I’m snowed in by a whopping 1 inch of snow that ‘s caused the entire City of Seattle to shut down. Aside from no swimming today, that meant a run in the snow, an indoor bike ride, and some quiet time at home to notice some little things going on around me.

This is a Bald Eagle in the tree outside my room. He was just finishing a snack (some kind of rodent).

And here is Aaron studying for his Physical Therapy Licensing Exam, which is all day tomorrow.

At least, that was him 20 minutes ago – now I hear him snoring, so I’m assuming he’s taking a short break. The umbrella is to keep the glair of all that snow away from his computer monitor. He has an enlarger that he puts his text books into and it blows up the image on the computer screen so he can see it. Imagine taking an 8 hour test like that!

Mmm…. I just had a very small scoop of delicious egg nog ice cream. At 4:45 in the evening, this may have been a mistake. While I knew from the ingredients that the nog is around 20 proof, it seemed to me that once it was frozen it would be less potent.

Wrong. This stuff is not for children.

After last nights experimentation (Which I was ready to call a failure), I was planning to buy some dry ice this afternoon (per the suggestion of Scott and Noah, thank you), but as it turns out, simply putting the 13 degree mixture into a –5 degree freezer after it had already partially frozen was enough to solidify it in a “ice cream like” texture. Apparently the Nog had been mixed enough that it was able to become ice cream rather than solid ice.

That’s cool, but I learned something about ice cream through this process. The melting point of ice cream is determined partially by its structure (which is determined by the whipping of the ice cream machine) and partially by its ingredients (similarly the flavor of a chocolate bar will be different if you melt it and let it solidify again because of the structural changes in recrystallization). The smoothness of ice cream (the “mouth feel”) is a large part of the taste, and is why ice cream is more enjoyable to eat than sorbet. The smoothness is because the ice cream, unlike ice, is only partially frozen. In regular ice cream only about half the water molecules that are trapped in the whipped mixture are frozen, while the rest are still liquid. This allows the ice cream to have a large temperature range in which it melts on the tongue, which helps our perception of creaminess.  While the amount of fat in my frozen nog may be enough to emulsify the ethanol (the same way it does the water molecules) it has too low a melting point for it to remain ‘creamy’ on my tongue. The mixture turns liquid and runny almost instantly in my mouth and really has a disappointing texture. The flavor is still good, but I would definitely recommend getting rid of some of the alcohol before you turn your leftover nog into ice cream.

I wrote a post about swimming, but I’ll put that up tomorrow now I’m finished with my kitchen science.

It’s supposed to snow a bunch in Seattle tonight, which is super exciting. We rarely get snow here, and when we do, the entire city shuts down. I know it’s going to stick because the last few days have been unusually cold with clear skies. Mount Rainier was crystal clear form my house, and so were the Cascades. From downtown Seattle the Olympics out to the West looked like giant white cliffs rising out of the evergreen islands. It was way cool.

Last weekend I went to a Christmas In July (in December) party at Chris Tremonte’s house. Courtenay and I made eggnog, which was all but devoured by the thirsty party goers. All but meaning there was a little less than a quart less from a batch that started at over a gallon. Now, I’m not really interested in drinking any more egg nog (I’m really not a big drinker and that stuff is potent and rich), but I don’t just want to throw it away either. So my plan was to turn it to ice cream. And there is where I ran into problems.

This is my off-season science experiment: How cold do you have to get your nog before it freezes?

I started off with my nog refrigerated at about 35 degrees Fahrenheit. My ice cream maker was in the freezer at –5 degrees (F). Now, normally when I put a creamy sugary milky mixture into the ice cream maker under these same conditions, it begins to freeze almost instantly. Apparently alcohol complicates things. Here’s a running diologue of my nog-to-cream experience:

7pm:

After three or four minutes I realized I needed more coldness, so I moved the mixture outside where it is currently 32 degrees (F). This won’t help freeze the mixture, but it will help keep ambient heat away from the mixture.

7:20pm

After 20 minutes the nog still appeared thin and liquid. The sides of the bowl still had no sign of making the nog freeze and the mixture was at 17 degrees F, so I came upstairs to write this blog and see if I could find an answer to the vital question of the night: Can I make a strongly alcoholic ice cream?

