Hiatus? New York!

So this is probably one of the longest breaks from blogging i've had, and it corresponds to a period in life when i am largley very free. It just goes to show that all that stuff about blogging to share your life etc. etc. is largely superceded by the primary selfish reason for blogging - procrastination.

So quick updates about my life: i'm into my graduating quarter and life is good, and the weather is turning better on selected days when the stars are aligned (affects the tides and thus air currents), and so i've actually been able to go outside for fun and kite-flying and general revelry. Back home to sg for summer after a short trip to the Canadian Rockies, probably back in sg around June 20thishishish. Thence to do my Masters in Cali.

Preliminaries aside, here are some photos from my Spring Break trip to Philly/New York to spice up the front page! (and lengthen loading times for each time the diehards check back to this page hoping for an update and, with all probability, seeing the photos on top of the front page again.) I've tried to avoid the usual empire state/times square nonsense, so it might actually be entertaining.


Cup 'o tea fer ye, laddie? (St. Patrick's day themed air stewardesses!)


Someone's marketing team is doing a good job choosing names. 


Mural on South Street in Philadelphia. We spent a while trying to figure out what it meant.


The Magic Garden, a house made up of plenty of glass and other random objects stuck to the walls, the kind of thing which would befuddle civil servants trying to figure out if it needs a house permit or an installation art one.


Closeup of part of the magic garden.


Our gracious hosts in Philly!


Pregnant women should not ride Shark.


Yes, it's a subway station.


SAFRA national bank. I didn't know they made that much money from subscription fees. =)


Advertisement leverage.

Glacier Cornell

This message is brought to you by the bored-of-studying-and-too-little-time-before-relocation-to-do-anything-useful commission.

So in a new update on Patch's Exciting Life (now with illustrations!), we bring you tale of the glacier which has formed in my garage. Cool! you say. Yes. And smooth, too.

It's a tragic tale of innocuous elements which all come together in an amazing way. Basically, we have:

1. A drainage pipe for water from the roof
2. A garage which is slightly below road level
3. A door which doesn't really shut well
4. Chicago-style 30mph wind
5. Chicago-style winter
6. A banana

(1) + (2) = flooded garage (7)
(3) + (4) = ajar door (8)
(7) + (8) + (5) = glacier (see below)



Yea. So i had a sheet of ice over my garage, which initially was kinda brittle and fun to crack through, because it was like stepping onto creme brulee with satisfying little crunches beneath your feet (except that your shoes got wet afterwardS) and then it became slightly more solid and you could gingerly walk across without it breaking as you see the water move beneath you, and then it became a solid layer of ice which would bear your weight if you jumped on it. It's kinda cool, and if i could be bothered now would be a good time to bring something and break up the ice and throw it away, because all the dirt and stuff has been frozen into the ice, which normally gets stuck in the garage since there's no drainage hole! mm.

So where's (6) come in to the story, you say?

Oh well I ate a banana for lunch before this.

Lyre birds

From today's Animal Behavior class

Lyre Birds

The lyre bird is a bird where the male attracts mates through a stunning vocal display, imitating the songs of other birds in the forest. Better than African Grays! almost.

Happy Chinese New Year!

Still suffering from post-Boston work backlog. Photos up soon! For now, check out Clocky, the alarm clock which "runs away and hides when you don't wake up." Which i guess works assuming it doesn't run into a muffled corner. hmm. Cute though!

AFK

Midterms over, off to boston 'til Sunday.

Haiku Schmaiku

Today's lunch was a most curious and tasty lunch of linguini laced with vegetables and in a peanut butter/rice vinegar/soy/sugar sauce, spiced up with red pepper flakes and with just a hint of ginger/garlic/onions to make it Asianish. Served chilled just like soba (not like it takes much to chill things here) on a bed of lettuce. Stick a fancy name on it and put it on a zen black plate and it could've been a fusion dish served at some michellin star-red restaurant, but this was simple fare at the Stuart Cafe where i'm hiding from the snow and using their powerpoints. muahaha.

Anyway, the point is that I also drank this bottle of green tea, which had this verse at the side:

"on the pond
a curled duck feather
catches the breeze"

Which is all well and good, except that below that it says that it's the "ITO EN New Haiku award winner". Which is ........ odd, since that is not at all like a haiku, except for the tone of it. hmm. scammy. Surely the Japanese company which makes this strange Japanese tea (or, well, Japanese sounding company) knows its haikus from its tankas from its free verse? So a quick browse to their website shows that they're trying to push a form of New Style Haiku which is basically free verse. Which is totally cheating, since i think so much of the beauty of haikus comes from working within the constraints of 5-7-5 syllables. *Traditionalist*

P.S. if any of you is wondering why i'm suddenly posting so much, I have no idea either, but i put it down to the fact that it's midterm season and suddenly i have this immense need for procrastination. hm.

Why it is cold

1. Because the pipes which vent steam now seem to vent ice



2. Because your jacket crackles like the skin of roast pigs when you walk out into the cold


3. Because lake michigan and chicago river have blocks of ice on them


4. Because the insides of your nose stiffen up when you walk outside


5. Because your toes feel like falling off after walking 10min to class

Viva la Chicago!

Go Bears!

So Chicago finally made it into the Superbowl finals, and the whole city is crazy over it: no photos because i keep forgetting to bring my camera, but the Art Institute lions are wearing football helmets, and the office buildings have entire faces selectively lit up to spell out messages like "bear down, bears!" and "go bears!". Awesome!

