Regular Singular Points

One interesting thing about the mid-western United States is this fascination with County and State Fairs. It’s really a celebration of agriculture and may even have roots in European harvest festivals. I don’t know. But one thing is for certain: farm animals smell bad.

But there’s silver lining: Fair Food. One favorite of mine is the tremendously over-priced Lemon Shake-up. At the fair I suspect that they use corn syrup instead of simple syrup, but it’s difficult to say. At any rate, here is the recipe for Lemon Shake-Ups, posted here so I won’t lose it.

This recipe allows you to prepare a simple syrup that you can use to make several batches of shake-ups:

2 cups sugar (380 grams)
1 cup water (240 ml)

Combine sugar and water in saucepan. Boil for 5 minutes. Cool and refrigerate up to a week.

To make two shake-ups, cut a lemon in half and juice each half into a tall glass. Fill the glasses with ice. Add the lemon rind and 3 Tablespoons (45ml) of simple syrup to each glass (some like more, some like less). Fill glasses with water, cover and shake well. Don’t skimp on the shaking part.

Yesterday was my birthday.  Here is a picture of the New York style cheesecake that Siobhán made me for my birthday.  The stupid autofocus on the camera malfunctioned, but can you tell how old I am?

No, Ray, you don’t get to have a guess.  You already know I’m an engineer.

Nothing like an infection of the fluid in the spinal cord. There was about five days where I was so weak I could not hold a pen and sign my name. And even now I get this odd rash that pops up randomly on an arm or a leg, and then goes away, like some viral whack-a-mole game.

I’ll tell you something funny, though: when I told the doctor in the ER that I couldn’t even write my name, he asked to see my signature to see how bad it was. As he left to get a piece of paper, I started laughing. I told him how ironic I thought it was that a doctor was asking me to show him how illegible my handwriting was. He very nearly smiled.