The Maine Thing

Hurrah! My husband and I made it to our 1 year anniversary without killing each other! Since this is definitely quite a feat for us, we decided to take ourselves out of the bustling ball of stress that is Boston and try some sweet serenity in Maine. We were really looking forward to this trip since both of us were (still are) feeling a little burned out. We stayed at a great bed and breakfast called the Three Pines Bed and Breakfast. It was wonderful! It has a gorgeous view and the owners were fantastic. It was a little off the beaten path so it wasn't as touristy as nearby Bar Harbor. I have nothing but good things to say about it!

We spent most of our time at Acadia National Park. We drove up Cadillac mountain, which had great views of the surrounding ocean (see pictures), and we biked around Jordan Pond. There are so many beautiful views in this park that you become a bit desensitized. Toward the end of the day my husband and I were like, "ANOTHER gorgeous view... again..." It was really great, though, and it was so nice to be surrounded by nature and quietude.

We also spend a little bit of time at Schoodic Park, which is a smaller park nearby. It was great because it had fewer people but still had great views of the ocean. My husband and I hiked out to what we thought was a penninsula. Unfortunately when the tide came in it became an island, and the land bridge we had crossed to get out to the point was completely covered with water. My poor husband and ultimate hero swam across the channel and got our kayak, which we had luckily brough with us. He rowed back across and picked me up. What a sweetheart! Anyway, that was our first anniversary trip together.

Mini Cheesecakes

I just made these last night. They were so easy to make, and my husband (a.k.a. my official taste tester) said they were pretty good. I found this recipe at the can you cook? blog page, which is a great blog! The recipes all seem pretty easy, and the creator of the blog takes real pictures of the finished product. Check it out or just enjoy this recipe!

You will need:

paper or foil muffin cup liners
12 vanilla wafers (I used crushed graham crackers mixed with some mini snickers)
2 8oz. packages of cream cheese, softened
1/2 cup sugar
1 Tsp. vanilla
2 eggs, slightly beaten

Line your muffin pan with foil muffin cup liners, or two paper cup liners. Place a wafer in each one.

Mix the cream cheese, sugar, and vanilla, with an electric mixer until well blended. Add the eggs and mix well. Pour (or spoon) the mixture over each wafer, filling cups 3/4 full.

Bake at 325° for 25 minutes.

Let them cool in the pan on a wire rack, then refrigerate. Garnish (or leave as is) just before serving. Mmmmmm!

Cheeseburger soup

This is one of my husband's favorite soups, probably because it has cheese and hamburger (his two major food groups) in it. It is really easy to make and very tasty. Even though we are going into the warm summer months, which are not very conducive to hot soup, I have had a couple of requests for this recipe.


1lb ground beef
3/4 c. chopped onion
3/4 c. shredded carrot
3/4 c. diced celery
3 Tbsp. butter or oil
3 c. chicken stock
4 c. diced potato
1/4 c. flour
8 oz. Velveeta cheese
1 1/2 c. milk
1 tsp. basil
1/4 c. sour cream
salt and pepper

Brown hamburger, drain, and set aside. Saute onion, carrot, celery, and basil in same pan for 5min. Stir in flour and add broth, potatoes, and beef. Bring to a boil then cover, reduce heat, and simmer for 15min or until potatoes are tender. Add cheese, milk, salt, and pepper. Cook and stir until cheese has melted. Remove from heat and stir in sour cream then enjoy!

Diseased

For the past three weeks, I have been a walking pit stop for all microbes that can make a person miserable (well, okay not quite ALL...mostly just the cold/flu related ones--thankfully no Shigella!). First, I got a sore throat that then developed into laryngitis. I am a pretty quiet person, so no talking would not normally upset me too much. Unfortunately, I had to give a lecture for class, so not talking was not an option. I spent an entire weekend trying every possible measure to get my voice back. Luckily, I recovered enough to squeak through the lecture, and it actually went fairly well (here's a tip: if you lose your voice and have to teach a class, ask the students lots of questions so they do all the talking!). Was that the end of my misery, though? Perhaps I angered the gods in some way because within days of recovering my voice I got a major sinus infection. Were the microbes content to stay in my sinuses? No! They then happily took up residence in my eyes giving me pink eye! Again (I got pink eye in college. I think I got it after petting a cow, which is a very long story...)! So not only did I sound like a fog horn, I looked like I was doing crack. Let me tell you, no one wants to be around someone who looks cracked out. I recently helped a guy pick up something he dropped. He started to thank me when he looked up, took one look at me, and walked off (well, hopefully it was because of my pink eye).

