isn’t actually any nordic skiing to be had in Eugene. It’s a really fun group of kids, parents, and coaches, and so when they said they were doing an on-snow camp over in Bend over the New Year, I signed up to help out. The first surprise was when I woke up in the morning, saw that a blizzard was forecasted for the Cascades, and promptly received a phone call telling me that Janice, the head coach’s wife, had broken a crown and needed to get emergency dental work, so she couldn’t drive the van. I was the only other coach with experience driving in snow, so all of a sudden, I was going to be captaining an unfamiliar minivan full of giggling teenagers through a huge storm. Awesome.

The drive was actually fine – we slid around quite a bit, but never going too fast, and I was somehow able to stay calm and hide my occasional freakouts from the kids. As we went over Santiam Pass, it was clear that there was going to be tons of snow at Mount Bachelor. We were scheduled to skate this afternoon and I began mentioning that this probably wasn’t going to be very much fun, in six inches to a foot of new snow. Maybe we should classic ski, I suggested. This idea was met with opposition as “waxing is hard and takes a really long time.”

So, we slowly inched our way up to Mount Bachelor to find that they were not grooming due to the blizzard. It was windy and there was a lot – a LOT – of new snow. Wonderland, sort of. I was assigned to go on a jaunt with our star skier, Trevor, and impress some of my technique knowledge on him. We set out and it immediately became clear that technique work was NOT going to happen. Since nothing we could do would have been “good training” anyway, we went on an adventure, slogging around a six or seven kilometer loop down through the middle trails. We were essentially trying to stride, step, herringbone, or do anything to move forward on our skate skis through what was now almost a foot of new powder. It took us about an hour.

It was fun, but I really wish we’d been on classic skis. I was silently cursing the other coaches and thinking, oh, right, waxing would have been hard but this isn’t!?

The worst part of the afternoon was when we finished skiing and tried to pack the skis back into the roof boxes of the vans. It was blowing really hard – the temperature was about 25, but with the wind and snow and ice, it felt like it was 20 degrees colder. The boxes had iced up and were impossible to open, then impossible to close. Kids were shivering, yelling, in some cases almost crying in their wet workout clothes. I was almost crying. I was frozen.

Luckily day two was sunny and the fresh snow had been packed down into perfect corduroy. We had a great day of training. That night was New Year’s Eve and I went into town to meet up with some college friends, Matt and Anna, who I hadn’t seen since graduation. The three of us had run together at Dartmouth before one by one quitting the team. Matt and Anna are married now, and were visiting Matt’s family in Bend for the holidays. It was great to hang out.

The next morning I woke up not exactly hung over, but thinking that I probably should have skipped that last beer because wow, I didn’t feel awesome. The team was supposed to head up to the mountain for MBSEF’s annual New Year’s Relay, a fun event where costumes are encouraged. We figured all the kids would make teams and it would be great. The problem was, on Sunday morning none of them seemed very enthusiastic. We went from having every kid on a team – many had even brought costumes – to all of a sudden not having a single three-person team.

Another coach and I charged in, saying we wanted to do the relay, would just one person do it with us? And got three responses. That gave us five people. We recruited vigorously and managed to get a sixth so we could field two teams.

My team consisted of me, Natalie, and Langdon. Natalie had skied the year before and was pretty athletic. Langdon was tall and athletic, too, but had never skied before this weekend. He also had a costume, an inflatable snowman of the sort that people put on their front lawns, which he had cut armholes and eyeholes out of and dismantled the bottom so you could move your legs a little. There were also a series of small holes around the mouth so you could breathe a little bit. He was too embarrassed to wear it, though.

So guess who did. That’s right. I’m pretty sure that I’ve never met a costume I didn’t like, and this was no exception. In a matter of minutes I was no longer Coach Chelsea, but…. Snowwoman!

The course was just three kilometers, but it was deceptively hard – three one-kilometer loops going up and down and twisting around. I was the leadoff skier and given that I had no peripheral vision inside the snowman suit, at first I just tried not to get tangled up with anyone. Then I realized that I had extremely limited mobility – I couldn’t open up my stride and was stuck taking very short steps. When I double-poled, my arms bashed against the bulky middle of the snowman so I had to have a very wide stance.

I also realized, pretty quickly, that the mouth holes did not line up with my mouth and that I was essentially trying to race with my head inside a plastic bag.

It was hard, and I felt a little lightheaded, but it was fun. A lot of people cheered for me – “Go Snowman!” and “Wow, here comes the snowman already!” Apparently they don’t expect snowmen to be quick on their skis. And I wasn’t, particularly – I think I tagged off somewhere in the middle of the field, maybe the front of the middle. I quickly took the costume off and enjoyed sucking all the oxygen I could out of the thin 6000-foot-high air.

