two laptops

on friday i have to say goodbye to the laptop on the left, as it belongs to my school and friday is the last day of school...and apparently we can't be trusted to keep it one day past that.  so!  today i bought the laptop on the right, identical to the one i'll be giving back on friday, and i'll spend the next four days transferring my documents, music, and photos.  or rather: i hope my school's tech people can do that for me.

but i'm very excited!  new laptop!  all my own!  woo hoo!  it's the first major purchase for my new adventure.

“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.”
--Charles Dickens

i just received my first facebook friend request from a student.

it really must be...20 hours until graduation!

what i'm listening to right now

"on the radio," by regina spektor:



great song, and the least lame video featured in a while.

potato gratin.

there were no leftovers.

today:
my students took their AP exam and reported that they think they did well.  hooray!
i am continuing to go through old papers and books in my office, clearing through the clutter of six years work at this school, paring down to move.  i've filled six recycling bins so far.  becky would be proud: i'm fighting my hoarder tendencies!
i brought this for lunch: crunchy vietnamese cabbage salad with pan-seared tofu.  um, DELISH.  the perfect meal to pack for lunch.
i'm playing an occasional game of words with friends (shh - don't tell).
i'm making potatoes au gratin to bring to a dinner with friends tonight, shaved super thin with my mandoline.  i can't WAIT to watch those slices of potato fall.
we are 3 days, 20 hours, and 11 minutes away from graduation, according to the countdown on my computer.  CRAZINESS.

all in all, the chaos of the last three weeks has abated and i'm back to the routine.  that's a little boring, so sorry for nothing interesting on the blog recently.

hope everyone is having a good day!

the first CD i ever owned was the collected works of simon and garfunkel, purchased by my dad for me, and played on repeat for many years.

i later learned that, oh yeah, paul simon did some pretty amazing stuff on his own afterward.  i stole my parents' graceland album and never gave it back.

(proof that i still have it.  sorry, mom and dad!!)

a couple months ago i found out from nora that paul simon was doing a reunion tour with ladysmith black mambazo, the south african group with whom he recorded graceland.  nora and i agreed that going to that concert would be one of our bucket list items - things you only do once in life, and after that moment you can die happily.

fast forward to last week.  i'm in a paul simon mood, i do some internet research to see where he'll be playing on his graceland tour, and i find out that he'll be playing in london while i'm in england.  tickets are about $100 for general admission, standing room only, outdoors-in-london-so-it-will-clearly-be-raining.  I DON'T EVEN CARE.  some speedy email conversations with oxford friends erupt, one friend is in, and it ends today in the purchase of two tickets to the concert.

i am beyond excited.  truly, i'm not sure i have the words to express how i feel about this.



i have had a stressful and frustrating last three weeks of work.  i'm SO READY for this year to end, as much as i love my job.  i just watched this video three times in a row, and cried through it all.  oh, the power of music.

i can't wait for this concert.  i need this concert.

"a man may do an immense deal of good, if he does not care who gets the credit for it."
--father strickland, 1863


a good reminder, always.

Lying on the couch with my bestie, drinking wine and watching american idol on tivo = the best way to recover from a chaotic day.

in other news, i've got some freckles, huh?

"the south is everything its revilers have charged, and more than its defenders have claimed.  it is racist, violent, hypocritically pious, xenophobic, false in its elevation of women, nationalistic, conservative, and it harbors extreme poverty in the midst of ostentatious wealth.  the only point i have to add is that the united states as a civilization embodies all of these same qualities.  that the south possesses them with more intensity simply makes it easier for the nation to pass off its characteristics to the south, leaving itself innocent and righteous."
--howard zinn, the southern mystique, 1964

i just read that maurice sendak died this morning.  i only knew him as a quirky children's book author until i watched this two part interview on the colbert report in january.  this man was HILARIOUS and not afraid to speak his mind.  and he speaks the TRUTH.  had i not seen this interview, i don't think his death today would have hit me as hard as it is.

if you haven't seen these videos, you owe it to yourself to spend the time watching them.  DO IT.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Grim Colberty Tales with Maurice Sendak Pt. 1
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Grim Colberty Tales with Maurice Sendak Pt. 2
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

What's that?

Oh yes - this afternoon I passed a McDonald's sign on the highway, making its way to a new location.

It was totally bizarre to see the arches driving down the highway.

a. Don't you love my wall calendar? An excellent purchase in New Hampshire this fall. It brightens every day.

b. Counting down the days until the end of the year...

the electoral map

this is VERY cool, but it also makes me incredibly anxious.

(i love the new york times' graphics, though!)

two pastas recipes that you will love:

1. fettuccine with swiss chard, onions, and goat cheese.

there was no time to take a picture of the finished product because i was too busy gobbling it up.  i like this recipe because it incorporates a healthy element: the dark leafy green.  i probably got lots of delicious iron from that swiss chard, which outweighs the unhealthiness (sorry - we're thinking positively here - CALCIUM!) of the delicious goat cheese.

(sidebar: yay for my new iphone - i'm much more likely to take pictures, i'm finding, since my phone is right there with me!  thomas recommended i get the blogger app for my iphone, which was a great idea - i can post the pictures directly from my phone, though i'm finding that i like to type the posts on the computer - much speedier.)

