The day started off with a field trip to Aztalan State Park up by Jefferson, WI for my anthropology class.  Despite the last couple of days being very moderate, the temperature plummeted to the low twenties and a strong wind developed.  Our tour of the park didn't last very long and was bitterly cold.  I might have been okay, but I had forgotten my scarf at home.
    This evening was an other  of Altered Realitie's DDR parties. Gaming was underway by 7:00pm and we played until around 2:00am. Again,the bunk/loft was used for a second gaming area.  Adric brought his Xbox 360, were I proceeded to bring on motion sickness by watching them play (curse you first person shooters!).

   This is my experimental loaf of Italian bread I completed this afternoon.  I've read through a good deal of the website The Fresh Loaf and tried a couple new things.  First was the technique of making a preferment.  I mixed up some yeast, flower and water and let it ferment over night.  When I got up, I added the rest of the ingredients-- more water, flower and yeast.  I also threw in some olive oil and an egg.  The oil is suppose to enrich the flavor as well as soften and help preserve the bread.  The egg I just tossed in 'cuz I like egg and figured a little protein couldn't hurt.  I didn't use much yeast-- 1 teaspoon for the 3 additional cups of flower.  The site recommended having a rather wet dough, so I make it pretty wet.  That was imposable to kneed, so I ended up adding more flower to dry it out.  I allowed the dough to rise twice, each time giving it an hour.  I tried to shape the thing, but it was very sticky and unruly.  So I just let it be a blob :) 
   For baking, I first prepared a cooking sheet with some grease (this dough was extremely stick-- normally I don't grease Teflon cooking sheets) and sprinkled a tablespoon of cornmeal even across the top.  Then, I mixed up two egg yokes, cornmeal and some water and basted the top of the dough with it.  I preheated the oven to 550°F-- as high as the oven would go, and tossed in a pan with a big chuck of stone in it.  When I put the dough into the oven, I pored several cups of boiling water into the pan, over the hot stone.  The idea of the stone was to hold heat and help vaporise the water.  The idea was to create a lot of steam for the initial few minutes the bread was in the oven.  I'm not sure the stone helped much, possibly because it had an irregular shape and didn't hit a lot of the water.  Next time I might find a flat stone.  Anyway, after 5 minutes I dropped the oven temp down to 350°F.  I basted the top again after 10 minutes and cooked it for a total of 30 minutes-- 5 at 550°F and 25 at 350°F.
   The results: a fairly tasty bread.  Thin, fairly soft crust with good texture.  The inside was soft and chewy.  I made up a plate of pasty and gorged myself.  And it was good :) 

   I got back my anthropology paper and did very well on the draft, receiving all 30 points.  I was a bit surprised, since I thought the paper was pretty awful.  Reading over it again, I'm sticking by my original assignment-- it needs a lot of cleanup.  However, it clearly covered enough of the topic, and that makes me very happy.
   In math, on the other hand, did quite bad on the homework.  Turns out I missed an entire section.  That doesn't surprise me, since I got confused about assignments and couldn't figure out how to work school's website.  The website is suppose to have the homework for my classes listed.  After figuring out what I messed up trying to find the location homework is listed, I understand why I didn't find it. Apparently, you have to be logged in.  Thus, my google searching turned up nothing.  That's the 4th different system with a username and password the school has.  The others are e-mail, class scheduling/finance and wireless network access.  By the time I have it figured out, I should be done with my degree ;)
   Pictured is Roni

    So I did this several days ago, but forgot to mention it. I added some new galleries to the photos page: Storms, Roads, Autumn, Water, Jr, U-Rock kids and Random 06. All of these just contain pictures I've already posted by date, but were not sorted by category.
   A lightning strike fetched in the Storms gallery.

   An other IE/Firefox not matching up issue... On my post on the 22nd, I wrote out a radical expression.  In Firefox, the radical sign, followed by an overline looked perfect, and I thought nothing more of it.  Today, I was checking out the page in IE, and the radical expression lines didn't align.  I looked around the web for information on making radical expressions and tried several before reaching the conclusion there wasn't anything I could do that would make IE look correct
   Somewhere west of Baltimore

   After Thanksgiving dinner at Caryn's.  I made pumpkin pie and bread.  Life was good turkey gluttony :)

   A car along Elmwood Ave in Beloit