My teammates did the best they could. Langdon really struggled, which was understandable given that he had basically never skied before. We dropped to last, but we didn’t care. Natalie and Langdon both said they’d had fun, and they had a sense of accomplishment that their other teammates, who hadn’t raced, couldn’t have understood.

And me? I had a slobbery snowman suit. What a prize.

upside down and underwater?

So over a week ago I did a race. It was kind of a big deal, but I’ve been too disorganized to write about it because I’ve been busy answering to the mistress that is grad school applications. I’m really tired; it’s possible that I fell asleep in our lab meeting today. While my real boss (the postdoc) definitely made fun of me afterwards, I’m pretty sure that the big bosses (the professors) didn’t notice because they don’t really notice me in general. Phew!

So – I’m overworked. Getting up at 3 a.m. to watch and then report on biathlon races on Sunday probably wasn’t a good idea either. In hindsight, it was obvious that it was completely stupid, but for some reason I did it anyway.

On a related note, if anyone knows what the hell the difference between a personal statement and a letter of motivation is, please, drop that knowledge on me.

But anyway, last weekend I did the Civil War Relay, a 52-mile race from Corvallis to Eugene. Out here people call the Oregon State-University of Oregon football game the “Civil War”, which as a reasonable person who understands history kind of offends me. OK, more than offends me. We live in America, and the Civil War, capitalized, means something specific, something really bad and sad, something that defined what our country is today in many, many ways. It’s not a thing where you sit in a stadium and get drunk and party. But anyway. I digress.

The relay features teams of five, and everyone runs five times, roughly two miles per leg. I, of course, got stuck with the only three-mile leg as well as the only one with any significant uphill – oh well, I can’t complain too much. As I was completely exhausted and kind of a zombie, I didn’t really run very fast, but our team still managed to be the top open team – that means that we were the first team with at least one woman. Woohoo! We finished in 5 hours and 41 minutes. And oh yeah, in typical fashion, we wore red dresses. It was good fun.

At some point I’ll get some more pictures that do NOT involve porta potties and do a real race report, but here’s what you need to know: it rocked. I love relay races.

at least you found your way to McArthur Court.

I only arrived in Oregon in June, and when I came there was a certain set of expectations. In fact, I would say that Eugene was marketed to me by my bosses. They didn’t have to try very hard – I was just so excited to get a job – but try they did.

For instance, there was the line of argument that even though they weren’t paying much, there would be great benefits. That all went out the window when the state legislature decided to overhaul health care for university employees. I know why they did it – Oregon is in a massive budget crunch – but for me, it still kind of sucks.

Then there was the environment at the University of Oregon. Some people might not have a high opinion of the academics at U of O, because they haven’t been all that great in the recent past. But if you asked my bosses when they hired me, they would have said that U of O was on its way up. It was becoming bigger and better, doing better research, attracting better faculty and staff, and helping more students. Across the country, people were recognizing that U of O was changing. Three times more students are applying to the school now than they were five years ago.

Well.

If you asked my bosses now, they would mutter something about the Chancellor and swear under their breath. Or maybe just right out loud.

I didn’t know much about politics or education or education politics in Oregon until last week, when the state board voted not to renew the university president’s contract at the end of the fiscal year. From there, things only escalated. President Lariviere – who wore a fedora, loved football games, and raised an incredible amount of funds for the school – had broad student support and even stronger faculty support, and everyone came out cheering for him. He made statements about how Oregon needed to continue to pursue excellence. That rubbed the board the wrong way so on Monday they straight up fired him.

That has caused a lot of anger, resentment, and unrest – and even people who were neutral about Lariviere before back him now. After all, when asked why they did it, they responded that it had fired Lariviere due to a “personal matter.” They hadn’t consulted anyone in the university community, and they hadn’t even really publicized their meetings. It went behind the backs of the students and faculties and happened very, very quickly. Even the people I’ve talked to who didn’t like Lariviere say that he shouldn’t have been let go in this way – and that their distrust of the board now far outweighs any dislike they ever had of Lariviere’s policies.

And what was the board’s problem with Lariviere? Again, I’m not entirely sure, because I wasn’t paying attention until everything blew up. But the gist of it seems to be this. Despite being the state’s flagship university, U of O actually receives the least support, per-student, from Oregon; it ranks last among public universities in terms of state per-student funding according to the Association of American Universities. In the face of these huge budget problems, Lariviere actually found more funding and made his university get better, not worse. He hoped to partner with the state to get the U of O its own board, because it is currently run by a board which oversees all of the state universities. He called it “A New Partnership.”

Yeah, so much for that partnership.

In their explanation, besides stating that it was a “personal matter”, the chancellor indicated that one of their problems with Lariviere was that he wanted too much for U of O. Their goal, they said, was for all of the Oregon universities to be excellent. In essence, the wealth should be spread around and Lariviere shouldn’t be doing such a good job making U of O great.

Which, let’s think about this for a moment.

(1) Do you seriously hire someone and then tell them to do a little bit less excellent of a job?