Here is the upside to having pink eye. I wore sunglasses everywhere, which may seem weird, but it is actually a terrific way to spy on people. In the subway, you don't have to worry about not making eye contact with crazy people, and if you want to check out some cute shoes or a handbag someone is wearing, you don't have to worry that they think you're a crazy person checking them out.

My Ghetto Booty goes Lucky

Get your mind out of the gutter! My title is not meant to be a double entendre. I thought about going for 'My Ghetto booty gets Lucky' or 'Getting Lucky with my Ghetto Booty', but I thought that would be even worse. What I really mean is that I have found the most fabulous pair of jeans, which is even more amazing because I have what my sisters and I refer to as a 'ghetto booty' (a.k.a a bubble butt). Finding jeans that fit right in the legs and still has room for my bum has always been a challenge for me. The few pairs of jeans I do own have been with me for at least five years, and let me tell you, they are not looking so hot. What's worse is a couple of weeks ago I lost a load of laundry at the laundry mat (either by theft or my own thoughtlessness, and knowing me it was probably the later), and this load of laundry had my one good pair of jeans left to me. I decided I had to do something about it, and I went shopping. As an undergrad, I never bought a pair of jeans over $40, and since my last jean purchase was roughly around the time of the last ice age, I decided I could afford to buy a really nice pair of jeans (read expensive here). I tried True Religion, Seven, and other designer jeans, and I was disappointed that none of them gave me the fit I wanted (plus I still couldn't bring myself to spend $200 dollars on a pair of jeans--there are children starving in Africa for crying out loud!). Then I remembered that my older sister swears by Lucky brand jeans, so I went to a local store and tried some on. Not only did they fit my bum, but they also came in long sizes and a number of styles with my personal fave being the flared. I have never been happier with a pair of jeans! The only down sides are that they are expensive (almost $100!) and you want to buy a size smaller, which feels tighter at the store but the fabric really loosens as you wear the pants. I'm so glad I got Lucky! Sorry, just had to throw that one in there one last time.

Hot Sausage and Lentil Soup

I am a big fan of most of Rachel Ray's recipes because they quick, easy, and taste good, which is about all an amateur cook such as myself requires. This recipe is, of course, courtesy of Rachel Ray. I had a bag of lentils that I had absolutely no idea what to do with and was, I admit, a strange impulse buy on my part. I made it one weekend when my husband was out of town since anything that sounds remotely like a vegetable does not appeal to him, and I lived off of it all weekend without getting tired of it. I had it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner (this was extreme and I would not advise it--I really like soups in general). I tend to alter recipes to fit my tastes, which can lead to some pretty bad meals, but this recipe still tasted great. I put the changes I made in bold below.

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, 2 turns of the pan
1 1/2 pounds bulk hot Italian sausage
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 medium onion, chopped (you can leave these out if you don't like onion)
2 portobello mushrooms, gills scraped out, chopped (I hate mushrooms so I didn't add)
1 cup pre-shredded carrots, available in sacks in produce department of the market
1 cup lentils
1 large starchy potato, peeled and chopped (I think the lentils are enough so I didn't even add potato. Besides, they are pretty bland tasting, and I think they dilute out the flavor)
Salt and pepper
1 bay leaf, fresh or dried
2 teaspoons smoked paprika (or substitute a mix of 2 teaspoons cumin, 1 teaspoon sweet paprika and 2 pinches cayenne pepper) (I used the substitute mixture and it tasted great!)
3 sprigs fresh rosemary, in tact on stems
1 (14-ounce) can fire roasted chopped tomatoes, such as Muir Glenn or, regular diced tomatoes (I used regular diced, but if you want spicier go for the fire-roasted)
6 cups chicken stock
4 cups kale or chard, a small bunch, veins removed and chopped (I didn't add this because I couldn't find it in my supermarket)
Crusty pumpernickel bread, to pass at table
Butter, for bread

