Yummy Key Lime Bars

I went scrapping with Laurie last weekend, and when I go up to her place, I usually bring a treat of some sort. This weekend I made up a recipe after seeing key limes at the grocery store. It turned out pretty darn good, if I do say so myself. So, for posterity, here is the recipe, with modifications I'd make next time in red.

Summer Key Lime Bars

Ingredients:
Crust:
3 ¹/₂ cups graham cracker crumbs
¹/₂ cup butter, melted (1 stick) (I'd use ³/₄ cup next time)
1 cup sugar

Filling:
16 oz. cream cheese, softened (2 pkg)
¹/₂ cup sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
juice from 12 key limes
12 oz pkg. white chocolate chips

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9x13" pan (I used canola oil spray, but it would probably be best with butter or butter-flavored spray.)

Mix ingredients for the crust (graham cracker crumbs, melted butter and sugar). Reserve 1 cup of crust mix for later. Press the remaining crust mixture into the bottom of the pan. Bake in oven for 10 minutes.

While the crust is baking, mix cream cheese, sugar, eggs, vanilla, and lime juice with an electric mixer until smooth. Reserve ¹/₂ cup of the white chocolate chips for later. Hand mix the remaining white chocolate chips into the cream cheese mixture.

When the crust is finished (it will be set, but shouldn't be browned), spread the cream cheese mixture over the baked crust. Sprinkle the reserved graham cracker mix over the top of the filling. Finally, sprinkle with the reserved white chocolate chips. Bake for 25-35 minutes, or until the cream cheese mixture is set. (The chocolate chips will brown -- I wasn't sure I liked that, but JD said that he like the chocolate chips on top.)

Note: JD suggested that the filling section could be a bit thicker, so I thought that adding a small container of ricotta cheese might do the trick - adding some volume to this layer, but not adding quite so much fat and calories. I might try that next time.

On why I'm still leaving Netflix

Those of you who use Netflix Profiles know that two weeks ago they were planning on unceremoniously removing the Profiles in September. On Thursday, June 19, at the very end of the day, Netflix sent out the following e-mail to their Profiles-using customers:

We wanted to let you know we will be eliminating Profiles, the feature that allowed you to set up separate DVD Queues under one account, effective September 1, 2008.

Each additional Profile Queue will be unavailable after September 1, 2008. Before then, we recommend you consolidate any of your Profile Queues to your main account Queue or print them out.

While it may be disappointing to see Profiles go away, this change will help us continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers.

I was pissed. I sent this note to them within an hour of the e-mail hitting my inbox:

I am highly disappointed to hear that you will be eliminating the Profiles feature of Netflix. To be honest, that was the best feature that you've created, and the one feature that truly set you apart from your competition. When recommending Netflix to friends and family, it was the highest selling point that I would tout.

To add to this mistake is not offering customers a way to easily reintegrate their queues into one. My husband and I have three queues - one for me, one for him, and one for us - with over 100 movies in each. Consolidating these movie-by-movie into one queue will be a huge undertaking. A large enough undertaking that I might just as well start over at, say, Blockbuster Online.

Over the past couple of years, we have occasionally supplemented our Netflix movies with a trip to Blockbuster, and while I don't like their business practices in general, I've been tempted to switch because of the convenience of trading movies in their stores. Please reconsider this decision. I'd rather stick with Netflix, but this is enough of a reason to look seriously at my alternatives.

I can, perhaps, understand that if one feature is slowing down the entire website, it may need to be eliminated. However, the slimy part is that Netflix's solution to them closing down my queue was to "consolidate any of your Profile Queues to your main account Queue or print them out". People I know who manage databases have told me that it should be a simple database query for Netflix to reintegrate our queues for us. Rather than offer that solution, they wanted me to print out my queue, and re-enter my over 100 movies by hand to our main queue.

To me, Netflix has shown its true colors. I know that Blockbuster is slimy, but then, they've never pretended to be anything else. Netflix pretended to listen to its customers, relying on power-users to drive some if its features. But as soon as Neflix felt that it had a large enough customer base, it was about to yank the one feature that most power-users used.

June 23, I signed up for Blockbuster Online. I've already switched my queue over, and have movies in my house.

Now, a week and a half after the original announcement, I got this from Netflix:

You spoke, and we listened. We are keeping Profiles. Thank you for all the calls and emails telling us how important Profiles are.

We are sorry for any inconvenience we may have caused. We hope the next time you hear from us we will delight, and not disappoint, you.

-Your friends at Netflix

Too fucking late. Netflix, you and I are no longer friends. I know that I'm now onboard with "the evil empire", but that means that they can't disappoint me. If they screw up like you guys did, at least it won't be a surprise.

Graduation!

A week ago yesterday I graduated! It was a moment I think many of us thought might never come, especially during the past 6 months, but I'm happy to say I did it.

