Alice Yi-Li Yeh's Blog, page 4

Custard Curlicues

When venting frustration over recent disappointments, what better way than to bake bread? After all, the process involves throwing the dough at the work surface...hard.

Using half a dozen eggs, I made my own custard cream last night using a recipe from Corner Café. It sat in my fridge to chill, and after getting home today, I set about making bread dough for the first time in four years. I have to tell you — working butter into the dough is one big, greasy nightmare!

Now the blogger at Corner Café gave various descriptions of pliability, but I ended up kneading until it felt right. Literally. It's difficult to explain, but the texture of the dough changes over time, and at some point, you can tell that you're done.

While the dough rested, I went ahead and wrote another book review. After that, I cut the dough into eighths, rolled the pieces into discs, piped in the custard, and closed them up and formed them into buns. The recipe actually called for kneading the dough between cutting it up and rolling out circles, but I skipped that step to avoid losing air or making the bread too chewy. They rested for a while and puffed up a bit more, and after an egg wash and some custard decorations, into the oven they went!

This was the result. I'm officially excited for breakfast tomorrow! Four hour training session on a Saturday...At least my belly will be satisfied.

Winged Words

In a sudden blaze of ambition yesterday, I decided to design a logo for products to sell for Stimulated Outlet Book Reviews. It took all of five minutes messing around with the pen tool on Photoshop for me to lose my patience and break out the pencil and paper. After drawing my outline, I tried photographing it and uploading the photograph. Needless to say, that was a complete and utter failure. After several hopeless attempts at cleaning up that mess, I scrapped the whole thing in favor of scanning in the pencil drawing. Next step: fixing up the original. That involved darkening the lines so that they look like actual ink instead of faint pencil. Believe it or not, it actually took me an hour before I finally figured out which settings to use. Apparently converting to black and white and then increasing contrast works wonders! After all of this, however, my conclusion was that the image looked kind of bare... ...thus leading into my first foray into coloring with Photoshop! A combination of the magnetic lasso tool, as well as adjusted pressures, led to some improvement, though I kept getting confused about the layers and whether or not I was extending transparency to areas that should be left opaque. It was also difficult to gauge work quality objectively! Below, we have the final product, for which I have a shamefully giddy affection: And there you have it, my new Books In Flight logo. I think I'll take a break from Photoshopping now...

Showing Progress

This weekend, I added a "Currently Reading" module to my book review blog. Noting that the space looked remarkably bare this morning, I decided to add a progress bar.

A quick Google search yielded only instructions using block level containers, or <div> tags. As a proponent of efficiency and parsimony, however, I was bothered by what seemed like an excessive amount of code for so simple an object. I gave it some thought and decided to devise my own method instead. The obvious choice was to base it off of a two-cell table.

I started off by figuring out the width of the table. To do this, I eyeballed the percentage of the module that the progress bar would occupy, increased it by five percent, and whittled that value down one percent at a time until the bar was no longer forced below the book cover.

The next step was to set the border width, along with eliminating spaces between cells and padding within cells. I set both to zero.

Two columns were set up within one row. I only needed to set the width of the left-most cell to match my progress, since the second cell will adjust automatically. Instead of using a plain background color to "fill in" the bar, I used CSS tags to insert my blog's background image.

(Note: The percentage used for columns are based on the total width of the table. For instance, if <table width="50%">, and <td width="50%">, then the width of the column will be equal to 50% of the table width but only 25% of the total space. In other words, no conversions are necessary. If you've made "x" amount of progress, then <td width="x%">)

The resulting code ended up looking like this:

<table margin="0" width="58%" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tbody><tr><td style="background-image: url('image url');" width="10%">
</td><td>10%</td></tr></tbody></table>

Eventually, the right-hand cell will be too small for me to type in the percentage completed thus far. To compensate for this, I placed the text in the left-hand cell and colored it white so that it shows up against the dark background. This is the updated code:

<table margin="0" width="58%" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tbody>
<tr><td style="background-image: url('image url');" width="90%" align="right">
<font color=#FFFFFF>90%</font>
</td><td>
</td></tr></tbody></table>

And there you have it: progress bars made easy. Please leave a comment and let me know what you think!

