Pumpkin Buns 南瓜饼

I have wanted to make these pumpkin buns for at least a month now because they look so happy and so fit for autumn. Finally I made them for my friend's small gathering last Saturday. It took me more than two hours in total to make these 8 buns, and that was really unexpectedly long. However, I was really glad that they were well received by the hosts and guests. My little friend, Emma, probably gave me the most unique approval, though at 14-months of age, her vocabulary is only limited to "要" and "不要". She first started by licking the outside of the bun; then she licked the red bean paste inside and ate that. In the end, she was taking big bites of the sticky flour skin and the filling altogether. She said no words, but I knew she really liked it.

Here is the recipe in case you want to try it in your kitchen (note: the amounts are only my guesses):

pumpkin: 1/2 pound
sticky rice flour: 1 pound
sugar: ½ cup
red bean paste: 1/2 pound

Microwave or steam the pumpkin until it's well done. I think steaming might be better. I had to microwave it forever.

Remove the skin. Chop/blend (or use whatever method you like) to mash the cooked pumpkin. Make sure not to add water to it (it's wet enough!).

Add 1/2 cup of sugar (add more it you have a sweet tooth), and 2 cups or more sticky rice flour. Mix well with the mashed pumpkin. Keep adding flour until the dough is no longer sticky to your hands. Divide the dough into 2, 4, 8, or 16 (or more) smaller pieces. Make a small circular wrap with a piece of dough, and wrap some red bean paste inside to make a bun. Use a knife to make the shallow incisions so that the bun resembles a pumpkin. Steam for 5 to 8 minutes.

Devour.

Two Evenings with the Orchestra (Part II, Julia Fischer)

Julia Fischer after the last note

Thanking the conductor

Greeting Associate Concertmaster Tamara Smirnova

Conductor Pavvo Berglund at the end of the concert

The second evening I went to the Symphony was on October 25th. The program was the last of the four concerts celebrating the 100th anniversary of the premiere of Sibelius' Violin Concerto. The conductor, Pavvo Berglund, was Sibelius' fellow countryman. The Finnish conductor, one of the most distinguished musicians, has won his reputation on the podiums of the world's greatest orchestras. Not until he appeared on the stage did I know that the old gentleman had to walk with a cane. He conducted the whole concert (about 2 hours) from a chair placed on the podium. Even though he was not free to walk, his music ideas, expressed through his baton with the orchestra, were brilliant and upbeat. His conducting was anything but an old and fragile man.

Julia Fischer, the 22-year-old German violinist, made her BSO debut with the Sibelius Concerto. Her 1750 Guadagnini violin in her hand, she walked onto the stage in a red dress, very beautiful and elegant. Before I went to the concert, I checked out Julia's website. I saw that concert-goers in Boston had already signed her guest book and she had really impressed her audience. Thus seeing her bowing gracefully on stage to the audience, I had already started loving her. Music ensued soon after. From her violin came the melancholy opening, quiet, sweet, and nostalgic, like the northern wind sweeping through a wintry landscape. The violin concerto is in B minor. So it was no surprise that it was a little sad and moody at times. But it eventually went through a lot of developments and in the end of the third movement, it gave the audience a satisfying upbeat ending. I had not paid much attention to this concerto before because I was too absorbed with the big four violin concerti (Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn, and Tchaikovsky). But since this concert, this has become my new favorite.

My observation: Concertmaster Malcolm Lowe did not participate in the violin concerto, though he showed up for the Shostakovich Symphony and played some prominent solo themes. My understanding: 一山不容二虎。

I totally love Shostakovich's 8th Symphony! From all that I could find in the program I had the impression that this was a very sad and dark piece and so it was a big surprise that it was relatively very much upbeat. Maybe it did not end in the ultimate triumphant note, but in my opinion, the darkest symphony would be Tchaikovsky's 6th. Shostakovich's 8th is a long symphony, running for more than 1 hour. I especially liked the third movement. It was very rhythmic and witty and I thought that it was some kind of dance. Only afterwards did I learn from the program that it was a death march. Oh well. Who says I have to follow the program? I have my own rights to imagine.

Here you can listen to excerpts:

Sibelius Violin Concerto - BSO, Leinsdorf, Perlman
It shows the technique, not necessarily the beauty of the concerto.

