smiling on the hills

James and I went cross-country skiing on Saturday with Diana and Greg. They are staying in Maine for the month, and we met halfway at a little farm called Smiling Hill just south of Portland. It had rained the night before so I wasn't expecting great conditions, and indeed some parts were kind of puddley, like there was a layer of yellow water below a top crust of ice. But besides that, it was super fun! It was a good workout, but with just enough sliding to get a skating feeling on the flat parts. We were totally sore by the end of it, and just a little banged up from falling at the bottom of all the downhill parts. (It's practically impossible to stop on x-country skis.) But we had a great time - it was sunny and bright, and all the open space of the farm was so refreshing. The added bonus was that it's also a dairy farm, and while we didn't see any cows, we were in heaven browsing through their little market store, with fresh milk in flavors like blueberry and chocolate, artisan cheeses like camembert and cheddar, and delicious varieties of fudge. I almost want to go back just for some more blueberry milk! What a great state Maine is.

dream garden

Woo hoo! I will officially have my own garden plot in the Squirrel Brand Community Garden this year! I am already dreaming of the gorgeous flowers and scrumptious vegetables and fragrant herbs I will grow! I fear that I will choose too many things to fit in the plot, but I guess 10'x10' is actually pretty big. I started browsing through the Burpee.com website for some inspiration, and possibly to make a list for ordering seeds. Marigolds would be easy to grow, but they don't look great in vases, and seem rather common. I grew a bunch of zinnias last year, which bloomed like crazy, so I'm still zinnia-ed out. How about asters? Or cosmos? Maybe geraniums? I really have no idea here, to be honest. I'm so inspired by the flower arrangements I see on the Saipua blog, but I don't know what anything's called or if it will grow in the Boston summer. At least I will hopefully be able to grow some zucchini this year!

Well, I have a Vokabeltest in German class tomorrow morning, so I should probably study. !

a girl can never have too many earrings

I painted my fingernails dark gray, a shiny pewter, over the weekend. I usually never paint my nails because it takes no time to chip and look horrible. And it's been more than a decade since I painted my nails anything but a pink-related hue. But for some reason I am loving this steel gray! I went shopping today, and I always touch all the clothes, partially to feel the texture and weight, and partially to see how it looks next to my skin tone. And today I was like, oooh, this looks good with my nails! Haha... but this nail color will only last a week, probably, and the clothes have to match me for much longer. Anyway, I am beyond excited because I found this j.crew dress that looked similar to one I was drooling over at their website. I thought I would try it on, just to see how it looked. But it's so awesome I had to buy it! It's stretchy with a full, swingy skirt, and a more fitted stretchy strapless top. And it's a dark turquoise - I cannot resist that color. Now I really can't wait for spring!

Oh, and I also bought two pairs of earrings. Dangly, of course.

I had a couple hockey games over the weekend with the club team, which were fun even though we lost. Northeastern really has a good team. I got my skates sharpened just before the second game, and man it made such a difference in being able to skate faster! It was exhilarating.

I managed to scrub off that gross hockey smell in time for a cozy v-day dinner with James, which we cooked at home. We started with a Raspberry and Almond Salad, followed by Broiled Tilapia with Thai Coconut-Curry Sauce, and finishing with two most delicious Molten Mocha Cakes. Man, we are good.

excited and terrified

Spring semester starts tomorrow! I can't believe IAP is already over. I'm hoping that my research momentum from IAP will carry me straight into a productive spring full of brilliant results. (Right...) I'm officially done with technical classes, so I'm stoked to really get some things done on the research front. I had my first phd committee meeting last week, and it went pretty smoothly, so I feel great about actually finishing someday. I put together a slide for the meeting with a general timeline for the rest of my phd, and it actually scared me a bit to see it laid out like that, with a projected ending. Spring 2010, baby!

The last two weekends in a row, my club hockey team has had games cancelled due to our opponents not being able to field enough skaters for a game. Totally lame! I get really excited for games, and it is so not cool to cancel on us last minute! I hope we can round up a good showing for our away game at Bates College next weekend, because I don't think I can handle another cancellation now! I need my hockey fix!

Sometimes I feel like my life is a series of half-finished projects. For example, today James got some birdseed so we could make a bird feeder for the back porch, and we picked out a good milk jug to be the vessel, but I still have not cut a hole in it or attached strings. I have been working on this gray scarf for months now, and it is still 10 inches too short. I have finally cut out all the squares that will comprise my queen-size duvet cover, but I have yet to actually sew them together. It's been months since I bought the fabric. I wonder if the only project I'm capable of starting and finishing in a reasonable period of time is Making And Eating A Grilled Cheese Sandwich. Man, I am really good at that one.

