I'm the Bobblehead

Critter Hunt, Smithsonian Style

2011-03-02T20:20:00.000-05:00

Apparently someone at the Smithsonian reads my epic blog, because they ripped off my critter hunt idea. Only unlike mine, their pictures have actual critters in them. (Sorry insects, you just don't count) Why didn't I think of motion-triggered camera traps?! Ah well, at least they posted some entertaining pictures. Enjoy!

Smithsonian Critter Hunt website

Travel Blog

2010-08-29T20:08:00.002-04:00

http://westwardeastward.blogspot.com/

Wild wild west

2010-08-06T13:21:00.000-04:00

I got into Reno last night at about 12:30 Pacific Time and despite the jet lag, so far it has been a lot of fun. The only place we could think of that would be open for food last night when I got in was an all-night diner in the casino Atlantis. So we ended up getting some late night diner food and Dan played a few hands of Black Jack. Winner of $3.50! We raked it in. Today we're going to check out Reno some more and right now we're planning our breakfast adventures. Western themed blog with pictures to come!

breaking the silence!

2010-07-04T23:45:00.000-04:00

Look at this critter! It is a marmot- a ground squirrel! I hope you are as blown away by its cuteness as I am. I am going to be on the lookout for one when I go out west this August to see D. Apparently they live around there. Critter hunt part 2? The wild western sequel?

Meet September

2010-03-14T18:02:00.001-04:00

I recently got the most amazing gift- a guitar! I named it September and am having constant fantasies about becoming an brilliant folk guitarist. I can't wait to learn how to play it! So far I've learned a few chords and already feel like I'm on my way. I picked up a beginners guitar book today. All very exciting.

Ode to a Pittsburgh tree

2010-02-06T14:47:00.001-05:00

Ode to a (fallen) pittsburgh tree

Farewell tree of leaves and shade
Who buckled under a snowy cascade
Tree that housed my tire swing
And sheltered birds that tire-lessly sing

Many great memories! I'm going to miss this beautiful tree! But what a spectacular and dramatic end.

Attention: Non law school book purchase

2010-01-16T16:57:00.000-05:00

After trading in a small fortune for this semester's textbooks, I decided to spend just a little more a book that had absolutely NOTHING to do with the law or law school. This is my new book: "Goat Song: A Seasonal Life, a Short History of Herding, and the Art of Making Cheese" by Brad Kessler. I'm going to learn all about goats and goat cheese! The book is about a guy and his wife who went from NYC life to raising goats. So, as a warning, be prepared for lots of fun critter facts and possibly some rambling musings about how much I love goat cheese.

In other food news, I've become a dedicated follower of the great and powerful butternut squash. It's so amazing! I was really close to trying to make butternut squash ravioli last night, but I kind of wimped out remembering the great pierogi attempt of '09. (See infra). I'll just have to put it on my life list of goals- right in between 'win the nobel peace prize' and 'see Wayne's World dubbed into German.' ;)

Random thought of the day: Life is a dead end.

Critter Corner

2010-01-14T19:52:00.001-05:00

The Victoria Crowned Pigeon. I never would have imagined such a beautiful pigeon!!

People and places

2010-01-11T15:26:00.000-05:00

Back to school! Last semester! (this calls for many exclamation marks) (!!!!!)

So I'm back in Virginia and two of my favorite people are responding to distant calls to travel across the globe. It's times like these I wish we still thought the Earth was flat. Certainly if the threat of a hippo or kangaroo attack isn't drastic enough to keep them here, a fear of falling of the edge of the world might just do the trick. New Years Resolution: Donate lots of money to the Flat Earth Society.
http://www.alaska.net/~clund/e_djublonskopf/Flatearthsociety.htm

I spent my break in Pittsburgh, where the weather seemed to know just how much I missed snow down here in Virginia. If only driving conditions weren't a contentious issue, I couldn't have been happier. Also, I think my back muscles are super strong from lots of shivering. I'm increasingly looking forward to going back to Pittsburgh after school ends. I don't like the idea of "settling down," but I can't think of anywhere I've liked even close to as much as Pittsburgh, so I'm trying to take that for what it is and not worry. And aside from being a great place, Pittsburgh is full of awesome people that I love coming home to and am always reluctant to leave.

Hunger calls! More updates later.

