Things I have learned today

There are a disturbing number of threads on the Internet about soundproofing car trunks. Many of them seem to be about properly balancing the sound of subwoofers, but at least one poster said that he wanted it to be able to stand up to kicks. (Why, yes, this was story related. I have a minivan — no trunk.)

M&Ms do not bake well inside a white cake.

Coarsely crushed coffee beans (or coarsely chopped) work much better for coffee ice cream than coarsely ground because you can mostly filter them out with a mesh strainer.

What have you learned today?

random Friday thoughts

There are all kinds of people in the world. If I get to divide it in two, though, it gets divided by people who can fall asleep instantly and people who take half an hour or more to drift off. I’m in the latter group. I also tend to be a light sleeper, which means if a kid gets up, I wake up — and then have trouble going back to sleep. I anticipate getting a full week of sleep probably a couple of decades in the future.

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NPR recently did a review of the book Annoying. There’s a quiz that goes with it that’s supposed to tell how readily you get annoyed. The average score is just under the midpoint; I was just over. (Scale of 1 to 5, where 3 is the middle, and 1 is nothing irritates you.) On the other hand, you’d think they’d program it so that if all your responses are falling in the middle but you mark “strongly agree” to caring about what other people think of you, your scores would be adjusted — because you may be marking (okay, I was marking) based on who might see the results, rather than how picky you actually are.

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Justine Musk had a really interesting post on embracing naked ambition the other day. I keep mulling it over. There are things I’d like (such as having membership in all the various professional writers’ organizations) and standard middle-class ambitions (pay off the mortgage and consumer debt, have enough money for the kids to go to college where they want, have money set aside to do what we want during retirement — whatever retirement may mean for someone who plans to write for the rest of her life), but I don’t have any major make-my-mark naked ambitions, like curating an anthology series, having a TV show (something mentioned in her blog), or anything like that. The closest I come is writing in every genre that appeals to me and having people who like reading what I write. Pretty simplistic.

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What about you? What’s on your mind this fine Friday afternoon?