This has been a really nice weekend so far.

Yesterday I spent some time weeding, some time on the phone with my mom about the cake and dress. We went to the Italian Market in the morning, so in the afternoon I was out in the backyard for awhile, reading the New Yorker and eating a lot of fresh strawberries and sugar snap peas. Our peas are dying off because of the heat (they are really a spring/fall vegetable around here), and our blackberry plant has flourished but we've eaten almost all of its bounty. Mmmm. Oh, and we watched some Invader Zim, which is a really funny short cartoon series from a few years ago. Today I went on an 8-mile run, and I was surprised that it felt a lot shorter than the last time I did that particular run. I was filthy and streaming sweat by the time I got back, but it felt great. What is nice is that, after I took a cold shower and laid down in bed to relax and stop sweating, Blinn jumped up on the bed and cuddled up next to me for pets. I love our cats. Since then, been working on our wedding favors for everyone, which is kind of fun.

Wedding planning is going really well. I did make Thursday an artificial deadline to get done a lot of stuff I'd been putting off, and that worked great. I'm sure lots of little things will come up, but I feel on top of things. And increasingly excited.

We're thinking about getting rid of our car. By getting rid of, I mean cancelling insurance and registration and parking it in the driveway at Ben's grandparents' in Levittown, because it is a nice, reliable car and we'll probably need it in 3-ish years when we move back west. But at this point, we don't use it much at all; yesterday when we drove to the Italian Market, it was the first time we'd driven it since 3 weeks ago when I got back from Oregon and Ben picked me up at the airport. We walk to work, we have a cart so we walk to Trader Joe's. I like having a car for the freedom to drive to the shore, or to visit friends, but you can rent a car for that. We don't use it frequently enough that the insurance payments on our car are less than the cost of renting a car when we do want to drive somewhere. Plus, we have Philly Carshare here, and there is even a lot for them a block from our house. Ben applied for them and got in, so we're going to start trying it out to see if we want to make the switch. I think it'll happen though; it will save us money and simplify our parking situation. Plus, our car will get fewer dents and won't get broken into.

I went swimming at the gym and was walking back to my office, just now. There is about two inches of the thick, wet slush that people here call snow on the ground, and it was raining small ice pellets as I walked. I was on Walnut, which has a lot of shops and things by the university, and I noticed a guy in a DHL uniform, next to a parked DHL truck, lobbing a snowball over a bus going by. "What is he doing," I wondered, until noticing that behind the bus on the opposite side of the street was a UPS truck! The UPS guy had been standing in the street, but jumped into the truck and out the other side of the front to get snowballs to throw back, while the DHL guy kept pelting his truck!

It was pretty funny.

I went into work today for a bit, was very productive and made two things that weren't working Friday spit out some data for me. It feels very good. And it was overcast outside, but I did something I rarely do and took my camera anyways (I normally like to wait for good weather, for better lighting). So here are some pictures of places I walk everyday.

house and flowers, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

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I am a firm believer in the motivational and efficiency-inducing power of lists. Without them, I wouldn't get around to doing half the stuff I mean to do and enjoy doing, and with them I manage 90% or so. And since I am likely to move away from the east coast after graduate school, I want to see a lot of things in this area during my time here. With these things in mind, here is my list of things to see this year; feel free to chime in if you can think of something really cool (or many things!) that I don't know about.

1. Hiking in Shenandoah National Park. It isn't too far from here, it looks lovely, and it is one of the only national parks on this coast (since the parks system wasn't introduced until the mid to late 1800s).
2. Seeing more things in NYC (MOMA, Whitney, Statue of Liberty, Greenwich Village, Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum... probably a lot more).
3. Boston! Never been there, though we tried to go last March but it ended up being sub-zero and windy.
4. DC! I was there in eighth grade for a school trip, but obviously I could get a lot more out of it, and I remember we were so pressed for time that we had to sprint through the bottom floor of the Holocaust Museum.
5. I would like to visit a beach in New Jersey that isn't ugly and doesn't have mean lifeguards (or alternately, no strong rip currents).
6. It would be great to go to Cape Cod again.
7. Vermont/New Hampshire during fall colors!
8. Backpacking in the Adirondacks!
9. More canoeing, someplace other than the Delaware river.
10. It would probably be fun to drive up to Maine, where my great-aunt Pat lives. I haven't been there since I was really little.
11. Montreal! I would love to go there, though I'm not sure it will happen this year because it would be more expensive, and we will be trying not to spend too much before the wedding.
12. I really want to go to Falling Water, which is on the other side of the state. We may drive to Indiana to see Jeanine and Andrew at some point, in which case it would be right along the way.
13. My aunt and uncle have a place out in the woods in New Jersey, and they have told us it's really beautiful and we're free to spend a weekend with them and hike around and such. It would probably be a lot of fun, and I haven't seen them in ages.

