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I can (and do!) make excellent almond milk at home. Compared with hauling boxes home from the store, mine looks and tastes about the same, is nutritionally the same, costs 1/10 as much,  takes literally 30 seconds of effort, has far less container waste, and I get buckets of foodie cred every time I mention “my home made almond milk”.

Now pay attention because it’s really hard to make home made almond milk. Ready?

1. Put 1 teaspoon of creamy almond butter in your blender
2. Put 1 cup of water in your blender
3. Push the button for 15 seconds. Let go
4. DONE!  You now have nose ticklingly frothy, nutty, slightly gritty, home style almond milk!

Want store-like almond milk? Proceed!

1. Let it sit for 5 minutes
2. Pour it into a glass, easily leaving any foam and sediment behind
3. DONE and DONE!

Seriously. That’s all.

If you want more notes, read on

• Yes, you can double the recipe and stick it in the fridge. Cold milk tastes even more store-bought.
• Organic almond butter begets organic almond milk!
• Does super-premium roasted almond butter taste better? You decide, it’s crazy inexpensive!
• Does it need salt? Add salt!
• Like vanilla almond milk? Add a splash of vanilla!

One cup of store bought almond milk costs $0.62 ($2.50 for a box with 4 cups milk)
One cup of home made almond milk costs $0.06 ($8 for 138 1 tsp servings).

How I arrived at this recipe: I compared the nutrition facts on a carton of Almond Breeze unsweetened Vanilla Almond Milk with a jar of Mara Natha Almond Butter. I noticed that a 30 calorie, 1 cup serving of almond milk had almost exactly the same nutritional content as a 1 teaspoon serving of almond butter for calories, fat, carbs, fiber & protein (I used simple algebra and a spreadsheet, you can do it too). I saw all kinds of recipes online for almond milk that involved meticulous soaking of dried almonds and long blend times and figured, “almond butter is easier and I’ve got it. Let’s try blending it!” And darn if it didn’t come out great.

I did a blind taste test with my fiancee and her comments were:

• Color was roughly the same
• Taste was similar except one was more vanilla-y (that would be the vanilla flavored almond milk)
• The purchased almond milk was a tiny bit creamier. She didn’t think it was better or worse. It’s no wonder she noticed, Almond Breeze adds calcium carbonate, tapioca starch, carrageenan, and sunflower lecithin explicitly to improve the mouth feel
• I noticed that the home-made smelled pleasantly nuttier when it was at room temperature

Almond Breeze Original Unsweetened Almond Milk has 12 ingredients: (from their site) ALMONDMILK (FILTERED WATER, ALMONDS), CALCIUM CARBONATE, TAPIOCA STARCH, SEA SALT, POTASSIUM CITRATE, CARRAGEENAN, SUNFLOWER LECITHIN, NATURAL FLAVOR, VITAMIN A PALMITATE, VITAMIN D2 AND D-ALPHA-TOCOPHEROL (NATURAL VITAMIN E).

My home made almond milk has 2 ingredients: almonds and water

I saw a fancy fold-out ad on the inside front cover of November 2013 Vanity Fair magazine. It’s an ad for the 2014 Acura MDX. It has problems.

The ad reads, “With 99.9993% of the body reimagined to be stronger, lighter and faster.”

First problem, it’s not a sentence it’s only a dependent clause. But let’s look past that.

Second and vastly more important problem: 99.9993%?? Do they have any idea how high a percentage that is? No they do not.

They are saying that 0.0007% of the body was not “reimagined”. If the body weighs 1,000 pounds, then the “unreimagined” portion of the body weighs 0.007 pounds, approximately one tenth of one ounce. That is the weight of a single sheet of paper! The only unreimagined part of the body is the magazine ad we’re looking at. Ooph!

I for one welcome our new semiliterate‎  MBA overlords.
I saw this billboard on BART.

The headline makes no sense whatsoever.

In case you’re wondering: advanced degrees don’t inspire advancement. One might argue that advanced degrees are advancement or that they help  the advancement of the person with the degree. But no one would ever say, “After getting my MBA, I was inspired to advance in my profession.”

I just mailed off the applications for 2 of the 3 schools I’m applying to. This is the culmination of 2 full years of work. If I’m accepted, I’ll have another 2 1/2 years of school before receiving a Master’s Degree in Occupational Therapy.

This is the second time I’ve sent applications. This time my application is much stronger:
* I have completed all of the prerequisite courses
* I raised my “last 60 units” GPA from 3.67 to 3.87
* I raised my GRE score to include a 4.5 on the writing: 160 Verbal, 150 Math, 4.5 Writing. (previous attempt was 161, 156, 4.0)
* Starting at having 100 hours at a private pediatric clinic, I added another 78 in a (hardcore) non-public school for non-verbal autistic kids
* My Personal Essay kicks ass! Thank you Megan, Alexis, Bean, and Tami for writing help!

