You are all aware that I started PA school at the end of May, thus the absence of Bird blogs of late. Well, I happen to have a rare opportunity to write up our adventures, being that I just finished my first anatomy test (3 hours for written, 2 hours for practical) and I am actually home before 7:30pm. The test went well, by the way, although I won’t have the results until tomorrow, after which I will not be disclosing that information to anyone. Usually I have 12 hour days filled with anatomy lecture, a 3 hour gross anatomy lab, an hour for lunch then class until 5pm. After class we (my friends Kim and Lauren and I) can be found in The Hole (the room in the library where we hunker down) scrambling to complete assignments and reading and studying for the next day. Weekends also find me in either the cadaver lab, at a study session or at a blood drive earning some book money because it seems we have a new $50 book to buy every week. If you find that this sounds like a lot of boring work, I can assure you it is. It’s very hard, but also challenging and fun at times. I am also happy to report I have only cried once during the last three weeks and it mostly had to do with my frustration at not having time to go to Target. (see list below)
So what about Dan, you might ask? Dan has been great, making me dinners (some experimental) and lunches and doing the grocery shopping, laundry and most of the cleaning. He usually even does the dishes and cleans up after me when I go into study mode and forget to clean up after myself. (see list below)
He’s also been working a bit at Mannes and playing gigs randomly.
Oh, and it’s getting hot back here. And let me tell you that the hotter it gets in Brooklyn, the worse it smells. And the hotter I get and the worse everyone and everything around me smells, the angrier I get. Enter Dan and his A/C installation magic; he slaved away and now it’s nice and cool and somewhat bearable in Brooklyn.
In other news, we will be getting a shipment of birds (four of them!) from our friends Ben & Jara on Sunday because they will be in Alaska at a Music camp Jara works at every summer. The blessed event is scheduled for this Sunday until July 4th. Pictures to follow, of course…it will be a bit of a mad house. A Mad Bird House, if you will.
In conclusion, I will leave you with a list to give you a better understanding of my life now that I am in school. Should you see these signs in anyone you know, at least you can attribute it to something justifiable instead of insanity. Enjoy.
You may be in PA school if:
1. You never get home before 7:30 in the evening.
2. Your spouse just hands you food like the passing of a baton on your way in the door and leaves you alone to study for the rest of the night.
3. Your habits go from meticulously neat and tidy to leaving yogurt cups and cereal bowls lonely and abandoned in the place you were last studying.
4. Charts and graphs of anatomical origin pop up on bathroom mirrors, walls and cupboards in order to facilitate studying while flossing/cleaning/doing the dishes.
5. You only have one dream: your anatomy professor pointing out structure after structure on your cadaver and demanding, with increasing vehemence, “what is this? WHAT IS THIS?!”
6. When you wake up in the middle of the night you actually consider reaching over your sleeping spouse to get at your anatomy notes just to check that your answers in your dream were correct.
7. You feel guilty for taking a shower because that time could be spent studying.
8. You have a three-minute window between studying and sleeping and God help the person who interrupts this precious time.
9. It doesn’t bother you when someone taps you on the shoulder in your gross anatomy lab and it turns out to be the outstretched arm of the cadaver behind you.
10. It’s been three weeks since you’ve been to Target. Or any other store, for that matter.
Thursday, June 22, 2006
Monday, June 05, 2006
Food Journal
Today's post is all about food.
Katie's birthday was last Tuesday and, besides me making her breakfast and then going to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, we went out to dinner to eat sushi. This is one type of food we don't have a lot of experience with. The restaurant we went to was called Tomoe. It got a rating of 27 out of 30 on food in the Zagat survey (this little book is an absolute must-have for any New Yorker). Just for comparison, the highest rated restaurants get a 28. The survey also said to be prepared to stand in line for a while.
Well, it was as if they knew Katie was coming because we waltzed right in and got a seat in the small space. We had miso soup, seaweed salad (6 different kinds of seaweed!), pan-fried noodles with veggies, and a sampler platter of sushi and sashimi. Both sushi and sashimi are raw fish, but the sushi comes with rice wrapped in seaweed (as opposed to sashimi which is just the raw fish). Among other things, there were pieces of red snapper, yellowtail and blue-fin tuna, salmon, shrimp, mackerel, octopus, squid, clam, roe, and spicy tuna rolls. You could tell the fish was super fresh because, though raw, it didn’t have a “fishy” smell; it was all very, very good. Then we had a bowl of red bean and green tea ice cream for dessert.