There is my list! If I have done 75% of these things at the end of the year (10/13, ha) then it will have been a good year, and if I haven't, well, there's always next year!

Daria, a friend of mine from high school that also went to Berkeley, came out to Philadelphia over the weekend with her boyfriend Simon, at the end of a weeklong east coast trip to celebrate getting a job. It was very fun seeing them; on Saturday night we went out to the Continental Midtown, which is a very cool bar with tasty food, to celebrate Daria's birthday. We went with some friends of Simon's who also live in Philadelphia, including a professor in the computer science department at Penn who was a postdoc with Simon's group at Berkeley. Then on Sunday, we walked around Philadelphia, following loosely the walking tour I have developed for when people visit me. Simon left Sunday night but Daria came with me to Penn yesterday, and we walked around and ate a late lunch at Bubble House, a restaurant on Sansom which I like more and more.

I was talking to Steph last night, who told me she had to get a rabies vaccine because there was a bat in their apartment. I have to admit that bats were not something I thought that civilized people had in their houses, and before I moved here, I also thought it was very unusual to have mice, rats, or roaches in your house. And yet now we have had all three (though no bats yet). When I was a kid, all we had were spiders and the occasional lizard, but maybe that's because we had cats to scare the larger rodents off.

There's been an interesting development in my teaching situation. I am teaching these two lab-only mechanics courses, for students that got a 5 on the AP Physics exam but need lab for some reason. Although last year my students turned in their labs two days after the lab class, now we are supposed to make them turn in their labs at the end of two hours. The labs are the same, so it's just not nearly enough time. Combine that with the fact that these kids have forgotten a fair amount of the physics they learned, and the result is that I don't think they learn nearly as much as when they can take the lab home and just spend an extra hour on it. I brought this up with the professor in charge of the class, and he responded very nicely, saying he agreed with me completely and felt really guilty, but apparently it's a jurisdictional issue and the engineering school will be all bitchy if we give lab-only students too much work. He did say, though, that I could change the content of the labs however I want. Like, if a lab isn't that educational, I could cut it partially or completely and insert something I think would be more edifying. I am still sorting out what I could do with this, though; it's a lot of freedom. What do you wish you had done in physics lab?

This week is Restaurant Week in Philadelphia, a twice-a-year thing where some very nice restaurants offer a three-course prix fixe meal. The upscale dining scene here is huge, which is nice I guess unless you can't afford to pay a lot for dinner very often. But restaurant week is sort of a nice way to visit some great places more cheaply than usual, so last night Ben and I went to Haru.

Haru is a sushi/fusion place, in Old City near Uzu (which, if you'll recall, is the tiny place I think has the best sushi in Philly). The interior of the restaurant was really beautiful, the service was amazing, and the food was really quite good. I had sushi, a really nice spicy roll and then some assorted sushi and sashimi, and interesting bitter green tea ice cream for dessert. I think that the quality of the sushi was about the same as at Uzu (Ben suggested that they might have the same supplier), but Haru is normally much more expensive. Plus the intimate atmosphere of Uzu is really nice. So it was a fun dinner, but I wouldn't go there for normal prices. Afterwards we walked home, along South Street, which was nice. I liked going to dinner group during the summer somewhere across town and then walking back. I know I've said it before, but this is a great walking city.

I have something nice planned out for my anniversary with Ben in a couple weeks. But I can't tell you what it is.

While I agree that it's good for couples to have separate hobbies, I sometimes wish I didn't have so very many hobbies that Ben doesn't do. I've tried to get him to try some of them, but often he doesn't want to because he feels that if we do something together that I'm much better at, neither of us will enjoy it. But this weekend we played tennis together, and that was really nice.

