i made a lot of mistakes

i had the family over for dinner this afternoon, in celebration of my birthday on the friday two weeks earlier. (i refer you to the post below for a description of the events that occurred on said friday.) i made lasagnas and a simple yet delicious salad. my main claim to fame with these lasagnas is that one of them was made from a recipe by emeril, every old lady's favorit tv chef and pork fat connoisseur. if you are a fan of futurama but do not live in north america, you may be interested in knowing that emeril was the inspiration of elzar, and he loves to kick it up a notch. more often with pork fat than with the spice weasel, though. the lasagna was a four cheese lasagna with spinach and portobello mushrooms, quite extravagant if i may say so myself. it got smashing reviews from all the critics, which means that my family liked it, or at least that they said they did.

i miss the food network, which is where i discovered emeril's daytime tv show whilst i was living in vancouver. not that i'd be able to watch it even if it did exist here, as i don't own a tv. i've considered getting one, though, and were there a food network, that might tip the scale just enough to warrant a tv purchase. but alas, there is not, and the money stays in my pocket. probably a good thing.

for birthday gifts, i mainly got what i have craved for so long: very sharp knives. i'm going to have so much fun with my new very sharp knives.

i ordered myself some cd's as a birthday present to myself, and they arrived this friday. i mention this because one of them was "avalanche" by sufjan stevens and i'm having a big sufjan period right now. i discovered him a few years ago, when i came over the "michigan" album and instantly fell for the album in general and the song "for the widows in paradise, for the fatherless in ypsilanti" in particular. it was probably the first song i ever listened to on repeat, over and over. it made me cry. when i was in school, i felt i was wasting time doing useless things when i could be home listening to the song. it still might be the song that has affected me the most, although there are other songs aspiring for the title. "avalanche" is a cd of outtakes and extras from the "illinois" album and i'm now alternating between those two cd's. they're both over 70 minutes long so it's not as repetitive as it might sound. still, lots of sufjan stevens in my life. it took me a while to enjoy the illinois album, but now i've definitely fallen in love with it. at first it seemed a bit bland and long and too similar to the michigan album, but now it's a whole different world of brilliant songs. i discover new ones every time i listen to it. the avalanche album isn't quite as good, but it's got some smashing stuff on it and i have a feeling it will grow on me as well.

in short, if you haven't listened to sufjan stevens, you should give him a go and probably start with "michigan". i like to describe music with feelings, and sufjan's music has a way of grabbing me and making me care. the word i'm looking for here is engaging. sufjan stevens makes engaging music that warrants multiple listens and is musically complex. not that i'd really know, being a musical illiterate and all, but he plays a lot of instrument and there seems to be quite a bit of orchestration going on. crescendo this and scherzo that. (i don't know if scherzo is actually a word in english. i don't even know what it means, just that it's something about music. the only reason i know it is because it's a seven-letter word that has both c and z in it, and in swedish scrabble there is only one of each. but i'm sure sufjan is all about the scherzos.)

this week has been a good week for my thesis. i've done some serious coding in matlab and made a program that grabs all the data from a spreadsheet and calculates means and standard deviations and plots everything nicely and smoothly. i'm actually a bit impressed by myself, i'm glad i got it all to work in the end. tomorrow i'm printing it all out (32 graphs) and discussing things with my supervisor. it's good, because i've been wanting to learn how to write code that quickly gets out and organizes relevant data for a while now. and it's cool, because when i look at the program, it seems really complex and i feel smart. my thesis topic has also gotten more interesting this week; instead of just doing statistics on collected data, i'm going to build a model for mass balances for clear-cut forests, and we're also going to go up to the actual test areas to collect mineralogy samples, so that means there will also be a small field component in the thesis. these things are both very good, they make the thesis both more engineery and environmenty. also, i feel it is a good thing to actually get to see the areas that i'm devoting half a year of my life to.