Funny Bunny

I received this attachment from my brother's girlfriend this morning and felt compelled to share:



She actually made the e-card after scouring the internet for an appropriate image to use.  Apparently there is a plethora of rabbitty photos over at The Daily Bunny. Oh bunny, my bunny...I actually want to own one now, though something tells me that the cat might end up getting really, really annoyed.

Sticky Sweet

It's a new (lunar) year,but thanks to the crazy wintry weather, I was loath to step out of doors just to buy some 年糕, or Chinese New Year cake. As a result, I ended up baking my own for the very first time!

Ingredients:
2eggs1 csugar⅓ coil1½ cmilk10 ozglutinous rice flour¼ tspbaking sodaDirections:
In a medium bowl, beat both eggs.Add sugar and continue beating until eggs begin to lighten.Add oil and milk. Beat until smooth.Add glutinous rice flour and baking soda. Beat for 5 minutes with electric mixer or 10 minutes by hand.Let batter sit at room temperature for 30 minutes.Preheat oven to 350°F.Grease bottom and sides of an 8" x 8" baking pan.Pour batter into pan. Spread evenly with a spatula if necessary.Bake for 45 minutes or until top is golden brown.Cool on rack for at least 5 minutes.Cut into squares and serve.

Random trivia:
8 is a lucky number in Chinese culture, while 4 is unluckyyou're supposed to clean your house before the new year, sweeping bad luck out to let good luck in [done]you're supposed to settle all of your debts before the new year (runs along the same idea as "cleaning house" — I guess they never had to account for American student loans!)this year is the Year of the Rabbit — find out more about the "rabbit personality type" here

Happy new year, everyone! I hope your porches and balconies look nothing like this:

Vignette: Susie

I have posted the first in what I hope to be a series of vignettes/flash fiction. Each piece will center around an individual character and will remain posted until the next vignette or piece of flash fiction takes its place. I hope to compile them all into one book eventually.

Please give feedback. It definitely helps to hear objective opinions!

Vignette: Susie


Background Information
(Please read after the vignette.)

Susie began as a means of channeling my own recent disappointments in my professional life, as well as a Christmas that was spent stressing out over residency applications instead of spending quality time with extended family. I had this scene in my head of a grown woman staring at the nails where she and her siblings used to hang their Christmas stockings every year. The atmosphere was intended to be -- for lack of a better word -- gray, reflective of the quasi-depressed mood of the main character.

As I wrote, however, it quickly became apparent that Susie's reasons for feeling this way extend far beyond my petty woes. There was a sense of loss that an ended childhood alone could not explain, and gradually her past came to light: all of this is the result of a marriage gone terribly wrong.

There are hints at it, although I'm not sure how obvious they are. Her husband left her for a more attractive woman, and he also had a bit of an alcohol problem. These are the root causes of her own insecurity in her physicality, which is why she wears baggy sweats and why she flips out over food that might "make her fat." This could be the beginning of an eating disorder, but I hope not.

In any case, Susie finally loses it this morning, and the breaking point is when she feels skin where her wedding ring used to be. It somehow makes the whole thing real; before, she was living in hazy denial, so everything is sort of coming down on her at once. I'm unsure of whether or not her reaction is too over-the-top, but it's what felt right.

So there you have it: Susie in a nutshell. I have every reason to believe that she'll be okay.

Penciled In

From high school onwards, I have always been told to give a small gift along with a thank you card to instructors who write letters of recommendation for you. Over the years, these tokens have varied from boxes of chocolate to Chinese snacks to Girl Scout cookies. Notice a theme here? For some reason, the default items are always food...

In an effort to break from this trend, I opted for something a bit more personal this time: 11" by 14" colored pencil sketches. The subjects, of course, needed to be pharmacy-related, but after scouring the internet for images to sketch, I finally gave up in favor of what I could manage to generate from my own head. Here are the results:



It's always nice to rediscover activities that make you happy. Hopefully my old preceptors like them too!