Heat a medium soup pot over medium high heat. Add extra-virgin olive oil, 2 turns of the pan, then add sausage to pot and brown and crumble it, then add garlic, onions and mushrooms. Cook a few minutes, then add carrots, lentils, potato, salt and pepper, bay leaf, paprika or substitute mixture and rosemary (leaves will fall from stems as stoup cooks). Add tomatoes and broth and cover pot then raise heat to high and bring to a boil. Uncover pot and place heat back a bit but keep stoup at a good rolling boil. Cook 15 minutes until lentils and potatoes are tender. Wilt in greens in small bunches, remove rosemary stems and turn off heat. Let stand 5 minutes (or even longer since some of the lentils were still somewhat firm; I also boiled a little longer to get really soft lentils). Serve in shallow bowls with bread and butter to mop up stoup. Reheat leftovers thinning it with broth or water.

Cheap rent among other things...

Yes, finally I post something new! I'm sure almost nobody was waiting with baited breath, but here it is.

On my way to work every morning I pass by a maroon Cutlass sedan, which seems uninteresting in itself except that this car is completely packed with stuff. Clothes are stacked neatly in the back window, and every possible surface is covered with trash or cloth. Most mornings there are towels rolled up in the windows so you can't see into the back seat. After a couple of days in which the car never moved, I realized that someone actually lives in their car. Shock was my first response, but then I realized it's a great idea! Rent in Boston is so exhorbitant I'm sure I am paying the gross national product of some small third world country, or at the very least enough to feed several villages. If I lived out of a car, I would only have to pay $100/month for a residential parking permit, and I could park near my work, turning my hour commute every morning into a mere minute and a half. Fabulous! Since my husband and I have a four door pickup, we could hold dinner parties in the truck bed, and somebody must make a hot plate that can be plugged into the cigarette lighter. Even better, we can grill outside all the time. Now where would I keep all of my shoes...

I am bookless. I have no books to read right now, and I keep rereading books I all ready own. I've been so incredibly busy lately, I have not had time to go to the library. In lieu of a new book, I have been doing crossword puzzles on my way to work in order to keep my mind occupied (my mind would go crazy if I had nothing to do during my hour commute). Crossword puzzles are starting to really get on my nerves. There are somethings I am just never going to know, but how can I finish a crossword puzzle that has obscure hints like 'limerick writer - Nash' or 'Hell -'? Some days I do really great, and I almost finish a puzzle and revel in my vast knowledge. Some days I do really bad, and I barely get one out of every ten hints and curse my stupidity. Emotionally, I think books are just better for me, so if you have any suggestions let me know.

My husband and I are now the proud owners of a Toyota Tacoma. Driving a pickup in Boston is something I never thought I would have to do, but driving a pickup with a manual transmission seemed even less likely. Here I am, though, not only driving a pickup but trying to cope with a stick-shift as well. So far I have not killed it at any crucial moments such as in the middle of an intersection or in rush hour traffic. I like to think that my dad taught me how to be a pretty smooth manual-transmission operator, but I'm still a little rusty. Cross your fingers for me!

Respect Your Edges

My husband loves the cold and snow for two reasons: snowmobiling and skiing. Since there is no way a snowmobile could get into our apartment (once in our apartment it would have to replace our couch, which I don't really mind since our couch has golfers on it--see entry about living in a bachelor pad!--so we can't get much worse), my husband is left with skiing. Since I am the supporting, loving wife that I am (I think I just heard my husband guffaw...), I try to go skiing with my husband when he has no one else to go with. Personally, I'm not a terrible skiier, and I can at least hold my own on most mountains. But do I stick with skiing anymore? Needless to say, I have left the confines of what I know and wandered into the realm of the unknown, also known as snowboarding. Let me tell you, the unknown hurts and is much harder to master than you think! Falling while you are snowboarding is much worse than falling while you are skiing. If you fall while skiing, you just kind of crumple up and roll down the mountain. If you fall while snowboarding, your body is like a plank of wood so you have no time to crumple into a protective ball before falling flat on your face or the back of your head. Also, sometimes the only way to stop on a snowboard is to fall, usually on your knees or your wrists. Such physical trauma drove half of my class to quit midway through our lesson, and we were only on the bunny hill! Our instructer kept telling us to respect our edges, and believe me, I learned to respect my edges plenty by the end of the lesson. I have bruised knees, wrists, and skull to prove it. After seeing me go down the mountain, my husband asked me if I was sure I preferred snowboarding to skiing. Here's the funny thing, I really do prefer snowboarding. It's crazy, but despite all the pain I really like the challenge. Plus, I know if I can conquer snowboarding, I can do anything!

