Things you Find in a Move

I contemplated calling this post "Why I am Destined to Live Among Clutter" but I figured this title was a little more positive.

As many of you know, my mother recently sold my childhood home. As anyone who has ever sold a  house knows, it is a massive project, and I am so very proud of the Madre for managing to sort through, organize, and pack everything up to give away, sell, or move to the new place.
We had some great memories in that house. My parents took me home from the hospital to that house. We had birthday parties, cats, and serious life lessons at that house, and I am going to miss it now that a new family has inhabited it.

However, in the move, there was a significant amount of random junk of mine that Mom didn't know what to do with, and so she brought it to my house in DeKalb to sort through. I figured I'd take some representative pictures of pieces of my childhood, adolescence, and early college years. Because it's fun. :)

This is the good, the bad, and the stuff I just can't throw away (no matter how ugly). Some of it is embarrassing. But it still brings a smile to my face whenever I see it.

Childhood

So, I'm not sure if you knew this...but I was the most BA 3 year old on the planet.

look at this! Ray Bans. waayyyy before my peers were rocking them. Talk about a trend setter.

Speaking of trend setter....bangs are back!!! And so is Lisa Frank. For 4 year olds anyway. Or 5...this may or may not have been my first day of kindergarten.

Prom

This is my junior prom portrait! That is a city triangles dress in "watermelon" (hahaha did a 16 year old pick that??) but I swear that if I ever got nominated for an academy award I would wear that color again in a heartbeat. I went to junior prom with a football player from my high school named Ben, a super great guy who sang in Varsity Choir with me. We had such a good time I hardly noticed that someone else wore my dress....

p.s that corsage was gorgeous. I dried it, but a couple years later it got tossed anyway because most of the rosebuds had returned to dust. But thats what we have pictures for.

College

When I graduated from high school, my twin cousin Olivia gave me a scrapbook with pictures from photo shoots we had taken as kids, posing in outfits of our own design (for your sake, I won't post those disasters). This is the note on the front of the book.

the book was a look back and a toast to the post high school life
"here's to college and jobs, all nighters, and buying houses and cars. I can't wait to keep going!"

me either :)

I didn't just go to college and get accepted to grad school (and pull a few all nighters along the way) but I also went to Italy with my amazing college roommate.

In the move, I found this watercolor of the Trevi Fountain that I bought when I went to Rome and had the best two weeks of my entire life with Liz and our friend Ana. I tossed two pennies into the fountain when I visited. One was to make a wish, and one was to ensure a return to the fountain someday (as is tradition). While I have to keep the exact details of my wish a secret, I'll have you know that my wish came true about 4 months later, but I have yet to return to the fountain. Regardless, that wish making at the Trevi is serious business.

But before I knew it, our family was changing in a lot of ways, including the arrival of our Chinese brother (YFU exchange brother to be exact)!
Clark lived at our house for a year, and attended high school with my sister while I tackled sophomore year as an undergrad at GVSU. This gorgeous Chinese hand mirror turned up in the boxes from the house that my Mom recently delivered. Looking at it reminds me of the Christmas vacation and summer I got to spend with him.

And speaking of sophomore year, it was this year that I met
(drumroll please)
ERIC! ...and lots of others whom I love.

In the move, I found ticket stubs everywhere. I still have no idea what to do with them, but for now I hope you enjoy the pictures.

The first I'll feature is the ticket stub from the time I went with Eric and his family to see Atlas Shrugged. That night Eric and I were supposed to meet his family at the movie theater, and while we were driving there, the breaks on the Buick park ave.  he was driving gave out! Luckily there was no oncoming traffic and we were perfectly safe. However, the Buick took us on our last adventure that night :(

The next is from the time the Titanic exhibit came to the Henry Ford Museum.

Each of us got these boarding passes that detailed who we were on the ship. At the end of the exhibit we found out if we lived or not.