I decided to go through ceremonies for several reasons -- the first was that I promised my dad that I would. When I quit grad school in 2001 with "just" my master's degree, I decided not to go through ceremonies, and my dad was fairly disappointed. I didn't want to celebrate my master's, though, because I felt like it was a defeat, rather than a triumph. I was quitting short of my goal.

More importantly, though, I feel like I needed the ceremony as a kind of closure. The defense was a bit of a let-down because I didn't have the sense of accomplishment when I finished. The graduation ceremony gave me at least some of the sense of closure, the sense of accomplishment. I even walked away with a real diploma!

Here are a couple of pictures of my hooding ceremony, from Peter Teuben, a member of the astronomy department

Felicia graduated, too, and here she is in her regalia (I still need to make her hood, though):

I'll post a report from the grad party that followed last Saturday later; hopefully tomorrow.

Hee hee hee!!!

Felicia's cap for graduation is ready:

Now, if I could just get the gown the right color, I'd feel pretty good.

Regrouping

I know things have been quiet around here lately. I was hoping that after I defended that I would magically find a new fount of energy which would result in a flurry of activity both in my life and in my blog. Truth is, I'm tired. I've been tired for months, and I have a feeling that it's going to take an equal amount of time to recover.

We did take a long weekend in Myrtle beach a couple weeks ago, and I have to say that it did wonders for my morale. For the first time in a long time, I can say that I was truly happy. I went into sensory overload in the Build a Dino Store there, but a good kind of sensory overload. We played loads of mini-golf, and also played in the ocean.

(All of my Myrtle Beach trips are here.)

We haven't gotten on our bikes this year yet, and that's probably going to wait until mid-June, after I get back from a meeting in St. Louis. I haven't gotten into my scrapbooking yet, though hopefully that will pick up this weekend. I have had loads of ideas for blog posts (pink? in a John Deere store??), but lose interest by the time I get to a computer. I promise that I'm coming back, and I'm getting less tired and more happy every day, but I have a feeling that its going to be a while before "My Silly Life" is terribly active again.

I'm trying, though.

Not really a big surprise here...

Thoughts on finishing my thesis and PhD

I suppose I haven't blogged this here yet (though it did make it onto Galaxy Girl), but I successfully defended my PhD on April 11. Since then I've been working on revisions, but they need to be turned in by Friday, so will be completely done in just a couple of days.

Just after I turned in my thesis three and a half weeks ago, I started hearing things like, "You must be so happy to be done with your thesis," or "You must be relieved to have that done," or "You must feel a real sense of accomplishment." The truth of the matter is that I didn't feel happy or relieved. I chalked that up to the fact that I still had my defense to worry about.

For the two weeks that followed, I put together my dissertation talk. In some ways, it sounds like an easy thing – after all, it was only to be 20-25 minutes. However, being asked to turn 5 years of work into a 20 minute talk is a real chore. I debated taking auctioneer lessons to learn to talk faster, but settled on giving the digest version of much of the work, and hitting on the important and interesting results. I also studied the concepts in my thesis, so that I would be ready to field any of the weird questions my committee might come up with. All the while, I knew that I would finally feel a sense of accomplishment once the defense was over.

I won't mince words. I was very nervous the day of my defense. I won't go into details, but I have to say that as it was becoming obvious that the private questioning by the committee was drawing to a close, I was surprised. I had thought it would be more of an ordeal. Maybe it was because I tried to keep the mood light in the room, at one time even calling one of the committee members a "crazy man" (in jest, of course). But, after it was over, I still didn't feel my sense of accomplishment. Don't get me wrong, I was relieved that it was over, but I didn't feel like I'd done anything great.

Since then I've been working on revisions to my thesis, and taking some much needed R&R as I can. Will I feel the sense of accomplishment that I keep hoping for when I submit the final thesis to the University on Friday? I have a bad feeling that the answer is no.

Any regular readers know that I have struggled with my thesis and my role as a grad student ever since I returned to finish my PhD in late 2002. I've debated quitting since about a year after I returned. I discovered that I don't really like doing research, at least under the constraints that my thesis imposed (i.e. meetings only once a month at most, and very little interaction or discussion on my thesis science). I've kept going, it feels, only because I'm the kind of person who finishes what they start, rather than finishing to satisfy my need to follow my data and analysis to a logical conclusion. In some way I felt trapped, miserable in what I was doing, but unable to stop because I don't like to be a quitter.

It seems that my thesis has become more an object of distain, hurt and frustration, so it's hard to view it as a grand accomplishment. It feels more like I've decided to stop hitting myself in the head with a 2-by-4 after years of thinking it was the right thing for me to be doing. There's not much sense of accomplishment in finally ceasing something that has caused so much pain and frustration. Maybe in a year or two I'll feel like I've accomplished something. For now, I want to throw my thesis across the room every time I look at it.