originally posted august 04, 2003

what I do in my spare time

During my time in school, I could laugh off the question "what do you do in your spare time?" by explaining how much work I had to do. Now, as I log yet another 40-hour week, that question is serious business. My company's CTO asked it to me at a company-sponsored outing, and I had to fumble my way through an answer.

yes, I cook

During my anxiety-ridden transition to apartment life, I made a half-hearted promise not to cook. Food, you see, goes bad; when cooking for one, it is absolutely critical to eat food before it spoils. I still can't eat bread or cucumbers before they go bad, and I stopped buying green peppers altogether after one of them liquefied in my vegetable drawer. After about two weeks of not eating the green pepper, it decided to just cease being solid and melt.

Some foods, meanwhile, last forever. My one bulb of garlic, bought during some ridiculous shopping trip months ago, appears to be still good -- or at least it spoiled in a very inoffensive way. A one-pound bag of carrots lasted for months, and each carrot tasted just fine. Potatoes and onions, the ideal vegetables for a bachelor's diet, also last for a long time and are inexpensive as well.

So yes, I cook -- simple things, like George Foreman-grilled chicken or fried shrimp. I've found Food Network's web site to be incredibly handy, even rating recipes so I can skip directly to the easy stuff. It still bugs me that so-called "easy" recipes require ingredients like sour cream and cornmeal that beginning cooks tend not to have. But for those ingredients you can't find anywhere else, there's...

you win again, whole foods

...Whole Foods Market, the Wal-Mart for granola-chugging yuppies. The first time I visited Whole Foods, I tried to treat it like a normal grocery store and was upset at the paucity of "normal" groceries there. Today, I needed to buy cornmeal and was reminded of the other things Whole Foods is known for: top-notch meat and produce. They had better be the best foods known to man, for what they charge people:

Item	Whole Foods	Strip District market
Chicken breast, boneless, skinless	$5.49/lb	$2.79/lb
Donut peach	$1.57 each	89¢ each
Idaho russet potatoes	$1.49/lb	39¢/lb
Granny Smith apples	$1.99/lb	$1.29/lb

This had better be the best damn food I ever tasted, for that much money. Incidentally, at $1.99 for a 24-ounce bag, the cornmeal was the second-cheapest of the four items I bought there. I just wonder how much cheaper it is at a "normal" grocery store.

Well, I tried to like Whole Foods for what it is. Maybe I'll go back the next time I need something unnecessarily fancy.

yes, i bake cookies

The very first thing I tried to bake was chocolate-chip cookies: an old standard that I managed to mess up by confusing teaspoons with tablespoons and putting in about three times as much cocoa as normal. Two dozen brown bitter-tasting cookies later, I swore to try again. Since then, I've made chocolate-chip or chocolate-and-peanut-butter-chip cookies three times. The extras go to my co-workers, ever amused by the fact that I of all people bake. I went through a similar trial-and-error phase with sugar cookies, with my last attempt an excruciatingly long success.

yes, I read

I read, or at least I try to. When I'm not partaking of the media frenzy of recorded TV shows, DVDs, video games, and the Web, I try to get some good reading time in. Lately, I've been making incredibly slow progress on Cryptonomicon, one of those books that I practically feel obligated to read by now. My library card has still gone virtually unused; I borrowed Cryptonomicon but decided to buy it from amazon.com after making little progress in the five weeks I had it out.

Unfortunately, budget cuts have eliminated Sunday hours at the library's main branch, thus limiting the time I can spend checking out books. At least I can renew them on-line.

no, I don't exercise

Yeah, I know. I'm supposed to be running or biking or DDRing, but I'm not. End self-loathing.

Back to August 2003, or to the year 2003.

Where am I?

This is Weill Aspects, the official news archive of Jason Weill Web Productions. All articles posted to the front page end up here. This page was generated automatically by a series of Perl scripts.

Articles in Weill Aspects are organized solely by date. You may find the Google search in the left column to be useful if you are looking for an article but do not know the date on which it was posted.

Weill Aspects is composed of static web pages generated as appropriate when a new article is posted. It was developed in May 2001 as a way of managing the content on this site. I also used it extensively while in Japan, during which time I did not have continuous access to the Internet. I was able to write daily updates during July and August 2002, pack the files onto a CD-R or memory device, and upload them from the Internet-connected computers at school.

These scripts are all hacked together in less than elegant fashion, and I don't plan to release them. Some of the design that went into Aspects also was used to develop Livestat, a suite of Perl scripts to process statistics for academic competition tournaments. Livestat is available freely.