Tumultuous January

In the middle of January we received some upsetting news – Amy had been told that my uncle Willy might have to be put in hospice care. He’d been in the hospital for months battling cancer so I booked emergency plane tickets to visit him with my parents. It turned out that he was in quite good spirits for the situation, and thankfully had the same mischievous spirit I expected although he was a bit slower than I'm used to. He had started to grow a beard in competition with his buddy Johnny, and was driving all the nurses nuts, so I took that as a good sign. We also got to visit with Angie and her cute kiddos, who are growing like weeds. I left feeling quite hopeful, but still worried. Willy was let out the week afterward to go finally go home and pet his dog.


This happened to coincide with a performance of Flash's at Cornell, which was terribly convenient... I hadn’t seen her performance in a while and had forgotten how clever it was. Afterward, we drove around with Flash to visit Taughgannock – the first time I’ve seen it frozen, very cool - and some wineries as is traditional.


The next we took a bread class at Enrico Biscotti that I had given Peter for Christmas. We had originally booked it for the previous weekend but the staff was kind enough to let me switch. It was pretty entertaining – over a HUGE brunch spread, Enrico himself told us the history of the world as according to bread, from ancient Greeks and Egyptians to current day. I wasn’t completely sold on his schpeal – it was told with too much certainty to be historically accurate – but it was fun to listen to anyway. He then pulled out great vats of dough and showed us how to roll a nice skin on a loaf and use the brick oven they have. We also all made foccaccia with various toppings and learned some dough tips. Throughout, Enrico rattled off an impressive array of bread-related stories. A very pleasant morning with tons of food! We brought back two giant loaves each of bread and foccaccia. Pretty neat.

New and exciting

We've done a lot of interesting things in the past two weeks! Who would've thought.

A superb, gorgeous sunset followed us on our drive west, after a mighty satisfying break. I also got to participate in the Summit classes this year, which are fun, random classes offered to kids a few days before the real semester starts. I took yoga (which kicked my butt!), gun safety (won the shooting "competition" with 6/6 shots in the target), massage therapy (yay), and self defense (very neat). Not so good for productivity, but great for learning a bunch of seemingly separate things. =)


In other new skills news, pop sent me back with a lot of chestnuts. I wanted to make a few things with them, and after a lifetime of using the X method of roasting chestnuts, this time I tried www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnthcUOQWTo - parboiling the halves for two minutes and then squeezing the meat out with a pliers (couldn't pass up the opportunity to mix the toolbox with the kitchen). It actually worked pretty well! Learn something new every day.


In keeping with my New years resolution of trying / cooking more new foods, I present brussells sprouts! I have never ever tried brussells sprouts and thought, heck, it can't be as bad as that week we had cabbage three ways (all of them less than satisfying). And, when made with bacon fat and chestnuts, they weren't! Success.


On a final "doing new things" note, we tried making grilled cheese our silly toaster bags tonight. It was more of a success than I had thought, and the bags can be used "up to 50 times"! Hmm! Probably not saving ourselves much work if we have to wash the bags too, but it is amusingly novel. As is the consistency of Peter's face in those shots...hehe.


Til next time!

End of 2010

Ah, the silent sound of blogging neglect. Sorry! Between trying to write my first paper for publication (eugh), doing cool things, the holidays...blogging has been on my list, but not far up it. I have, however, almost caught myself up to date with regards to my photo albums, even putting in some scrapbooky stuff like ticket stubs and receipts that I've been meaning to do. Christmas break was wonderful for that, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

December started with our first snow, and the Lawrenceville cookie tour! Although the cookies were sometimes hit or miss, we've never been down Butler and it was a terrific excuse to wander around. We even learned about a small-scale ciderhouse not far from our apartment, which was a very welcome surprise. We will definitely have to check that area out again.


Scholastically I did pretty well this semester, and hung out with a bunch of great people in pittsburgh before we left for Peter's parent's party. We arrived with a car full of stuff and a front full of salt (it was so white that I mistook our car for someone else's after coming out of the rest stop, oops). It was great, and set the tone for the rest of 2010 - great parties! There was a cheg '09 reunion at Iron Hill and Kate's, a Maclary party with even Mr. Yonko, then Whale band of course and all the other typical festivities. I tried to be a little more responsible w.r.t. gift wrapping this year (and gift-sourcing, thank you etsy and little shops), using old boxes, spare bandanas (boy was that fun!) and extra comics to wrap my gifts. Of course, afterwards I found my stash of old holiday paper, but it was really fun to try the cloth wraps and I am sure I'll do more of it in the future.


Speaking of the holiday, our 1990 cereal box Sugar Bear is still going strong! As are the very clever folks from Bing's, who thought up this santa-on-the-rooftop layer cake that I could not bring myself to leave the store without.


I also spent a lot of time trying to clean up my room and the basement, taking advantage of the two weeks I was spending in DE. I donated two large boxes of books, made some extra space downstairs and definitely cleaned out a decent bit of my room. Some might say that's boring, but I enjoyed it. As a vamily we also sorted through a lot of pennies, culminating in the first time I have seen my parents stay up until 1am outside of new year's. And $15 in pennies isn't too shabby. There was some protesting about the cleaning, but mostly it was great fun. Peter seems pleased that he has infected me with a need to clean, vs the packrat I was a few years ago. I'm okay with this, i guess!

Then it was New year's eve! This was the first year that peter and I haven't had concrete plans, and boy did we wing it with Edwin and Jeff. There was nothing good on main street, so we escaped to a very tasty meal at the Bamboo House. Then it was off to Edwin's apartment, which is much cooler than it has any right to be and includes a host of high-tech, awesome nerf guns. We watched The Thin Man (finally found it! all this time I was too short to see it on top of the home TV cabinet. curses), drank fancy champagne with Snap, watched Anderson Cooper and Kathy Griffin, passed out, and overall had a good end of the year.


2010 was pretty interesting, full of academics and adventures in Pittsburgh and beyond. I hope to be a little healthier, a little more efficient, and a little more involved and/or interested in my research next year. Here's to 2011!