The next entry in this food journal is to describe a party we went to on Saturday night (which dribbled into Sunday early morning). My friend Ted, whom I have known since freshman year at college, is an interesting character who stumbled across a publication from a European art movement from the 1920s and 30s called the Futurists. They were all about the juxtaposition of disparate elements. This particular document was a cookbook: The Futurist Cookbook. Apparently, it not only had explanations of their artistic objectives, but recipes incorporating those objectives as well.
For example, at Ted’s party we sampled variously named dishes from the “Sunrise” (stacked beet slices, smoked salmon and orange slices), another named something like “Apparition of Liberty” (biscotti, date, gorgonzola cheese, salmon roe within a radicchio leaf), there were also foods whose artistic names I cannot recall that consisted of pineapple topped by tuna and macadamia nut; appetizer of fennel, cumquat and olive; bread topped by mustard, banana and sardine; and rice cooked in either beer or wine. To drink we had “Alcoholic Joust” which was red wine augmented by soda water, lemon-lime and bitters (kind of like a weird sangria) and served with Swiss cheese and chocolate on the side. Everything was surprisingly good, which made us eager to try the dessert: vanilla ice cream covered with one of the following: 1) cayenne pepper, 2) wasabi beans, 3) chopped green and orange bell peppers. The contrast of spice to sweetness was very striking and for me, the wasabi ice cream was absolutely delicious. There were also cayenne pepper soaked maraschino cherries.
A good time was had by all 20 or so people who crammed into Ted’s studio apartment, and Katie and I found ourselves at home around 2:30am. Yikes! We haven’t stayed out that late in some time. Now Katie is at school from 8-5 everyday (a subject on which she will probably write about here on the blog sometime next week) and I am doing some work for Mannes, playing some gigs, and trying to get some good work done on my dissertation.
Katie's birthday was last Tuesday and, besides me making her breakfast and then going to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, we went out to dinner to eat sushi. This is one type of food we don't have a lot of experience with. The restaurant we went to was called Tomoe. It got a rating of 27 out of 30 on food in the Zagat survey (this little book is an absolute must-have for any New Yorker). Just for comparison, the highest rated restaurants get a 28. The survey also said to be prepared to stand in line for a while.
Well, it was as if they knew Katie was coming because we waltzed right in and got a seat in the small space. We had miso soup, seaweed salad (6 different kinds of seaweed!), pan-fried noodles with veggies, and a sampler platter of sushi and sashimi. Both sushi and sashimi are raw fish, but the sushi comes with rice wrapped in seaweed (as opposed to sashimi which is just the raw fish). Among other things, there were pieces of red snapper, yellowtail and blue-fin tuna, salmon, shrimp, mackerel, octopus, squid, clam, roe, and spicy tuna rolls. You could tell the fish was super fresh because, though raw, it didn’t have a “fishy” smell; it was all very, very good. Then we had a bowl of red bean and green tea ice cream for dessert.
The next entry in this food journal is to describe a party we went to on Saturday night (which dribbled into Sunday early morning). My friend Ted, whom I have known since freshman year at college, is an interesting character who stumbled across a publication from a European art movement from the 1920s and 30s called the Futurists. They were all about the juxtaposition of disparate elements. This particular document was a cookbook: The Futurist Cookbook. Apparently, it not only had explanations of their artistic objectives, but recipes incorporating those objectives as well.
For example, at Ted’s party we sampled variously named dishes from the “Sunrise” (stacked beet slices, smoked salmon and orange slices), another named something like “Apparition of Liberty” (biscotti, date, gorgonzola cheese, salmon roe within a radicchio leaf), there were also foods whose artistic names I cannot recall that consisted of pineapple topped by tuna and macadamia nut; appetizer of fennel, cumquat and olive; bread topped by mustard, banana and sardine; and rice cooked in either beer or wine. To drink we had “Alcoholic Joust” which was red wine augmented by soda water, lemon-lime and bitters (kind of like a weird sangria) and served with Swiss cheese and chocolate on the side. Everything was surprisingly good, which made us eager to try the dessert: vanilla ice cream covered with one of the following: 1) cayenne pepper, 2) wasabi beans, 3) chopped green and orange bell peppers. The contrast of spice to sweetness was very striking and for me, the wasabi ice cream was absolutely delicious. There were also cayenne pepper soaked maraschino cherries.
A good time was had by all 20 or so people who crammed into Ted’s studio apartment, and Katie and I found ourselves at home around 2:30am. Yikes! We haven’t stayed out that late in some time. Now Katie is at school from 8-5 everyday (a subject on which she will probably write about here on the blog sometime next week) and I am doing some work for Mannes, playing some gigs, and trying to get some good work done on my dissertation.
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