I left my phone at home yesterday

Which was entirely uncharacteristic of me, since I live by and always preach the refrain "keys, phone, id" to my roommate at school, encouraging her to check for all three before leaving to make her life easier and avoid having to rely on my forgetful self to open the side door of the entryway. But I had a very good reason for it.

The day before yesterday, I was sitting on the chair in my room, right next to my bed, with my laptop in my lap, probably creeping around facebook or something similar, when I saw something out of the corner of my eye. (Grossness alert - skip ahead to next paragraph if you are grossed out easily) I turned and saw - on the corner of my beautiful lavender fitted sheet, less than a foot away from me - a GIANT cockroach. After leaping across the room in a very prompt and athletic fashion to secure my laptop (and get away), I tried to deal with the situation using my designated bug catcher - an quart-sized empty yogurt container. After an extended struggle, the cockroach eluded me, so I cleared away my belongings and slept downstairs. 

Then, my morning routine got messed up, I took too long to get ready and had to run out to catch the 8:10 bus (avid readers of this blog may know that the 8:20 is a whole different story). 

Work is going well. I've started asking my co-intern about Stata and Excel commands, which has been working out very well. Just today, I learned to "concatenate," or combine strings of characters in different Excel cells and put them into one cell and made 350 lines of repetitive labeling code in approximately 5 minutes. It was awesome. That was a very nerdy thing to write, but it was such a highlight of my day, I had to share. In other news, I've been struggling with an education-related dataset, but mostly in a good way. 

Although I'm enjoying work and life in general, I sort of wish I wasn't sticking around for so long. I wish I could spend more time with my parents in my air-conditioned house, eating their food and being appreciated. Maybe the grass is always greener on the other side, but I even missed school a little bit this week. The other day, a friend sent me a link to a feature on one of the residential houses with photos of quintessential components of house life - studying in the dining hall, student performances, housing day, and a spring event in the courtyard. I'm glad I have a chance to get a glimpse of the "real world" this summer but still get one more year at school. I will just need to remember to appreciate it. 

The funniest thing that happened

During my trip last weekend occurred when I wasn't even around. I was staying in the NYU dorms, where my friend shares a suite with 3 other males, which is why I felt pretty confident about leaving my shampoo, conditioner and razor on the edge of the bathtub thinking none of them wanted to smell like Mango Mandarin. I might have been right about that, but when I came back from a day of stuffing myself with Chinese food and went to the bathroom right after one of the guys took a shower, I noticed that my razor was wet and placed in a configuration different from the one in which I had left it. To avoid alienating my friend from his roommates, I didn't confront the guy about it, but I'm pretty sure he used my bright turquoise, obviously girly Venus Goddess razor.

In other news, this week has been excruciatingly hot - over 100 and humid. I have a little air conditioner in my room, but I don't use it to save electricity/just to see if I can. I discussed thoughts on air conditioner use with my housemate, who claims they don't use it because they don't like it, not to save money on electricity, but I'm pretty sure that is a load of bullshit because my housemate does not strike me as the sort of person to ever admit wanting to save money on anything.

Not talking about the rest of my trip just yet

One thing I hadn't anticipated prior to this summer is the amount of difficulty I would have balancing my social life with the demands from work. Somehow, a couple of weeks into my internship, I started having many more things to fill up my evenings. After the first time I stayed at work until 8pm, completely missing happy hour with my intern friend and disappointing her in the process, I learned to not make any concrete plans with anyone and preface all arrangements with "I'm not sure when exactly I'll be getting off work..."

It seems like on most days, I either stay at work until around 7 or I have plans afterwards. Having plans is really nothing to complain about and I'm happy that I do, but I can't help but get kind of cranky when I don't have enough time for myself. I had been looking forward to getting home before 8pm yesterday, but then a friend who'd had a bad weekend asked to hang out, so I obliged. In general, though, it's tough to decide - doing whatever social activity someone is proposing vs. going home and making yummy food alone. Both things make me happy, but I guess I've been doing a lot of the former and not enough of the latter. 

Today, I got off at 6:30 and rushed home to make myself some pasta with turkey meatballs and salad and just generally enjoy life. 

In general, however, I'm curious about how things will go when I graduate and get a full-time job. It's great that I've got one more year of taking about 14 hours of classes and having lots of time to devote to my friends, but I'm pretty worried about what will happen afterwards. I hope I won't have to continue to be late to lunch with friends because of meetings that run late/have to cancel post-work plans/flake on people because I'm too tired..

The pursuit of char siu bao*

And other Asian delicacies was the theme of my trip to NYC this weekend. I dragged my friend to Flushing, Queens - a trip that involves approximately 50 minutes on the above-ground subway through the seedy looking parts of the city - to have some northern Chinese (Dongbei) food with me.

The meal was good, but not as magical as the first time I had some northern Chinese food, but still good. We got complimentary shredded potato salad and vegetable appetizers and ordered what was termed "triple vegetable delight" in the menu.

Part of the reason the meal wasn't as magical as I might have liked was because we made the mistake of ordering "braised pork," which sounded innocent enough, but ended up being not much pork and lots of lard.

The sweet potato with caramelized sugar syrup dessert - the chief reason I had to spend 2 hours going to Flushing and back during my brief trip to New York - did not disappoint. Check out the strings of sugar. Yum.

After lunch, we went to MoMA PS1, which I didn't like nearly as much as I like the regular MoMA. The garden was pretty and the building was cool, but the art was not to my taste.

We spent the rest of the evening wandering around Central Park and chilling.

