I don’t often have celebrity dreams, but those I have are usually limited to a handful of people. More than once, I’ve spent the night hanging out with the girls from Sex in the City. Another recurring nighttime visitor is (oddly enough) Ozzy Osbourne. I’m not sure why Ozzy pops by so often. I’ve never really been a fan of his music and I’ve only seen a handful of The Osbournes episodes, but he still shows up (sometimes with family) more often than any other celebrity.

Ozzy was back last night.

The dream started out with me, my sister, and I at some sort of resort/amusement park. We were in a hotel room and deciding on the evening’s entertainment, and we opted to go to a concert performance by Ozzy. Instead of going to the show, though, we went to Ozzy’s hotel room/dressing room and hung out with him for a while. When it was time for the show, he walked with us to the theater but announced he wasn’t going to be performing. Instead, we were going to watch a performance by Alice Cooper and Ozzy was going to sit in the audience with us.

We all arrived at this tiny little theater with the smallest stage I’d ever seen. After taking our seats (sans Ozzy, who’d disappeared), we learned that there had been yet another change in the entertainment. Instead of concerts by Ozzy or Alice, we sat down and watched a play starring none other than Pamie. I don’t remember too much of the play, but I think it was set in depression-era Oklahoma, complete with a dry, dusty, sun-bleached set.

I think Pamie’s shown up in my dreams before, but this was the first time she had a double starring role.

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That may not be a big deal to a lot of you, but it is to Central Texans, especially snow of this quality. Large clumpy flakes that crunch under your shoes and pack nicely into snowballs. What we usually get is sleet that just turns into a nice glaze over everything and renders most natives incapable of safely driving a motor vehicle.

Zoë even had a great time, running all over the place, snuffling through the snow, and catching snowballs.

Alas, I doubt it will last long. I’m glad that we got to enjoy it before it turns into slush and melts away.

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Neil Gaiman has a gift for writing as this blog entry of his well illustrates.

I know his site has been around a while but I still think it’s so cool that he publishes incredible books and comics, and on top of that, he share his talents in a web log.

This may help to explain why celebrity infatuations of mine have ranged from Brad Pitt to John Goodman.

At Min Jung’s suggestion, I took Match.com’s Physical Attraction Test. I’m not really surprised by my results, highlights of which I’ve copied below.

What Is Your Approach to Judging Which Men Are Handsome or Very Attractive?

Unique Tastes In Men: You are open to seeing a variety of men as handsome. Sure, men with “movie star” good looks catch your eye, but you are often equally wowed by more normal “cute” guys. You’re not one to judge people based on their looks. In fact, you’re genuinely drawn to men that others might dismiss. Maybe it’s because you don’t buy into society’s checklist for “mainstream” attractiveness. Instead, you notice unique features like a strong nose, beautiful eyes, or a cute butt, that make some men special in your eyes. For you, attraction is about the total package.

How You Compare?

Open: You have a more open and accepting view of what makes a man handsome than a lot of other women your age. In the test, you didn’t pick the most “popular” men, but instead seemed to focus on your own personal tastes. This doesn’t necessarily mean that looks are less important to you than to other women. You simply have a unique set of criteria and keep your eyes open for special qualities that make a man, who may seem ordinary to most, extraordinary to you. See the pie chart below to see how many women fall into picky or open categories.

Your Type

Your physical “type” refers to men you find appealing and whom you expect would find you attractive as well. In the test, you picked about the same number of men as attractive as most women who take the test. However, whom you chose was unique.

The choices you made in the test suggest you have strong, automatic preferences for certain types of men. You made your choices quickly suggesting you have clear physical instincts. A variety of features stood out as important to you. This report explores these features in detail. To start, look at the list of features below that were most common among the men you liked. These “turn ons” were noted in different combinations across many of your choices.

Regardless of how many attractive and beautiful men are out there and random crushes I may get on other men, Dale will always have my heart. When I look at him, I genuinely can’t find one feature of his that I don’t absolutely love.

Update: I took the quiz again, as a woman seeking a woman. Apparently, I’m much pickier about females and am attracted to “the most beautiful of the beautiful.” Well, yeah, but I also had plenty of picks that weren’t what I’d consider to be mainstream beauties!

…seems to be the first big trend of the year.

Either in tribute to, or hoping to cash in on the celebrity mammary du jour, people have been making Janet boob cupcakes (nice job, but I still think my boobie birthday cakes look better) and duplicating her scandalous nipplewear. I’m particularly amused by the fact that BodyPunks is so desperate to ride the Janet nipple wave that their product photo isn’t even of the final item, but of the green that will be used to make the jewelry mold.