I've played tennis since I was really little, but only seriously for three years or so in high school. I haven't played much recently since before I hurt my knee, because of those sudden starts and stops, but my doctor gave me a hinged knee brace and said to go for it. Ben had never really played before, so we got him a cheap racket from Target and took my bag of mostly-flat balls to the Penn courts. What we ended up doing was having me at the net feeding, and Ben at the baseline learning forehand and backhand. This was very familiar to me, because when I practiced ground strokes with my dad, it was the same thing, but with him feeding to me. It was actually a lot of fun for me, for three major reasons: firstly, that feeding is hard and consistency is a very useful thing to practice; secondly, it was neat watching someone improve so obviously in a short time; and thirdly, it was a beautiful day and I was outside spending time with Ben. I would really like to keep doing this with him, at least until it gets too cold for it. I also played tennis with Jen on Friday, with more running and less feeding, and that was nice too. The courts are right by my building, as you may remember.

We also went out to Uzu on Saturday night, which I was worried I had built up in my mind as the best sushi in Philly. I did not build them up; they are so great! Some of the best sushi I've ever had, really, and the interior design is great. Afterwards we walked around Old City, Market and Chestnut between 1st and 4th. It is a really hip dining area, with a lot of the best, most obscenely expensive places in town. Uzu has nice design, but it is designed with the idea that you are enjoying a cozy, delicious dinner there. Some of the places we walked by were dark, with colored lights in the floor, sleek metal furniture, edgy music... infinitely cool-looking, yeah, but it seems like eating there would be bizarre.

Me: Are we hip young people?
Ben: Well, we're young people.

I kind of based my whole summer around enjoying Philadelphia, so it was a little weird when Ben came home the other day to hear him lamenting how he misses California, because the cities there are so much cleaner and less crime-ridden. Of course, I plan to move back west after graduate school, but I also believe in making the most of things, and I am trying to find lots of things to experience here. It's such a different culture.

Of course, parts of California cities are dirty and crime-ridden, but parts aren't, and most of Philadelphia is. Ben said that our area is too, though it isn't that dirty, and I pointed out that it wasn't that bad for the really nasty crimes, though of course our car did get broken into. In fact, my exact words were, 'it's pretty good, in terms of homicides', which Ben laughed at and then started saying things like pizza, Harry Potter, and canoeing were 'pretty good, in terms of homicides'. :P An interesting ranking of major cities in terms of cleanliness can be found here, where they rank cleanliness of water, air, and other sanitation needs. Philadelphia does pretty poorly, and Chicago is just pathetic. I found it interesting that many southern and central California cities ranked very well in terms of water, but very badly in terms of air. San Francisco is way the hell up there, despite the large amounts of litter and homeless people one can't help but notice.

What's also interesting is this site, which has crime data for lots of major cities from 2004-2005. You can compare two cities, which leads one to find that Philadelphia is indeed much more crime-ridden than Los Angeles. If you compare Philadelphia to Berkeley, you find that Berkeley has more thefts of all kinds, but Philadelphia has a lot more murders and rapes. For whatever reason, Albuquerque and Santa Fe are not bad, though they have a disproportionate number of rapes. Great. These stats aren't very encouraging for Philadelphia, but you can find maps online that show where crimes are committed, and those show that the really nasty crimes are in a ring around Center City (where I live) and University City (where I work)... west Philadelphia (born and raised... heh heh heh), north Philly, south Philly, and east of the city (i.e., New Jersey) are where the bad things happen. Our car may well be broken into again before we move, but we're unlikely to be assaulted. I do intend to move to a safer city as my next home, though.

I've gone to a lot more restaurants in Philly over the summer, what with having time to go out, and it not being freezing cold. There's an interdisciplinary grad student dinner every Thursday, which I go to when I feel I can afford it for the week (that eliminates tonight because of last weekend). But the food has been great at El Azteca, Panang, Joy Tsin Lau, and Pietro's Pizza. It's also a lot of fun meeting students in other departments; the makeup is pretty different every time I go. And then Patou on Tuesday with Ben's grandparents, who were visiting from Queens.

One of my favorite things, though, about eating out is walking to and from the restaurant. See, Philadelphia is just the right size for a walking city; walking to the far end of Center City takes about 40 minutes, and walking to the far end of University City takes 30 minutes. And there are a lot of interesting things you find just by walking a different way. For example, last night I happened to walk home from 4th street along Lombard, and I came across this beautiful old colonial building, which turned out to be the first hospital in the United States. Living in a city with history is so weird. Then, I love almost all the murals in Philly, but one of the most breathtaking I've seen is the one at Broad and Lombard, called 'Theatre of Life'. The only image I found was this one, which is all small and doesn't do it justice. But it was really amazing. There's also just the houses, the brick and the old styles, which are lovely to walk along under the trees. I was somewhere, maybe around Spruce and 6th, and found a historical plaque for this row of houses, about how they were Greek revivals from 1800-1810. Philadelphia is such a perfect walking city, which is good because the parking here is terrible.

