i've never had more non-perishable food in my possession.

After last year's Hurricane Irene ended up being not much more than a missed day of church and a walk to see the swollen Schuylkill River for us, we weren't too worried about Frankenstorm Sandy. Until for no apparent reason I did get worried and two trips to grocery stores later we had a new propane tank, five cases of bottled water, flashlights, a full tank of gas, and so much canned food and boxes of cereal. (and candy corn!) I even got interviewed by a news guy at Lowe's about my hurricane preparations. It was really awkward, and now I know I have no career in television. Thank you Sandy!

On today's preparedness agenda: buy flashlights + batteries (check), bake pumpkin bread (same idea as candy corn: if we must suffer through no electricity, we might as well eat something delicious), clean the bathtub.

Tomorrow's agenda: turn the temperature down on the fridge and freezer to their lowest settings, fill up water bottles and tupperware with water and put in freezer, fill bathtub with water.

Monday's agenda: SURVIVE. 

Any awesome monster storm survival tips you have that you want to share with the Utah girl who can only deal with snow? 

how many treats can we eat in one day?

My cousin Sasha was in town for the weekend, so we had another go at being tourists in Philly! I think we had quite the lovely itinerary, actually, if you're ever debating about what to do in the city:
Roast beef sandwiches for lunch at DiNic's at Reading Terminal Market, plus chocolate truffles from some Amish people for dessert
Capogiro gelato for second dessert
Shopping on Walnut (buying Sasha a new iPod charger and some things for Sash at H&M. I coveted but did not buy some mint green skinny jeans.)
People/dog watching at Rittenhouse Square
Cupcakes at Pamcakes for third dessert
Dinner at home, nail painting and SNL skit watching.

All in all a wonderful Saturday! Thanks Sash!

(sidenote: look how long my hair is getting! Too bad at least the last six inches are pure split ends! Also, I'm thinking about growing out my bangs. Good idea or no?)

i hate titling my posts

Today, I parallel parked for the first time since moving to Philadelphia. I have successfully avoided it for nine months, which I think is rather impressive itself, but finally I sucked it up and parked, parallelly, on the left side of a road, on a very narrow street. (okay, the parking spot was pretty big, but still!)
THERE IS NOTHING I CAN'T DO NOW, WORLD!

(Oh, and the fact that I am driving means our car is all fixed up and back to us, all clean and shiny with a new window and paint and no more Diet Coke residue in the cup holders! Two weeks ahead of schedule!)

Another thing: science friends, have you seen these articles published recently in Angewandte?

Blood typing inspired by Tom Riddle's diary in Harry Potter

Using NIR imaging spectroscopy to look at paint binders in illuminated manuscripts

I mean, cool! Harry Potter and illuminated manuscripts. It doesn't get much better than that...unless you can also parallel park.

Hope your weekend is lovely and that you conquer some major fear so you can feel invincible, too!

angry girlfriend mistook our car for her cheating boyfriend's?

Well, today we got scared that the random guy who towed our car after it got the windows smashed and tire slashed and keyed yesterday was in fact stealing our car.

Living in Utah County sounds really nice right now. Or, at least anywhere we can afford to own a garage.

so you'd like to eat in philly...

Aaron and I went out to eat last night, and I thought about chronicling our experience through photos. But you know what, I feel really awkward taking pictures of my food in restaurants. It's one thing to take pictures when you're with a bunch of friends, and it's some huge outing. If it's just me and Aaron, though, it's kind of weird. How do bloggers do it all the time?

Anyway, instead of giving you a million darkened photos of Indian food, I'm giving you a list of mine and Aaron's favorite Philadelphia eats! Wahoo! I now have six months of Philly experience, and I like food. These are my qualifications. Enjoy:

The Indian Restaurant. Yes, that's the actual name. It makes it really hard to find on google. But the food is excellent, the price is right (around $13 for an entree), and you get free rice pudding. I don't like rice pudding, but if you do, plus for you! Our favorites include chicken korma (Aaron), chicken tikka masala, and chicken makhani (Katie).