I was Mrs. John Jacob Astor. On the plus side I was apparently very rich, although I think my person was also pregnant, so everything really equaled itself out in that scenario. Eric was a third class passenger, so we were a regular Rose and Jack Dawson! Well, except I was married with a kid on the way. And Eric didn't make it. And they never met.
We clearly had WAY too much fun with this.

Finally, I dug out this little treasure.

No this isn't a ticket stub. It technically wasn't even lost, but when my Mom dropped off the boxes, I found a pretty little travel jewelry box, and decided to use it for our trip to Chicago. This bracelet was the first thing in the box, because I love wearing it. I got this for my birthday from my sister Caroline. They are glass beads from Italy, which she bought while touring Europe for a school trip. I has every color and goes with everything, so I end up wearing it all the time.

Moving is a pain in the butt. But in a house that was inhabited for as long as it was (by our family), I was bound to find some interesting stuff from the past.
While all this stuff is hard to organize and at times hard to part with (although I'm keeping a lot) the last 22 years have been pretty cool. I'm so excited to see what will come next.

So here's to getting jobs, buying houses and cars, having more adventures, and accumulating more ticket stubs.

Disaster Dinner

"Tuna is Blue

  Merlot are Red

  Sushi is hard

  Let's do carry-out instead"

Above is a picture that was taken at Maru, a great sushi place on the east side of Grand Rapids. There is no question that Eric and I love going out for dinner. But we also have just as much fun cooking food for ourselves. Most of the time our projects turn out great! Last time we got adventurous and tried a new marinade for chicken and made a garlic sautéed broccoli. Our other creations include classics like fried chicken and burgers, spicy jambalaya, stir fry, and quesadillas with any interesting thing we can find to use as filling (my personal favorite being the breakfast themed quesadilla with scrambled egg). 

The last time I was in Grand Rapids, we went out for a beautiful anniversary dinner at a well known Italian restaurant. For this Valentine's day weekend however, we decided to stretch our culinary experience beyond our comfort zone and make sushi. 

How hard could it be? I mean, we had a book written for novices!

The first step was to find a place where we could buy "sushi grade" fish. Nearly all fish at meat markets and grocery stores has been handled in a way that cannot be consumed safely in an uncooked form.  Before this endeavor, Eric and I needed to do some serious research on the possibilities of food poisoning from bad fish and how best to avoid getting sick. On our end, the kitchen had to be neat, spotless, and completely sanitary in every way. But half the battle was finding "safe" fish. So for this select piece of meat we needed to go to a very select store. 

Enter Inboden's Market. I was referred to this store when I asked around at NIU to find out who had made sushi before, and where they got the fish for the raw rolls. We asked to talk directly to the butcher, who showed us the perfect tuna steak to use on our sushi. 

He also gave us some advice on cleaning the utensils and kitchen surfaces. 

This mostly involved washing everything in hot water and rinsing it boiling water. 

The most important step to making sushi is the perfect sushi rice. Now, I am absolutely terrible a cooking rice on the stove. But I tried my hand at some stovetop rice anyway, figuring that if I followed the recipe perfectly, my rice should be fine. 

Well, here was our rice. 

I'm not sure where we went wrong, but it was WAY too soggy to use, and there was just no drying it out. Despite it's less that ideal texture however, we decided to use it anyway. After all, it probably wasn't going to be that bad. 

So we chopped up our ingredients, prepared our bamboo mat, and rolled the first roll.

Here's our final product. Doesn't it look great??

Well unfortunately, it didn't taste nearly as good. 

I will say that the flavors were all there -- we had the right combinations of everything, including that delicious tuna steak! But alas, my rice was just plain wet and downright inedible. After a couple of tries,  we couldn't help but laugh at the state of the kitchen. So much effort for so little gain! After a couple of tries with our rolls, we agreed on cutting our losses, cracking open our Valentine's Day merlot, and popping the rest of the tuna into the oven. 