Heroes

My favorite new show on primetime is Heroes (my favorite character, Hiro the time traveler, is shown on the right). Those of you who know me best are probably not surprised by this. I have a history of enjoying extraordinary/fantastical/bizarre characters and plots. I love X-men, Star Wars, and most sci-fi shows, and fantasy novels are my guilty pleasure. Why exactly do I like this genre so much? Well, I'm not entirely sure, but I think it is the combination of appealing to my belief that everyone has some unique gift that makes them extraordinary and my crazy imagination, which leads me to believe that nothing is too far fetched. Anyway, I digress. I am totally hooked on Heroes. If you haven't started watching it, you should! Plus, NBC makes it easier for you by allowing you to watch past episodes online. Pretty soon you will be wondering what kind of super power you would have if you were on the show. Lucky for you, the website has a quiz so you can find out what kind of hero you would be. My super power? Flying, of course.

I work on an island!

(I know, I know, it has been a while since I last posted a message. I have no excuse except for work, work, work. Anyways, I will try to do better in the future, but I can make no promises!)

My work environment is very isolated from the outside world. I am not entirely clear on why this is. We do not work on classified material, so that cannot be the cause. Granted we have a 'guard' who you have to pass to get into the building, but he/she only slows people down. We have internet access even if we don't have television or other sources of media. Despite all this, I don't think I could be more isolated from the outside world unless I was in Fort Knox!

Here is a great example of what I am talking about. I am sure most people who aren't living under a rock have heard about the potential-bomb-plot turned marketing-ploy-gone-bad incident in Boston. Half of the city was shut down almost all day, and all traffic was totally gridlocked. The incident was all over the news. Where was I at the time? I was blissfully unaware of all that was happening. I worked for 10 hours without ever finding out that half the city was shut down because of potential bombs scattered throughout the city. As I was commuting home, people seemed on edge, and some students wouldn't get off at certain stops. It all seemed like odd behavior to me, so when I got home I asked my husband if someone got shot at one of the T-stops (this has actually happened a couple of times this year). He looked at me like I was from a different planet and had sprouted two green tentacles from nostrils. He then told me all that had happened. I was totally floored! How could I not know this was going on!?! Then I realized my work is an island unto itself. The only way I would know about a bomb threat is if it blew up right next to my building. So next time any of you hear about a bomb threat in Boston, you should probably give me a call. Chances are I have no idea what is happening.

Great Microbiologists and City Arborists

A friend of mine told me to watch this great clip about great microbiologists. It is worth the 8 minutes of your time it takes to watch it, especially if you are a microbiologist. Also, check out what my husband does all day as a city arborist. Enjoy!

Six Weird Things About Me

I've been tagged! So here are six weird things about me. I hope you aren't freaked out.

1. My OCD side: Whenever my husband and I get down to the last little dollop of jelly, mayo, syrup, peanut butter, etc., I absolutely refuse to finish it. I don't know why, but I cannot bring myself to finish off any food in our kitchen. I would rather throw it away than finish it. I also tend to leave some food on my plate, which I usually make my husband eat. I think this is very bizarre and probably OCD behavior. Think I'm crazy yet?

2. Watered-down juice: Whenever I drink juice, I like to have equal parts water equal parts juice. I think most juice is way too sugary, so I like it watered down. I've even trained my husband to fix juice for me this way. My older sis also does this, so if this is weird behavior, it is definitely genetic.

3. Eating Grapes: Most people eat grapes by popping a whole grape in their mouth. I, on the otherhand, like to bite grapes in half while eating them. One of my ex-boyfriends had a theory about this behavior. He was convinced that at some point I had a terrible run-in with a seed in a grape, which is why I always bite them in half. I'm pretty sure this is not true, unless it was so tramatic I blocked it out. Memory loss caused by a grapeseed? I don't think so.