Until yesterday, I was still saying things like, "I'm sure there could be good sushi somewhere in Philadelphia, I just haven't found it yet", but I wasn't really meaning them. And this really marks the first time in my life I've been openly snobby about food being 'inauthentic'; until I moved here, I hadn't had cheap sushi that was so lackluster, and similarly I hadn't had 'Mexican' food that was so far from the real thing.

But while my quest for real Mexican continues, I actually ate at a very nice sushi restaurant last night. 'Cheap' sushi here unfortunately means something different than in California, but it was possible to get a lot of sushi for under $20 a person, and the quality was great! The place was incredibly small, only six two-person tables and a four-person sushi bar, but had really nice decoration, obviously a lot of thought put into it, and was in a cool part of Old City. I only had some rolls, but they were all excellent, and they had a nice nigiri-for-two deal that I'll try sometime with Ben. I owe the knowledge of this place to my housemate Jen, who is an entertaining dinner buddy. And on the way back she asked if I felt like Rita's, and I said, 'what's Rita's'? And she made her horrified you-did-not-just-ask-that face and made me try it. The answer to my question is, Rita's is delicious.

One thing that's great about Philadelphia is if somebody visits you who likes to walk. When Joao and Gersende visited in October, we walked around the city a lot, and this time with Steph I had a pretty good idea of what routes to take that went by nice things. So we basically walked around and talked non-stop the two days she was here. :)

Saturday was beautiful, as previously mentioned, and after I met her at the train station and we had lunch at my house, we walked over to the Penn campus so she could see where I work. We popped into Ben's building to take a peek at the piece of ENIAC they have there (Ben works in the room where it operated, actually!), and then walked down Locust Walk and to the biopond. We sat and talked there, in the warmth of the late afternoon, and saw a blue heron! It was beautiful, but kind of a bully to the other birds. We saw it eat a fish, which was amazing because the fish looked way too big to fit down its throat but it slowly swallowed it, and the tail was still flapping as it disappeared into the heron's beak. There were also tiny cute sparrows bathing in the dirt, which I love to see. When the sun was starting to go down, we went back to my house and ate out at Grace, a nearby pub with great burgers, great spicy fries, and great Pennsylvania beer on tap. Then back home to sit in my backyard and watch fireflies and talk, though we were a little late for the fireflies so we didn't see many.

On Sunday we did a downtown walk, going up South St. to 6th, up 6th St. to Independence National Historic Park, then northwest to Chinatown, southwest to City Hall, southwest to Rittenhouse Square, and back home. Along the way we saw the Liberty Bell, ate tasty lunch at Mai Lei Wah, got boba, looked along the sightline from City Hall to the Museum of Art, popped in to the Victoria's Secret sale to paw through the bra bins, went to H&M for the first time, and sat in Rittenhouse, where every bench was taken, to talk. The weather was perfect and it was a lot of fun. When we got home we ended up making chocolate mousse at 11:30 at night, with cherries and walnuts, and watching videos on youtube.

Steph's train left around noon yesterday, so in the morning we went to the Italian Market. I hadn't wanted to go on Sunday because I drive there, but I also live near two churches so if I move my car on a Sunday I'm not getting a space near my house when I get back. And I had seen produce stands set up there on weekdays, so we went... but it was really dead, a big disappointment. There were a few produce stands, but maybe a fourth of what's there on weekends, and a lot of stores were closed for Monday (many of the butchers, the spice store, the sandwich place). We did end up having coffee at a really nice place, and going to the less awesome spice store, and getting things at Giordano's, which was open. But we'll have to go again the next time she's here, and now I know not to take people there on Mondays.

I had such a fun weekend!

It's beautiful today, blue sky and warm but not hot, and soon I'm going to the train station to pick up Steph. This last week in particular has made me realize that I am really coming to love Philly.

