Woke up, for the third time this week, to strange, circular brusies on my right leg. Whaaat?

Headache (state of life right now...grrr), logic homework, I'll save the feminist theory readings for tomorrow, I'd love to watch Chicago right now, missing my boy.

How is it that I was dead-on-my-feet tired at 8:30, but by virtue of having to power through to make a 9:30 appointment, I stayed up and am, now, completely wide awake when I need to go to bed. I sincerely hate insomnia, and that it seems to be rearing its ugly head in my life once again. Why can't you just leave me alone? Alternatively: all of my technology hates me. Funsies.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

Field Trip

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

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.

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....

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.)

Roma!

I'm finally settled back into the school routine here in Cambridge, so it seemed high time to start catching you up on my trip! First stop, Rome, where the coffee was delicious, the streets were crowded (even more than normal, as we were there over Easter), the art and architecture were amazing, and the sense of history was overwhelming.

Ubiquitous coffee shot. Pun...intended. So much coffee was had on this trip. Most of it delicious. This cup sure was. And STRONG, too.

Of course we hit the major highlights, like the Colosseum, which almost doesn't seem real, I think partly because you're just staring up at it going "Wow, I've seen pictures of that all my life. And here it is....this is crazy." That happened a lot, actually, and it never ceased to be strange. You'd just be walking down the street and be like, oh, hello, Trajan's Column, how's it going?

We also saw the Trevi Fountain, which I loved, but so did about 8bagillion other people, I guess, because it was SO crowded!

One of my favorite parts of Rome was the Baths of Caracalla, a not-on-your-average-tourist-map site of ruins that a friend staying in Rome brought us to. The place was huge and so much of it was still in tact...

...including some amazing mosaics that just chill outside in the elements, and yet have been around since the Roman Empire!

We went in a dizzying number of churches throughout the course of this trip (with I took with two good friends from school, Katie and Andy), and they were each stunningly beautiful. Honestly, I can't even remember the name of this one, but I loved it's ceiling, and the golden light on the underside of the arches.
The art in the churches (and everywhere else, for that matter) was equally amazing. Please forgive the blurry photograph, but these are two works by Caravaggio that were on display in one of the Churches. They were in a dark apse whose lights could only be turned on by putting a coin into a machine. Italy does know how to gouge it's tourists...But it was worth it, to be that close to such amazing art.

There was so much amazing sculpture all over the city, but these two lovely pieces were in the Vatican Museum, where I could have spent days wandering around, if only we'd had the time!
The building itself was art--it seemed like every square inch was decorated with something-or-other. The opulence was overwhelming, and a actually quite saddening, as Sarah Silverman's Sell the Vatican, Feed the World and other similar sentiments came to mind more than once....
We spent an afternoon and evening walking around the Jewish Ghetto, which, while steeped in history, wasn't too much to look at. I did love the storefronts, though!
Dinner at a restaurant in the Ghetto actually provided me with one of my favorite stories from Rome. Katie, Andy, and I met up with a friend of mine and Andy's from Cambridge, a German named Konstantine, and his French friend, Xavier. The five of us went to dinner at this tiny tiny restaurant in the Ghetto, which, while being in the Jewish district, was not a Kosher restaurant. We had a very hard time ordering with our waiters, who spoke very little English (none of us spoke Italian) but were very much mocking us the entire time...it's hard to describe exactly what they were doing, but they made frequent mentions of how they were not McDonnalds and we'd have to wait a long time for our food, sighed exasperatedly when we each ordered a dish and made a big deal about how long five meals would take to prepare, laughed with each other quite obviously about us, next to our table, and were just generally very uninviting. When the food came, the waiter plopped a plate of spaghetti with pork down in front of me, and I immediately tried to explain that I had not ordered that, but just a simple spaghetti in tomato sauce. He jabbed his finger at his notepad, showing me that he'd written down pork. The thing is, I don't eat pork, as I keep Kosher, so I know I didn't order it. I tried to explain, and he just got more and more angry, saying it was my fault for ordering wrong, and raising his voice as he tried to get me to keep the plate. My friends at the table and I were all sort of shocked and stunned by the sheer awkwardness of it all, until finally Andy just erupted with a repetition of "Jewish! Kosher! Kosher! Jewish!" while pointing at me wildly. This actually seemed to do the trick, as they angrily whipped my plate away and brought back my real order a little while later. However, in their lasting graciousness, they charged me for the more expensive plate. Oh, Rome, how I will miss you....

Next stop: Florence!

A very good day

So I am officially going to be traveling through Europe this summer with my boyfriend....I don't think it gets much better than that! And he's coming to Cambridge in under a month!! What a damn good day...

rain

Didn't think I'd be happy to see the return of rain to Cambridge, but I just love that humid warm rain smell....

zzz

Well, I guess I discovered a cure for my insomnia...do my Mary Wollstonecraft reading. Hello, unintended nap! Ugh. I'm going to make myself a strong cup of tea and try to get back to it...

Here comes the sun

I'm mildly afraid that the pigeons flapping about outside my windows are going to fly inside (the way a gigantic killer bee did yesterday, by the way...), but it is still too warm outside for me to want to close them! It was legitimately lovely outside today. LOVELY. I walked around without even a jacket on...first time since getting here! It's like early fall in Los Angeles...crisp and clean and warm and beautiful. Went to the library to pick up some required reading on Mary Wollstonecraft, but also got sidetracked and picked up Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkeban, Beginning Old Testament Study, and Feminist Interpretations of the Bible....y'know...for fun.... :-D

Yumm

Avocado and cheese sandwich and some tangerines. Mmmmm, late-afternoon snack.

Hooray!

Ballet class = total success! I am so happy and am definitely going back next week! Tomorrow, I will be sore, but still very happy. Now, for a big, carb-y dinner...pasta, here I come!