4. I can read anywhere at anytime: I know, I know, I always talk about my reading, so I am sorry to bring it up again. I read while I am blow drying my hair in the morning and while I brush my teeth at night, so I basically can read anywhere at anytime. I think that is pretty weird.

5. My runny nose: My nose is the bane of my existence. Whenever I wake up in the morning or from a nap, my nose will immediately start to run. It doesn't matter if I am sleeping in the car, on a plane, or in my bed, as soon as I wake up it starts running. It will also get runny for no particular reason. My doctor thinks it is probably a dust allergy, which they can't do a whole lot about. All I can do is take allergy medicine that doesn't really work. The worst part is that my husband has even suffered from it. One morning I woke up with a runny nose, and naturally I got a kleenex and blew my nose. The problem was that I went back to sleep still holding the kleenex. My husband rolled his face right into it and got a very nasty wake up call. Needless to say, I was mortified.

6. Weird, recurring dreams: I go through stages where I have the same weird dream over and over again. For the longest time, I dreamed that I was the leader of a militant group involved in guerrilla warfare in Mexico. I saved women and children imprisoned in old missionaries and trekked miles through an arid desert. I also had a dream where I was in a video game and I had to defeat a number of fantastic monsters like werewolves, vampires, and some obscure water beast. I think that was when I was watching a lot of Buffy the Vampire slayer, however, which may account for that particular dream. My dreams can be very vivid and very weird.

Okay, so that is six weird things about me. Some of them aren't too pretty, and I hope I didn't scare anyone away from my blog. I also don't know anyone I can tag since my blogging sphere is pretty small, so I am tagging You, the reader, to leave something weird about yourself as a comment to this post. You can even stay anonymous!

Snowmen and Cookies

If anyone has recently been walking down Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, he or she may have noticed that a number of walls containing graffiti also have snowmen spray painted on them. A simple snowman, and nothing more. No words or symbols besides his stick hands and top hat (the picture is not of the snowman on Mass Ave., but it looks similar). What's more is that the snowmen started popping up on building walls in August. It made me wonder why someone went through all of the trouble to spray paint a snowman. Was it a gang called the Snowmenz/Frosteez/Izemen/etc. that was simply marking their territory with something other than the bubble letters normally sported by gangs in the area? If so, their territory is contained in a five-block radius. Is it someone who is desperately wishing for snow and hoping to coax frozen water from the sky by invoking a symbol composed entirely of snow? Perhaps a crazy ski bum who is dying to hit the slopes early? If so, it is definitely not working since we have not a speck of snow to be seen. Is it some right-handed person who recently lost their right hand, is learning to use only their left hand, and drawing snowmen is all they can draw at present so this is them shouting their accomplishment to the world? If so, rock on, buddy, rock on. Let me know if you have any ideas, because I have not a clue.

Okay, now for cookies. This past weekend I went to a cookie exchange where everyone had to bring one type of cookie to exchange for a bunch of others. There was prizes for best tasting and best looking. Now, I am not much of a baker, a home chef on the rise perhaps but not a baker. I got a fabulous recipe from my friend MJ for peppermint tea cakes. After some minor setbacks in the beginning (I tried to get fancy and shape them into candy canes, but they just fell apart), I was able to bake 86 cookies all by myself. Not only that, but I got a prize for best tasting cookie! It just goes to show you can always surprise yourself even with a little help from your friends!