(2) Given that U of O is already getting less per-student funding from the state, and that state contributions only make up 8 % of the budget, why do they even care what Lariviere is doing?

On Monday I was sitting in a department lunch with a few professors, who found the whole situation ridiculous. They are in the midst of a “cluster hire” for some biological mathematicians, and the idea is to get about four really good candidates and convince them to come to Oregon because they other three are – strength in numbers (haha).

“How are we going to get them to come?” one professor asked. “We don’t even have a president, and the state board is making less than no commitment to funding and excellence.”

The faculty is pretty much ripshit mad.

And so – you were wondering how I was getting to Mac Court – on Wednesday the university senate held a meeting. They invited the chancellor down and a member of the state board, and they invited the faculty. A truly amazing number of faculty showed up, many wearing green and yellow and a few wearing fedoras.

And they asked the chancellor questions. They asked biting, angry questions. They called him horrible. They said he should resign. They said he didn’t understand education, that he didn’t even try to understand the U of O, that his whole board should be disbanded. They asked what he had learned from this experience and he didn’t answer the question. They asked if he would rehire Lariviere and he said no. They asked if he had purposely done this during finals week so everyone would be too busy to notice. They asked him whether they wanted a degree from U of O to be worth anything in the future.

He did a terrible job. He didn’t even try to be sympathetic. He would say how he wanted to have open communication and work with the faculty, and they laughed.

A former dean of the architecture school talked about how his program used to be nothing. Did I complain when the business school got a new library, he asked? No. When the law school got a new building, did he say it should be torn down because we didn’t have one? No. Instead, like many deans, he went back to his program and tried to make it better. Today, the U of O architecture program is one of the best in the country. The professor laughed at the notion that one institution should be less excellent to allow room for the others. We should all grow together, he said.

When Lariviere came into Mac Court to hand over his authority to the senate president, the clapping went on for literally minutes. He cried.

When the chancellor made his opening remarks? Maybe ten people clapped.

This guy is not going to sleep well tonight – and if he does, then he seriously does have a problem.

This was not the way that I thought I was going to find Mac Court, but I’m so glad that I did. Watching those faculty – many of whom prefaced their remarks by saying they had taught at U of O for thirty years – stand up and demand to be taken seriously was kind of incredible. Gray-haired men and women, bowties, blazers – many people think of college professors as affable. Today, the faculty was not affable. They even talked about going on strike.

Lariviere is not coming back, but people at the university have been galvanized, and it was cool to watch.

I’m not even Oregonian, but after this week, I stand with the hat.

-follow the events with the We Love Our Pres blog.

more to be thankful for.

Did you have a good Thanksgiving?

That’s great. I’m so glad. I did too.

My friend Anna – who just hosted me in Bend – came over to visit. Her boyfriend was off racing at the West Yellowstone Ski Festival, a place that I really came to miss over the last few days, and as a recent transplant to the west coast she didn’t have many options for the holiday. Come to Eugene, I said! And she did.

It was very cute because when I go to Bend, I get really excited by all the snow. When Anna arrived here in Eugene, she was simply astounded by the amount of green stuff. Growing. As a fellow New Englander, I can understand, but I’m mostly numb to it at this point. Still, every once in a while I think, wow, this is crazy. Look at all of these plants growing in November. The green stuff really made Anna happy.

We set to work making an apple pie and then took it up to my friend Matt’s house. He had invited me up for an orphan Thanksgiving of sorts, but when we arrived the last things we felt like were orphans. Ten or so of Matt’s friends from as far away as California and Alaska had converged on his house and spent the day making delicious food. As soon as I sat down I was offered my first real hot toddy. It was good, and everyone was so friendly. We had a great time sitting around in front of the fire until it was time to eat. Eventually a few more Eugene natives showed up with side dishes in hand. Matt and his grad school buddies carved up the 24-pound turkey. It was time to eat.

Now: imagine a Thanksgiving potluck with seventeen people. I think there may have been seventeen things to eat. There was turkey, of course, and gravy, and cranberry sauce and cranberry relish, and three kinds of stuffing and two kinds of mashed potatoes. But then there were brussels sprouts, kale, corn bread pudding, roasted carrots, salad, sweet potatoes, a Mexican mole casserole, spicy tofu, delicious bread, and a squash, apple, and onion gratin I had brought. I’m probably forgetting something. But trust me, filling up a plate without overfilling it was pretty impossible. I wanted to try everything and it all ended up in a big foodpile.

When we were all sitting down at the table with our monstrous plates, Matt did a brief reading from Barabara Kingsolver about Thanksgiving and then we began eating. As we picked away at our hoards of food, each person in the circle gave a toast. Luckily somebody had invested heavily in champagne and there was actually enough for seventeen people to drink to seventeen toasts. That’s a lot of champagne. I don’t think I’ve ever had that much champagne before. It was delicious.