Luckily once the tuna was baked, our dinner was delicious. However, try to imagine for a moment sharing that fish between two people...needless to say, we were both hungry after our fancy tuna "snack". Thus, we threw in the towel, settled into the living room, tuned into Netflix, and ordered the rest of dinner from Lukulo's. 

And it was delicious. So what did we learn?

1) Just because you read a book about it, doesn't mean you can do it. 

2) You can have fun even when dinner is disastrous. 

3) I am still bad at rice. Seriously, how does one cook rice!? I need a lesson or a rice cooker.  

4) Sushi is better left to the pros. 

In the future, I imagine we'll probably stick to the food we know how to make for all major holidays. However, nothing beats an adventure in the kitchen.

 

Milestone Moments: 1st Conference Submission

The last two weeks have been very intense in just about every way possible.

Weather-wise, DeKalb had some of it's coldest weather all year, with some of the nights reaching as low as -2 degrees...and we were all feeling it. Students were texting and emailing that they couldn't get their cars to start, the roads were so icy that no one drove above 30 mph, and my bed (which is right next to the two very large windows in my bedroom) was covered with every last one of my blankets (including the sleeping bag that I normally reserve for guests).

I also hadn't seen my boyfriend in an intensely long amount of time.
We said goodbye in the very beginning of January and didn't see each other until the first weekend of February.
Naturally, a reunion after 4 weeks necessitated a three day visit and really really good Italian food to celebrate a milestone for us... three years together as a couple! A couple of what, I'm not sure, although 'pranksters' seems to fit pretty well, as you know who asked me to write directions to the restaurant we went to with a trick pen that delivers a painful electric shock to the thumb of the person trying to open it. What a jerk!

We also had a lot of chill time with friends. This is me trying to drink something with my feet during the Super Bowl. My lack of flexibility failed me, but it was a valiant effort encouraged along by Eric. Maybe we're a couple of dorks?

However the most intense part of the last week or so for me was a conference deadline that was fast approaching (whether we were ready or not). The lab that I work in often has a myriad of projects that at any one time are in different stages of development (anywhere from conception and literature review to manuscript editing). I happen to be in the data collection phase of the newest project, and was given the task of turning our study into a tangible experiment description...you know, with like..a prediction. And a hypothesis. And and feasible abstract. No big, I wrote the application to get the study approved, this should be a piece of cake...

Ha.

It's not that I've never done this before, this is how research is accomplished. It stars with an idea, the idea becomes a proposal, the proposal gets approved, it's set into motion through data collection, blah blah blah. But as an undergrad I had someone holding my hand through it all. I could sound as fancy as I wanted saying I worked in a lab on a grant as an undergrad (which I did) but lets be real: I collected data. I shook the participant's hand and I explained the study. Data collection is the easy part (thats why they let the undergrads do it). Being in charge of writing up a project for a conference submission was a brand new experience that had me banging my head on the keyboard of my laptop more than a couple of times over the course of the week.
Nothing sounded right. And I don't even mean stylistically right, I mean straight up correct. It's so amazing, the difference between a surface level understanding of a complex study, and truly deep understanding of the same project. Through writing this, however, I learned something things about my own work ethic I didn't know previously.
1) I work best in the morning

2) with coffee
3) and silence
4) I have to take a minute to think about what I want to say, and then write for about 5 minutes without rereading or editing anything
5) Then I get up for a second (get a pop tart, go to the bathroom, brush my teeth, refresh my coffee)
6) and go back and edit whatever I wrote.

Normally the thing that I wrote in that 5 minutes was terrible. However, editing (no matter how much editing needs to occur on the product itself) is so much less dubious than a blank screen. I soon figured out that with a tangible product, I was making real headway with this draft!


So there you have it. Another milestone moment in the grad school baby book of milestones = a halfway intelligible project write-up to send to a conference! I've had so many this year. Looking back, I really do feel like a completely different person than I did a year ago, after receiving my acceptance to grad school. Little did I know, I had no idea what I didn't know. Pretend that made sense.