I once saw a group on a popular social networking site titled: "Nothing Gets My Room Cleaner than a Paper Due Friday." Accordingly, I have several non-academic pursuits that I use to distract myself when necessary. Here is where you can-if you're so inclined-find out about what I do behind the scenes:

Goldfish

I have three goldfish that I'm very proud of. Our relationship is very gender-normative, I understand that but here they are anyway:

Moo is the hungriest and the biggest. He's assertive and isn't afraid to push the others out of the way. He sleeps behind the rock in the back-left. (photo: Lauren Collister)

This is Cid (named for a video-game character, not the Spanish heroic figure). He's our charmer; bold and charismatic, he nibbles our fingers if we're too slow to release the food when we feed him. He usually sleeps in the plants in the front-left. (photo: Lauren Collister)

Finally, meet our beauty: Fran. She's the small, shy one. When I feed them, I make a point to give her a head start because I'm sure she's not eating enough. She really loves peas, more than the others I think. I see her most often in the bridge, but she probably sleeps underneath it. (photo: Lauren Collister)

Baking

My other very time-consuming hobby is baking. It's good to get my hands in there and work the dough; kneading is very therapeutic. Most of all-and I know how clichéd this is-I enjoy making people happy by baking delicious things for them to eat. Here are a few photos of the things I'm proud enough of to take a photo of:

My old stand-by: chocolate chip cookies. I've been working on perfecting the Betty Crocker recipe for the better part of twenty-two years, starting first by standing on a kitchen chair at the counter with my father. I'm finding a few tricks that make a better cookie, both in terms of flavor and texture.

Occasionally, I'll have a go at something a bit more technically challenging, like baklava-but it's not nearly as hard to make as people want you to think it is. The hardest part is choosing and then defending a recipe. Everyone has a favorite. Besides, you're likely to choose a Greek recipe and everyone knows that Baklava is Turkish... or Lebanese... or Jordanian... you get the picture.

I have a few recipes in my arsenal that possess a very useful characteristic I call the "Wow Factor." It's a recipe that's very easy to make, but it never fails to raise people's eyebrows and elicit a few "wow"s. This lemon cake is one of them. The recipe calls for it to be made in loaf pans, but I think the Bundt cake is so much more attractive; and I don't have any silicon loaf pans.

This is the result of giving the recipient free rein in choosing its components. "What do you want on your birthday cake?" I asked. Here you have it, then: the bottom layer is rice-krispie treat, the top layer is Madeira. The icing is butter cream and you see an extended family of hand-shaped and -tinted fondant penguins.

PS - I don't recommend rice-krispie treat cake layers. It's way too sweet.

This is the cake that started it all; a friend of a friend heard that I was interested in cake decorating and asked me to make her wedding cake. After gaining her assurance that she knew I was but an amateur and nearly killing her with marzipan on the first test cake (a word to the wise: some brides have nut allergies), this is the final result. I originally wanted a butter cream filligree, but two problems prevent that: the merciless Texas heat in August and my rather shaky, unpracticed hand.

This is the cake that my good friend and I did for my older brother's wedding in December 2008. Just a simple fondant-draped cake and my brother's choice of cake'topper.

And finally, the cake that I am probably most proud of: a Nintendo controller cake iced in hand-tinted butter cream and decorated with hand-tinted and -shaped fondant pieces. I made this for my fiancé's graduation party after he earned his Master's of Entertainment Technology.

Correspondence

I spend a lot of time (and postage) on traditional snail-mail. I'm an active member of Post Crossing, a free website where you can send a postcard and receive one back from somewhere else in the world. It's always a challenge to see what meaningful message I can fit on a postcard, and it's great fun to see what kinds of postcards and messages you receive in return. I was scanning in my postcards as I received them, but now I have too many and I don't think I'll ever catch up.

I have quite a few pen pals whom I write with varying degrees of frequency, but there really is an inimitable joy in opening your mailbox and finding hand-written correspondence addressed to you with funky stamps attached. I love imagining the journey of each piece of mail, its long game of waiting: waiting in the mailbox, waiting in a distribution bin, waiting on a truck and then a plane and then more trucks, and finally waiting in another mailbox until I open it and pull it out. It's also, not incidentally, a great way to put language skills to social use!