Valentine's Day Cookie and Albuterol Cocktail

A return to curiosities:

1. Cake + cookie = ? Around Valentine's Day at Shaw's I found a heart-shaped chocolate cake covered with white frosting, a blue-frosting cookie monster AND A COOKIE ON TOP. This was ground-breaking, to me. I've had cake with cookies, cookie cake, severely frosted cookie cake, and even cookie cupcake (aka Lump of cookie). It had never occurred to me to put cookies on top of cake. This marvelous invention was my Valentine's Day present to 81 Huron, and it equaled delicious.

2. Living out nerd paradigm This week the stars conspired against (?) me: I had two diff eq math projects due in a span of two days, and then my docs put me on an inhaler because I couldn't breathe. Given my post-flu mental and physical haze, it was all I could do to keep track of the derivatives of Bessel functions and the number of species in a given fauna at time T, and -- brace for the nerd statement of the year -- I lost my inhaler. On some level, I felt that this established additional nerd cred that in regular circumstances would have been beyond my reach, because really, I am a field hockey-playing science nerd, and there is just something extra special about asthmatic mathematicians. +5 points

We end with an Amy Adams quote from Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby

You need to go out there, and you need to rev your engine, you need to fire it up. You need to grab a hold of that line between speed and chaos, and you need to wrestle it to the ground like a demon cobra, and then, when the fear rises up in your belly, you use it. And you know that fear is powerful, because it has been there for billions of years, and it is good. And you use it. And you ride it; you ride it like a skeleton horse through the gates of hell, and then you win, Ricky. You win! And you don't win for anybody else. You win for you, you know why? Because a man takes what he wants. He takes it all. And you're a man, aren't you? Aren't you?

This ranks up there with Theoden's inspirational speech to the Riders of Rohan, in my reckoning.

Posts will be sparse this semester, a warning.