High speed photography, a pellet gun, and balloons combine to create some really cool images. I think the neatest photo is the water balloon that popped so fast, it left a balloon-shaped glob of water hovering in the air.

Sunday’s Indian food experiment may not have gone as well as we had hoped, but I was much more confident about Monday night’s dinner. I was making wontons and spicy pork bulgogi, both of which I’ve made before. I started on the pork early so it would have time to marinade, then I made up the wonton filling. Dale sat down and assembled the wontons for me while I showered. After the wontons and pork were prepped, they were placed in the fridge until it was time to start cooking.

I had planned to start frying the wontons at 7 pm so that I could move on to the pork at 7:30, but I got distracted and didn’t start cooking until about 7:30. I ended up frying the wontons while Dale had to cook the pork. The guys (Kevin, Aaron, and Wil) munched on wontons while we finished cooking.

Once we were done and the table was set, I just had to take a picture to send to my mom. (She’s always bugging me about cooking at home more, so she’ll be pleased I used her recipes.)

Dinner was a hit. We’d made maybe 60 wontons, almost 3 pounds of bulgogi, and 6 cups of rice. By the end of the meal, there was about 6 wontons left, 2 cups of rice, and all the pork was gone.

See Mom, I can cook!

(More photos, including the guys, are in my album.)

One of the gifts I gave Dale for his birthday was an (eastern) Indian cookbook. He LOVES Indian food and enjoys cooking, so I thought he might appreciate it. He did. And last weekend, he had us sit down together and use little Post-it notes to mark all the recipes we want to try. After that, we picked a couple of items to make the next day, wrote up a grocery list, and headed to an Indian market. Then we headed to a Korean market, because there was a meal I wanted to prepare as well. We rounded out the grocery shopping at H.E.B.

The Indian food we’d picked for our first attempt were vegetable samosas and Chicken Tikka. The chicken is supposed to marinade overnight, so on Saturday, Dale mixed up the marinade and prepped the chicken.

Sunday evening, I started on the samosa dough while Dale made the filling. I’m not sure what I was doing wrong, but I had a horrible time with the dough. It was only water, flour, margarine and salt, but it was very hard to knead and mix. I finally had to break it into chunks, work the small chunks to mix it thoroughly, then smash all the small chunks back into one mass. Then, I had to divide the dough into a dozens parts and roll out each one to a 7 inch circle. That sounds so much easier than it was. Maybe there wasn’t enough water, but the dough was very elastic and kept shrinking back. I think the best I could manage was 5 or 6 inch circles.

Dale had a better time with the filling, which smelled yummy despite the fact that it contained asafetida powder, which is some of the foulest stuff we’ve ever smelled. Really, it smells like rotting food. Like the tupperware container that you discover in the back of the fridge.

Anyway, once I was done with the dough, we fixed up the samosas and Dale threw the pan with the chicken skewers into the broiler part of the oven. (We’ve never used the broiler before, so it took a little bit of searching to discover that it was the drawer beneath the oven door.) I started deep frying the samosas, until Dale sent me away because I was bitching about how much my shoulders and arms hurt after working over the dough.

A little while later Dale came upstairs with a batch of golden-brown samosas and some pale soggy looking chicken. The chicken was cooked, but it didn’t have the nice roasted look it should have. Chicken Tikka’s actually kind of dry, but the yoghurt marinade was still drippy. Dale was clearly disappointed, so I took the chicken back downstairs. I took another look at the broiler, then poked around in the cupboards until I found the broiler pan, then I realized what we had done wrong. Moving the chicken to the broiler pan, I put it back in the broiler, at the top rack, and set the timer for 3 minutes.

When the timer went off, I checked, and the chicken was looking a lot better. I pulled out the pan, turned the pieces as best I could (since they’d been removed from their skewers already), and stuck the pan back in the broiler. The next time the timer went off, I opted to give it another minute and a half, and that turned out to be about 30 seconds too long. I burned the damn chicken.

But, it looked more like it was supposed to, and when we tried it, the flavor was right, so the recipe was good. It was just our broiler knowledge skills that were lacking.

The samosas were a different story. The dough was much too thick, so instead of being nice and crispy, it was kind of hard. But once you got past the dough, the filling was tasty. Dale and I are really hoping the Indian market carries pre-made samosa dough. If it doesn’t we’re going to try making them with wonton or eggroll wrappers so I don’t have to screw up make the dough again.

Overall, the meal was disappointing and encouraging. We know what we did wrong, so the next time should be a lot better.

Molecular Expressions is a very interesting site filled with stunning microscopic images of things ranging from AIDS theraputics to beer and wine. Two of my favorite images are Amoxycillin and Soap Bubble #4.

All of the Beers are wonderful too, and the Amstel even looks like a watercolor painting.