Sabrina's Cafe. Right next to the Italian Market, Sabrina's Cafe is this kind of funky little...cafe...with delicious banana-cream cheese stuffed French toast. It's cheap ($10 entree) and cute and I really want to try everything on their brunch menu (dinner is also great).

Sugar Philly dessert truck. I have to admit I've never bought anything from them except their macarons (although I've been meaning to try their creme brulee) because they are that good. The French sandwich cookies are incredible. You can't go wrong with milk and honey, chocolate ganache, salted caramel, or chocolate hazelnut. If you're lucky, it'll be a pomegranate lemon or pistachio day and then you'll really be in heaven.

El Vez. You get what you pay for at this place. It's pretty expensive (Aaron, his mom and I spent $70 here), but it's so good. Cough up the $12 for the guacamole. You will not regret it. Also recommended: pork tacos. Delicious. It's also in a kind of fun part of town with a lot of cute little stores nearby. Only con is that it's really noisy.

Giorgio on Pine. This is an adorable little Italian restaurant with amazing Italian food. I swear I will always remember that tortelli with the tomato-basil cream sauce. And, Giorgio himself gave us free dessert (chocolate cake >>> rice pudding), so hello, I love you.

Capogiro Gelato. Proclaimed the best ice cream place in the world by National Geographic, these guys are legit. I am the champion of pairing flavors at this place, probably because everything is so delicious that it's impossible to go wrong. Winning combos include: chocolate hazelnut + pistachio (I love pistachio) or blood orange + ultra dark chocolate.

Jims. I can't believe I almost forgot this one. This is the best cheesesteak place in Philly (Tina Fey, Billy Joel, and Denzel Washington from the 80s agree with me). For the full Philly experience you'll have to get it with whiz, not pansy provolone cheese.

There you go! Are you drooling yet? Are you searching for flights on Expedia? Our guest bedroom is calling your name (but Capogiro is screaming it)!

the view from the quiet zone of the chemistry library

On your left we have the hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP), the med school's translational research building in the middle, Penn tower (hotel for patients' families) on the right, and dome building on the far right is part of the anthropologie museum. Since this was taken using photobooth, everything is reversed in real life. Hope that doesn't confuse you when you come to visit us.

I am determined to get some falafel this week. I am also determined to carve pumpkins because it is October! ($6 for one pumpkin be darned!) I am also determined to make candy corn-themed dessert, carmel popcorn, and apple cider! It is fall! And it finally feels like it, too. No more 90% humidity and 75 degrees outside. Today was a beautiful, crisp 55. In a couple more days conference talks will be online, which is great because I am never able to catch everything I want to the first time around. (but you can already re-watch here. and I highly recommend you do if you need a pick me up.)And by tomorrow, my first grad school [take home] test will be out of my hands, and there will be nothing else I can do with it. Hooorah!

So, the first time I published this post, I had [/randomness] only with little arrow brackets like this: <   >, like html code, except blogger took it as something real, and it didn't show up. Funny. The end.


/random

pretty philly

When Becky was visiting, we hit up a lot of historical sites. One of the more random was Elfreth's Alley. It's the oldest continuously inhabited street in the US or something like that. Basically, it's just a really cute pedestrian street (where people still live).

A lot of Old City looks like this. It's really quite beautiful to walk around. When you visit, you shall see. :)

(thank you for the picnik suggestion! doesn't the spacing look so much better on this collage?)

we love visitors, yes we do!

This past weekend my cousin Sasha came and visited us from Massachusetts! And then, the day before she left, my sister Becky flew in to visit too! I can't even tell you all how nice it was to have them here. Like having friends again!

Cue photo evidence:

(i made this collage using powerpoint. how ghetto is that? any suggestions for better software to use for this sort of thing?)

We did all the required Philly things: Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, cheesesteak at Jim's. And then we did all sorts of other great things like getting caught in a rainstorm after eating crepes in University City, walking through an earthquake on our way to Betsy Ross's house and Elfreth's Alley, buying a Donna Summer record and a record hot pad at the Italian Market, throwing pennies on Ben Franklin's grave, lots of shopping (thank you thank you thank you Mom for the back to school shopping money!), taking touristy photos with the historically dressed people at Independence Hall, playing plenty of Dance Central on the Kinect, making coca cola cake, and watching "Raising Hope".

