第一场雪

今年的第一场雪来得很早，而且来势汹汹。短短两小时就积了又湿又沉的两寸。忽然间发现原来好多树已经落尽了叶子，但有更多还是绿叶满枝头，除了几棵刚变黄的枫树。今年的红叶真的很奇怪。

下午二时开始下，到五点钟：


可怜的玫瑰：

Two Evenings with the Orchestra (Part I)

The Orchestra was the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Thanks to Jenny and the Symphony's educational program, I recently have attended two Tuesday concerts for free. It was not my first time with the Orchestra, but every time it always turned out exciting. What was different of these two Tuesday concerts was that there were quite a proportion of young audience. It was nice too see young faces at a concert hall for serious music.

The first concert I went was an all-German concert featuring Weber, Schumann, and Mendelssohn, conducted by the young German conductor Jens Georg Bachmann. The three pieces were all typical Romanticist music with very beautiful melodies and no restrains on emotions. You can hear an excerpt of Weber's Overturn to Oberon here (by the London Classical Players). It was a very happy and festival opening for an evening of music. The second piece was Schumann's Piano Concerto in A minor, which was first performed by his wife, celebrated pianist Clara. We had Andreas Haefliger as our soloist that night. The last piece was Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 3, Scottish. The triumphant last theme was ringing in my head for a long time after the concert (so much better than a stupid Taiwanese pop song I picked up earlier that day). Coincidently I heard his Symphony No. 4 on radio that weekend. Both are very beautiful symphonies.

Now let's take a tour in the Symphony Hall (more than 100 years old!). Above the stage, you see this (it says Beethoven):


The balconies:


And sculptures on the walls:


Oh, I was sitting in D1, four rows behind the stage. I can see this: Scores for second violins on row 5.




Concertmaster (leader of first violins) Malcolm Lowe practicing before concert:


Even the piano movers wear suits:


Pianist Andreas Haefliger:

Rain, Rain, and More Rain to Come

No doubt it will make the wettest October in many years. We have had so many rainy days this month. Apart from the 9 consecutive days of no-sun about 10 days ago, we are now in the fourth day of such a stretch, again. What's more, this is a nor'easter. I hate the word "nor'easter". That means it is a storm that would linger on for a long time. So this one won't stop until sometime tomorrow. It is so windy and wet outside. It is just nasty.

I am going to the Symphony Hall tonight. What a program it will be! It's Sibelius' violin concerto and Shostakovich's symphony No. 8 (completed in 1943 during WWII). The latter is supposed to be excessively gloomy and despairing. It doesn't seem to be the best choice for this kind of weather. But Shostakovich himself said that his No. 8 was about beauty and affirmation: "Life is beautiful. All that is dark and depressing will disappear, depart, and the beautiful will reign."

Glass Pumpkins

Though it is colder and wet after 9 consecutive days of rain (still going), it does not feel like fall yet. Normally at this time of the year, we would see colorful foliage already. Maybe not in our backyard, but at least we could go north or west a little bit to enjoy the red and yellow display. Now it is soaked wet everywhere, I feel like going nowhere.

To cheer myself up, I found photos of glass pumpkins I took two years ago at the preview to the sale. I missed this year's annual glass pumpkin sale, not that I could afford buying anything (the cheapest price tag: $25), but I really wished to be able to take better pictures. The sale started at 10am. People came around 9am to get close to their favorites. I arrived at 4pm only to see a dozen or so left on the lawn. Oh well, there is always next year.

The Great Glass Pumpkin Patch

Close Up

My Favorite Pumpkin
Mmm, $155!

天漏啦

雨这样不停地下，已经是第九天了。下得新英格兰都发大水了，树叶儿也似乎推迟变色儿了。气象预报说今天下午可能会见太阳，怎么看不出来呢？九天没见太阳了，弄得人都很压抑，连实验室的宠物狗Roodi都病倒了。天快晴吧。

Cooks and Bakers 本周新尝试

There is an interesting article in this week's Dining In section of NY Times about the difference between cooks and bakers. I can't agree less with the author. It looks to me cooks just "invent" meals from whatever they have on hands, while to be a successful baker, you have to follow recipes. No invention or impromptu allowed, not until you have done a lot of baking.

I consider myself a cook. I can cook delicious dishes. One of my dishes won me an award. Seriously. And I have only once participated in any cooking competition in my whole life, ever. On the contrary, I'm not much a baker at all. So when I received a 2kg Trader Joe's chocolate as a Christmas gift at one Yankee swap, I decided to venture into baking. I searched all the cooking books that I couldn't resist from buying and found a recipe for brownies. I always think that American desserts are too sweet. So I cut back on sugar. I cut back on butter and shortening (gotta be healthy!). So my first brownies came out as a fudge. I tried again. Now it was somewhere between fudge and brownie. The consequence of these attempts is, I still have more than 1kg chocolate left to consume.