Some of it is getting out more, seeing the fun neighborhoods and things to do, the culmination of slowly trying to get to know the city over the last year. It's also partly the weather... I was really dreading living here for the summer, because when we moved here permanently last August it was just miserable, in terms of both temperature and humidity, and I dreaded three months a year like that. But even though I know I still have July and August to get to, I was surprised to find that June hasn't been that bad. In New Mexico, I always found June to be the worst month, where it was straight hot and no breaks. But July and August there are monsoon season, with thunderstorms every afternoon, which is actually pretty fun. Here June isn't like that; sometimes there are really hot and humid days, like the day I left for LA when it was 95 and very humid. But mostly it's been tolerable, with sometimes weeks of mid-70s and cold at night! I can take the occasional hot day, which is all we've gotten so far. Of course, I'm inside all day on weekdays, in a heavily air-conditioned building. But I do have a twenty minute walk to and from work each day. Anyhow, it's a relief to know that I only have to deal with two months of yucky summer.

Another thing that has certainly contributed is our house, which I love, and our garden, which I am coming to love. Now, our initial plans ended up gang agley, probably because the seeds weren't watered enough while we were both gone for a week. So most of the exciting and wonderful things we planted don't seem to have sprouted, though we do have peas, tomatoes, cilantro, and parsley at the very least. But some things are growing, and I'm thinking of getting cheap tiny pots and starting some seedlings in those for the herbs we really wanted that didn't come up. I mean, we still have loads of seeds. The rest of our yard is a profusion of weeds, beautiful thriving ones. And in fact, I spent a lot of time weeding the patch where stuff is planted, which is sort of enjoyable. It's sort of like my backyard is offended that we put seeds in it, and killed off our seeds and replaced them with morning glories in a massive attempt to give us the finger. 'You think I need help to grow things?!'

Something that occurred to me with the roses I bought last weekend is that they will probably get really big. See, my mom grew many roses in New Mexico, and is an excellent gardener, and almost without exception all of her roses are two or three feet high. So I thought this was the height that mature roses get to, until I saw roses growing around London and Philly in the last few months and saw ones that are six or seven feet high. Gigantic! At first I thought it was some sort of super-rose breed, until I realized that New Mexico is a desert, and the only wild roses you see there are those tiny ground-cover ones, and probably if you grow a plant in the environment it's suited to, it'll get much bigger. Something to look forward to!

Of course, something that's helping me immensely to enjoy Philly more is the lack of problem sets I have now. And while I probably will take one or two more problem set classes, I'll never take more than one at once, so this is a condition I will happily continue in. :)

I was making myself some dinner yesterday when the doorbell rang. I answered, and standing in the rain is someone I've never seen before: "Excuse me, did you park a car on the 2300 block of this street? I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but it's been broken into." RRRRRRR.

The guy lived in the house right behind where I parked the car, which is how he noticed. They broke the passenger's side window (wtf? Civic locks are notoriously easy to jimmy, and every time Ben's radio got stolen when he lived in downtown LA, the window never got broken), rifled through everything, skipped over some CDs and the radio faceplate (again, wtf?), and took... wait for it... A ZIPLOC BAG OF CHANGE.

I was less upset than I would have imagined I'd be, so I made a police report, and my housemate Jen helped me clean out the bulk of the broken glass from the car. It sucked that it was raining at the time, and a lot of water had already gone into the car, but we put a trash bag over the window opening and it had dried out inside by this morning, when I got the window replaced. This is the second police report I've made in two months!

Dear thief, maybe you could have left me some of that change to help pay for the $100 new window? Oh wait, I guess since I left nothing of value in the car, you needed the change to cover your losses. SO LAME.

For Ben's birthday, my present to him (and me, kind of) was two tickets to the King Tut exhibit that's currently at the Franklin Institute, on travel from the Egyptian Museum. It's sorta pricey, but that's what birthdays are for! I had heard mixed things about it, but boy was it amazing! What makes Tutankhamun's tomb so special is that it had so many incredible artifacts left untouched, so you see some amazingly detailed artifacts in pristine condition. There were a lot of impressive gold chests or seats and chests made of inlaid wood. There was a large collection from Tjuyu's tomb, including a huge gold coffin and a lot of beautiful artifacts, and they had a lot of beautiful stuff from Tutankhamun's tomb as well. I really couldn't get over the quality of the artifacts.

It's so popular that it's also the most micro-managed museum exhibit I've ever seen... our tickets (which were for today because I couldn't get weekend tickets anytime before summer) were for entry between 2:30 and 3:00 pm, and when we arrived we waited in line for a while (they let people in a certain amount at a time) and then were packed with a bunch of other people into a small room to see a short video, after which the curtains on one side opened and we were let into the exhibit (think of "this dismaying observation: this chamber has no windows, and no doors!"). For all that, though, it was really worth it.