But that implies that we were all just getting plastered. Which, I mean, I’ll admit, by the time Kurt, the last one at the table, gave his toast, things were kind of sloppy. There were a few instances of uncontrollable giggling around the table.

Despite all the booze, though, the toasts were amazing and they really made me think about all the things that I am thankful for. Kevin, who sat on one side of me, was thankful for his health and having the ability to move around and do the things that he loves to do. People were thankful for friends and family. They were thankful to be finished with graduate school. They were thankful for love. They were thankful that they were vulnerable enough to be loved.

What was I thankful for? I didn’t speak as eloquently as I wish I could have, but I got a bit of stage fright. I said that I was thankful for change, for being able to move across the country and start something new and be happy.

But what I really meant was not only that I was thankful for the ability to change, to adapt, to make yourself into something a little bit new. I’m also thankful for being able to see the big picture, and be able to recognize the negative aspects of a situation instead of being so hemmed in by being grateful for the positives. It doesn’t matter how many positives there are if you aren’t happy, and you’re not obligated to ignore your own feelings based on the pros and cons that everyone else sees. I’m thankful for being able to pick up and move on, constantly in search of something that is more completely satisfying. One day we’ll all find it, that thing.

For me, I’m not sure that Eugene is that thing, but it certainly has lots of pluses. I thought of all of them as I sat around Matt’s giant table with an ever-refilling glass of champagne and surrounded by a group of incredibly kind, creative, thoughtful people, many of whom I hadn’t met before but already felt like old friends.

For dessert, we had four kinds of pie and a giant amount of whipped cream. We had for some reason started with two quarts of heavy cream. Matt doesn’t own an electric mixer or even a hand-cranked one, so we took turns whipping it for a whisk. It was sad to see the giant bowl of whipped cream that we produced and realize that there was no way we would eat it all. Anna and I wanted to start throwing it at people, but I felt bad making Matt’s house a mess, so we restrained the six-year-olds inside us.

After dinner, Matt dragged mattresses and air beds into the living room, cleared out the table and chairs, and made a stage. The more talented members of the group sang, danced, read poems, and performed skits. Anna lay back on our air mattress and took it all in. We were both incredibly happy to be there.

And then, finally: the concluding event was a dance party DJ’ed by Matt’s friend Kurt (he of sloppy toasts), replete with both recent hits and nineties classics. I am ashamed to admit that I apparently can still sing along to all of the words of a Spice Girls song. Someone had brought a tub of costumes so there were tutus, leotards, gold snakeprint spandex, suspenders, sequins, and stretchy lace numbers. We traded the costumes around and danced off our turkey calories. I have never danced on Thanksgiving, but I guess it kind of makes sense when you think about it.

Finally, it was late and Anna and I went home. As we drove back to my house, we marveled at how great the night had been and how many things we did have to be thankful.

things to be thankful for.

I know, it’s a little early for a saccharine collection of words about how lucky I am.

But I’m going to do it anyway, because this weekend I had a great trip – and it reminded me that yes, I really AM pretty lucky. On Saturday morning I drove over Santiam Pass to Bend and went for a wonderful ski at Mount Bachelor – so I’m thankful for snow, and skiing, and being healthy and able to enjoy the outdoors!

It was the first day that the nordic center had groomed, and the roughly three feet of snow hadn’t quite packed down all the way. There were no tracks, but I slapped some Rode Super Blue on my skis and set off down the trail. Slip, slip, slip. I wasn’t sure if it was my technique or the wax, so I covered it up with Swix Extra Blue. I slipped a bit more but eventually either I skied the wax in or I started shifting my weight, and by the end of my hour-long exploration of the trail system I was striding comfortably – or as comfortably as I could at 6,000 feet of elevation.

The snow was so beautiful, so perfect, so abundant, that I couldn’t keep a shit-eating grin off my face.

When I finished my ski, I drove back down into Bend and over to my friend Anna’s house. Thing number two I am super thankful for: amazing, generous, big-hearted friends all around the country and the world.

I was pretty much a trainwreck after a long and crazy week, so I’m a little bit afraid that Anna was like, oh man, Chelsea is so boring, this is a terrible visit, but we did have fun. We cooked! We went out to a microbrewery! (We are in Oregon after all) We watched a little bit of a really lame rail jam! We rented a terrible comedy! And mostly we caught up.

On Sunday, I caught a ride up to the mountain with Anna and the middle school team she coaches at Mount Bachelor Sports Education Foundation. In exchange for the ride, I helped coach. Anna decided that she’d send me with the faster kids, which was great because I wanted to do some actual skiing and get some exercise, but tough because, well, enthusiastic 13-year-olds can really wear out a sea-level twenty-something.

