5 Reasons Micheal Faraday Is as Cool as Tesla

My article on mental_floss was published this morning!

Choc-Pum-Muffs

Today, it is fall. It's technically been fall for quite a while, but today I wore tights. And a sweater.

I thought there was no more appropriate way to celebrate Texas finally changing seasons than to bake something pumpkin-y. And what's better than pumpkin plus chocolate?

In muffin form

Nothing. That's what.

And so I present...

Chocolate Pumpkin Muffins (affectionately referred to as choc-pum-muffs)

1 15 oz. can pumpkin
1 box Devil's food cake mix

Yeah, that's right, two ingredients.
(Also, I used a 30 oz. can of pumpkin and two boxes of cake mix because I was trying to feed my whole floor.)

Preheat oven to 350 F.

Mix pumpkin and cake mix. This will take a while. You can add water if necessary. Scoop batter into greased muffin tin. It's fine to pretty much fill the pan, as the muffins don't really expand that much. Bake for 17-20 minutes, until a fork inserted into the center comes out clean.

They're so delicious and so soft...sweet on the tip of my tongue. (Sorry, I like that song.) But they actually are very moist and dense and yummy. And so cheap! And easy!  :D

Did you know? Rice turned 100 this year!

Hah. Kidding. Everybody knows that Rice is turning 100 this year. BECAUSE THEY WON'T SHUT UP ABOUT IT.

But, it was actually pretty cool. So I can't complain. I mean we got two days that we already get every year off, so they were really generous.

My dad came to visit (hi, Dad!) so that was good. And it's thanks to him that I have any pictures at all for this post... Oops. Tee-hee. Need to get cracking with the camera...

We heard from some very...distinguished (boring) speakers and ate lots of free food and saw what might possibly be the best car ever.

Apparently Willy is actually buried here. Kind of odd.

The fish (and lobsters) dance along as the car plays music. 

There was also this awesome light show called the Spectacle (though I kind of suspected it would involve naked people, given that it was the 13th...)

Friday night was Esperanza (the Homecoming dance...I think) and it was the best. Seriously. There were free food trucks and (dry) mix drinks that were absolutely fantastic... They had the best lemonade, and I consider myself a lemonade aficionado. And the DJ is kind of famous.

(Shamelessly stolen from Facebook, once again.)

SO I guess happy birthday Rice.

...and also cupcakes

Nutella cupcakes, that is.

I made this recipe this summer (Emily knows) and they were soooo goooooood. Of course, I had to try them again. Cause... Centennial.

Cupcake batter! Has both Nutella and cocoa powder for delicious chocolatey amazingness.

I always like to bake them just a little bit short. Just so that the fork (or toothpick) comes out with a few crumbs. They stay very dense that way.

Nutella buttercream frosting. Basically Nutella + sugar.

This is definitely my favorite cupcake recipe (not that I've made all that many...) but they are so sweet, your teeth might literally hurt after eating one.

So I got the recipe from Leanne bakes (ugh hers are so pretty!) and I pretty much followed it to the letter, except for where noted.


Nutella Cupcakes

1 cup flour
1 tsp. baking powder
¼ tsp. salt
½ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
½ cup butter, room temperature (I usually just pull it straight out of the fridge and microwave for 30 seconds, shhh)
1 cup sugar
½ cup Nutella
2 eggs
½ cup whole milk
2 tsp. vanilla

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Beat the butter with an electric mixer until it is soft, then add sugar. Add Nutella and mix until smooth.  Add the eggs, one at a time beating until they are well combined. Combine vanilla and milk. Add dry ingredients alternately with the milk, beginning and ending with dry.  Beat just to combine. Add vanilla and milk, mix until combined. Add dry ingredients all at one, mix until combined. (This is the lazy/I-only-have-one-bowl way to do things.) Divide batter among the muffin tins, filling each no more and 2/3--I used the 1/3 cup measuring cup to dole it out. Bake 20-22 minutes, until a toothpick/fork inserted in the center comes out clean. Allow to cool completely before frosting--sticking them in the fridge/freezer speeds that up pretty well. Makes 14-18 cupcakes.

Nutella Buttercream Frosting


1/2 cup butter, room temperature
1/2 cup Nutella
3 cups icing sugar
1 - 2 tbsp cream (if needed)

In the bowl of a large mixer, whip butter and Nutella until creamy. Gradually add in icing sugar until desired consistency is reached. Add cream if needed. (Or you could just throw the first three ingredients into the bowl simultaneously and mix away... That is a bit more difficult.)

I found that I did need the extra cream (though I just used whole milk) and I also had tons of icing leftover after icing all of the cupcakes liberally. There's a whole Nutella jar of frosting in my fridge right now...darn.

Enjoy!

How Tess Harper Helped Me Get Into College

Alternatively, "I Have to Post Something for mental_floss to Read"

As a few all of my readership family may be aware, in high school I was in a play called "The Rivers and Ravines" by Heather McDonald. It was one of my favorite plays (of the 8 or so I did throughout high school), and I really connected with my character, so much so that I ended up writing one of my college admissions essays about her.

Re-reading this, I can tell this was written during my over-dramatic, angst-y years, but the basic message still stands: your friends are there to help.

The Rivers and Ravines 

It takes the greatest courage
To go on Acting to the end
As do the rivers and ravines.

--Boris Pasternak (epigraph from The Rivers and Ravines, by Heather McDonald)

From the moment I met Tess Harper, I understood her. I was a sophomore in high school, far in age from her, but we had a connection. She had gone through some difficult times, and I sympathized. A little after I met her, Tess committed suicide.