Sundae Sunday

Thanks to a detailed work of fan fiction, I have spent the past hour working on a poster while drooling over the idea of an ice cream sundae. Given the minimal amount of physical exertion in which I have engaged over the past few months, it is a bad, bad idea, and I blame an overactive imagination and decent writing as the kryptonite to my personal battle of the bulge. What truly did me in was the mention of rainbow jimmies. Well, I call them sprinkles, but it amounts to the same thing: small dashes of crunchy goodness pairing perfectly with decadent vanilla bean and sinfully rich whipped cream. Yum.

I guess what it amounts to is me being a sucker for food descriptions, in a phenomenon I am hereby coining a "gastronomigasm." I remember countless afternoons rereading Mariel of Redwall and dreaming of giant trifles and monstrously sized fish (not together, of course). The Harry Potter series had me constantly wondering about the taste and texture of a pumpkin pastie or treacle tart, while The Omnivore's Dilemma gave me the oddest craving for corn. In this respect, I find the written word to be infinitely more powerful than a simple image, as it gives a detailed accounts not only of what one may see, but also what one may smell, taste, and touch, all in phrases designed to titillate the imagination. In short, it pulls in all the senses, with the result that I find myself dribbling over a memory or what I imagine a food could be.

Gastronomigasmic indeed. I should probably mention that it is currently nine degrees Fahrenheit (with a windchill factor of negative four degrees) in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Looks like I'll have to bundle up before pursuing my quest of a fatty, sugary persuasion.
Two hours later...

I made, I ate, and now I feel queasy. Too many calories at once do not a happy hippo make.

Casting Purls

Over Christmas break, my mother asked me to knit her a vest similar to one my late grandmother made for her several years ago. After one all-nighter figuring out the pattern and the gauge, I decided that there was no way in which to complete the project prior to returning to Ann Arbor. Several weeks later, it is finally finished — just in time for her birthday!

This is the first garment that I have completed, earlier projects being baby blankets, scarves, and popover mittens. While it is not as nice as my mother's mother's original, I am prodigiously proud of the fact that I eliminated any and all seams by knitting the body on a round and then weaving the shoulders together at the top. Minor achievement? Perhaps, but still, it makes me happy.

Papering Presents

The supplies:

-wrapping paper
-tape
-stapler
-plastic knife
-Macy*s catalog
-green ribbon
-black pen
-used Williams Sonoma wrapping paper





The  handmade decorations

-2 Santa Claus name tags
-2 snowman name tags
-2 stocking name tags
-2 paper bows


In the interest of aesthetics, I decided to put a little more effort in gift-wrapping this year. By making adornments by hand, I saved myself some money and a trip to the store. One of the paper bows was made using a page from a Macy*s catalog and several staples, using instructions from the Crafster community. The other was made with one continuous strip of leftover wrapping paper and a grand total of one staple.

The small Santa Clauses were made using instructions from Origamitube. It's simple enough that I was shocked that someone would try to charge $1 per Santa. The profit margin for that should be at least 50% for one Santa and higher if mailing more than one. Perhaps she is capitalizing on laziness or lack of time. People will sell anything, I suppose.

The stockings were a modified version of the ones found on Leah's crafts and doodads. I'm not a big fan of the colored piece at the end, as it reminds me of a steel-toed boot. In order to create contrast with the red wrapping paper, I inverted the colors of the folded stocking and  used pictures of jewelry from the Macy*s catalog as "stocking stuffers."

I got the idea for the snowmen from Joseph Wu, but I added an additional snowball to the body and modified the folds so that there wouldn't be any "webbing" where the snowballs join. I also made each of the body parts different sizes to avoid something that resembles a totem pole. The hats were created through some experimentation with leftover wrapping paper, since I wanted something that looked a little more whimsical and a little less like a dunce cap. Lastly, eyes and buttons were drawn on. I don't have the patience to apply glue to tiny paper cutouts with a toothpick today.

Noteworthy Find:

As I looked online for homemade gift-wrapping ideas, I stumbled upon joybucket's blog, where she has instructions for "Reusable Gift Wrap." It's a relatively easy sewing project using pretty fabric and ribbon. The result is gorgeous and much more reusable than wrapping paper will ever be. Give it a look!