Back in Boston

Of course, Cambridge weather gets good when I've only got five more days to enjoy it, most of which will be spent doing more dorm crew. I'm not sure why I was so excited to borrow my brother's sleeping bag - looks like it might not even be necessary.

I had a very enjoyable outing to Shaws to buy my upcoming week's worth of food. I couldn't get anything that required any actual cooking or dishes, which made me even more excited to commence living in DC where I will have access to a real kitchen. I won't have to go outside to get to it! I'm pretty sure it won't be in a basement and if I'm lucky, it might even be well-lit!

On the way back, I thought I'd take a closer entrance and got lost in the unfamiliar depths of Comstock Hall. Oh quad life... 

Happiness is... farm-fresh produce

At least for me.

I went to Richmond, VA with my brother and his girlfriend yesterday. We stayed in a lovely Southern house on the outskirts of Richmond, where her grandmother had lived. It had a covered porch, a swing, and three rocking chairs, all in matching white wood. I had barbeque twice in one day - for lunch and dinner, the former being Texas-style, the latter proper Southern BBQ. By the way, in the South, when one uses "barbeque" as a noun, they are explicitly referring to pork. Here is a picture of my real southern BBQ. The sketchily oblong things are hush puppies - deep fried scraps of cornbread batter.

My brother claims these are the best hush puppies he's ever had, but perhaps the snack is not for me in general.

After dinner, my brother's girlfriend's family took us on a drive through Richmond, showing me the main sights. Perhaps my favorite part of the evening was coming home and having vanilla ice cream with strawberries and peaches from the farmers market.

Today, my brother's girlfriend took me to the produce stand where the fruits had been acquired and I bought more of each, as well as a Georgia tomato that I devoured raw at dinner today.

 

When I was at the produce stand, taking too many pictures with my big camera, one of the workers started making small talk with me. When I told him I was from Arizona, I had to repeat myself - he seemed pretty confused about why one would come all the way from Arizona to a rural town near Richmond. Otherwise, he was quite pleasant, as everybody else had been during my time in Richmond, even strangers. Overall, my experience in Richmond almost made me reconsider the South as somewhere I could live after graduation.

My new blog

Well, I finally decided to venture back into the blogging world for the first time since my xanga from freshman year of high school. I will be writing about and posting pictures of all the adventures I hope to have in DC this summer. Expect to learn about the food I'll make, places I'll go, and maybe a little about my work. I'm actually not in DC yet, but this is a blog about my summer - I just wanted to name it something that rhymed - so I can discuss all the exciting stuff I do before I settle at my summer destination. 

For anyone that cares to catch up on the goings on of my life, here's what I've been up to since school ended:

After my last final, I frantically packed, taped, carried, and stowed boxes, then celebrated the end of school with a few friends by getting a ridiculously huge ice cream cone. The next day, I started my dorm cleaning job, taking trash out of rooms for 2 hours. I've heard that people can get some really excellent stuff this way. However, with the exception of some spicy chocolate, a half-filled bottle of Stolichnaya I didn't want, and a box of Prismacolor markers that some girl snapped up into her possession a bit too eagerly, the loot was not very interesting. 

The following week, I cleaned bathrooms. Making monayy, yeah. This clean-up job deal is quite lucrative, but cleaning toilets all day - though least strenuous among other available tasks - was still quite exhausting. With my 10pm bedtime, I feel like I did nothing else that week. However, I successfully completed my first week of work and I have one more left May 31 - June 3. This week, however, I'm in Baltimore, enjoying some family time with my parents, graduating brother, and his really cute cat. The graduation ceremony was today, actually. It was lovely, though I nearly fell asleep during the dean's speech. I'm sad my parents are leaving tomorrow, but looking forward to coming back home at the end of August this summer.