Shostakovich's 8th Symphony - BSO, Previn

全民都博客

这世界变化是快。忽如一夜东风来，漫天遍地的到处都是博客。我这回时髦可是赶大发了。我可不是什么写手，从来作文是我的弱项。这个博客呢，只是想用来分享我近期的照片和胡思乱想什么的，毕竟我那个摄影的网页更新起来比较麻烦。只可惜我写得差，读者都很少的。

大概一个多月前，看到了张海迪的博客，我真得很兴奋。海迪姐姐是我小时候的榜样。我们小学生中学生都学习她身残志坚，刻苦学习的精神。这么多年以后又在网上遇见她，读她写的充满感情的文字，看她每天更新，真是一种很奇妙的感觉。

然后就发现新浪在实验他们的博客了。他们邀请了一系列的名人 建博客，真是个不错的商业构想。我也很无聊地跑去看，居然有一些炙手可热的明星什么的。看一下可不得了了，这下知道哪个明星有文化，哪个明星没水平了。徐 静蕾不错。李冰冰还行。范冰冰就没什么意思了，只知道每天贴自己的大头照，好像怕有人不知道她漂亮似的。哎，我喜欢的她的歌声的张靓颖怎么也那么没水平呢，真让我失望。

大家都写博客，所以我都怂恿爸爸也弄一个了。爸爸爱写文章，但是还不知道网络的好处。要是哪天爸爸也博客了，那就全民都博客了。

The Near-Demise of My MP3-Player

Last year before I embarked on a two-week trip back home, I searched for a portable mass storage device for backing up my digital pictures in lieu of a laptop PC. I landed on an Archos Gmini220 based on its good reviews at dpreview.com. At 170 grams and 20 GB, it is a small yet powerful device with a multitude of functions: it plays mp3, wma music; it records voice; it reads data from a CF card and downloads on to its hard drive; it displays JPG images (in gray scale). It was just what I wanted for a long trip. I used the Gmini220 to store digital picture on at least two trips and I was very happy with it. Lately the main use of the Gmini has been an mp3 player. I have about 14 GB of music on the device to choose from according to my taste and mood of the day. I find the large storage very necessary.

Then last Friday I listened till the player stopped. I thought that the battery died. I couldn't wake up the screen. That was normal. But something was strange: the light on the power button was still on. A bit odd. I didn't think much. I pressed on the power button to shut it off. I recharged it. I wanted to listen to the Sibelius Violin Concerto again because I want to write about it in my Part II of Two Evenings with the Orchestra. I pressed the power button. The screen lit up. Then it froze and in the mean time the device made several clicking noise. Very abnormal. After a long wait, the device said, "read access error: can's read from hard disk. Power off." OMG! If you can't read the hard disk, you can't do anything!

Panicking, I googled online for that error. There is not much information about it. Basically many things can cause read access error. It could be the firmware, or electrostatic, or simply a defective hard drive. The last thing is the one thing I worry about these hard drive-based mp3 players: it is not solid-state. It breaks when it's dropped. I dropped mine once, about 10 months ago. That can't be the reason why it's not working now. I updated the firmware, about 6 months ago. I recently installed Chinese font, two weeks ago. I had the player in my pocket while playing it this afternoon. No running or jumping. Nothing seemed to explain the read error. And of course, my player was out of warranty. I tried all the tricks people talked about: press on power button for 10 seconds to reset the player; plug in and unplug from a USB. Nothing worked. I checked its CF card reader function. That still worked. So it can't be the firmware. I was starting to get really frustrated. I was ready to open it up and had already started looking for a replacement 1.8" hard drive, which turned out to be very rare.

I suddenly realized how much I depended on this player. True, these ear buds in lab somehow make us stay in our own isolated realm (we probably have one player per person), but music makes tedious repetitive lab work less boring. Besides, now no one can complain about other people's choice of music. I loved my player. I still haven't used much of its recorder function yet.

Turning to our resident computer expert Dave for help, I plugged my player into our newest, most powerful PC. The PC couldn't recognize the new device because the player itself couldn't read. Dave was convinced that the hard disk wasn't spinning after carefully listening to it. Bad sign. He asked me to plug it into another USB that had been tested working. I turned off the player, and turned it on again. Miracle happened just like that: my mp3 player came back to life after two whole days' worth of revival attempts. I believe that it must be the powerful magnetic field of the new PC that released the electrostatic in my player. No matter for whatever reason my player came back to life, I am just happy that it did. It has been working just fine since. But I am not sure it will be my sole backup device on my next photo trip to, let's say, Africa.

A Life Well-lived

Roodi
April 15, 1998 - November 2, 2005

Roodi left us last Wednesday. It happened all so quickly. Now I still can't imagine that he will never come to work anymore. We are all very saddened by the loss of a very special member of the lab.