A perfect way to end the summer, really.

(Orientation starts on Monday!)

How was your last week of freedom?

supermassive black hole

This week my mom flew out from Utah and stayed with us for a few days. It was awesome! We love having moms visit us!!! We participated in a variety of activities including:

walking/melting around University City, seeing pretty Penn/Hogwarts campus
cheesesteaks with cheese whiz at Jim's Steaks
more guac at El Vez
Rodin Museum!
Franklin Institute!
Independence Hall, Congress Hall, Liberty Bell
leaving pennies on Ben Franklin's grave (he founded our school!)
Home Depot for patio furniture and materials to make a 2x4 garden planter
Captain America!
discovering a pizza place down the street that wasn't half bad
watching a lot of "Raising Hope" on hulu*
getting a parking ticket and just barely avoiding getting towed!

It has been incredibly hot the past week. Temperatures have been over a hundred, and with the humidity the heat index has been around 115 degrees. A hundred and fifteen!!! Thus, we tried to do things in the morning before it got too hot and all we wanted to do was crash on the [one] bed in our house.

I can't even describe how nice it was to have my mom here. She reminded me that I can do this whole move to a big city and get a chemistry PhD, and I believe her.

me and my mom and Ben Franklin on Penn campus

*If you have not seen "Raising Hope", you really should. We were laughing so hard we were crying during the first episode.

ground control to major tom

We are alive and well and have thoroughly enjoyed our [almost] first week in Philadelphia!

It was a little crazy and overwhelming driving into the city on Monday afternoon, especially going down sketchy Washington Ave for the first time. Luckily, Aaron's mom flew in to close on our house, and she helped us settle in. She was a lifesaver in taking the edge off the initial shell shock of moving 2,100 miles across the country. I seriously don't know what we would've done without her. Probably sat on the bare (and very dirty) floor of the house and cried.

While she was here we got a bed for the guest room (our moving truck won't be here with all of our furniture until next week at the earliest), cleaned all the floors and bathrooms on our hands and freaking knees, stocked up on food, ate at the most amazing Mexican/fine dining restaurant called El Vez and had the best guacamole, got gelato at Capogiro (which I have been missing greatly since Maestro's closed back home), and went to Target like 8 times. We took care of business! (and ate great food.)

After Aaron's mom left, we went and saw U2 at the stadium where the Eagles play. It was packed! It was an awesome concert! It was almost as entertaining to watch all the older ladies rocking out (probably slightly drunk) in the audience as it was to watch Bono (who, at 51 is wayy cooler than I will ever be at 22). Unfortunately, the memory card in my camera got corrupted somehow, and I lost all my photos from the concert! All my pictures of the claw (really expensive and time consuming to set up stage)!!! All the pictures I made Aaron take of the two of us!!! All my pictures of cool Bono!!! Alas, maybe I'll figure out how to get them back sometime.

Aaron and I also went and saw Harry Potter the second day it was out. We got there 30 minutes early because we were nervous it might be sold out, but we were like the 5th and 6th people in the theatre. We're not in the land of Potter Enthusiasm anymore...Today we walked all over the place downtown, going to the bank, buying bus tokens, touring Independence Hall, and visiting Reading Terminal Market. It was most enjoyable! (and good exercise after sitting in a car 10 hours a day for four days straight)

Tomorrow we look forward to attending our branch for the first time and having dinner with my friend Jen from ballroom who lives in the city with her husband! And on Monday, we shall explore University City and their macaron cookie truck!!!!!!!! Blessed day!!!!

i love my rand mcnally atlas. thank you grandpa!

We are nearly done with our East Coast exodus, our never ending tour of I-80. Here's a brief recap of the trip so far:

 

Day 1: Utah-Wyoming-Nebraska

I have almost nothing to say about this day, except, why would anyone hold a basketball camp in Kearney, NE and take up all the hotel rooms in the middle of nowhere city?

Day 2: Nebraska-Iowa-Illinois-Indiana

We ate pizza at Giordano's, a little south of Chicago in Orland Park. Delish. That thing is filled with cheese! Probably about 2,000 calories a slice, but so worth it. Also, I saw lightning bugs for the first time in 14 years (since we moved from Indiana), and they are just as cool as I remember them as an 8 year old.

