San Diego Pictures

I thought it would be a good idea to get pictures up from our last trip before the next trip, so here is a small selection of pictures from our trip to San Diego. We had over 1000 pics, and I tried to keep this under 200. :) Enjoy!

Click here for San Diego Pictures

Amish Friendship Bread

Our friends Jon and Holly gave us a starter for Amish Friendship Bread.  If you haven't had it before its a quite tasty "dessert" bread full of sugary goodness.  The starter grows in 10 day cycles.  At the end of the cycle the starter is big enough to seperate into 4 batches.  Each batch can be used to make 2 loaves of bread or start anew as a starter.  You can quickly see that if maintained, the initial starter will grow geometrically and produce ridiculous amounts of batches.  

How much growth?  Let us consider the a world in which I maintain the starters and hold off on making bread until Christmas.  There are > 220 days from now until Christmas.  That means the starter can go through 22 iterations.  After 22 cycles I will have 4^22 batches, approximately 17.6 trillion batches.  Forget Santa, an amish bread loaf for everyone on Christmas day.  This begs the question how much other ingredients do I need to bake (2*4^22) about 35.2 loaves of bread.  

Let's first examine the recipe.  To maintain the starter, you need to add ingredients on day 6 and day10.

For each Batch

Day 6

1 cup each of flour, milk, and sugar 

Day 10

1.5 cups each of milk, and sugar (no flour)

Every batch can produce 2 loaves of bread, the recipe for the bread is the following:

3 eggs

1 cup of Oil

1/2 cup of milk

1 cup of sugar

2 cups of flour

2 tsp. cinnamon

1 1/2 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp vanilla

1/2 tsp of baking soda

1/2 tsp of salt

1 Large box of instant vanilla pudding

Now I can calculate the approximate total amounts of ingredients for (2*4^22) 35.2 loaves of Amish friendship bread.  I converted teaspoons to cups (48 tsp in 1 cup).  Instead of performing all the calculations by hand a wrote a quick script in Python to figure this out for me.

Ingredients (approx.)

52.8 trillion eggs

17.6 trillion cups of oil

23.5 trillion cups of milk

32.3 trillion cups of sugar

41.0 trillion cups of flour

0.7 trillion cups of cinnamon

0.5 trillion cups of baking powder

0.2 trillion cups of vanilla

0.2 trillion cups of baking soda

0.2 trillion cups of salt

17.6 trillion large boxes of instant vanilla pudding

1 batch of bread (2 loaves) takes 1 hour in 350 degree oven.  Assuming I can find enough volunteers, ovens, and time, how much coal does TVA have to burn for me to bake 35.2 trillion loaves of bread.....

Sunny San Diego

It's taken me a few days to figure out how to post to the blog from the blackberry but here we are. So far things here have been just fine. Yesterday was Brian's presentation and it went well. We went to the beach on Sunday to walk around, and I've never seen so many people at the beach before in my life. Pictures will most likely come when we get home. Right now I am sitting at an out door mall drinking the only sweet tea in California and enjoying the shade. It's been unseasonablly hot here so far. I think the hot and dry is messing with my sinuses slightly. I'll just have to suffer through, right?

Go Go Gadget Metabolism

So in an effort to be more accountable about working out, I'm going to attempt to post once a week about my progress and/or laziness.

Last week I worked out Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and.... and... well I meant to workout more.  I really need to workout 5-6 times a week, but I can't really be too dissapointed in 3 times.

I worked out today too.  As usual it was two 30 minute sessions.  However, the heart rate monitor was having issues with transmitting/receiving, so the first 30 minutes I did on cardio mode.  It is a trapezoid of resistance.  I spent 18 minutes at level 11 resisitance, 6 minutes building up and 6 minutes building down.  The second session I was covered in enough sweat the heart monitor had no trouble doing heart rate mode.

I weighed in at 236.8 lbs.  I feel like I'm back on track on my goal of another 10 lbs.  This was only a few tenths of a lbs more than where I left off last Wednesday.  I suppose my metabolism is starting to increase.  Back in January and February any time off meant weight gain.  I was shocked last week that I really hadn't gained that much from being lazy for two weeks.  Regardless even if my metabolism is increasing, I can't count on it to keep me from gaining weight when I don't work out for stretches at a time.  It will decrease probably faster than it will increase.

I'm quite happy to be at 236.8lbs today.  This week I will get in at least 5 work outs and the result will be 232 lbs.