It was a lot of fun though. The kids were great. We did a fairly long ski, then worked a little bit on no-poles skiing and did some relays. Anna and I jumped on relay teams, and the highlight of the races might have been when I got tangled up and fell face-first into the snow. It took me a while to get back up and my team finished last as a result, but I’m pretty sure that they were so entertained that they weren’t too upset about it.

Once again, the sun was shining and it was the kind of amazing, warm day that you only see in the spring in New England. I felt so lucky and so happy to be there enjoying it. It was tough to drive back over the pass to Eugene and leave all that bright white snow behind, but I knew that I’d be back in the next few weeks, and tried to let that be good enough for now.

Me (red tights) in the relay races during Sunday’s middle school practice. Look at that corduroy! Thanks to Anna and to Matt Plummer for photos.

easy super supper soup, with a humorous onion incident in the recipe.

I took a GRE practice test this evening. Ew.

Not ew? This soup that I ate for dinner afterwards.

First of all: it’s winter, and it’s finally time to make hearty soups. I loved my summer soups – especially that squash one with the masa dumplings! – but now it’s time for different fare. I saw recipes for bean and grain soups and thought, hold off, hold off. In the winter you will want those soups. And now it’s winter and I can make them.

Because it really is winter. It’s snowing in the mountains; the Mount Batchelor nordic center is opening tomorrow and I’ll be there skiing. In Eugene, it’s actually not incredibly gray, but the pouring rain has turned into a much colder mist occasionally cut with bursts of sunlight. It chills you to the bone even though the temperature is pretty moderate.

And so: this soup. I made it on Tuesday, froze a batch, and finished the original batch of leftovers tonight.

The recipe originally called for white beans, but I knew how long they took to soak and I didn’t plan far enough ahead, so I improvised with black beans. Would it have been better with white? I’m not sure. It was great with black. And almost all of the black bean soups I make are spicy in some way, maybe even with a sweet element; this was a more traditional, herby, refined soup. The way that the carrots and celery softened into silkiness was amazing. All hail winter soup.

As a side, I cooked up some of my grandmother’s Biscuits Supreme and used crème fraiche for most of the liquid; I also added in a bunch of chopped up chives which I had left over in the refrigerator from another project. Those were GOOD biscuits. I think that crème fraiche might go into all of my biscuits from now on.

So: in conclusion: in many parts of the world, there’s no snow despite the fact that winter is supposed to be here. But even if you don’t have snow and are simply cold and miserable from a neverending autumn that you’re totally sick of – cook up some soup. And dip biscuits in it. And smile.

Black Bean Soup With Parsley

adapted from Vegetable Soups by Deborah Madison

2 cups dry black beans

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 very large onion, that has been sitting in the pantry for so long that there are green shoots coming out of it, but it’s still totally fine and you cry like a baby when you slice it

2 carrots

2 celery ribs

2 garlic cloves

six or seven branches of parsley

salt and pepper

Serve with: Biscuits Supreme, adapted – base recipe here; leave out cheeses, substitute 1/4 cup crème fraiche for 1/4 cup milk, and add 1/4 cup chopped chives

Start by pouring boiling water over your black beans in a large bowl. Let them sit for about two hours, then drain out the water and rinse them. Set aside.

In a large pot, heat the olive oil until it shimmers. Add the onion, chopped medium-fine, and the carrots and celery in large chunks. Cook ten or so minutes until they begin to soften. Pour eight to ten cups of water over the whole thing, then add the garlic (finely chopped), parsley, and beans. Cook an hour and a half to two hours, until the beans are soft. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Wasn’t that simple!? Enjoy!

things I love right now. no, now. no, now.

I just discovered these peanut butter cups. They are really, really good. The dark chocolate ones are better.

Also: the Red Leaf Organic Coffee hut at the Woodland exit on I-5 in Washington. Their dark chocolate mocha is to die for. It’s really nice to have places to look forward to stopping as I drive, never-endingly, up and down the interstate.

Things I would love if I knew what they were: more than four hours of sleep per night.

all fall pies rolled into one.

I had a busy summer of fieldwork when I moved to Eugene, and it had a very strong effect on how I thought the University was organized.

But now, I’m not as busy – or at least, I’m busy but not in the field as often – and school is in session. Other research teams are, like us, on campus and in their labs instead of traveling around to do their work. And with classes happening, the grad students are meeting for what seems like a dozen weekly journal clubs.

In short, it’s actually a community. I hadn’t realized that. Out in the field, I had been pretty isolated.

I’ve been invited to a few of the journal clubs, although I don’t really have time to go. But there are a few events which I do make time for each week, besides of course our two weekly lab meetings in which we seem to hash over the same discussions every time…

The first is the department seminar series, which is put on by the graduate students in our institute. They invite speakers not only from Biology or other departments here at the University, but from all over the country. Some of the lectures so far have focused on environmental toxins in relation to development in alligators, how to find the genetic basis of genius, and the really cool physics of jet-propulsion in little jelly creatures in the ocean. That’s right, jet propulsion.

