Chocolate Bunny Resurrection

Anda (my providence BFF) and I cooked a full Easter dinner for 15 people today? It's a long story. It was awesome, and I am tired. Anyways.

In an Easter Miracle, my annual chocolate bunny died a terrible death at the hands of a chef's knife, but was blessedly resurrected in the form of chocolate-banana bread pudding. With Caramel Sauce!

my mom is awesome at gchat

I love my mom...

Carol: I just discovered the emoticons :D
there's no stopping me now :P

me: oh goodness
you are making me laugh
and my ribs hurt!

Carol: And on that note, I'll say goodnight. :-/
me: good night mama
<3

Mom: Love you <3

the world is blossoming

At the risk of incurring another foot of snow, it appears I survived my first New England winter. The snow is melted, it's been raining daily, and within the last week the trees have started to bud and blossom. Early spring is always my favorite time of year-I think because those first signs of life are something you need so badly at the end of winter. I'll put up pictures a little later-I couldn't take any today becacuse of the rain.

And so four months into my life here, I am alive and well. Work is great, after the first few weeks on a very steep learning curve I'm patching like a champ and almost done with my first data set. I love the project, the lab, my boss-of course there are frustrations and late nights and days when I write "SORROW AND RAGE" in my lab notebook, but on the whole it is good and satisfying. I'm still adjusting to being a lab where the attitude is to work hard, do good science, and have a happy and healthy life outside of that. In my old life, it was more do good science and just because it is Sunday doesn't mean you can leave before six. So that is awesome.

I am remembering how achingly slow it is to build a life in a new place, particularly if you are a cold-natured person like me. There are certainly days of crushing loneliness. But I'm doing the things you are supposed to, and I have faith it will come in time. I am going to take some continuing ed drawing classes at the art school in the fall. I transferred my church membership, although I have only attended services a few times, because 10 AM is early, y'all. I joined the department intramural softball team. Twenty-four hours after the first practice, my body feels like there must have been a part of practice where I was run over by a truck and then everybody hit me with bats and I blocked out the memory of it. There are little things that are settling into routines of friendship-the grad student in the lab and I cook dinner together once a week, and others have started joining us on occasion. We're all having easter dinner on Sunday.

I still love my apartment, but am completely overwhelmed by making it mine and have sort of stalled on unpacking the last five or so boxes. It is still very empty, although I am hoping to paint and buy furniture for the living room in the next month or two. I have no idea what I am going to do design wise-I love doing this stuff but am paralyzed by the blank slate. Guest room, I hope to get set up maybe later this summer-so I'll be ready for visitors soon!

100 books-March

I had high hopes for March, but as I am now basically competent at my job, I find myself expected to "know the literature" and "produce data", activities that limit my reading time. And so, March was a bit of quiet month for reading...I"ll have to work hard to catch up in April!

22. Great House Nicole Krauss This book makes you work for it, but I think it pays off in the end. It is a lovely, winding meditation on memory and permanence.
21. The Children's Book A. S. Byatt. I should say that I rarely finish a book that I am not enjoying while reading. Unless it is for PSBC or one of those good-for-you, suffer through it classics, if I start to feel like the book is becoming a chore, I usually put it down. So any book I finished is one that I felt deserved to be read all the way through, and that is an endorsement by itself. That said. This book was SO LONG. and had SO MANY CHARACTERS and SO MANY STORYLINES that I wondered if it had been edited at all. Parts were magical and engaging, while others seriously dragged. It took me over a week to read (part of the reason for my slow progress this month). A week! I read books in hours or days, not weeks!
20. Room Emma Donaghue This was more like it. I got the book from the library on a saturday, came in, sat down in my reading chair, opened it and didn't get up until I turned the last page two hours later. Excellent
19. The Lady Matador's Hotel Cristina Garcia I've loved Garcia since Biffy and I read Dreaming in Cuban for PSBC last year. This one didn't blow my socks off like that one did, but it is a nice quick little read.
18. The Lonely Polygamist, Brady Udall I liked this much more than I thought I would. Going through it I really didn't know what to make of it, but at the end I thought "huh, that was really good" It's an offbeat but sweet book about grief and love
17. Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee Sort of the opposite-a brisk engaging read, but at the end I wasn't sure I really liked it


Previously
16. The Wordy Shipmates Sarah Vowell
15. The Warmth of Other Suns: The epic story of America's great Migration, Isabelle Wilkerson
14. Little Bee Chris Cleave
13 Fool Christopher Moore
12. A Dirty Job Christopher Moore
10. Lolita Vladimir Nabakov
9. Super Sad True Love Story Gary Shteyngart
8. The Swan Thieves, Elizabeth Kostova.
7.Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood.
6. Faithful Place, Tana French.
5. The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People who Read them, Elif Batuman.
4. Purgatorio, Dante Alighieri.
3. The Scarpetta Factor, Patricia Cornwell.
2. Bite Me, Christopher Moore.
1. Devil in the White City Eric Larson.