Exams!

Well exams are just two weeks away and I can say that I am ready for all of these tests to be over. That is one thing I will not miss about school is the times when you study 6 hours a day for an exam and then its over in just an hour.

Here are some pictures of the garden right now. everything seems to be well underway but the squirrels are going crazy about my corn. They managed to kill 10/12 plants. I replanted all of them. Its weird, they just broke the stems they didn't eat any of the plant.







very soon I will be on summer "vacation" however I will be working full time. Im really excited about being away from school for a while. I am going to miss seeing everyone during the day though.

Garden!

So the days of Mario visiting are winding down. He will be leaving soon and it becomes harder and harder to go to school and work for me. Currently he is working hard in my backyard while I am at work. The weather is so amazing today that i would rather be there with him than anywhere else.
here are some photos of our garden.






I would like to do a wine bottle border on every little garden plot but i cant. there simply are not enough wine bottles in my grasp. I have considered talking to some local restaurants but I have not done that yet. Also in a way I feel like i would be interfering with their busy day somehow.
happy spring!

garden

I have recently taken on a very ambitious garden project. I bought 13 different seed packets. Including watermelons, cantaloupe, and eggplant. I have a feeling i will have more food than I can ever eat. Pictures will be posted soon.
:)

Arrivals

So some good news. Not only am I one week away from spring break I am 2.5 days away from seeing Mario! My boyfriend Mario arrives on Monday and we haven't seen each other since January 11. That is in fact the shortest time we have been apart since I left spain, but it still felt like forever. Hopefully we will get some much needed paperwork finished while he is here.

Above is some graffiti we did while roaming around in Tarragona.

wedgiedom..and other things

This wasnt really supposed to be all about the foods I am eating, so here are some other things going on in my life right now.
I got a job in a lab, of course, working with mice. I got to see 2 litters of baby mice on my first day and i have to say they look like aliens. I mean human babies are pretty rasin-y and gross when they pop out but mice are reallllly gross.



This is a picture of my desk. I have to say i have had 0 desks in my life and this one though it may be modest is AMAZING. and not to mention the computer is nicer than anyone i have ever owned.



So here are some potato wedgies I made. I coated them in an egg mixed with olive oil. a bunch of red pepper, salt and normal pepper.



So then after an intense workout I went to Otherlands with my friend and she got this sandwich called the "bagel sandwich thing". it was good. I had a bite. We also appropriately ended our workout with a huggee slice of carrot cake that we are now addicted to.



spinach, feta, avocado, tomatoes, pear, olive oil...thats all I need to say

tofu-1 amanda-0

So in my attempts at becoming a semi-vegeterian I have tried to dabble in tofu. I read on a few websites that you just marinate it in your favorite sauce and then fry in the skillet. Well that didnt workout so well.



here is a picture of my stove looking a complete mess because I had no idea what I was doing. The tofu turned out horrible and tasted like the bottom of a shoe. I believe it also had to do with the sweet and sour sauce I bought. That was supposed to be my saving grace. If it tastes like crap pour the sauce on it. well the sauce also tasted like crap.



So you may be wondering what in the heck is a semi-vegeterian...well if someone gives me free food and it happens to have meat in it.. I cant say no. Im in college i cant turn down free food.

anti snow day pizza

So there was more snow. This winter so far has seriously been one heck of a snow storm. The Northeast is getting pounded and here we are a little ole southern town and I have to de-ice my car before i got to school. All those global warming skeptics are probably drinking champagne and buying hummers.

Here is my front yard with the recent dusting. It wasnt enough to cancel classes but it gave everyone a scare.

In honor of the snow day i decided to try a recipe i found for eggplant pizza. basically its eggplant, cheese, pesto, crust, sauce, 8mins at 450.

Why dont they make eggplants smaller? With all the genetic engineering you would think they could make a single serving eggplant......

Here is the crust. I used prego spaghetti sauce for the base.

I added motzerella, provolone, and cheddar cheese. Today i re-made the recipe and I would suggest doubling that amount of cheese. its way better with more cheesey goodness.

Here is the final product! it is beautiful, and it tasted beautiful.

snow days are amazing but somehow i find it incredibly hard to do schoolwork with all that winterwonderland going on outside. probably i shouldnt move farther north

i need some Zzzzzzs

This is an electron micrograph of Salmonella. It is of course artifically colored, but i think the little pink lines are flagella. This little bugger cost me last night and all day today. It seems that eating "questionable" lunchmeat is not the best idea in the world. Im big on throwing things away as soon as i have the thought "now when did I buy this?" Apparently my dad trusted whatever was in his fridge and fell victim to this enterobacteria. Ouch. Its nasty stuff. So as a warning to all you fellow eaters out there (pretty much everyone) watch out. those expiration dates are there for a reason. Now if I can only get my boyfriend to believe me. He thinks there is an expiration date conspiracy where they set them really early in order to make you buy more of their product. Yea that might be true, but part of me is still-if the date says throw it out, its goin out.

