Approaching the holiday season

It' there: I started my Christmas holiday. I decided to start it early this year, after I have spent three weeks managing the technicalities of merging contributions of 80 professors into a 200 page 100MB pdf document containing this year's research report of the school for engineering and science of IUB. At least we were using TeX and subversion otherwise the nightmare would have been complete. Submission deadline to the dean was on Monday, so after reporting on esearch I could do some actual research myself or..... go on holiday.

I picked option one for three quite productive days and then moved to option two. Just five minutes before I intended to leave I received an email from a journal editor that requested a referee report on some paper to be written until January 3rd. Just in case I get too bored
under the tree...

Now, I am at my parents' place and turned on the computer so check what has happened on the net over night and there is a message from Clifford asking me to My instructions:

1. Grab the book closest to you.
2. Open to page 123, go down to the fifth sentence.
3. Post the text of next 3 sentences on your blog.
4. Name of the book and the author.
5. Tag three people.

So, let's do it. 1. done 2. done. 3.:

500g Kastanien werden kruz angeröstet, dann von der äußeren und inneren Haut befreit und in Wasser weichgekocht; ich tropfe sie ab und streich sie durch ein feines Sieb. Dann rühre ich 150g Butter mit 150g Zucker und 2 Päckchen Vanillinzucker, einer Prise Salz sowie 3 ganzen Eiern recht schaumig und gebe den dicklichen Kastanienbrei dazu.

4. It's "Backe backe Kuchen mit Erna Horn" by Erna Horn, a recipe book for bakery. The quotation above is from recipe number 242 "Kastanientorte" a maroon cake. 5. is more difficult (given the exponential growth of these kinds of chain letter things). I tried to get out of the string theory circles by handing this over to Georg, Anna, and Amelie.