It was a frosty December day when I met Tess. I began my school day the same way I always did, heading to my theater teacher's room for tutorials. When I arrived that morning, Mrs. Tatsch called me to her desk and handed me a thick stapled script. “I'm considering this for One-Act.” Excitedly, I began to read The Rivers and Ravines that day. The story was about a small Colorado town in the 1980s that was almost destroyed by the farm crisis. The play was largely a political statement that blamed the government for the fact that so many people lost their farms.

Though I understood that part of the play’s message, what really struck me was one character: Tess Harper. Tess was a young farm wife, only 24, when she and her husband signed the papers that eventually would lead to the foreclosure. Soon after, she lost her only child, which devastated her. For Tess, family was everything. She wanted nothing more than to care for them. When she lost the land that had been handed down to her by her father, Tess was driven to suicide because of her feelings of guilt and failure.

As always, I picked a character, and for me, the obvious choice was Tess. Though her life and struggles were unfamiliar to me, I knew that I could portray her well, because I understood her devotion to her family. That year, for several reasons, we were unable to compete with The Rivers and Ravines in One-Act Play competition, and we performed another work instead.

My junior year, in later November, the Rivers script was pulled out once again. I hadn't thought about Tess in almost a year, but I still knew that she was the character I wanted. I was cast as Tess Harper a few weeks later, and I began working on my part.

When we got past the blocking and the line-learning, it was harder to be Tess than I had thought it would be. I felt a natural affinity for Tess, but I still had to work on showing her feelings realistically. It always took a huge amount of effort and concentration, until our performance at the Wimberly One-Act Play Festival. For the first time, it was easy to be Tess. I actually felt what she did. When Tess was burning the mementos of her daughter, I had to hold back actual tears so as not to ruin my heavy stage makeup. When Tess was speaking to no one about the pain of losing everything, I couldn't stop my voice from shaking.

When it came time for the suicide, I was breathing hard, hyperventilating almost. I could see nothing before me but the shiny interior of the barrel reflecting the red and blue colors of the flame light. My toes felt squished against the paper towels I had stuffed into the toes of my too-large mud boots. “I think maybe we are more alive when people say we are dead than we are now,” I said, a sob choking my voice. Taking in a shaky breath, I lifted my right foot from the safe, stable surface of the unit set and braced it against the lip of the metal barrel. Then, using a technique I had practiced dozens of times in rehearsal, I pulled up my other foot and balanced on the edges of the barrel. It was still shaking beneath my feet when I delivered my last, anguished line, “I keep having these dreams.”

Every light in the auditorium blacked out. I could see nothing before me. After counting two seconds in my head –one thousand one, one thousand two—I reached out in front of me and began feeling for the shoulders of my cast mate. That was our big secret to my silent disappearance during the ten-second blackout: a piggyback ride. My fingers found the flannel covered shoulders, and I let myself fall forward onto his back. A few quick strides and we were in the wings. I slid off my cast mate’s back and made my way to the down right wing so I could watch the show. My character (being dead and all) wasn’t in the show again until the very last scene, and then only by supernatural forces.

I leaned against the wall and watched as my friends, both in reality and in the show, held my funeral. It was a gift that neither Tess Harper nor her real-life inspirations ever received. I had attended funerals before, of course, but it was a very different experience to watch the funeral of the person you were two minutes before. I could see how much my actions had hurt everyone and that I had given up, thinking I had no options, when sitting before me were a dozen people who would have given everything to lift me out of the hole into which I had dug myself. I was wrong. Not 10 seconds into the funeral, I regretted it.

That evening, I thought about myself and about Tess. Though I had never lost a home or considered suicide, I knew I was guilty of isolating myself, just like Tess. Both of us were surrounded by people willing to help, and both of us, at some point, shut down and refused that help without even realizing we were doing so.

It wasn't until I felt what Tess felt—the crushing weight of losing everything—that I understood how truly important my friends and family were. Tess struggled alone for years, so when people tried to talk to her later on, she never confided in them because she just wasn't used to opening up to others. I, too, generally fought my way through problems on my own, never asking for help or reaching out.

Because of Tess, I realized problems can pile up quickly, and that one hardly ever makes the right decisions under stress and alone. Tess, through her terrible mistake, revealed to me how valuable my friends and family are. Tess's friends and family could have saved her, and I now know to let mine help me, even save me when I need it.

If I Were Pocahontas: Trying to Save John Smith

My creative prowess does not only extend to crafts, crayon melts, and bad photoshop. No, I'm also pro at drawing sharpie comics on notebook paper (such a sophisticated medium, yeah?). Observe:

The first in a far-too-long comic series about how I (and my lack of grace) would change the plot of Pocahontas. Click to embiggen.

mental_floss can make all of my dreams come true

(In Spanish, titles are often not capitalized. And mental_floss is stylized. So no, there are not capitalization errors in that title.)

But seriously. mental_floss has been my favorite website since high school. Just a few reasons that mental_floss is flipping awesome:

1. The articles (of course)
2. Morning Cup of Links
3. lots of library love <3
4. pretty sweet magazine
5. They introduced me to sporcle!
6. Hank Green reads mental_floss magazine.

So anyway... mental_floss is having College Weekend! Which basically means that, if I submit excellent article proposals, I will (a) get to write them and have them published on mental_floss.com (b) get $25 and (c) get a free mental_floss t-shirt! It's a contest designed for me. 

Меня зовут Сера!