The lectures have all been quite interesting and appeal to me for the simple reason that I love learning and hate specializing. I wouldn’t want to work in every field of science, but I do find myself happy to be learning from each of them. I’ve always felt that if I could go back to college three more times and do three more different majors, just taking classes and doing research projects and learning, that would be incredibly awesome.

Oh, and then there’s the free catered lunch after the lectures where we all get to talk to the speaker. That’s fun. And free. And yummy. And our discussion with the guy who was doing genome-wide analysis to find which loci related to higher IQ went for almost two hours, that’s how interested (and alarmed, in some cases) we all were. (You can actually watch a talk he gave at the link above)

The second event that I make sure to attend is the Institute of Ecology and Evolution teatime.

That’s right. All of us leave our labs and get together once a week to drink tea, eat snacks, and chat, only sometimes about science.

On the practical side of things, the teatime made me realize that our institute is actually an institute. You see, we work in a lab that actually belongs to someone in the Landscape Architecture program. We’re on the second floor, and IE2 is on the third floor. They even have a kitchen and a lounge! And it’s really nice! I had never realized this. Also, all the other labs are up there so everyone else runs into each other all the time. Just not us.

But it’s also been fun to meet new people in the Institute. I had a very cool talk with an elderly professor who has traveled all over the world and even lived in Oslo for a few years. We tried to speak Norwegian, but my vocabulary is pretty limited after not even a full term of class.

Last week, our lab signed up to host tea. That meant that we had to bring in some treats. We divvied it up: Laurel would bring something savory, Tim would make cookies, I would make a pie.

A pie might sound like overkill at an event where chips, dip, and cookies are the norm, but I’d had my eyes on this pie for quite some time. Furthermore, it was easy because it required puff pastry and I just bought it from the store. I was a little ashamed, but puff pastry is really time-consuming to make, and I wasn’t going to do that unless I, or my very good friends, were the ones eating whatever it was. So Pepperidge Farm it was.

Why had I wanted to make this pie? It was intriguing concept to me. I like pumpkin pie. I like apple pie. I like pecan pie. In fact, I like most kinds of pie. This pie used a squash or pumpkin base, but instead of pureeing the pumpkin left it in big chunks, which to some extent lost their form when cooked, but also maintained some texture. It also featured apples and walnuts along with a bit of brown sugar and vanilla, and everything was enclosed in puff pastry. Doesn’t that sound interesting?

Making the pie went very smoothly, and I found myself with leftover filling. No matter. I put it in a jar and added it to my oatmeal for the next few days. Delicious. I’ve always said that pumpkin pie was the best kind of pie for breakfast.

And the pie, as a whole, was great. It wasn’t too sweet, which I thought was great. The three main components played well together, and I liked the fact that it the filling was a bit rustic. Apples and squash are a great combination, but the walnuts may have actually been my favorite part.

At teatime, it drew mostly positive reviews. A few people were so impressed that they begged for the recipe. On the other hand, I overheard one guy saying that “this isn’t even like pie, it’s not sweet, like, at all.” I personally find squash quite sweet, and the amount of brown sugar gives it a nice, mellow sweetness. My housemates both loved it.

So: the pie is recommended. And with store-bought puff pastry dough, you don’t even have to work hard to make it!

Pumpkin, Apple, and Walnut Pie

adapted from Saveur

8 tbsp. butter
3 lbs. winter squash, peeled and diced – or 2 lbs if you don’t want leftover filling!
2 delicious local autumn apples, diced
3⁄4 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup walnuts, chopped
1 box frozen puff pastry (2 sheets)
1 beaten egg

First of all – take the puff pastry out of the freezer! I didn’t think about this, but you need to let it thaw a bit before you can work with it, so let it rest on the counter while you prepare the filling of the pie.

Put the squash cubes, apple cubes, and 6 tablespoons of butter in a large cooking pot over medium heat. Once the pot heats up, cook for about ten minutes, stirring so that all of the cubes get warmed. Then add the vanilla, brown sugar, and walnuts. If the mixture seems like it is thick and might burn to the bottom of the pan, add the rest of the butter. Cook over medium-low for another half an hour or more, until the squash is cooked and soft to the touch, but before it completely loses its form. Transfer to a bowl to cool slightly.

Preheat the oven to 350. While it’s heating up, roll out the puff pastry sheets. Cut one to be roughly the size of the top of a pie pan (or a cake pan, as I used). Put the second sheet in the pan itself – it should come up to the top of the rim on all sides. Trim off the excess that goes over the rim, and if there are patches which need more dough, add them there. You should have a pie pan lined on all sides with puff pastry. At this point, spoon the filling into the pan until it reaches the level of the rim (if you have extra filling, save it for another use). Place the round of puff pastry on top and press the edges against the edges of the bottom layer around the rim. Make sure they seal, because they will need to hold the filling in. Brush the top of the pie with the egg, and then bake for 35 to 40 minutes, until the crust is turning brown and the egg-washed top is shiny.

the whole story.