After reading that article, I realized that baking doesn't give a baker that much leeway as cooking do a cook. So I wanted to experiment again. This time I would follow the recipe exactly. I found a recipe from my favorite cooking site and I made these sesame seed cookies. They were putting on a trial at my friend's party last night and turned out to be a success!


Here is Allegro-tested recipe:

1 pound all-purpose flour (3 1/2 cups)
3/4 cup sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 pound vegetable shortening
1/4 pound butter
1 large egg
3/4 teaspoon vanilla
1/4 cup water
1/2 cup sesame seeds

In a large bowl or pan, mix together the flour, sugar and baking powder.

Microwave to melt butter. Add along with the shortening to the flour mix and work it in with your hands until well mixed.

Add the eggs and vanilla, and 1/4 cup of water, and work in well. The dough should hold together but not be sticky. If needed, work in a little more water, 1 teaspoon at a time.

Place the seeds in a shallow baking pan.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.

Pinch off a small amount of dough, about the size of a small fist, and cover the remaining dough with a damp dish towel. Roll the dough out into a long rope, about 1-inch in diameter. Cut the dough into 2-inch pieces.

Roll the dough in the seeds, pressing slightly to make them adhere. Place the seeded dough onto a large ungreased baking sheet. Repeat with the remaining dough.

Bake on the bottom rack of the oven until the bottoms are golden brown, about 10 minutes. Turn the cakes over and place the baking sheet on the top rack of the oven to bake for an additional 10 minutes. Remove from the oven and cool on cooling racks.

Serve at room temperature.

Yield: 40 cookies
Prep Time: 40 minutes
Cook Time: 20 minutes



Chinese Chive Pot Pie

这个呢，是本周早些时候第一次做的韭菜盒子。完全是cook风格，用完了所有的粉丝和鸡蛋。经四人数次品尝，评为优秀。“比四川小馆还好！”－－Pearl语。

CNN Offbeat Images 合肥的小猪运动会 及其他

Hogwash

Pigs swim in a pool during a piggy sports contest Wednesday in the Yaohai Park in Hefei, capital of Anhui province in eastern China.

今天看到这么可爱的照片，真为咱合肥骄傲。咱也有这么别出一格的创意。这些小猪的耳朵上都还带着钉，或者那是最新的计时器呢。

瑶海公园在哪里？

Follow the leader

Circus elephants from Africa saunter beside the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as they are led from their trains Thursday to the TD Banknorth Garden in Boston in preparation for the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

这张是我现在的“前院”。就是前天的事儿，我却没看见。可惜了。马戏团的大象从火车站走到剧场。蔚为壮观。

Photos and captions are from CNN.com, Offbeat Images.

Silkworm Journal II

I am a biologist. My colleagues are biologists. But what we study are tiny molecules (DNA and proteins), and at the best, cells in cell cultures. Thus the first day the silkworms made their debut to the lab, they became our instant stars. They go through so many developmental changes in their short life cycle. We just can't get enough of that. It makes me wonder, how on earth could all the genetic infomation directing all the complicated growth/transformations be packed in such a small nucleus. I just have to marvel at this magic life force.

Soon we learned another lesson from Nature. We had two polls for the silkworms. One was to guess in what order they start spinning. That didn't go well, because we started too late and before everybody could vote, they had already made their cocoons. The second one was to guess the gender of each worm. We had two weeks to decide since it took two weeks for the moths to come out. I'm very proud that I was the only one who got all four worms right. That is a chance of 1 in 16! I didn't really guess. I made an educated guess: since I measured their body weight almost daily, I noticed the growth difference between Worm #1 and the others. It was 1/4 smaller than the others. So I assumed it's male. And it turned to be correct. It could almost make Male #1 and its harem. The guy came out from its cocoon first, and had to wait 2 days for the next female (#4) to come out. Apparantly #1 could hardly wait to mate with #4 when the latter appeared and the mating lasted for a whole day. The second day, #1 was mating with #2, who had been waiting for a whole day for that coupling. That lasted for a whole day, too. Then it was a long, heart-wrenching wait for #3. And she just wouldn't come out. One afternoon we heard the noise she was making. But she didn't come out that day, or the day after. Then I had to go to the Cold Spring Harbor meeting. When I came back, I performed a C-section for #3. It was a sad sight. She was a mutant that wouldn't able to secret the enzyme that digests silk (这可能就是中文里所谓的“作茧自缚”了). She stayed in her cocoon and laid some unfertilized eggs. I tried to revive her, but she was too sick. Even the most ardant Male #1 couldn't coerce her into mating. I was thinking, even if they had produced any progenies, some of them would still have carried the mutant gene. What's the use to force that then? Nature is somehow cruel. This is called the fittest to survive.

So here I write a journal to commemorate my summer pets. I have safely stored their eggs at 4 degrees Celsius, all ready for another generation next Spring. Until then, we can look at some pictures of them:


The Start of a Cocoon
有句词叫“春蚕到死丝方尽”，殊不知它们还有更多更重要的事情要做呢。


这个可以叫“蛾眉”吧，很像古代仕女的眉。真的很美。