My new project

2009-11-18T22:01:00.000-05:00

http://hundredpushups.com/index.html

Adventures in Cooking, or... Potatoes Potatoes all around the room

2009-10-26T23:04:00.000-04:00

Sleepless nights always get me into trouble. I always end up either concocting some grand ambition or a hopeless fantasy to try to lull myself into sleep. Last night it was the former of the two. Sometime around 2:30 a.m., wide-eyed and frustrated, I became fixated on idea of becoming a better cook. Probably because it was 2:30 a.m., my idea quickly went from practical and responsible to ambitiously unrealistic. I- the horrible and mistake-prone cook- decided to take on making pierogies from scratch. (wikipedia tells me the plural is pierogi? But that sounds weird to me. So I decline.)

So, today was pierogi day! In retrospect, also known as an utterly exhausting day! After class I made a trip to Target and the grocery store-- still very excited-- to gather all my supplies.

The first challenge was making the dough. The recipe told me to knead it until most of the stickiness was gone, but not to overdo it. How exactly do you know when most of the stickiness is gone? I basically punched at it like a cat for a long time. Then I'd think -- this is probably done? Then I'd think... but wait! Maybe there is more stickiness to tackle? The end result was what I'm pretty sure the recipe meant by "don't overdo it." But, it was in dough form! So I claimed it as a victory. Check!

Next step: Make a mashed potatoes type substance for the insides while the dough is chilling. Easy, right? Peel & cut the potatoes, simmer some onions, throw some cheese in there, mix it all up with a mixer... creamy, delightful potatoes will ensue. True. Except when you forget the whole boil the potatoes step. As it turns out when you put a mixer to hard potatoes, all you get is potato bits flying like food casualties around the room.

Potatoes, potatoes everywhere.
Potatoes on the walls, potatoes in my hair.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that I might have done something not quite right. A gchat question later to the helpful Miss JK resulted in me learning the secret ingredient to making mashed potatoes-- boiling them first! (And by secret, I mean cleverly hidden in the recipe.) About an hour later after redoing all of the previous steps, however, victory on step 2! Cheesy potatoes! Check!

I did make up for the idiocy of step 2 with some genius, however. Because I didn't have a rolling pin, I decided to use my bottle of wine. Which basically meant I got to drink the rest of the contents before this next step-- yay!

So.... still cooking. This was beginning to take forever. I switched from Joni Mitchell to Kanye West's "Stronger." Then I rolled out the dough with my wine bottle (now mourning the fact that my wine was gone and there was still a ton left to do). I was supposed to cut little circles out and fill them with cheesy potatoes, then close 'em up, boil them, and sautee them with onions. It turns out you can do about 4 at a time with the pans/pots I have, and most of the little fellows didn't seem to make it through the end of the journey. While some of them came out, others tragically lost their potato insides in the water. It was kind of sad. I had sort of bonded with them by this point.

Anyway, 4 hours = about 7 pierogies. I'm hungry because I couldn't stand to eat them all in one sitting. Not after all that. Though they ended up pretty tasty after all.

In the end, I learned a valuable lesson- sometimes there's a reason people never make these things from scratch.

Law school .... and zoology

2009-10-02T19:56:00.001-04:00

I'm having trouble giving up my critter fascination after all. Here is another parking lot friend. I think he sort of looks like Fred Thompson, actually. Yeah?

When critters attack!

2009-09-28T15:19:00.014-04:00

A few weeks ago, with some spare time on my hands, I received a facebook-type poke from Mother Nature (or so I imagined). It was a gorgeous weekend and I decided I needed to do something earthy… nature-y…communing with the great outdoors…type of activity, as my proverbial “poke back.” Thus emerged “Critter Hunt 2009.”

Critter Hunt 2009 began when I saw the most amazing (and vaguely terrifying) preying mantis chilling outside of my front door. He/she (who knows??) rather politely posed for me after I ran into get my camera, and the result was pretty spectacular! Smugly, I figured that my point and click camera skills were right up there with National Geographic. (As a footnote, the Wikipedia preying mantis article is both fascinating and disturbing reading! Apparently they can eat small rodents and practice sexual cannibalism ((?!!!))).

Following my preying mantis sighting, I had another critter run-in a few days later. This time it was an ENORMOUS mosquito that had flown in to bask in our AC, and I decided to snap another picture. (Which I figure was good, because the remains of that mosquito are now attached to my roommate’s church hymn book.)

Now that I had two random critter photos, I figured I might as well keep going. Over the weekend I decided to find animals around town and document them into an album—critter hunt 2009. In my optimistic mind I expected a fair number of adorable critters—merry squirrels, frolicking deer, hopping bunnies? In reality, I realized there are just waaaaay more strange and gross insects than I really wanted to know were occupying the same space as me. I also realized my photography skills don’t extend to being able to capture tiny insect in focus. Guess National Geographic will not, after all, be knocking at my door.