So I promised a full writeup on my half-marathon, and then I kind of forgot about it because I’m so busy frantically writing and nursing my sore leg and registering for the GRE. WHAT!? Yes, registering for a stupid standardized test. I thought I would never have to take one of them again. Also, I made some amazing fish cakes and dilly potatoes from The Scandinavian Cookbook. No photos, sorry, but the recipe is here and you should make them. So. Good.

But back to the half marathon. I registered for this thing way back in August; I saw an e-mail from a friend mentioning that it was a great race and sold out very quickly, so the day that registration opened I went on line and bought myself a spot. I didn’t know what I was getting into, and at that point the race was months away. It just seemed like a good thing to do.

All through this month I felt the half marathon looming. I should do some threshold intervals, I thought. Or maybe I should do some more long runs. Either way, I should probably do something. I hadn’t been training – just doing easy runs and the occasional rollerski. Two weeks before the race, I actually had a good week of training. I did 3 x 15 minutes at threshold, and a rollerski, and some 60-second uphill intervals, and a 10-mile trail run. I knew that it wouldn’t do me any good physiologically, really, but I wanted to be mentally prepared to suffer.

Then the week before the race I woke up one morning hurt. It was my ankle at first – it felt weak and kind of crumbly – but it caused a shooting pain up the outside of my calf when I moved. I had no idea where this was coming from or what I had done to cause it. At first I thought maybe it would go away as quickly as it appeared, so I did an easy run. It didn’t get better. So then I took the two days before the race off. I was nervous, really nervous, that I was going to be limping around for 13 miles.

Luckily, that’s not how it happened. We arrived at the rainy, cold start in Silver Falls State Park about 40 minutes before the race, picked up our bibs, and tried to stay warm. I had an idea that I wasn’t going to go out too fast, that I was going to ease into the first mile to gradually get my heart rate up. The gun went off and I jogged about a quarter mile, and then my competitive juices got going and I thought, what am I doing!? This is a race! I started passing people and went through the first mile in just over seven minutes. My plan had failed, but the andrenaline kept me from noticing my ankle and calf. They didn’t complain one bit.

At first I thought the fast pace was a huge mistake, but then I figured I would just go with it. In every long ski race I’ve ever done, I’ve been afraid to push from the start. I’ve thought about the distance and rationalized my way out of going hard. This time around, I ignored that. I watched my heart rate climb into the high 170s and low and then mid 180s and I embraced it. I just kept running. The first few miles were flat or rolling and it wasn’t until mile four that we had a big climb and I noticed that my legs were heavy and not really working the way they usually do. But oh well: I pushed anyway, and I passed some very athletic-looking guy who was walking. Walking! Four miles into a half marathon! Come on! At that point we were running 7:20, 7:30 miles, too. Walking. Sheesh.

It took a few miles to get to the real waterfalls. I was beginning to think that this race was some sort of hoax and the waterfalls were totally lame. But then: bam! There they were! And they were spectacular. Big cascades coming down from rock ledges. Huge drops. In a few places, the trail cut behind the falls and into the cavernous overhangs they came off of, which is an unusual experience to say the least. I have to give it to these guys for finding a unique and beautiful venue for the race.

Let’s see, blah blah blah. Eventually we started going downhill. When I thought about this race, I thought my strength would be the uphills. But instead, it turned out to be the downhills. All of that skier training – running on the Appalachian Trail, darting down singletrack – has made me relatively fearless. I would pass men and women who were daintily picking their way through the mud and wet leaves, afraid of slipping and falling. Me? I know that running downhill is simply a matter of channeling your momentum, so I just rolled along. It was fun! A friend later told me she thought it was my giant quads that made me good at the technical downhills, and I guess she probably isn’t wrong.

Even early in the race, I began rationalizing the distances. When I had run three miles, I thought to myself, hey, you only have ten miles left! That’s not so bad! Then when I thought about it, I realized that I’d only run ten miles a few times in the last six months, and that was actually still quite a task. Five miles in, I thought, hey, you only have eight miles left! That’s only, like, another hour.

And that’s where things started getting good. My least favorite training as a skier was the long run at a fast pace, or at a pace that’s just below threshold. Pepa would have us do these workouts to prepare for marathons where the entire point was to deplete your energy stores and force your body to metabolize differently. They would be two, two and a half hours of this pretty fast pace, but not fast enough to actually be fun. Just fast enough that two hours later you were amazed that you could keep it up for two hours.

Anyway, that was the best mental toughness training I could ask for. If you tell most people, oh, just run for another hour with your heart rate averaging, say, in the low 180s, they would say, holy shit, that sounds impossible. I thought that too, in half my brain, but in the other half my brain, I was thinking, I’ve got this.

