Tvindy

I really dropped the pao on this one.

Greetings from Bakerina's corner of the world...

It's October 3, less than 24 hours until Tvindy's return to this space, and even as I'll be thrilled to see him again, I am distressed, for there were a few things I wanted to do before he came back, and to date, I have done, in Eric Idle's words, "nnnnnnearly...one, sir." No, not even that. I haven't done a one. Not a sausage.

Once upon a time, when he was doing a much better job at guestblogging than I was, Tvindy put up a recipe for pao de queijo on my page. I have been transfixed with the idea of these little breads, made from tapioca flour and parmigiano cheese, and I have been trying to find the right moment to make them, bake them, photograph them and share the results here, with accompanying laurels for the man who gave me the idea. All I had to do was:

1. Update my half-assed HTML skills so that I could learn how to put the tilda over the a, because I know that "pao" is not the correct way to spell it.

2. Go to my local source of interesting flours and buy some tapioca flour.

3. Go to my Italian local and buy cheese.

4. Reload the software I use for downloading pictures of my digital camera. (Said software vanished mysteriously after I used one of my USB ports to install another ethernet port as a backup for those nights when my neighbors insist on having two-hour conversations on their cordless phone, thus rendering my wireless connection useless. I don't know why the software vanished, but I have about 100 photos on my camera, and I'm petrified of losing them.)

Of course you know I did none of this. My HTML knowledge has not been broadened, the tapioca flour is still on the shelf at Kalustyan's, the cheese is still at Italian local, and the software has not been downloaded. This is the point at which I would engage the services of my husband, Lloyd (a/k/a Lloyd [Not His Real Name]), but Lloyd is currently engaged with getting ready for his five-day trip to beautiful uptown Cleveland, Ohio, where he will be visiting the art museum, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and the banks of the Cuyahoga River (no longer flammable! woo-hoo!); where he will be having dinner at Lola, the restaurant whose chef, Michael Symon, was profiled in Michael Ruhlman's The Soul of a Chef; and where, hopefully, he will not do anything to piss off Dick Cheney. It's all very exciting, and Lloyd definitely deserves the vacation, having not had any paid time off since, I think, 1998, but all I can think of right now is that I punked out on Tvindy; I let him down in the pao de queijo department, and now I owe him a favor.

(Tvindy, there's your opening. Pick it up and run with it. ;)

MMMMM

Is it just me, or is one of my parents' cats sitting a bit too close to the turkey?

Caffeine

I'm often astounded by the power of caffeine, but no more so than last week when I was up for 33 hours straight with no drowsiness and no nodding off. All it took was one 2-liter bottle of cherry coke consumed over a 10-hour period. I'm not in the habit of drinking anything with caffeine in it as part of my regular routine, so, unlike most people, I haven't developed a tolerance to its effects. I normally avoid it, because it interfers with my sleep.

Last year I was taking caffeine pills when I was training for a marathon to increase my endurance. It really helped; I could run faster and further by taking a couple of caffeine tablets before a jog. The problem was that it caused me to go from eight hours of sleep a night to six or seven, which ended up hurting my performance more than helping it. I could fall asleep alright, but I always ended up waking up much too early and not being able to get back to sleep.

Apparently caffeine blocks the neurotransmitter adenosine, which, among other things, triggers drowsiness. So the more the adenosine is blocked, the more awake and alert you feel. Unfortunately, that is the one effect of caffeine to which people quickly build a tolerance. What a shame -- I'd love to have every day be a 33 hour day.