Snack Attack

I am five months into a new job, and while the work has been rewarding, it has also kept me from updating my blog on a regular basis.  I can sacrifice a few precious hours of sleep for the sake (or sake, in this case) of writing one small, bite-sized post!

To my loyal readers who still check in from time to time, I am still around.  I have been busy working, but when I’m not working, I’m eating and taking pictures like the one below.  In three days I will be going on a much-needed vacation to New Mexico, where I will be visiting a magical place called Pie Town.  You’ll never guess what they serve there.  I’m sure I’ll be sampling some interesting cuisine on my trip, such as the green chile cheeseburger, which apparently is a tourist attraction.

Since it is after midnight and I can’t think of a witty segue, I leave you with sushi.  Why sushi?  Because I have too many pictures of cupcakes and I need to stop typecasting this blog.  Snack well, my readers.  I look forward to sharing my adventures with you again soon.

Gettin’ My Mac[ro] On

Today is Single Awareness Day, otherwise known as Valentine’s Day.  I haven’t cared about Valentine’s Day since elementary school, when your popularity was judged based on how many cards you got.  It was an emotional day filled with panic, excitement and too much chocolate as you taped your nicely decorated brown paper bag to the side of your desk, and waited.  Would someone be your Valentine?

There were rules one had to follow about the giving and receiving of cards.  I understood that you had to give a card to everyone in the class, otherwise it wouldn’t be fair and anarchy would break out in the school.  If you received a card from the Boy/Girl Of Your Dreams, you could not assume he or she liked you until you investigated the card further, like something out of CSI, but others could mercilessly taunt the crush/crushee on the playground.  On the playground, there were no rules.

Now that I am older and more mature, I started to create Anti-Valentine’s Day cards for my friends to show how much I cared.  Truthfully, this only has happened once, but it will become a tradition.  You don’t even need to put glitter or stickers on a bag to get one.  I like finding fun and unconventional ways to ruin holidays.  I also like helping friends decorate cookies, which is exactly what I did yesterday.

However you choose to spend today, I hope you at least get something tasty out of it, even if it’s just the eye candy off my blog.

[Special thanks to my friend who let me use her shiny, new DSLR camera for these shots!]

My Dreams Are Delicious

The results are in!  For those of you who read my post about the bizarre experiment I was going to conduct (I know a lot of you did — site stats don’t lie), I have an update on my week of eating and dreaming.  Disclaimer: This obviously is not backed up by real science.  I don’t know why I need to clarify this.  If you study science, it will probably seem like a toddler has created a graph to amuse herself and you’ll just have to nod your head and smile, perhaps give her a gold star for trying.  I’m not going to tell you what I dreamed about each night, nor am I going to launch into a wild explanation of what my dreams could mean, simply because that was not the focus of my experiment and it will take too long to write about.  If you want to know, just ask me.  I also tried not to eat the same genre of food twice in a row, although I did not plan out what I would eat before bed.  Sometimes it was a snack, other times it was dinner (most often it was a snack).  The amount of time in between eating and sleeping varied, as well, and I didn’t keep track of that.  One final note: I don’t remember my dream this past Friday (as the graph indicates), but I do know that I had one.  Since this graph cannot prove that, you’re just going to have to believe me.

I measured three things: the vividness of the dream, if any food appeared in the dream, and my memory of the dream.  The first and third categories relate to each other, but I chose to keep them separate because “vividness” refers to how well I am able to recall the small details of my dream (i.e. if I was in a house, what did it look like? did anything stand out? if there were people in my dream, did they talk to each other and what did they say?) and “memory” refers to if I remember my dream from start to finish (i.e. if I walked through a house to go to a party in the backyard to meet up with some friends).  The food category is pretty self-explanatory: I tracked how many times food appeared in the dream (i.e. one point for one appearance of cake; seven for one appearance of seven types of food, or the same item of food seven times).

I am a graph! Click me!

What I found most interesting was that when I ate something relatively healthy, I would dream of unhealthy food.  For example, on Saturday night I ate some plain vegetable crackers.  In my dream, I was eating a TON of junk food (chocolate bars, cotton candy, gummy worms/candy) and desserts (cupcakes, cheesecake, brownies).  Another funny thing was that I never dreamed about the food I ate.  Celery never appeared in the dream I had on Sunday, although peanut butter was present in my dream on Monday night.  When I did dream about food, I was always with other people (friends, strangers — or in one instance, Andy Bernard from The Office) and I was always in a public indoor/outdoor setting (a restaurant, the forest where Andy and I went camping, a shopping mall).

The amount of food I ate before sleeping differed throughout the week, but I’m not sure if it affected the vividness or memory of my dreams.  For instance, I ate a lot of pasta and perogies for dinner on Monday and Thursday, respectively.  But, I ate nachos as a snack last Friday and was able to remember my dream quite well.  All three of these foods ranked high in those categories.  One possible theory is that my ability to remember everything is linked to eating some kind of dairy product along with my meal/snack (I had cheese with my pasta, cheese/sour cream with perogies and the nachos).  However, when I ate chocolate (milk chocolate, to be exact), I clearly didn’t remember much.  I’m not sure what this proves at all.  I think I will have to do another study.