Craftless

I know a lot of awesome women, and the one thing I've noticed about them is they are proficient at some sort of art or craft. Some of them paint/draw, play an instrument, sew, knit, scrapbook, crochet, etc., and most of them have mastered more than one of these. I am always in awe of these women. Some of them are so good they can make contemporary art from old cans, lamp shades from old rags, and just about everything else as long as they have a glue gun. They are like a feminine McGyver (who, by the way, plugged a sulfuric acid leak with chocolate because it has lactose and sucrose, and when you mix acid with sugars it forms elemental carbon and a thick gummy substance). For many years now, I have been working on trying to find my craft. Now, I realize that some things require a certain amount of talent, but I figured I should be able to find my niche somewhere. I do not have a musical bone in my body as my friend MJ can attest to (I subjected her to an awful day of bad caroling while helping to hang up Christmas lights--side note: I did somehow get a lead role in a middle school musical, probably because my music teacher couldn't completely hear me over the piano during auditions, and it was so bad people said I sounded "interesting") so playing an instrument is probably not right for me. I tried painting, first something abstract which came out as a big blob of maroon streaks, and then I had my talented sis (see my previous post) sketch a picture for me which I then proceded to fill in like a coloring book. I think a five-year-old could have done better. I've tried crocheting, but I get bored too quickly to ever finish anything, so knitting would probably not work for me either. My family use to do themed stocking stuffers for Christmas, and one year we had to make something homemade. You know what I made? Bookmarks, and they weren't even pretty. Maybe I should have Beadazzled more when I was younger.

Anyway, that brings me to my most current attempt at finding a craft. I have tried to take up sewing. My older sister has kindly let me inherit her old sewing machine. Sewing has been an attractive hobby to me ever since I started watching Project Runway, a reality TV show about fashion designers. They design and make their own clothes, which I would love to be able to do. Obviously, that requires much more skill than I currently have, so I am trying to take baby steps. My first project was to sew curtains for our apartment, which has a big windows in the dining room and living room, and all our neighbors can see right into our apartment. Since my fabulous husband is not afraid to walk around in his boxers for all the world to see, I figured I take it upon myself to give us a little more privacy. I got all of my supplies, and I even managed to set up the machine by myself. Things took a turn for the worst, however, when I broke two sewing needles before I had even finished one edge of the curtain. Then my foot would not stop spasming (is that a word?), so now my seams are straight with intermittent areas of spastic zigs and zags. My curtains were also going to have some fringe along one edge of the right curtain and the edge of the left curtain, but then I put the fringe of the right curtain on the wrong side. When I asked my oh-so-sensitive husband what he thought of them, he just started laughing. Hmm, not exactly the reaction I'm looking for but better than crying I guess. Oh well, hopefully practice will make perfect or in my case at least presentable.

Post Secret

Even if you are against blogging in every way (which if you are, how come you are reading my blog?), you have to check out Post Secret. It is a community art project where people can put a secret of theirs onto a homemade post card and then send it anonymously to the people that run the site. Every week they put up ten new postcards, and there is no archive so you can only view the new ones each week. The postcards are funny, sad, and endearing, and project was developed to help people heal. I learned about it from some co-workers who are addicted to the site. I can't blame them. Don't we all want to hear each other's secrets?

A Few of My (New) Favorite Things

1. Shabu-Shabu: Shabu-shabu is the Japanese version of hot pot. What is hot pot, you ask? It is only the funnest way to eat slices of uncooked meat and raw veggies! In a nutshell, there is a pot of boiling broth in the middle of the table (can be communal or individual), and you put your uncooked meat and veggies into the boiling water to cook it. The meat is sliced very thinly so it cooks in minutes. Naturally, because I am in the field that I am, the idea of touching raw meat with chopsticks and then putting those same chopsticks in my mouth to eat is not very agreeable. As far as I know, no one has gotten sick from the shabu-shabu place I go to, but I believe it is better to be safe than sorry. I overcome this by keeping my chopsticks in the boiling water while my meat cooks. While my favorite food will always be Indian cuisine, I have to say that shabu-shabu comes in a close second.

2. Stranger than Fiction: I just saw this movie over the weekend, and I really loved it. I thought it was the smartest film I have seen since Little Miss Sunshine. I never thought Will Farell could star in the same movie as Emma Thompson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Queen Latifah. I was very pleasantly surprised.

3. Re-reading old books: As I have admitted all ready, I am addicted to reading. I actually devour books so quickly it is simply not cost-effective or convenient to get my hands on new ones all the time. Therefore, I have resorted to re-reading my old favorites. Anything by Jane Austen, Alice Hoffman's "Practical Magic", and Ayn Rand's "We the Living" have been read almost a dozen times. Right now I am re-reading "The Poisonwood Bible" by Barbara Kingsolver. It's like visiting an old friend you haven't seen in a while. You notice things you've never noticed before, and you appreciate all the things you loved about them in the first place.