2. tortellini with mushroom sauce.

as i was making this dish i couldn't help thinking about how much dad and becky would love this recipe - they are huge mushroom fans.  (i'll make it for you guys soon!)  the sauce is just sauteed mushrooms and garlic and water, with some butter and parmesan - it's more of a broth than a sauce.  but a VERY yummy broth.

(don't you love this bowl?  i have three of them - they're from anthropologie - and they're the perfect big bowl for soups and pastas.)

go to hell, carolina, part 2

a little more than two years ago i paid off my first student loan from attending duke.  today i paid off my second (and final) one!  my duke education is paid for!  woo hoo!

i'll again reiterate how TOTALLY WORTH IT i believe it is to take out student loans if you can't afford to attend your dream college without them.  i'm not advocating anything excessive, but a couple thousand dollars a year was very manageable for me to pay back, and i'd wouldn't do it differently if i had to do it again.

the timing of this is good, as in august i'll take out a loan to help finance my year at columbia.  in fact, the timing is on purpose.  i could have continued to pay this loan off over another year or two but chose to just pay off the remainder from some of my savings so i'd have a clean slate before starting grad school in the fall.  this felt important to me - the ending of one chapter of debt before beginning a new one.

the interest rate on the loan i just paid off?  2.1%.  the interest rate on the loan i'll take out this summer?  6.8%.  times have changed.

(anyone know if graduate loan rates will be lowered - like undergraduate ones will - if congress passes this student loan bill?)

so...i'm a little confused.  i can track my blog views, and this blog was visited about 1,200 times in march, which is about average for a month over the lifetime of the blog.  and then in april this blog was visited 2,500 times, the highest for a month ever.

um, what happened.  if you have thoughts or info, please enlighten me.  is everyone is just checking twice as often...or are twice as many people reading??  am i twice as interesting as before??

this is a fun conundrum - i love that the blog is getting more views!

having a bad day?

make cheesecake-stuffed strawberries.  things will get better.

yes, that is a strawberry that has been hollowed out and filled with cream cheese frosting.  it is GENIUS.  and imagine how pretty these would be on a platter at a party!  you would be the best hostess everrrrrrrr.  i would definitely go to your party.

what i'm listening to right now:

"empty house," by delta spirit:



you can't tell me that this song isn't awesome.  it makes me want to dance around in my office.  (don't worry - thus far i have refrained from doing that.)

april: 9, 10, 11, 12, & 13

i ran across this quotation recently and loved it - particularly the last line:

"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? ...we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."
--franz kafka, 1904

that said, this month's total is higher than normal, as i thought it would be - some of these books i'd been working on for several months.  in april i finished:

maus: a survivor's tale (II - and here my troubles began), by art spiegelman (just as good, just as moving, just as sad as the first book.  and a quick read!  i highly recommend it.)

looking for alaska, by john green (better, i think, than the previous john green book that i read - and i really enjoyed that book.  if you're into young adult fiction AT ALL, you should read some john green!  up next is fault in our stars, which i have been warned is SAD TIMES, but these books are so good i can't stop reading them.)

a study in scarlet and the sign of four, by sir arthur conan doyle (two sherlock holmes books!  [they are short ones, so i'm counting them together as one book.]  for 99 cents amazon.com organized all the sherlock holmes stories into chronological order and allows you to download them to your kindle all at once - for free you can download individual books and stories, but i felt that this was 99 cents well spent.  there are some tedious parts of these two books, but they have great premises and plots.  i recently watched the first season of the  BBC show sherlock, which does a GREAT job of modernizing these stories - so there's a tv recommendation for you, too.)

kindle singles: i'm starved for you, by margaret atwood and an unexpected twist, by andy borowitz and basic training by kurt vonnegut and a supposedly fun thing i'll never do again, by david foster wallace (okay, so i went on a tear through some kindle singles.  the premise of kindle singles is that they are stories too short for book form, so they're sold individually in the price range of $0.99-$2.99.  some are written specifically as kindle singles [the first two on this list] and some are just short stories being sold individually.  i am eating them up.  i'm starved for you is some excellent margaret atwood, if you like her, and an unexpected twist is HILARIOUS.  basic training is a vonnegut story that was published posthumously and is...pretty good.  a supposedly fun thing i'll never do again is about david foster wallace's first vacation on a cruise and it is also SO FUNNY and SO TRUE and THE BEST TITLE OF A STORY EVER.  i've never read anything by him and it made me want to read more - hat tip to nora for recommending this story to me.  [got any more david foster wallace recommendations?]  in short: if you have a kindle you should buy some kindle shorts.  they are quick and fun little reads.)

the happiness project, by gretchen rubin (if you want to read a book where someone overanalyzes happiness to such an extent that it can no longer POSSIBLY make anyone happy, this book is for you. yes, she's got some great ideas about how to make yourself happier, but she goes about this project [trying different happiness-boosting techniques every month of the year] in such a clinical way that i quickly wanted to punch her as she analyzed and overanalyzed her life and the lives of others.  her tone was "i am a sage and let me tell you how you can be like me, something you should clearly want."  perhaps i should have known that a 300 page book on happiness would be too many pages on this topic, but i didn't.  and in retrospect, i'm a pretty happy person - so why did i want to read this book in the first place?  unless you feel like you need to make real changes in your life, leave this book on the shelf.)