The only nightmare I had was on Monday, but it was a mini-dream/nightmare because I woke up when my alarm went off and went back to sleep for a few minutes.  In those precious few minutes of sleep, I was being chased by zombies.  Does it relate to food?  Absolutely!  Zombies need to eat.  Unfortunately, they eat people, not people food.  And no, I was not eaten.

In conclusion, I have proved that I am able to remember most dreams, on average, quite well, regardless of what I eat before going to sleep.  If food is an influence, this graph doesn’t prove much of anything.  In the future, if I do another study (signs point to yes), I’ll control what I eat and I’ll do it for more than one week.  I hope that this was entertaining for someone other than myself.

I leave you with a picture of the dessert that was featured in most of my dreams:

Food + Dreams = Science?

I’ve had some really bizarre dreams lately and I’ve wondered why this might be so.  I remember someone telling me that eating certain food before bed can affect the kinds of dreams you have.  Food doesn’t predict what you will dream (let’s be real — I don’t think broccoli has the power to make me dream of rainbows or squirrels), but it makes your dreams more vivid or memorable.  Or, so my source told me.  Whether or not this is true, I have decided as of now to do an experiment.

Last night, before going to bed, I made nachos with cheese — mainly because I was so excited when I found sour cream in the fridge at 12:30 a.m.  I had a very intense dream which I woke up from this afternoon, which then caused me to wonder if what I ate resulted in my subconscious taking me on a wild, crazy adventure.

Here is a graph that I created.  Don’t worry, the link won’t kill your computer.

wtf food

I haven’t made a graph since second year university, where I suffered through statistics, slowly succumbing to the idea that I should stop studying (p)sychology and study English instead.  Alliteration is much more enjoyable.  So, based on the fact that math and psychology were not suitable career or lifestyle choices for me, I can’t promise that anything about this graph is statistically significant.  Or that the x-axis and y-axis are even labelled correctly.  BUT — I can promise that I spelled things correctly.  [Edit: I proudly showed the graph to my dad, who just told me that it was all wrong.  The one you are viewing is more accurate*.  Maybe.  And then he said it was good that I didn't study math and walked away laughing uncontrollably**.  Thanks, dad.]

However, I enjoy making meaningless graphs and I will continue to do this until someone complains.  This bar graph is not very exciting yet, but I hope that because it is 3D it is super fun to look at.  I will continue to update my graph for the next week, as I track what I eat before going to bed and how intense my dreams are.

English nerds can still do science.

Here is a picture of a salad that I enjoyed during the summer, because I haven’t posted anything healthy on my blog yet.

*Update: The graph you are viewing as of 10:30 p.m. on a Saturday night is NEW, because the one I created a few hours ago was terrible.  I am now measuring 1) how vivid the dream is, 2) if any food appears in the dream, and 3) how well I remember the dream.  Fascinating stuff, I know.

**slight exaggeration about the laughter

Red Velvet New Year’s

I’ve decided to start 2011 off with a cupcake.

A cupcake, without frosting, is like a tabula rasa of the edible variety.  You can build and shape it how you want, and if it doesn’t work out, you can just eat the icing and start over.  Either way, you get to indulge a little by trying something new (and hopefully yummy).  I wish everyone a sweet start to the year.

Knorr’s Lipton Soup Contest

A few days ago I entered a contest for Lipton soup to win a Canon SLR with two lenses!!  You can view the contest here (but you must be logged into Facebook).  For purposes of the contest – a.k.a. I read the fine print – I don’t want to “publish” anything on this blog that could interfere with my chances of winning.  While I desperately want the camera kit, I would be very happy with a runner up prize (a high-def camcorder of which there are six).  Keep your fingers crossed!

Funny (not really) story about this contest: as I was setting up for my mini photo-shoot, I accidentally tripped and dropped my camera on the floor while it was on.  I feared the worst, as unfortunately this has happened before (also the sole reason why I’ve stopped lending my camera to other people), but all was okay!  Panic attack averted.  This is why it is EXTREMELY important to always wear that wrist strap.

My next entry will promote another Knorr product, but you’ll just have to wait to find out which one!

iFruit

I fell off the blogging sphere.  Why?  I got super busy with my internship and now that it’s over, I’ve started looking for a job.  You’d think that since I have nothing to occupy my time with, I’d be writing more entries and posting more pictures, but I just couldn’t get motivated – and I’ve spent most of my time writing cover letters.

However, I feel like I owe it to the Internet to post some food porn.  Currently, this is my desktop background:

I’m not sure if anyone spends time picking a background for their computer, so I might be alone on this one.  But when I wake up every morning, I want to be greeted with something worth looking at, dammit!  What else can a girl ask for but a vibrantly coloured bowl of fruit?  Mangoes, strawberries and blackberries work well together for these reasons:

• each fruit has its own savoury flavour, but when forced to be together in the same bowl, they accent each other well
• the colour contrast is awesome!
• it makes me happy

Ideally, this would be my breakfast every morning.  And it was, when I was in L.A. many months ago.  If you’re wondering what else is in the bowl, that would be cottage cheese.  Yogurt would probably work well too, but cottage cheese balances out the sweetness and adds a bit more texture to every bite.  I practically have all three primary colours in one place: red, yellow, blue (ish).

I will probably end up changing my background picture at some point, but for now it serves as a cheery reminder to keep this blog active…and to buy more fruit.