Sequel to the Eight!

If you want an interesting read, I would highly recommend anything written by Katherine Neville. Her books have a lot of history blended into fictional thriller stories. Plus, she has basically led this amazing life. She has traveled all over the globe, set up computer systems for Algeria, been a top exec for Bank of America, a model, a photographer, world famous author, married to a renowned neuroscientist... the list goes on! Anyway, she is currently working on a sequel to my favorite book by her, The Eight. I'm not sure when it is coming out since right now it seems like it is still in a very rough stage. I can't wait!

I Heart NY

"New York is a granite beehive, where people jostle and whir like molecules in an overheated jar."-Nigel Goslin

I saw this quote about New York city, and I couldn't resist including it in this post. This past weekend, my husband and I went to New York to visit a friend. This quote is, I think, an accurate portrayal of the energy New York has. Everything in New York seems like it is on a grander scale. Bigger buildings, bigger stores, bigger attitude. Unlike the subway in Boston which can be coded by color, the New York subway system has numbers, letters, express, local, uptown, downtown, etc. I think we got on the wrong train almost half a dozen times. People were everywhere! When we went to Times Square, we actually had to get in line to cross the street, then get in line for the waiting list of a restaurant, then get in line to be seated. We really wanted to go to the restaurant Serendipity, which is featured in the movie by that name, but it was a 2.5 hr wait at 3pm in the afternoon! We did get into the Museum of Natural History, which is really an amazing place. They have one of the best dinosaur collections, and we only got through a very small part of it since it was so large. My favorite part was the butterfly exhibit, whcih was basically a tropical room filled with an amazing variety of butterflies. Some were electric blue and some had a wingspan as big as my two hands put together. The best part was that a little brown butterfly with orange spots landed first on my hair, which must have been too unstable, and then landed on my shoulder. Since you are not supposed to brush away any butterflies that land on you in case you cause them injury, I simply let him/her/it hitch a ride around the exhibit until the butterfly tired of my company (lacking in nectar and witty banter, I'm sure I was not a terribly exciting companion) and flew away. We also explored Central Park, had dessert in Greenwich Village, and walked around Ground Zero. I cannot even begin to describe how eerie and sad, yet strangely hopeful Ground Zero is. It's one of those things you have to experience for yourself. New York is always an amazing trip because no matter how many times you go, you always see/feel/hear/smell something completely new.

Crazy story!

Check out this crazy story on Dr. Pistachio's website! It's under the heading "Urban legend...or a true story?"

The Boston Crazies

It is inevitable that every major city has its crazies. Some of them are fun and amusing, like the guy in San Francisco who hides behind a bush and scares tourists, and some of them are just plain, well, crazy. Boston definitely has a lot of crazies, and since I ride public transportation (the crazies' Mecca) almost everyday, I get to see a lot of them. Because I see crazies all the time, I think I can safely say I know of the two craziest of crazies. One of them is an old woman who carries around an unlit cigarette wherever she goes. Originally when I met this woman, I thought she simply carried it around because she was going to smoke it as soon as she got off the train or maybe she was trying to quite and simply carrying the thing helped sooth her addiction. Just as I was thinking this, the woman put the cigarette to her lips and started taking discrete little bites of it. The woman was literally eating her cigarette! When I told my sister about this, she did not believe me until a couple of weeks later when she saw it too! The other craziest of crazies was seen by my sister while she was standing at a bus stop. It was a guy who went around picking up trash while talking to himself and making weird noises. Now you may be thinking that picking up trash and making weird noises is not too crazy, and it may actually help the environment. This guy, however, doesn't only pick up the trash, but he has to put it in his mouth and chew it before throwing it away. When he picks up bottles, he has to put it in his mouth before he throws it away. Gross!!!! Most crazies in Boston just talk out loud to themselves or to God or maybe some imaginary person. I was thinking the other day that maybe this behavior is not so crazy. Living in a large city surrounded by people, you may think that you are never alone, but really everyone builds a bubble of self-containment around them so that no one waves, smiles, looks you in the eye, or says hello to each other. Maybe all the crazies want is someone to listen to their complaints and thoughts, even if that person is themselves, God, or imaginary.