My immediate answer is no, but here’s what I found on further investigation. Turns out ethanol works great as antifreeze. The freezing point of pure ethanol is –114 degrees Celcius, or –170 degrees F. The nog is about a 1:1 ratio of liquor and cream, plus a bunch of eggs, so in total it is something slightly less than 20% ethanol, which sounds like anti-freeze. So my only hope is that the abundance of fat molecules will act as a surfactant and engulf the alcohol, making it possible for the rest of the solution to freeze with the ethanol suspended.

7:50pm

That seems unlikely to me, but my most recent status check showed only slight progress, and the nog is down to 13 degrees F. My thermometer showed that the ice cream bowl is also at 13 degrees, so my next move is to put the bowl back into the –5 degree freezer, and see if I can get the whole setup any colder. If this doesn’t work I may have to heat the solution to about 176 degrees (F) to see if the alcohol will boil off without the milk congealing. Maybe a double boiler would work for that?

I’m going to give the freezer a few hours, or if I fall asleep, I’ll give it a night., so I’ll get back with more updates.

[Left: The nog was starting to get thick like the beginning of ice cream, but it was still runny to the touch, and with a bowl the same temperature as the liquid, there was no way it would continue to freeze without a little help from the freezer.]

Does anyone have a better idea for how to make this stuff freeze? I’m not really concerned with keeping the ethanol in the mixture, so distillation is fine with me, so long as it doesn’t ruin the rest of the ingredients.

Here’s a short rant about the only genre of food I completely despise. I hate Chinese food, but the other night after watching the Garfield High School Swim Team kick Ballard High School’s butt I found myself agreeing to eat the stuff rather than being a drag on the group. By group I mean Courtenay, and my friend Braden. The problem is not exactly the taste of Chinese food, but the smell and the way it makes me feel after eating it (like lard dripping down the side of a boiling pot of lizard stew). Ugh. I know I hate Chinese food, and yet every time I give in and try it I’m able to convince myself that it will be different.

So Courtenay’s leaving tomorrow. I’m a little sad. The 17 day weekend seemed to get more and more fun while she was here. It started with me running a 10k (and winning) on Thanksgiving, and it ended with her running a 10k (and winning) yesterday. I ran with her and took pictures as often as I could. It was fun.

And unlike Chinese food or fish, Courtenay hasn’t managed to wear out her welcome in 17 days.

Next up, Aaron comes back up tomorrow for his last four days of super cramming for the physical therapy boards. Think positive thoughts for him, and with any luck he’ll fail so he can study with the Delta Gamma Girls some more!

It’s always easy to see when I’ve been studying pretty hard. I have a tendency to run my fingers through my hair until it sticks straight out – afro style.

I’m finishing up all the backlog of work I have due for the last day of the quarter, which is tomorrow. This includes, 2 case studies, an in-class exercise, that we didn’t finish in class, a final exam, and a poster project. I think I’m down to one question on the last case study and the poster project, which still seems like a lot of work. I’m giving this week a big two thumbs down.

But after I lift my thumbs and present my poster tomorrow night I have time to start doing things like, sleeping, swimming, biking and running. Which is a fairly comprehensive list of things that make me happy. Well, that along with humorous social interactions that have been toned down the past week while Courtenay has been around. I swear people treat me better when she’s around.

Two nights ago on the daily show I saw an interview with Arianna Huffington, “a blogging evangelist” who wrote some book about how to be a great blogger. I don’t normally pay much attention to the interviews (and this was no exception), but I did hear her say that the key to a great blog is to have a secondary interest which adds depth to the author. Her example was her love of cheese.

[left: Courtenay was here for a week before the skies were clear enough for her to see Mt. Rainier. Once she saw it she was stunned, “that thing’s been there the whole time?” Then she took this awesome picture.]

So that raises two questions in my mind:

1. Am I more likely to enjoy reading how to blog from a woman who also talks about cheese?
2. If so, what’s my cheese?

Is it my interest in Seattle area culture and politics? Is it my new interest in learning to sail? Is it my biochemistry class? Is it my duels with Klepto the Crow? Or is it the humorous people I interact with, like Aaron Scheidies going on nighttime bike rides with his own lack of eyesight as a guide?