how knitting a scarf is like doing a phd

I was thinking today about this blue-gray scarf I'm knitting, and also this PhD that I'm working on. They seem to have a lot in common sometimes. In both cases, you're pretty excited to get started. You begin by making a lot of mistakes, cleaning up the messes, frogging the errors, and trying again till you have a little more success. Eventually you get the hang of it, and it's just a matter of persistence before you make real progress. The more you work on it, the faster your stitches get, and the better you become at spotting patterns and stitch combinations. You start to think you might be able to design your own scarf someday. Inevitably though, you get tired of the whole journey, a marathon of yarn, with weary fingers and sore eyeballs, but the scarf is still not long enough to keep your neck warm! Winter is totally freezing your socks off, and you just want to finish the darn thing so you can move onto another project, like some mittens or something. So you sigh and pick up those bamboo needles again, reminding yourself that you really do enjoy the sheer act of knitting, most of the time anyway (when things are going smoothly), and that your scarf is going to be absolutely gorgeous when it's finished!

over again in mexico

I have a new song obsession. This time it started randomly with my tame New Year's Eve when I watched the post-midnight performances on Dick Clark's show, which included Fall Out Boy performing "I Don't Care". They were the only band that night who actually performed legitimate music, rather than some flashy, dance-obscured, lip-synched tune as did those other schmoes. Anyway, a week later I heard the song again and spiraled into an obsessive cone of that single song - I've watched the music video on YouTube about 20 times since Friday. Okay, so I don't always watch the video, as it's rather annoying, and the lyrics are too self-centered and mean-spirited, but sometimes lyrics don't matter that much to me. My obsession overlooks lyrics when needed. I also, as is typical, have developed a music-crush on the lead singer, Patrick Stump, as I did with my previous song by Regina Spektor. This is analogous to a nerd-crush, in which one is attracted to someone's super-brain, but with music this time.

Anyways... snowstorm in New England this weekend. I went up to New Hampshire to visit my James and neglected to realize that it might snow in Boston with my little car parked on Broadway, a snow-emergency street. Walking home from the T, I noticed the dearth of cars on Broadway and wanted to slap myself for not parking elsewhere. Dang it! At least they just towed it a few blocks away this time, so I could walk to the towing lot to retrieve it. A couple of overweight trashy-looking people in ill-fitting sweatpants sat in the office, collecting wads of cash for the virtue of simply owning an empty lot to which cars could be towed. They didn't even have to leave the crappy office, complete with half-eaten PBJ sandwich and a pack of Marlboros, in order to collect my hard-earned dollars. I wouldn't be surprised if these towing companies orchestrated this snow storm for Saturday night, to trap people at their most unwilling or unable to move their cars. They have Mother Nature on speed dial.

sunshine therapy

Well I guess I'm back in Cambridge. The weather in California was so perfect that this chilly slush weather is like a slap in the face. We took a walk at Surf Beach last Tuesday with James's dad and sister Connie and two dogs. It was so wonderfully warm that I took off my sweater to feel the sunshine on my bare arms. How could that be December? Unfortunately I also caught a cold while in California (go figure), and I'm now fighting off the remains of it here in Cambridge. I'm at the stage where I'm not really sick enough to not do anything useful, but my nostrils are getting all dry and flaky from all the tissue usage. Bwahh!

Anyway, James and I really did have a great break. We spent the first week in San Diego with my family, doing some last-minute holiday shopping and cooking lots of goodies for xmas. We caught up with some old Berkeley friends, who are always as awesome as I remember, and ate a bunch of Mexican food. We took my parents' dogs, Chuckie and Buffy, for a long walk in the crazy Christmas-Card Lane neighborhood, and enjoyed the sunshine coming through the corner windows in the house. My relatives came down from LA on Christmas day, and we had a tasty late lunch ending with a delicious chocolate tart made by Ayesha. (Yum.) Then Dad insisted that we all go over to the house of this Sri Lankan friend of theirs, who was having a big celebration at their similarly big house. Of course, we managed to arrive right as they were saying a prayer before their dinner, and we noticed this as we walked to the front door and saw about 60 people through the window, all holding hands and bowing heads... so we awkwardly stood outside the front door in silence for like 15 min, pretending we weren't there! Especially since most of us had never met any of those people! Our entrance was still the epitomy of awkward, but sometimes I expect nothing less from my parents. ;)

Anyway, James and I took an Amtrak train up to Lompoc the next morning - actually it took the entire day to get there. By that time I probably needed a break from my lovely family, and he was really itching to spend time with his. We crashed with his brother Jason and his wife Jeanne, and spent most days hanging around at various people's houses, cruising around town in the giant tank of a wood-paneled station wagon, eating tasty oatmeal prepared by James's dad, laughing at Wally dog. My cold started right when we arrived there, which was super lame, in addition to the fact that I seem to be allergic to most dogs and cats these days. Lame. But we had a great time, and it was really good to see everyone!

Our journey back to Cambridge was not too fun, starting with the drive to Santa Barbara airport, where I started to feel carsick, a feeling that seemed to linger with me for the rest of the day. We took a really small plane to our layover in Denver, and there was so much turbulence before landing that I was seriously not happy. And here I vow never to book a flight on such a small plane ever again! Hopefully I remember this vow next time I'm booking flights!

Well, back to work tomorrow. I really needed that break.