I have more to say about my trip, but I'm going to bed, so it will have to wait.

*For anyone that cares, char siu bao is the Romanization of the Cantonese pronunciation. For anyone that doesn't care that much, it refers to those delicious BBQ pork buns.

Living the housewife dream, part 2

Although the most crucial component of any housewife's duties is cooking dinner for herself or her family, there are sometimes opportunities to showcase her skills outside the home. Such an opportunity became available to me this weekend, with an invitation to a potluck goodbye barbeque for one of my coworkers. Having had my jalapeno cheddar cornbread baking plans derailed by my housemate, who objected to the heat that the oven would create, I decided to make ginger sesame slaw. 

I'm not sure how the slaw turned out, but the relatively low ratio of side dishes to beer brought by the guests ensured that it was completely gone by the time I had to leave, which is really all I wanted. 

This afternoon, after doing some data entry for a paid RA position I've taken up and listening to my housemate ridicule me for doing work on Sunday, I attempted Indian food again. The decision was largely influenced by my desire to use up the leftover coconut milk that's been staring me in the face every time I open the fridge and justify some of the fixed costs of the pricey curry paste. I'm not sure if they eat very many carrots in India, but I had some I wanted to use up so I cooked them with ginger, cilantro and coconut milk. 

This was the end result. 

Aside from the commuting trouble

The past weekend was actually pretty awesome. A friend of mine came down from NYC, thankfully having done all the touristy stuff at some point prior to this visit and not requiring that we visit every single Smithsonian Museum, or any of them, for that matter. Instead, we went to Old Town Alexandria, which is a quaint little neighborhood. After brunch, we went to a bead shop to play with beads and feel young again.

There are times in life when an ice cream is so good that you are compelled to visit the same ice cream shop multiple times over the course of a single weekend. The Florentine Perche No attained this distinction with its delicious watermelon gelato that we had 4 times over a three-day weekend when I was studying abroad last summer. The urgency to visit the Dairy Godmother, which I will have access to for the rest of the summer, is not nearly as dire, but I did it twice this past weekend anyway.

Yesterday, I made banana chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast and made my friend endure the wait associated with plating and photographing the results.

In th evening, we had the truly patriotic experience of listening to country music (because I was too stubborn to go to the better concert) and watching fireworks on the National Mall.

The wheezing sound of an approaching bus

Never sounds as sweet as it does when you are hot, sticky, tired of waiting, and still feeling that strawberry vodka Sprite.

I barely made it onto an early metro after I dashed down the escalator and boldly reprimanded some lady for standing on the walking side of the escalator, but my efforts were all in vain. I ended up waiting for 40 minutes for a bus at Pentagon, in an impressively long line of people. Once the bus finally pulled in 10 minutes late, which was also about 40-50 minutes after people had started waiting, everyone's wonderful northern Virginian manners quickly evaporated into the humid nighttime air and everyone, including those that were in the back of the line or not in line at all, rushed towards the entrance to the bus. There was shoving and yelling, a security guard was brought in, and the bus pulled away without even having been properly filled to capacity when there were still about 10 people ahead of me. In case you're wondering, after a couple of minutes, another bus showed up to collect the other half of the people that had been waiting.

This summer, I've been learning many valuable things, including how to dress for work, cook real food for myself, and sort values properly in Excel. Perhaps the most important lesson that I've learned is to never move to the suburbs unless I have a car. 

My plans to go to Baltimore

Yesterday did not work, so I decided to have a chill housekeeping day and finally cleaned and did laundry again. I also made fake Indian food and had a friend over to help me eat it.

After dinner, we walked through suburban Virginia for about half an hour to get to a Wisconsin-style frozen custard place my housemate recommended. I got the blueberry kind and it was amazing. I am so going back.

Whiny post #3

My project at work is going moderately well. I'm learning cool Excel tricks from the RA that is supervising it and doing my first, though simple, replication exercise! It pretty much worked except for one part.

Apparently the local food trucks have Farragut Friday, for which, as the name might suggest, many of them park in Farragut Square on Fridays. My intern friend and I have decided to make Friday food truck lunch a tradition for the summer. 

After work - which was supposed to end at 2:00 in preparation for the long weekend, but actually ended at 2:30 for me - I went to Old Town Alexandria for my very first visit to an ABC Store, where ABC stands for Alcoholic Beverage Control. That's how they sell liquor in Virginia. On my way over from the subway, I walked through a neighborhood that seemed sketchy, a feeling that only intensified when I passed by two guys sitting on a porch and heard a comment about "that booty" as my hind side receded into the distance. 

Once at the ABC Store, I saw Sweet Tea vodka (only in the South...) and took not one, but TWO pictures of it to post on here, however, just like the last time, they didn't get saved onto my phone! Also, I know smartphones aren't exactly known for long-lasting battery life, but it's been discharging completely every 4 hours! Yes, I know, first-world problems.

If you happen to notice the time stamp on this post, you'll see that I am home, writing it at 11pm on Friday night when I could be swatting off drunk admirers at a club instead. I went to jazz in the Sculpture Garden - which has become a permanent fixture of my DC life - and then to Five Guys, where I didn't actually get anything, but inhaled all my friends' extra fries that end up on the bottom of the paper bag. As I was standing behind some lady and waiting to get ketchup, I held my purse and felt that treacherous vibration that my phone performs when it turns off because the battery is completely drained. Unwilling to try to get home after a night of clubbing without the help of trusty Google Maps and the general feeling of assurance that comes with having a working cellphone, I decided to head back at 9pm. And here I am.