Now, in less than an hour, I'll be meeting prospective students and enjoying free dinner and open bar on the department. Hooray for physics!

Remember how we have mice? We've seen one a couple of times, and we've stopped leaving anything edible on the kitchen counter because we frequently found nibbled scones or bread or paper towels, or just nibbled holes in bags we leave out. So all our food (like cereal) that we use a lot and leave out, we now have on the dining room table. We have traps and poisoned bait out, but they don't really seem to have helped any. We're really just coexisting with the mice.

Last night I came home from yoga, hungry, and was talking to Ben in the kitchen where he was making chili. He had his back to the kitchen, and behind him I see the mouse run across the floor, from the refrigerator to under the stove. I've just barely spat out "mouse!" when we hear the trap next to the stove go off, and hear the mouse struggling (it isn't a back-breaking trap, more of a neck-grabbing trap, which can be fatal if the mouse gets its head stuck and then suffocates). Ben and I were very surprised at this happening, but Ben grabs the mousetrap, opens the back door, and throws the mouse free of the trap into the backyard. I go "close the door! don't let it back in!" but he watches it and says, "it's too late!" and then comes back into the kitchen. We were both really surprised at having actually seen the mouse get caught. I pointed out that now we have a dead mouse in our backyard, waiting to get frozen into the snow, and Ben says, "no, I'm going to be proactive about this" and goes out back to put the mouse in the trash. But apparently when he got really close, the mouse got up and ran away! (Not into our house.)

The real questions are, do we have more than one mouse, and can the mouse get back in? I guess we will see.

From the very beginning, when we first started to move in, the beating heart of our house has been the kitchen. It isn't very large, but a big window and a skylight make it easily the brightest room we have. It has counters, a sink, and a stove along one wall, and enough space for one person to work at the counter and another to easily pass behind them. It is an excellent two-person kitchen. The cabinet space is sort of limited, but we've compensated for that in two ways: firstly, by putting rarely used kitchen stuff in the basement, and secondly, by putting lots of stuff on the walls. We have a big shelf of oils, vinegars, and sauces, and a large spice rack, and a pizza peel and some other stuff up on the walls. I have hopes to get a Great Chile Poster, in memory of my first home. There is a window, for some reason, which looks into the dining room, and on the shelf of this window we have two bowls, one for fruit and one for vegetables, and some bottles of rum and scotch, and a container of sea salt.

We got a bunch of new stuff for the kitchen for Christmas, including a very nice blender and a Kitchenaid mixer, along with an amazing assortment of attachments (pasta maker, meat grinder, sausage stuffer, ice cream maker, etc. etc.). It is really fun to have these things together, because we both make so many more things together than we would separately. We had cocoa pasta with chipotle cheddar sauce tonight, green chile pizza last night, rosemary pepper pasta with parmesan and cream the night before that. It's sort of insane how much cooking we've done together since moving in, and it's really fun getting to try lots of new recipes that I had always meant to try, and some I would never have thought of.

I think that if you are going to try to be with someone your whole life, there are a lot of requirements they have to fill. You have to get along nearly perfectly, at least well enough that an argument are smoothed over and forgotten before the next one begins. You have to love and value each other, of course. But I'm a strong believer in the idea that there has to be an aspect of growth, as well. It's more interesting if your friends (all friends, really) challenge you, and teach you things, and help you to grow. A partner should be the ultimate in this, helping you to better yourself and explore new things, while you do the same for them. It's sort of idealistic, I know. But I think the way that Ben and I are in the kitchen is the most perfect representation of that ideal, at least in our relationship. Of course, it's easier to be adventurous and clever and cooperative, with anyone, when there's little at stake.

On the advice of juhi, Ben and I got tickets to see Vienna Teng perform tonight. Neither of us knew much about her music, but I seem to know a lot of people who like her, so we went. The venue was nice but it turned out to be a jazz house with not enough seating, so we had to leave to get dinner and then come back and stand through the show. It was worth it, though.

