New routines

The big news of the last week and a half: I've moved! Just down the hall. But I have twice as many windows and (finally) room for a papasan chair. I moved nearly the entire studio myself while Andrew was working -- took a day and a half, wheeling everything back and forth on my desk chair. And then cleaning the old apartment (which apparently *still* wasn't good enough for EV, they're charging me for cleaning... which isn't I suppose *that* bad considering I would have been charged twice as much to move if I wasn't a CA. That is, if I were allowed to move at all). The bad news about the cleaning fees spurred me to action today: I bought Mrs. Meyer geranium scrubbing powder, and a daily "shower spray" to maintain it. While I was pondering the various products at Mollie Stone's, this old, grandfatherly gentleman got into a conversation with me. And I decided to go with it -- he clearly wanted to chat, and it was nice to feel like I did something, well, at the risk of being redundant, nice. He was concerned about my catching the sales on bananas, not spending too much while I'm in school, finding Jesus (which for me translated into, having faith in the world), and staying in the graduate program. Back home, I scrubbed the already quite clean new tub, rinsed, and spritzed, just to smell the geranium. It kind of makes me *want* to clean.

Other news... A week ago (Monday) Rachel & I met up with Andrew for lunch. Such good, creative vegetarian food. Black quinoa, blueberries in balsamic vinagrette, salad with nectarine, etc. And oatmeal chocolate bars to die for. Which I later recreated at home after finally finding a recipe online that called for "only" two sticks of butter (well, and a bag of chocolate chips. And a can of condensed milk...). But so good!

Invited people over for a "studio warming" over the weekend -- we had said chocolate oatmeal bars & fruit for dessert, and Andrew made our drink-of-the-evening, cherry lime rickys (gin, muddled cherries and sugar, lime juice, ice, and mint). After spending so much time moving, shopping for food, and generally spending time by myself, it was lovely to see everyone and catch up.

I've been keeping up with my reading better than with my Rosetta Stone French. I finished New Grub Street, read The Handmaid of Desire for fun (Ryan's recommendation: it's a "wickedly" hilarious fictionalized account of the Stanford English dept), and today started The Red and the Black. So far, so good.

I'll have to post pictures of the apartment... For now, back to The U.S. vs John Lennon.