I learned that some insects clump together for maximum grossness potential.

Williamsburg = Spiders Galore!! This is just one of many varieties I encountered. (And, of course, the only one that showed up in focus)

Finally a fuzzy critter!! Deer in the distance!

Complete FAIL attempt to capture what I thought were swans, but then realized were probably just geese. As gracefully as a fake swan, I stumbled down the hill in the woods to get this stunning picture of a far away white blob.

Grocery store critters. Very sad.

Epilogue:

Since Critter Hunt ’09, I’ve been bitten by 20 mosquitoes and was greeted by a snake when I stepped out of my car. I’m not sure, but I think the critters mistook my intentions. Maybe I should have considered a description other than “hunt”? In any case, mother nature and I are no longer facebook friends.

Waldorf and Statler go to Starbucks

2009-05-03T15:34:00.003-04:00

Today I had a coffee shop run in with two old men who reminded me of real life incarnations of the Statler and Waldorf grumpy old men Muppets. One of the men came up behind me in a wheelchair, hair bright white, thick, and standing straight up in the air. The other, who ordered drinks, was dressed in a formal shirt with contrasting gray sweat shorts, his extremely long and skinny legs bare to the breeze.

As we waited for our drinks, the man in the shorts turned to me and asked if I was a student. “Yes,” I replied. “Where?” He asked. I told him that I was a student at the law school. “You don’t say! The law school.” he repeated and then paused for a moment. Then he asked, “Why don’t you become a nurse or an elementary school teacher?” Thinking that he was commenting on the shortage of teachers and nurses, I responded that it’s certainly true we could use more of those. Without responding to me he turned to his friend and yelled across the store, “Look, Jim! We’ve got a WOMAN lawyer over here.” They both laughed.

After the man in the shorts sat down, I heard them say: “a woman lawyer. I can’t believe it. Next thing you know one of them will be president . . .”

I got my drink and sat down not too far from where the men were sitting. Jim, still waiting for his friend, asked me in a bemused tone if I was “investigating” or “going to court” today. I smiled and just told him today was a studying day. They continued their conversation with each other, amazed at all the electronics students had out on their tables in the shop.

“It certainly is a different world today,” they said.

Thank God that it is.

2009-04-29T19:51:00.002-04:00

But not even headlines or the bitter smear of newsprint or the choke of smokescreen and gas or chatter of brokers on the stockmarket or barking of phantom millions or oratory of brasshats laying wreaths on new monuments
Can blur the memory
Of the chilly December day
Two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, OH
first felt their homemade contraption
whittled out of hickory sticks
gummed together with Arnstein's bicycle cement
stretched with muslin they'd sewn on their sister's sewing-machine in their own backyard on Hawthord Street in Dayton, OH

Soar into the air
Above the dunes and the wide beach
At Kitty Hawk

- From John Dos Passos, The Big Money

Gwim Video

2008-11-07T17:38:00.000-05:00

This is just a collection of Gwim photos with some cheer up music :)

Transcendental Etude

2008-04-26T22:25:00.000-04:00

"No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history
or music, that we should begin
with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on trying
the hard ones, practicing till strength
and accuracy became one with the daring
to leap into transcendence, take the chance
of breaking down the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
--And in fact we can't live like that: we take on
everything at once before we've even begun
to read or mark time, we're forced to begin
in the midst of the hard movement,
the one already sounding as we are born."

- From Transcendental Etude, Adrienne Rich

Lost and found

2008-04-26T01:07:00.000-04:00

If I let my imagination run free,
What if it doesn't come back to me?

The Color Wheel

2008-04-19T23:51:00.000-04:00

I've captured my emotions just beneath the surface. Rainbow colored lights flash beneath my skin—ready to burst when punctured. Red. Blue. It’s a dangerous lottery. Red is feeling hot today.

I push it further down and the pressure grows. The red begins to boil. I cover it with a gloss of yellow.

Time passes. All the colors fade.

The wisdom of chocolate

2008-04-15T22:24:00.000-04:00

Today I took advice from the inside of a Dove Promise wrapper. Outcome remains to be seen.

Randomness

2008-04-06T00:03:00.000-04:00

I saw the Old Man and the Sea today
In Colonial Williamsburg

Walking a slow gait

A man out of place
in a place out of time

10 minutes to go . . .

2007-11-30T11:49:00.000-05:00

10 minutes left of the longest call center shift ever. I decided to write to keep myself from falling asleep. Unlike the effects of studying. When I was younger I used to try to fall asleep in my books because it seemed so picturesque and Full House like. That was kind of weird. Mostly it was just uncomfortable. Here there is at least a wall that I can snuggle up with. It doesn't help that the temperature is so warm. I feel like I'm in an incubator. Like a little baby chick. Only not as cute.