Roodi was our advisor's Vizsla (Hungarian hunting dog). Ever since he was a little puppy, he started coming to work daily. He was well trained. He knew he should never come inside the lab, so he stayed in the office on the carpet, most of the time. He brought us so much love and affection, and received so much attention from us in return. He had a certain routine: he would come to work early in the morning, and demand people to play with him for about 5 minutes. Then he would go to sleep in his kennel. He would wake up for his noon walk, waiting impatiently for Steve to come take him. He would basically take himself on the walk route (he needed help getting out of the building, though), running all the time only to stop at certain trees to jump at the squirrels, and to point at the corner of Walker Memorial to some imaginary animals. Coming back from his walk, he would play a rope toy called "Kung" for a long time, shaking the rubbery Kung so violently by the rope that it clashed with his skull while he ran around the office constantly avoiding all the furniture. He was just full of life. Though there were signs that he was getting old, such as the appearance of white hair on his chin, cauliflower-like skin tags popping out here and there, and worse, cysts on his chest and belly (which the vets said were benign). But he was only seven and a half, which was about 52-years old for a person. No one had expected him to go so soon.

Roodi was smart. He saw people putting on their jackets he would think that they would take him out for a walk. We tried not to put on our jackets in front of him. He understood several words such as "go out", "walk", "treats", "Kong", "ball". We would not say "go out" loud in the lab. Instead we say "go O-U". We couldn't even say "T", because he would associate that with "out". If you asked him "do you want...?" he would tilt his head sideways and raise his eyebrows as if expecting something. Sometimes he whimpered and whined to get attention. He hated fire drills. The fire alarm must hurt his ears. He would cry so sadly and loudly and I believe everybody in the building would hear his cry. His cry alone would get everyone out safely.

Though he was a hunting dog and he had the instinct to point and chase animals, Roodi was very timid. He was afraid of almost any new things to him, from a small magnet lion to a large inflated rhino. He was even afraid of ice buckets. Sometimes he would overcome his fear and become fond of certain things, or even become overly possessive, like what happened to the magnet lion or the mouse cover in the shape of a mouse. But sometimes he would run away as fast as he could to take refuge in his safe haven - his own kennel. That usually cracked us up.






Roodi loved people. Though he would bark at strangers and sometimes he was a racist (he especially liked to bark at young Asian females), he would get to know them very fast. If people got down to his level, he would not hesitate to bestow on them his kisses. He rolled over for certain people (he was very selective on this) and asked them to rub his belly. I heard that this was the ultimate show of submissiveness of dogs. That did not necessarily mean that Roodi was submissive. Most of the times he was, but he changed a lot since Strider arrived a year and a half ago. Strider is the younger Vizsla. Roodi was very dominant to Strider. Roodi bond to his caregiver very quickly. I took care of Roodi and his older sister for about a week around one Christmas. I left them for two hours on Christmas day. I came back home he was not in the living room where he used to be. He dashed into the living room hearing me and I was wondering where he was while I was away. I saw that my bed looked a little messy though I made my bed that morning. I could faintly make out the outline of a dog and four paw prints. I touched the bedding and it was still warm! It turned out that Roodi slept in my bed because he couldn't find me in the house but wanted to get closer to me. My bed, which had my scent, was the closest thing he could find! What a sweet dog!


To me, Roodi was a very special dog. He was my most loyal photography subject. I went through all the Roodi pictures I have taken over the years in the last couple of days. I was surprised that it came to a total of 2.5G JPG images. He had certainly helped me improving my skills.

It was so shocking when Dave told me that Steve postponed his trip because Roodi was very sick last Wednesday morning. The whole lab was very disheartened. I knew Roodi was in surgery and they found cancer on his liver and spleen. I thought that they would just remove the tumors and Roodi would recover at Angell's and come back to work later. But he didn't make it.

At least Roodi didn't suffer long. Just Tuesday he was still running around the campus like any other day. He even successfully begged Wendy and I into giving him a bonus walk around 1:30pm that afternoon. Like any other walk I took him on, he got so many compliments from people for his boundless energy and superb ball-catching ability. It was such a nice day: temperature in the 70s, only two days after two inches of snow. Roodi had the sense for a good day. I was so glad that I let him win, let him go on his usual walk instead of playing ball right downstairs. I will always remember him as an energetic dog that loved people's attention and released our stress and tension.

Rest in peace, Roodi. I will miss you a lot.