Tuesday nights: drag self to yoga. Return from yoga feeling ridiculously pleased with everything, write mini-paper for Spanish cinema class.

Generally, the blissed-out yoga feeling helps with writing the paper. This week, it's just helping me not stress out about not having written a bit of it yet. Besides which, I happen to be aware that a friend who will remain nameless is currently writing the same paper while drunk...so despite not having started, I'm feeling a little ahead of the curve.

Lately I've very much been wanting to start a food blog. But what with school and half-assed job searching and all the other things I'd really like to do at some point, I can't really see it getting done for at least another few months.

Just the same, here's what I'm making this week:
spinach-laced dal (based on this)
spinach pakora aqui
general tso's tofu
palak something or other...chickpeas?
a big batch o' oven-baked brown rice (my casserole dish is the biggest cooking implement I own at this point)

I got a huge bag of fresh spinach at the grocery store for cheap, which is where all the spinach stuff comes from. The pakora and tofu are supposed to help work on the seasoning for my new cast iron pan. And I got some Indian spices in the mail last week, so I'm playing with those a little. Suggestions appreciated.

Ooooh, and a couple of suggestions for general food porn, recipes, and online time-wasting: Naughty Curry and b/eats.

So, back to that paper...

Nothing coherent to say. Just watched Reality Bites...always fun to watch the jerkface get the girl.

Think I need to focus more on the present, rather than what I can do/where live/what make/get once we graduate, as if graduation will just switch us suddenly to the Real World.

On the upside, I have a gigantic bag of spinach, a bit of stilton, and a shipment of Indian spices in the mail.

Oh, and my hair is reddish.

Just made a to-do list of stuff that I should be doing. I got to about a page and a half and was surprised that I couldn't think of anything else that's really pressing. It's 39 items, not including really specific things like homework for specific classes. To do any of this involves a good chunk of time per item (per day) and even though in the average day I do jack shit it still doesn't seem like I have time. I need moderation in everything, now, but instead I'm at one extreme or the other for everything.

Golly gee wilikers, we're going to be seniors.

...or in about three hours. Still, it was my first pie ever and I'm proud as an unnaturally domestic peacock. ::speads tail feathers and struts::

Things here are...interesting. My grandfather isn't doing so well, and whether that's a temporary or permanent thing is yet to be determined. My mom's been driving him around to doctors and the hospital and bringing over food, and I feel a little bad that I'm leaving this week and won't be around for at least moral support. And of course I worry about my mom, etc...isn't it too early to be at that age of worrying about your mother all the time? I thought I was supposed to still be drunk every night and worrying about the meaning of life. But ahh well.

By the weekend I'll be living in an apartment! Apartment apartment apartment! I'm...ridiculously excited.

Just got back from San Francisco, our wireless is dead and dsl is working in spurts and besides, now I'm off to Richmond for a couple of days to visit Danny (woot!) and then to Williamsburg for Steph's birthday (woot again!) and then I guess I get to panic about Baltimore. Supposed to be getting my key in the mail, but it's Sunday. ::drums fingers:: Supposed to be sitting in on an elementary school class but the Charlottesville schools are out for the summer, the Richmond principal hasn't emailed me back and their site is down so I can't find another one. And Williamsburg isn't an urban area.

San Francisco seems to have a huge homelessness problem. Will probably blab about that later.

Aaaand packing time!

After careful thought, I have decided that human nature is silly. To bed, awake to take the car in and dine on sumptuous scrambled tofu. One day until the west coast.

I need a median poem between joy and heartbreak, something that says I miss you terribly, and isn't that silly?

So. I've got a few days until San Francisco, and then nearly two weeks until Baltimore. In the interim I need to:

1. Figure out finances; ie whether I can live off of what amounts to minimum wage. Is that even possible? Also, why does Baltmore have a living wage law for "service contracts" that's $4 more than the minimum wage ($5.15). What are service contracts anyway, and why do they deserve a living wage while no one else does?

2. Observe an elementary school classroom for a couple hours.

3. Purchase a club and pepper spray. Maybe.

4. Figure out: how to set up a phone line. How to get a parking permit.

5. Find some cheap, easy recipes that don't use meat.

6. Find something more interesting to do than watching my "bored" lj icon bounce up and down.

Fluteworld is currently selling my flute for over 50% off. Meaning that if I were buying a new flute now, I could get my current one for half off or get another much more expensive flute for about the same price. Grr.

Also, I suddenly sort of want to go to the NFA convention this year. It's in Pittsburgh, which is significantly closer than it will be for a few years (next year is Albuquerque, year after that Kansas City, year after that NYC which would be exciting but membership is more expensive if you're not a student). Maybe it would stimulate my interest in flute, which has been lagging. I could get some exciting new books, maybe find someone to repair my flute, play with expensive toys...

I'm a dork.

Exams are coming up this week and the next, and I'm not really that stressed. I have all this reading to do which has gotten put off, but it'll get done. I'm more worried/excited about finding housing in Baltimore (and playing house for the summer). Ahh, and I'm doing an internship with Teach Baltimore from mid-June to early August, which would explain the living in Baltimore bit. This is all...random, but veryvery exciting.

This feels somehow like a quieter, uneventful semester, and rather atypical from anything that came before it. Fewer baking parties. No orchestra. Suddenly I can sorta speak Spanish. No friends on the hall. Lots of sunshine, ponies and butterflies. Occasional parties. Less stress, less coffee, more classes, less patience with English classes. I am now a completely failed English major. Also, enough of this avoiding of reading for Abnormal.
(Choice bit from the substance abuse chapter: Shared needles contribute to the spread of the virus that causes AIDS. This is a critical public health issue, because AIDS contracted in this manner accounts for the highest proportion of AIDS-related deaths in the heterosexual population.(Technically, yes. But cases of AIDS and HIV infection in 2004 reflect that rates of infection have shifted.) Oh, and then there was the sex chapter that claimed that a chromosomal male with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome is completely rosy: Her life works out because everyone thinks she is (by virtue of her vagina and later her breasts) the same sex she thinks she is--a woman. (Presumably, she wouldn't menstruate. Also, she'd be infertile...and would it be at all possible that later in life she'd discover through some other genetic test that she was actually genetically male? The Olympics apparently carried out mandatory genetic testing from 1968 to 1992, which led to just this problem--people who were apparently one gender realizing that they were genetically another, and as a capstone being barred from competition for life. Funfun.)