Maybe I have too much cheese. It could be that I need to write more about my focus – becoming a great triathlete. After all, the blog’s name is “confessions of the highly motivated” not “stories from the guy with 20 hobbies.” Then again, Let My People Go Surfing, was written by a guy with 20 hobbies, and it’s a great book.

I promised a full recap of my eventful weekend, but like my failure to write a recap yesterday, I also failed to have quite the eventful weekend on my schedule. Friday I planned to go for a hike, but ended up sleeping in until 10am, eating breakfast, going back to bed, eating again, laying around in a semi-conscious state, eating more, watching a movie, then going back to bed. It was a far superior day to hiking, and equally non-participatory in the commercialism of Black Friday. Saturday, once the protest was over I went with my mom to get some cross country skis, ordered two books and the Spanish version of Rosetta Stone off Amazon (my mom and dad have been talking about getting this for ages so they can relive their glory days of the 1970’s driving through Latin America in a VW minibus. Selfishly, I’m hoping to use it for my own linguistic benefit as well.), and spent a bazillion hours in REI which resulted in nothing more than a pair of wool socks. Everyone else on my gift list is getting a mix CD (I’m only making one, so don’t think you’re special if you get one) or a personalized poem (this will be more special) or a piece of fiction that will either make you laugh or cry or stop talking to me permanently. Believe me my writing is much better than any other form of art I’ve tried (i.e. amorphous ceramic blobs, mime shows where I had to vocally explain what was going on, paintings of stick figures puking off chair lifts, and other standard short bus productions.)

Sunday I volunteered at the medical tent for the Seattle Marathon. I showed up late, and missed all the exciting sick people finishing the half marathon, then stood on my feet for the entire rest of the day watching healthy people finish 26.2 miles in a day so foggy it looked like San Francisco. Then later I went with Courtenay, Aaron Scheidies and Carrie on a fantastic voyage. We tried to participate in the Christmas parade on Lake Washington by putting lights up on my boat. Unfortunately – due in one part to the fact that I have yet to clean the barnacle covered bottom of my new (to me) sailboat and in another part because I refuse to make the 35 year old diesel engine work harder than 50% effort – we were dropped from the parade like a tricycling 5 year old in the Tour De France.  [This is the Fremont Bridge going up in the fog to allow us through.]

So that’s it for Friday through Sunday. The only other thing that’s worth mentioning is my 10k from Thanksgiving morning. The race had about 200 people in it, though the majority were running the 5k run/walk (including my dad mom and sister). I don’t have a lot of experience in run races, so I decided to pace myself off the leaders for the first 5km. That worked alright, the front pack started as five, and lost a member every mile, leaving two of us at the 5km turnaround, where I realized I wasn’t breathing hard, but the guy I was pacing off of seemed to be scarfing down the brisk air like a German Shephard in a butcher shop. I picked up the pace and never saw that guy again. I don’t know if it was due to the course’s elevation profile, or because of my somewhat poor pacing strategy, but I negative split the 10k by 50 seconds to finish in 33:30, and a full minute ahead of second place. My sister had just finished the 5k a few minutes earlier, and we were able to run back and find my parents finishing their 5km walk. This gave us a chance to have a family finish picture, thanks to my brother-in-law who acted as our private event photographer (thanks Matthew!).

After that Thanksgiving got even better as Courtenay Brown came into town. I’m having fun dragging her around Seattle, telling her how awesome the city is with my best “I’m a Seattleite and this city is way more progressive and awesome than all other cities ever” tour guide voice. It’s something like this, “That’s Queen Anne Hill, where I grew up, and over there is Capital Hill where I went to school, and I think we should go get some coffee at Cafe Vita, which used to be called Paradiso when it was cooler, but now it’s filled with aging cap-hill yuppies with young children – but that’s okay, because even the yuppies in Seattle are totally progressive, and have you heard my favorite radio station kexp? Because Seattle’s music, art, and social scene is totally progressive too.”

That’s all for now. I’m sitting here ignoring both my friends that are staying with me. Courtenay is reading blogs or something, and Aaron is in the next room snoring really loud. I have to write a post soon about how much I enjoy Mr. Scheidies being here. He’s an awesome kid, and it’s hard to describe how much fun it is to have him around in my limited literary giftedness.