Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Tonight's Menu...

Tonight for dinner: delicious salad of fresh feta cheese, baby greens, roasted red peppers, avocado, olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Tanya made this for dinner a few weeks ago, and I've this is now my third time recreating it, I love it so much!

(Forgive the picture quality, but I wanted to give you some idea of what the thing looked like...)
Yes, I am a poor college student. Yes, I am eating my salad out of a sauce pan. Don't judge me.

This is from the last time we made the dish, but this time around I'm subbing out the olives and adding fresh avocado instead...a taste of California home. Mmmmm.

Saturday, May 22, 2010

Sculpture Park

For your viewing pleasure: a random smattering of photos from my most recent field trip to Goodwood Sculpture Park. It was a really cool place, a sculpture park set in the middle of a forest, right on the edge of big fields of sheep, and near enough to the sea that you could almost smell it. You just got to wander through the paths, running across strange sculptures, both big and small, all the while. Pretty cool stuff.








Cherries, locally grown cauliflower, and freshly ground coffee from the farmers market. I think I want to live in that place forever.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Updates and hellos

I have been such a bad blogger. I should be relegated to blogger purgatory. *gulp* sorry!!

A quick update, because that seems like all I have time for...

I've been working my butt off to get some essays done a bit early, in preparation for my boyfriend to be here in six short days!!! Ya, I'm a bit excited. So that means I've written approximately 100,000 words over the past week, and still have about 25,000 to go, and damn does that get old fast.

Still had a bit of time to cook, though, so tonight I made some delicious homemade mac n cheese, which I'm eating as I type. Yes, even dinner seems like it has to be multitasked right now.

So lots of work + a bit of stress = low grade anxiety attacks throughout the day. Luckily, I am a champ at anxiety attacks after all these years, so I am totally kicking their butts. True story.

I was the subject of not one, not two, but three separate tourists' photos today. I was just working in a park on my laptop, and literally had three separate people come up to me, stand about 4 feet away, point cameras straight at me, and take a picture. It was kind of surreal. Now I'm in a few Japanese families' photo albums, though, so...that's fun.

There are still birds living in my chimney, they are still hooting at all hours of the day. Thankfully they seem to sleep through the night, though, so I appreciate that!

Alright, back to work. Wish me luck!

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Delicious Dinner

Roasted red bell peppers, feta cheese, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and herbs, all tossed in a nice green salad. Delicious Mediterranean dinner, indeed.

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Blech blech blech--where did all this work come from?? All of a sudden I actually have tons to do...merh.

Monday, May 10, 2010

Field Trip

Off to Goodwood Sculpture Park and Chichester today. Long day of driving, walking, and art-seeing. Looking forward to it!

Sunday, May 9, 2010

What A Day

What a day. Walking to Grantchester, drinking tea in fields, chilling with cows, watching my mom open her Mother's Day present, making pizza, playing with friends, dancing, thinking excitedly about the future, playing capture the flag in the freezing cold, walking home happy. Lovely.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Florence, and other things

Ok, so things have been crazy over here this week. I have, most days, simply locked myself in the dorm and done ridiculous amounts of work. One class presentation and one paper down, one class presentation and one paper to go. Then, a field trip on Friday to see various contemporary art things in London. Whoohoo! But, before that, and in a brief interlude between essay writing, preparing for my presentation, and laundry (ugh. laundry day here never ceases to be awful), I thought I'd do a quick post about Florence. So, Florence! I apologize for the disjointed-ness of this post in advance....

Florence was beautiful. Relaxed, calm, pretty, warm, lovely. The people still made sure that we knew nothing about coffee, or Italy, or the world, for that matter, because we were but lowly stupid Americans, but once we got over that particular aspect of the trip, we had a great time.

Our hostel was awesome. It had a beautiful patio and garden, nice rooms, free breakfast, super-cheap dinner, and super-cheap wine. What more could you want?

The Duomo. Crazy amazing on the outside, quite underwhelming on the inside. But the outside, wow. The picture doesn't do it justice, but the building is made up of the most vibrant green, pink, and white marble. Incredibly colorful and awesome.

The Baptistry Doors. GORGEOUS, but unfortunately replicas. The originals are still under restoration after a massive flood that covered the city in about 13 feet of water. And when they're restored, they'll probably go to a museum, not back outside.


The Arno river with the famous Vecchio Bridge in the background:

Oh my god, the world's best Gellato:

Florence also had lots of pretty little things, like this silver:

And...maybe this poster...or this might just be strange. I'm not sure:

Also: Oh my god, ridiculously small car!

And, last but not least, the Great Synagogue of Florence. You weren't allowed to take pictures inside, bags had to be checked into lockers, you had to walk through a metal detector, and there were armed guards outside, but god damn, was that place beautiful....

Saturday, May 1, 2010

May Day

Rabbit rabbit! It's May, in which the weather's getting warmer, I'm going on two cool field trips, taking some interesting dance classes, having cooking dates with friends, my boyfriend is coming to visit, and things are generally looking good. Yay! (Oh...and...two essays and two class presentations due this week...merh.)