Done:
San Jose State University, San Jose, CA
Samuel Merritt University, Oakland, CA

Almost Done: (not due for 4 months)
Dominican University, San Rafael, CA

I joined Megan on a diet called Vitaliti. It’s got great fundamentals. It doesn’t feel like a diet. I’ve lost weigh, gained muscle, feel great, look great, and don’t feel like I’m being starved at all. The fancy Tanita TBF-300A scale at the weigh-ins says that over the last 4 weeks I’ve lost 5 pounds of fat and gained 3 pounds of “fat free mass”, most of which is water. All this has been happening during a very stressful (and binge-worthy) time in my life, applying to grad school. What keeps it working so well? I get to eat food like this!

Almond crusted tilapia with spicy southwest roasted kabocha squash and baby peas

I’m more impressed that Megan helped me get to a place where I made this dish from scratch — on my own — for no other reason that it tastes good, gives me energy and is filling.

What, you might ask, do I get to eat for the rest of my day? Plenty! I am not hungry on this diet at all. I’ll tell you about it sometime!

But now, back to writing my Personal Statement for my application to grad school!

I felt a tiny earthquake just a minute ago at 1:08am. Maybe a 2.9. It felt like the whole room shook east-west a tiny bit like 3 times. Like a big truck on the street below had jammed on it’s brakes a couple times and wiggled the whole neighborhood.

Ha! I got the magnitude right!
USGS says it was a 3.2 with an epicenter between Berkeley and Concord!

My friend Ben is running a Kickstarter to do a run of totally awesome custom belt buckles and bottle openers. Get some!

View Ben’s Kickstarter

I took the GRE today. I needed to bring up my writing score from the last time and I think I did it. I won’t get the score back for 2 weeks but I feel really good about it.

Phew.

Short form: don’t buy Norton Antivirus. They are almost as ruthless about extracting money from people as the Russian scammers they are protecting you against. Instead get Microsoft Security Essentials and don’t click on offers that sound too good to be true.

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Long form:
Years ago, having an antivirus program on your computer was an important part of keeping bad people off your computer. Today this generally is not generally the case. Here is why:

– Bad people don’t use “frontal attacks” to get onto your computer any more. Instead, they use social engineering. They won’t try to hack your IP address, instead, they will sneak their way into a product you will download willingly and when the antivirus program asks “Are you sure?” You’ll naively say “Sure!”
– Norton and Symantec, the two biggest antivirus companies, make products that do 1 thing well, scare you into thinking you need them. They are almost as bad as the scammers they are protecting you against, really.
– By far the best antivirus program out there is YOU. If an offer seems too good to be true and all you need to do is install a piece of free software, IT IS TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE. It is a scam and you will get what you deserve.
– Remember, on the internet, you are literally 1 click away from the world’s best, highly paid, amoral Russian scammer professionals!
– There are FREE antivirus programs out there that work very well. Namely Microsoft Security Essentials or AVG Antivirus. Yes Microsoft Security Essentials is from Microsoft and yes it’s free.

I went to take the GRE today. Long story short, the computer at the testing center broke. I have to reschedule the test. Ugh. Maybe I’ll get to take it next week.

I’m trying to get into a Master’s program for Occupational Therapy. To this end, I’ve been preparing to take the GRE for the last couple months. This is actually my second attempt. I took it in January and did “ok”, and that wasn’t enough to get me accepted into grad school. It was time I did “great”.

I went to bed early, had a normal breakfast (the golden rule I follow is “don’t do anything out of the ordinary”), a good lunch and then was off to the test location. I got there an hour early just in case. 20 minutes before the test was to start, they told me and the others in the waiting room, “there’s a technical problem, there might be a delay.” Ugh, so much for starting my test early.

12:30, my test time, came and went. 12:45… 1pm… 1:10 rolls around and I’m thinking that I will have to reschedule. It’s a long test, last time I was in the test center for 5 hours. After 6+ hours in there, I know I’d be thinking “what’s the square of the hypotenuse of LUNCH?!? What is the definition of LUNCH?!” Just as I was about to bag, they called my name.

I sign in at 1:12pm. I sit down at the computer and begin. Will my energy hold out? Did I take enough caffeine, or maybe too much? All that starts to fade as I sink into the first question. It’s asking me how I feel about politicians with a dark side. I dig in! My mind is in gear, making connections, developing a convincing argument and BAM! “JAVA EXCEPTION” the computer vomits onto the screen. WTF? I turn around in my chair, as if yanked out of The Matrix. A woman sitting opposite me turns away from her desk a moment later looking bewildered. She whispers something that I can’t understand to me and all I can spit out is a grumbling “I don’t know.”

I think back to when I was checking in. The attendant had said something about, “If the screen goes blank, come back here.” Or maybe it had been “When…”. Grrr. I go back to the attendant, I explain how I can’t go on. With a bit of sympathy in her voice she says how the test is run over the internet and there’s no way to fix things at this end. She’s a nice enough lady. She gives me a piece of paper with some numbers scribbled on it and describes how I can reschedule the appointment.

I wandered around downtown San Francisco for an hour, trying to purge my huge buildup of energy.