The two things I liked the most were her amazing voice, which I liked all the better for it being so low, and the wide variety of musical styles played. I guess most of the songs were somewhat close to the piano ballad, but some were jazzier, some less melodic and more harmonic, and some more energetic. I don't remember all the songs, but my favorites were Blue Caravan, Pontchartrain, Love Turns 40, Transcontinental 1:30 AM, 1 BR/1 BA, City Hall, I Don't Feel So Well, Harbor, Shasta, Feather Moon, and Soon Love Soon. She's an excellent performer to see live, with a lot of nice stories and chatter, and the audience was especially great because it was a DVD shoot, and apparently lots of her fans made pilgrimages to Philadelphia just to see her record the DVD performance. I really liked at the end, she had the audience sing Soon Love Soon with her, and it was one of those great crowd moments, where you all feel united in a love of music and humanity.

It was great to come out of a concert like that and see snow accumulating on the ground, not a lot but enough to make everything white. I loved walking home with Ben, through Philadelphia's classic, brick-house tree-lined snowy streets, great music echoing in my head, cold air making me feel light-headed and free.

I have a lot of stuff to do this weekend, but luckily it's mostly stuff I can do at home, so I can intersperse it with snuggling with Ben. I stopped writing so much about how fun it is to live with Ben, but that's more because it's so familiar now rather than because it's not still fun. It is. :) I am going through old livejournal entries, friends locking the really old stuff (does the internet need to know that I was a lot angstier five years ago?) and tagging things, and I came across an entry from the end of the first summer that Ben and I lived in the same place. It was wistful and hopeful and in love, and I spoke longingly of something like "that endless summer, with no looming specter of separation". I don't know why, but it comforts me now to look back on those words, or to look back at my entries from when I was constantly suffering for not getting into graduate school, and say, there, now I have it. I wouldn't say it's wallowing in old suffering, more like... acknowledging suffering to remind myself that I have worked to have joy. And while suffering doesn't seem so needless if it drove you to achieve something, it always seems like, looking back, one suffers a little more than is strictly necessary.

It's very cold here right now. This is unfortunate because our heater is broken. See, today I went down to the basement to check on some laundry and immediately smelled gas, very strongly, at the top of the steps. We called the gas company, and they came over and found that our igniter for the furnace is shot; the gas smell was from the heater turning on, the igniter not, well, you know, and gas still being emitted. Undoubtedly the rental company will replace it on Monday, because they are very prompt about such things, but they're closed weekends. Hooray for warm sweaters and cozy robes, for now. And for the rest of winter, really.

This weekend so far has been mostly errands, chores, or various things that needed to get done, with some fun stuff thrown in.

( saturday: immunizations, museum, dead like me )

( today: christmas presents, decorating )

I am really excited about this project!

Yesterday was the nicest day we are likely to have until springtime; the temperature was in the 70s, and it was not necessary to have a coat on outside! On most Saturdays Ben and I head to the Italian market and enjoy shopping for fresh produce and other fun stuff there. The Italian Market Spice Co. is especially awesome, because they have a huge variety of spices which are generally $1 for a small baggy that's twice as much as the larger containers at supermarkets. I also really like going to Giordano's and buying the $7 a pound prosciutto (it's great having such a cheap source of it).

In the evening we went out to Mizu, one of the sushi places that people in philadelphia recommended to me for good, cheap sushi. It was decent sushi, though not great, and the prices were okay. I miss Berkeley sushi (by which I mean, cheap and high-quality). Ben pointed out that it seemed to be more Americanized sushi, with the flavors less pronounced, no wasabi on the nigiri, and more accessible and uninteresting rolls. We walked afterwards to Trader Joe's to buy frozen mochi, and ate them while we walked home, talking about East coast culture versus California culture.

What we came up with was, it seems like the culture here is more established. That is, there are more regional specialties that are considered East coast or New England or Pennsylvania, things like Pennsylvania Dutch baking, Philly cheesesteaks, New York style everything, Amish-crafted furniture, apple and pear products, the Italian-American food you see everywhere around Philly, maple things, etc. There is more history, everywhere, and it feels like imports are adapted before they really integrate with local culture. Of course, it still has that mish-mash of influences that most regions have, with different aspects being taken from different groups of immigrants, religious groups, etc. But by contrast, in California, even things which are considered really a part of California culture are relatively recent. California cuisine is very young, and most foreign foods you can get in California are completely unmodified, not having been changed at all because of a slow integration process into the culture, just because it's had little time to do so. I think most of these differences are just a result of time, though.

Today it got cold again, rainy, and I made babka and portabello mushroom soup. I have stat mech due Tuesday, but I am avoiding it, with my characteristic procrastination. I can't wait until I am in a lab again, let's just say that.