I also realized that I do HORRIBLY without sleep for one night, it totally ruins your day. When I was in Barcelona we stayed out until 6am one night and I thought for sure the next day that i might have ran a marathon or something. I guess we all take for granted how important sleep is.

fun fact- if you have jet lag, for the next month after the jet lag experience, you have decreased brain function. A whole month!!! whew

picture courtesy of wiki

Kindle Vs Book

Here it is, the Amazon Kindle. It is one of the most amazing pieces of technology that i have recently been able to witness. These things that I come across make me really love technology. I have a few dilemmas with it but first let me talk about how amazing it is. I have been to a few electronics stores recently and I have played with the various new "desktop PCs." The ipad is cool, yea i dont really have a use for one, the HP version is cool, its a bit smaller, but really in this situation you have to ask yourself "how much more portable does a laptop need to be?" The one feature that makes the kindle so amazing, is the screen itself. They have made it in such a way so that there is no light behind it. This allows for an extremely detailed picture and one that is as similar to the pages of a real book as possible. There are no pixels, or loading, or lag time, because its not that type of screen. I am also pretty sure that the battery will last me a really long time.

How does this compare to reading an actual book? Well I am no stranger to books, this photo below is one of many bookshelves I own and I love having them around. I love the smell the feel, the act of going to a bookstore. All of it is amazing. I simply am not ready to give this up. Somehow the magic will be lost. If i take a step back and look at this from a global perspective it is more efficient and cost effective to have everyone using e-books like the kindle. we would be saving tons of pulp from

trees, and in reality books would be cheaper and more accessible to everyone. Sure bookstores would go out of style, but maybe the coffee shop would replace them. I firmly believe all textbooks now should be in online form and they are slowly heading that way. But every book? Its a hard idea to grasp. However, maybe our generation shouldn't make the same mistake that the one before us did. There were people who believed that computers, the space age, and technology would ruin our culture. In a way it has enhanced it. Maybe this is one of those things we will just have to get used to. As long as there is still a library around I can go sit in, I think I will be ok.

What a day

This is all it takes to bring everyone out of the woodwork, shedding their winter garb for some rays. The weather was 60 and sunny today, a little teaser for the spring to come. I cant believe that just last week we almost had a snow day. I rode my bike all over midtown, around the zoo, through the park, and I had to try to avoid all the kids +dogs running around. Days like these make you wish you had a puppy to drag around and play fetch with. I keep thinking about that dog I fostered last year. Her name was ragan and we just got to know each other and she went away. Im a little glad though, I am more a cat person, I think it takes more dedication to take care of a doggy.

SUN, and snow

If you can actually believe it it SNOWED again. wow. We did not end up getting a day off so it looks like this week will be the first in the whole semester so far where we actually go to school for 5 days in a row. In the top picture my plant bob soaks up some rays after almost a week without sun. I opened all the blinds in the house to get as much of that UV light as possible bouncing around. We all need our vitamin D, especially in the winter months.

Snow Day!

It seems that the days of one snow a year are long gone. It used to be that it snowed only once in our little southern town and that was all we saw of winter. Yesterday was the second snow day of the year so far, and a day later the snow is still on the ground! Not having school and all I thought I would get tons of homework done and be prepared for the next week. well that is a joke. I managed to squeeze out some Astrophysical Chemistry homework and then spend the rest of the day talking to my boyfriend in Berlin. Visa troubles are on our minds nowadays. It seems that the "home of the brave, and land of the free" is reserved for only the privileged few who were born here. I can comfortably say it is easier to buy drugs than it is to get a work visa for the USA.

This Was my snow day dinner. My attempt at becoming a partial vegeterian, I had mashed potatoes with mushrooms, garlic, and onions, Black beans, salad, and cheese bread.

An ode to everyone who works in a lab

I have spent many many hours of my life in a lab. This is due to the fact that i have taken many hours of lab at my school and I have managed to work in a lab every year. This little beauty to my left i think is the apple 2. it is still up and running just as well as the day it was made. Due to the incredible cost of technology and the fact that at a university you need about 10 of everything, at my school if it aint broke dont fix it, or waste your time buying a new one. I have heard tons of stories of people in labs that need a 3 piece equipment set to run an experiment but one of them broke, and in order to continue they need to buy all three pieces. Well I am sure there is an apple 2 graveyard out there. I have had my eyes on a macbook ever since I got my first laptop. I am stuck in the PC age and I want out badly. However, I do have a functioning computer at my fingertips. Should I retire it like so many apple2s or just wait until it breaks on its own?

we all live in America coca cola, wonder bras... Rammstein

Home sweet home now. The first thing I noticed was how rude the flight attendants were. Also how they did not bother to announce anything in any other language. My seat-mate and I both had an encounter with a flight attendant. She tried to talk to her and the woman didnt understand a Scandinavian accent. It really isnt that much of an accent but it just shows how un-traveled the flight attendants were... depressing eh.