And in church today, my priest gave us two passages to meditate upon, and this is probably one of the rare occaisions i'll post scripture on my blog, but:

Isaiah 59:11 "We all growl like bears."

Psalms 32:9 "Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no understanding: whose mouth must be held in with bit and bridle, lest they come near unto thee."

And there was also a blessing of throats (all the better to shout at the TV with)... so amusing! And everyone took it really really seriously.

Weather.com

"Today's forecast: High of -13 degrees celcius. Windy. Snow flurries and a few snow showers throughout the day. Very cold. Wind chills may approach -26C. High -13C. Winds W at 25 to 40 mph. Chance of snow 30%.


Tonight's forecast: low of -18 degrees celcius. Bitterly cold. Evening flurries with a better chance of snow showers overnight. Wind chills may approach -29C. Low -18C. Winds W at 20 to 30 mph. Chance of snow 40%."


Yup, definitely time to go walk around. First time i've heard a weather forecast use the words bitterly cold.

Intellectual curiosity

Today i found myself in Crerar searching for a forestry book on Indonesia's 1997 forest fires (they actually have it here!) and i realised just how long it's been since i've gone to Crerar. The landscape in front of the building has completely changed since the addition of a new building or two and it took me a while to actually remember which building Crerar was supposed to be. I just don't come to this part of the world often.

And then i was reminded of just how quiet Crerar is... the top level of the building where i'm sitting right now has probably about 4 people scattered around the floor in random nooks and crannies. Nobody is in sight, and nobody is within earshot either. It's pretty spooky, but the clean scientific hospitalish setting is more reassuring than the dark foreboding which is the quiet spooky law library. Only Crerar also gives this feeling that you have the whole place to yourself, which is sort of cool, when you include the fact that it's chock full of tomes of knowledge. There were countless volumes on forest fires in the shelf where i was looking, which actually (sadly) ignited a little spark of excitement deep within my soul. So much knowledge!

A quick visit to the toilet revealed the nature of Crerar's usual inhabitants - the walls are full of premed graffitti. Obscene drawings of toulene jostled for space with lewd remarks like "for a good time, call #QC141.P211". Clearly they aren't as vigilant with removing graffitti here as they are in other places. All the better for my amusement. In place of the usual proclamations about being well endowed that adorn bathroom stalls, there were people showing off their great manliness with displays of GPA and MCAT scores on the walls. Enough of this vulgarity! I head out to find a place to sit and ostensibly do work, but since nobody is actually watching, I end up blogging instead.



(Oh, and if you were wondering what QC#141.P211 was, it turns out that no such book was on the shelf. boo. However a quick browse through the library catalog shows that the closest QC#141 was the journal of rheology. )

Groundhog day

The slightly more astute of you might have realized that I haven’t actually been updating particularly frequently of late. This is due, of course, to a number of reasons (excuses):

1. The Cornell park processing house hasn’t quite finished going through the Argentina photos yet, and since that was the next chronological thing I was going to blog about, I feel bad using the photos before they’re stamped ready for mass-release.


2. I’ve been busy, with, you know, this school thing, and stuff.


3. Since I don’t really read blogs because I don’t blog, I lack inspiration to write new blogs, thus I continue to not blog.


4. I’ve gotten lazy.

Nevertheless, in an attempt to retain the 3 loyal readers who still keep an eye out on this site for updates, and because I’m currently bored eating lunch when everyone has disappeared off somewhere, here is an update on what my life has been in roughly chronological order.

Argentina!
Is where I traveled for winter break last year, and since I refuse to post photos before they’re distributed to everyone, and since I also refuse to write without photos, here is a short summary of Argentina:

Muy Scenically Pretty. Many long bus rides. Unfriendly to cows. Friendly to stomachs.

New Year’s Countdown Dinner

Happy New Year’s! Hey, the month is still right. Presuming I finish this blog post by today.

The Cornell Park household decided to disdain all hopes of clean floors and cooked up a French Fête for New Year’s Eve. What other way to assert ourselves as the top-culinary-household-with-too-much-time-on-their-hands? Here’s a pictorial overview:


Roasted sweet potatoes caramelized with maple syrup. Because, well, I had leftover sweet potatoes.


Chicken with 40 cloves of garlic (no kidding!) simmered in a white wine herb sauce. I’ve recently taken a liking to this dish, because it contains all the important tasty ingredients for a good entrée. The fumes you get when you open the cover after it’s been simmering in the wine for a long time must be enough to knock over an AA meeting. Plus, of course, there’s the matter of finishing all that leftover wine…


The rest of the lineup: Bouef Bourguignon (Beef stewed in red wine with sweet carrots and tender mushrooms), Herbed new potatoes, Zucchini Gratin, Pork roasted with French spices, and Asparagus in hollandaise sauce. The flowers were a nice touch too.


The happy gang celebrating Chicago! With one extra special guest. =)


Oh, and of course, dessert. Brownies courtesy of Huileng, and Adela’s secret Ice Cream bombe. Hidden in the background are our hors d’ourves.


Chocolate fondue. Of course.

Good times, ringing in the new year, and since my tofu noodle like object is now finished (or at least, I can’t eat any more of it, I think this update will have to do for now), so:


Cheers to everyone! May this new year be full of joy, love, and good food! =)