And I did. I may not have maintained an even pace, but I maintained a hard effort. I pushed myself for another hour. Then after another couple miles I could change my mantra to, all you have to do is keep running for another forty five minutes. Why, that was even easier than before! Until I got to the climbs, that is.

From looking at the course profile, I knew that at about eight miles I would start climbing again and the fun would be over. I had it a bit off – the eighth mile was actually pretty easy. It was the ninth one that killed me. And the tenth. And the eleventh. As I said, I wasn’t expecting to feel so sluggish on the uphills, but it was really tough. The clincher was that after mile nine, the really big climb came as a series of stone steps. I was not expecting this. Running up steps is different than running up a hill because you can’t set your own rhythm or cadence – you are bound to take steps exactly as big as the stairs. It was the only time in the whole race where I walked, because after a while I just couldn’t find the right rhythm for those darn steps. And there were a lot of them.

From then on, it was ugly. With two miles to go I tried to pick it up, telling myself that I only had to run for another fifteen minutes, so how bad could it be? The worst of the climbing was over, but there was still plenty of gradual, rolling terrain, and I was beat. My strides had shortened and I felt awkward, like I was hobbling along as fast as I could. Still, I pushed it and I saw my mile splits come back down towards 7 after being up over 9 for the last really steep sections. With one mile to go I thought I could make it. I was so close. Just seven more minutes, I told myself. You can push really hard for seven minutes. Think of all the things you’ve done that are harder than that.

Then I came around a corner and saw a mountain.

No, it wasn’t a mountain. It reminded me a little bit of a hill at the Thetford High School course back in Vermont, actually. It was just that it was quite steep, and not short, and 3/4 of a mile from the finish of a half marathon. That’s a lot different than being two miles into a 5k. When I finally got to the top of that hill – and several people had passed me during the process – I was faced with an equally steep downhill. Maybe even more steep. I’ve already told you I’m good at running downhill, but this was too much. My legs were jelly and I was afraid that they were just going to give out. It was muddy. I was sure I was going to fall, but the finish was so close that I tried to roll along anyway.

When I finally made it across the line, I just wanted to lie down. It feels so good to feel so tired, but it feels bad too. Honestly, I was proud of myself not so much for my time or place but because I had really pushed hard the whole time, harder than in most ski races. I didn’t have any mental issues to deal with, and I didn’t have any pressure: those were the two things that wrecked my ski career. At the half marathon, I didn’t have anything else to think about except working hard, and boy did I work hard.

There wasn’t time to lounge, though. I needed dry clothes, and more of them. I needed something hot to drink. Something hot to eat. I found some of my friends who finished before and after me and we ate chili provided by the race staff. It was great. We drank beer. After the awards we had a party and drank more beer.

And that’s the story of the half marathon. My leg is back to being all messed up, and it’s November, so I don’t think I’ll be doing any more running races in the near future – when I get back in action, I’ll be focusing on skiing – but it was an amazing way to cap off an awesome fall. I beat my half marathon demons and some of my more general racing demons, too. I’m ready to ski!

half-marathon by the numbers.

On Saturday I ran my first-ever trail half marathon! The Silver Falls Half Marathon was a hard, wet, cold blast. I’ll do a full write-up later this week but here’s a quick summary of some highs and lows.

Time I woke up on Saturday: 5:30

Minutes I jogged around to warm up before the race: 10

Temperature at race start: 44 degrees and raining

Clothes I was wearing: shorts and a t-shirt

Percentage of the field wearing similarly few clothes: < 1 %

Number of interval sessions completed in last six months: ≈ 3

Number of 13+ mile runs completed in last six months: ≈ 2

Pace of first mile: 7:05

Times I regretted this: approaching ∞

Time for last 1.1 miles: 7:49

Does this create the impression I ran an even race: yes

Pace of slowest uphill mile (#11): 9:18

Pace of fastest downhill mile (#8): 6:13

Number of waterfalls passed in race: approximately 9

Finish time: 1:42:49

Place overall: 61st

Place among women: 6th

Place in age group: 1st

Oldest woman who beat me: 51

Minutes by which she beat me: 8.5

Number of men I met, pre-race, wearing a US Biathlon Association hat: 1

Number of said men who passed me in last 3/4 mile of race: 1

Elevation gain, then loss, in last 3/4 mile of race: 175 feet

Minutes I jogged to cool down after finishing: 0

Pounds of coffee I won: 1

Cups of coffee I drink per day: 0

Pounds of coffee I gave to Christina Howard, who drove and stuck around for awards: 1

Number of kegs at post-race hash party: 3

Number of goats at said party: 2

Place among female hashers: 1st

Place the first male hasher finished, in the entire race: 1st

Minutes separating our finish times: 24

Yup, he looks 24 minutes faster than me. Photo: Christina Howard.

Percentage of my muscles which hurt on Sunday: approaching 100 %

Amount of fun I had on Saturday: ≈ a lot