Above: Lil in my clothes helping me unpack. I think they missed me, probably because now they have a warm room to sleep in now that my heater is back up and running.

Pretty soon I will be back to the daily grind of school days. Im not looking forward to loosing my free time once again. The semester is winding up and this is supposed to be my last. A few transcript complications from spain and I end up missing two classes which I need to graduate. I don't mind taking the extras except it may put me not going to graduation. That is not acceptable.

mmmm egg and meatloaf?

This glorious meal to my left is one of the best meals i had in Berlin. It was supposed to be a meatloaf but i think it was pork. The egg added a nice touch to the meal. And most of all it was 100% comfort food that warmed me up and filled me up. I have to say that the germans know how to make a heavy meal. The beer I had to go with it was a Lowenbrou...i think i spelled that right.

Shortly after this meal Mario and I were making at home pizzas and I slipped out of the potholder and burned my finger. My thumb to be exact and for one whole day i was without a thumb. It was devestating. I was unable to do anything really and it was my left hand too. I have a new respect for all the thumbs out there.

Back at CBU today, and the weather is cold and snowy. not unlike Berlin. I think the temperature is hovering in the teens (F) and is windy.

Palaces

Today I went here. (Charlottenburg palace) However this is not the picture that I took myself. This is from the interwebs, because I was frustrated a bit with my foto. A guy was standing right inbetween the gates and decided to take a picture of each detail on the gate itself and the two statues on the top. sooo you see the need for this picture.

The palace was very grand and amazing but the most amazing part really was the collection. The interior was bombed during wwII so alot of the palace has been reconstructed. the most impressive part is how much wealth the castle is sitting on. the property itself is huge with gardens that extend behind the palace. It also contains a very large silver dishware collection, as well as a gold dishware set, and a large handmade porcelin collection. the ammount of silver alone is in the millions. The family jewels, which are actually real, have mostly been stolen or given away. the remaining jewels are amazingly the king´s collection of diamond snuff boxes. yes I said snuff boxes which contained snuff, which is in fact cocaine. its amazing that after all these years the snuff boxes are the ones to remain. Of course the crowns the king and queen wore, and the royal sword and armor are all there, but the jewels have been damaged or removed on most of them.

Afterwards I soon took refuge from the cold in a bookstore that happens to be 3 stories. yess

berlin, its cold

So being in Berlin is very interesting. It is not a exceptionally beautiful city nor is it really ugly. it seems to be just a city. it is very obvious where in the city the russians occupied, mainly because the architecture. It is winter and there are about 5 hours of daylight during the day and if you happen to miss even one of them you feel cheated. I find myself hungry all the time, and it takes me a couple of hours to wake up in the morning. i think this is somehow related to the temperature and the daylight. today the sun came out for about an hour and everyone looked like meercats warming their bellies in the sunlight. eventhough the sun showed its face only slightly above the treeline it felt amazing. This woman actually almost pushed me to get a better view of the sun. It snowed like a foot a few days before i got here and it hasnt melted yet. the snow is begining to turn brown from some mysterious brown water that i guess is just a part of living in the city. I also am learning how many layers it takes before you are warm/looking stupid. yesterday i was borderline looking stupid and today i was borderline cold. i think i have only reached equilibrium one time.

i have been in search of coffee all the time because of the constant tiredness i feel, and yesterday i found coffee for 1 euro. i think that was quite a score. today we went to a coffee shop that was ultra trendy. there were a bunch of students with their macs in there studying something. mario hates macs and he seemed to believe that they were doing something unproductive. nonetheless the place was nice, two stories, had food, was warm, and im guessing lots of power outlets. afterwards i went to a couple of sight seeing places, i got to see the US embassy with guards all around it, and we ate at an australian resturant. The food was really good but i dont think the waiter liked us.

Interesting facts about berlin/germany

-the letters z and y are swapped on the keyboard. at first i was very confused but now i realize it completley. i have not yet heard or seen a german word with a y in it. yet all of them seem to have a z. its like another vowel to them

-people arent that polite, though they seem to follow the rules by the book, like crossing the street, letting people pass, general traffic rules, general other unwritten rules, they seem to have skipped manners class. we were walking on the sidewalk a few days ago and generally its a large sidewalk but because of the snow it was very narrow. this woman with a stroller was coming towards us and like normal people we let her pass. but of course she didnt say anything or even look up. i think she may have even given us the stink eye. and this has happened many times with different people. i have been given the stink eye alot on the train, where in most societies it is acceptable to push because people are always taking their time, here no way. if you push someone you are in no way forgiven. even if it was by accident.