It's been a long week. I'm tired. I've been pretty darn tired for the past few days. It might be that I've actually started going back to the gym on a daily basis now; it might be some hormonal thing that will fix itself it a few days. Either way it shouldn't last long, especially if I sleep and eat properly.
Speaking of eating, I took a trip to Fortinos on Tuesday and spent a good $60 on groceries + some household supplies. Among my buys were eggplants that were on clearance - they looked like they were about to die (i.e. go bad) soon, so on Wednesday (after I found out the machine I used at the lab was being used by someone else) I resolved to cook the eggplants:
They are:
- Grilled eggplant drizzled with a blend of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, oregano, salt, and pepper.
- Stir fry eggplant with green onions and salt
- Tofu in hoisin sauce with green onions and thickened with flour.
Retrospectively, the balsamic vinegar was excessive and in the future I might just season the grilled eggplant without it. The hoisin sauce was supposed to go with the stir fry eggplant, but at the last moment I realized the tofu had passed its best before date and that I should probably cook it before it spoils. Unsure of whether it was already spoiled, I didn't want to risk wasting the eggplant so I decided to cook the tofu with the hoisin instead of just lumping everything together.
Everything turned out a lot better than I expected; the tofu was a little sour but that was because of the hoisin, I think. Besides, I haven't gotten sick after two meals so I'm going to take that as a good sign.
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I've already mentioned that I came home from the lab early on Wednesday; I neglected to mention I only ran experiments on Monday. I took Tuesday off, as usual, and came back Wednesday to find the spectrophotometer I needed was being booked out by the grad students that particular day, so I left almost immediately after and came home to cook. I woke up Thursday morning feeling exhausted and nauseous and very late, so I took another day off. And I usually don't stick around after lab meetings on Fridays so I came home after that.
My high school English teacher (because I only had one, but that's a story for a different time) had recommended it to me half a decade ago in grade 11, and I thought it was fascinating at the time but never got around to reading it. Eventually, I forgot the whole thing existed, until last night when I stumbled across a Reddit post about Mt. Everest and the bodies that lined the path towards the summit. Then I remembered an IMAX film I watched about an Everest expedition in which a mountaineer died shortly after making a phone call to his heavily-pregnant wife. After some digging, I found out that the movie I was thinking of was simply titled
Everest.
It described the
1996 Everest Disaster, and to my surprise, Jon Krakauer (a name that had a ring to it such that despite never having read his works, I would remember forever) was part of the expedition team
and that
Into Thin Air was his account of what transpired. Funny, I had never associated Krakauer and the film.
I tore through the book in record time (nearly 300 pages in less than 18 hours). It was as poignant as I remember the film was. While I enjoyed the book for its quality of writing and narration, I felt guilty for enjoying it as a narrative because real people lost their lives 18 years ago.
It's a good book; I recommend it to anyone who has even the slightest interest in Everest, mountaineering, adventures, or just the outside world in general. I was too young to know anything when the tragedy occurred, but nearly two decades later it still hits me just as hard.
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