School has been kind of wearing lately. I've been dreaming of going to Poland. Are pierogies Polish? That seems about right. I could really go for a pierogie right about now. Speaking of these last ten minutes taking forever, I'm also hungry. I decided to eat grape nuts this morning and ignore the fact that it looked like gerbil turds. Unfortunately it tasted like gerbil turds too. I figure that I drink alcohol that tastes like lighter fluid, why not put the same effort into a healthy morning? I couldn't do it though. I guess I'll have to work up my grape nuts tolerance.

Have been thinking about performing a skit for the public service fund date night fundraiser (now know as the masquerade themed something or other people you don't actually go on a date with the person you bid on). I was thinking about recreating the jazz flute scene from Anchorman. It makes me laugh in my head. I need to commit to doing it before I back out and decide to sit at home with my pierogies instead.

Three minutes. . . three long minutes.

Speaking of pierogies again. They hardly sell them here in Virginia. I had a cashier ask me what I was buying once when she scanned them. This place is bogus. My roomate says I'm overreacting. That's probably true.

Strawberry Fields Forever

2007-11-12T09:51:00.000-05:00

This weekend I rediscovered a love for the Beatles. My CD collection, like the velveteen rabbit, has been sadly neglected since I started listening to downloaded music on my computer. Going through my CDs the other day, I happened upon the second Beatles anthology with its bright green granny smith apple jewel cover. For the Benefit of Mr. Kite, I popped that baby into my computer to cozy up with my much-loved digital collection. It kind of made my weekend.

The Beatles are so much a part of pop culture that it's easy to forget that individual connection you feel to their music when you're listening to it. I've never meditated, but the feeling I get when I'm listening to certain music is what I imagine it would be like. The raw emotion of their songs is so consuming it's unbelievable. Across the Universe, Let It Be, A Day in the Life . . . absolutely amazing.

I also saw August Rush this weekend, which I really loved. Once you get over the cheesiness factor and accept the movie as an unrealistic fairy tale, it's really a sweet movie. The music totally made this movie too. Jonathan Rhys Meyer's character has this scene with his (unknown to him) son in the movie where he tells him to never give up on his music, no matter what. Whenever life goes wrong, your music will always be there. It made me kind of sad because I feel like I've given up on my music. I hardly play anymore and I always have some excuse for myself about being too busy. But I really miss it. Today I'm going to go search out the undergrad practice rooms and start playing at least a couple of times a week. Even if no one else ever hears, I still want to be playing again.

So that was my weekend of music! It capped off with the Hugh Grant movie Music and Lyrics. Now I have Pop Goes My Heart permanently stuck in my head. It's going to be a long day. . .

Stiched with color

2007-10-11T15:12:00.001-04:00

Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.
—from "Separation" by W.S. Merwin

I thought this was such a beautiful line. Have been thinking a lot about the people I love and miss.

Call Center Blues

2007-09-21T10:50:00.001-04:00

Sitting in a closet-sized room with one hour left to go on my call center duty for the day. It's been three weeks without one call. Actually, no. That's not entirely true. I did get an accidental call one day.

There I was, drowning in boredom as usual. That's when I heard it. . .The ding. Just like that, it was on. I eagerly hit the button to accept the call and followed along in my how-to call center guide. Deep breath. "Law School Call Center, how may I help you?"

No answer

I tried again, louder. LAW SCHOOL CALL CENTER, MAY I HELP YOU??!! Nothing. Time for emergency measures. I pushed the listen button, expecting to hear the chaos of an emergency situation only to hear the law professor continuing on like nothing had happened. Didn't he wonder why his podium was speaking to him? Was there a classroom full of students wondering why in the middle of corporate transactions a tiny excited voice was squeaking out in the middle of the room?

The world may never know.

take that Paul Revere

2007-06-19T15:25:00.000-04:00

I just learned that you have to be 18 and under to be a fife player in the colonial Williamsburg fife and drum corps. Damn you Williamsburg! They leave me no choice. I guess I'm going to have to become a redcoat now.

2007-06-19T14:07:00.001-04:00

I’m convinced that moving from the constant social atmosphere of college to the relative isolation of the “real world” has me building up the crazy. All the random thoughts, the paranoias, the stories with no point, and other hallmarks of my existence are forming a sort of “mental plaque” on my brain with nowhere to go.

I recently read that writing is like a cheaper version of therapy. So here goes . . .