Caltech

Comfort Tacos

My friend Melissa knows what she likes. Window shopping at Prada and Gucci in Beverly Hills? No thank you, she says, but she'll take us to a "really good taco place" instead. "It's authentic. Most authentic." After a half hour's hazy highway drive, we park on the street and walk a block to the auto shop parking lot hosting our dinner spot, Tacos Los Poblanos #1 Estilo Tijuana. The line snakes almost all the way across the parking lot. Tacos... Read more →

Day in the Life as a Tech Company Intern

It's a Wednesday at work, and while I wait for some measurements to run, let me tell you about a day on the job at my internship at a sensor company. 8:50 a.m. I roll up to the bayside office complex on my bike, winded. I just can't keep pace with those speedy little automobiles. I climb up to the fourth floor and head straight to the lab to check on the measurements I started last evening. 9:00 a.m. Crap.... Read more →

Three-Ingredient Peanut-Butter Cookies

I'm usually suspicious of recipes with click-bait titles like this one. "Simple" and "easy" and "N-ingredient" baked goods have been around longer than click-bait itself, masquerading as genuine homemade desserts in my grandmother's cookbooks and on Betty Crocker's website today. Consisting of ingredients as authentically American as cake mix + pudding + oreos + jello + whipped cream, these recipes seem like they'd be as shockingly sweet as they are simple. The ingredients for these cookies, on the other hand,... Read more →

Watching the Perseid Meteor Trickle

It was 10pm on a Sunday night, and as I'd been lazing around all afternoon, I decided to drive up to a nature park to watch the Perseid Meteor Shower. I pulled into the empty parking lot and gingerly stepped out into the dark. Leaves fluttered in the breeze, birds chirped, and tiny footsteps crinkled dead leaves on the ground. Not going to lie, the footsteps part freaked me out a bit. But if there were coyotes, I'd see glowing... Read more →

Dourmet Dishes: Chickpea Dumplings

This is the part of a series of posts on food that can be prepared in a dorm kitchen amidst the craziness of life at Caltech. Waiting out the city traffic hour after a Saturday morning hike with a friend, I ended up wandering through the aisles of an Asian supermarket. Among the rows of snacks, sauces, and seafood were boxes of the classic Golden Curry and bags of bbang, the Frisbee-sized rice crackers I used to munch on as... Read more →

Feelin' Sharp

I finally did it. Four weeks into summer - that's four weeks of trying to slice apples and chicken thighs with a knife older than me and duller than my teeth - I worked up the motivation to go on Amazon and purchase my own: a gleaming, German-steel chef's knife. Deciding which knife(s) to buy was actually quite an ordeal. The top two contenders were a Sagler chef's knife, relatively pricey at $14.99 for the one item, and a set... Read more →

Dourmet Dishes: Lemon-Watermelon Slushie

This is the part of a series of posts on food that can be prepared in a dorm kitchen amidst the craziness of life at Caltech. I don't want to scare you away, but it gets pretty warm in Pasadena. I got out before the triple-digit dog days of summer but did catch a few days of some serious heat in the spring. My roommates and I would sit at our desks in our apartment and work, the din of... Read more →

Pine Trees

One thing I love about NorCal is the trees. Pine, spruce, fir, all of them. I'm here for my internship this summer, and they're quite the novelty - we don't have this many around Caltech, and definitely not at home. They remind me of road trips as a kid with my family, driving up winding mountain roads with the windows down, taking in the splotchy sunlight, brisk air, and this incredible smell - how do I describe it? Citrusy, wintry.... Read more →

Dourmet Dishes: Imperfect Produce Review

This is the part of a series of posts on food that can be prepared in a dorm kitchen amidst the craziness of life at Caltech.* If you use Facebook and live in LA, you may have recently been seeing ads for Imperfect Produce. Imperfect Produce is a grocery delivery service that rescues undesired fruits and veggies, whether oddly-shaped and or just surplus, from being wasted. It reroutes the destinies of these googly-eyed garden harvests from the garbage to our... Read more →

Episodes from the Office: Not My Confrontation (continued)

This is part of a series of stories of workplace interactions that cracked me up, made me cringe, or maybe even both. Sado's typical cheeriness now sounds forced. Although I'm still standing by the doorway, I feel caught in the crossfire. Back and forth it goes, tense but to my surprise, never bubbling over. Then I realize that the debate is not so much tense as it is intense - although each thinks the other is wrong, they are good... Read more →