Day 3: Indiana-Ohio-PENNSYLVANIA!!!

Being only around 11 hours from our final destination, we decided to do some sightseeing. We stopped in Kirtland, OH and visited church history sites. We toured the Kirtland Temple and the Newel K. Whitney store. We would've seen a few more buildings (sawmill, ashery, historic houses, etc.) but our tour ran a little long, and we were getting starving, not having eaten since pizza the night before. So we drove onward to PA! Our GPS took us in sort of a roundabout, through residential areas way to get back to I-80 so we got to see some Amish country! Horses and buggies! Little kids in bonnets! It was awesome, and well worth the detour.

And we are currently in western Pennsylvania, having eaten at a terrible Applebee's down the street from our hotel. (ever since we started watching Masterchef-does anyone else love that show? because I watched every episode on hulu last week-I sort of feel a need to critique meals as if I were Gordon Ramsey.)

We look forward to a 4 hour drive to Philly tomorrow morning, and reuniting with Aaron's mom who's flying in! Woo!!

so long, so long

We leave town in five days. I suddenly find myself scrambling to cram in more time with friends and family- movies with sisters-in-law, earring making night with friends, lunch with Grandpa, trip up the canyon with family, BBQ party, it is not enough.

The truth is, I have never moved more than 15 miles away from my family, except for the two months I spent in Europe last summer. I am a sheltered, naive Utah girl. And now I find myself driving 2000 miles away to do the scariest thing I've ever done in my life (attempt to get a PhD), without my mom, without my sister, without my friends. I can feel myself mentally digging in my heels, getting a little desperate to stay a little while longer, feel comfortable and safe a little longer, but on Friday, time is up. Life is moving on, and we are moving to Philly.

green thumb

I'm making plans, a year in advance, to grow a garden on the rooftop patio of our future Philly house. I asked Aaron what I could plant that he would actually eat (he has an aversion to almost all vegetables) and he said edamame! Like the Japanese soybean edamame! Whoa! I guess he was won over by the free appetizers we got while waiting for an hour to be seated (when we had made reservations) at the Japanese shabu shabu restaurant in Anaheim with all the chemists.

So come next May I'm going to plant tomatoes, basil, parsley, strawberries, and edamame. And we shall be so trendy with our Japanese soybean crop. (did you know you can freeze edamame? rad. we shall be trendy all year long!)

Anyone else want to be a gardener? What are you planting?

library, i'm going to go all tiger mom on you.

Today I went to the library in search of aforementioned books (seriously guys, no recommendations?!). I was determined not to leave that place without a book in hand. Looked up controversial Asian parenting book in the online catalog, and they had it! Except they actually didn't when I got to the shelf. Annoyed. This has happened to me multiple times. Come on HBLL, get it together! Stop misinforming me! I keep wasting time wandering around your many shelves! Couldn't find the Barbara Kingsolver book I wanted to check out either (that they apparently had, sidenote: have you ever read The Poisonwood Bible or The Lacuna? you should definitely read the former, and you probably should read the latter).

In other news, Aaron found us a lovely Philadelphia condo. With hardwood floors, granite countertops, and three bedrooms. So hey, come visit us because we are doing this med/grad school thing in style, and we have a bedroom for you! (although sleeping on our really comfortable couch would not have been a bad option!) If you're friends with Aaron on facebook he posted photos of it (which I will eventually get around to posting on this blog).

Too many parenthetical phrases for one post + Y Chem meeting in 2 mins = see you later!
Have an awesome weekend!

check this one off the list

There is a macaron truck in University City (which is where Penn is).

It was meant to be, guys, it was meant to be.

we'll be spending the next 4+ years of our lives in...

in case you have problems reading backwards (what the heck photobooth?), those shirts say PENN!!!!

We're sending in an apartment application tomorrow (hello $1600 rent, ouch) and we'll be moving out the second week of July. So! This means I must play with all of you before I leave!

I've already started planning our touristy east coast travels. In Philadelphia we must visit Independence Hall and see the Liberty Bell, go to the Rodin museum, and the Philadelphia art museum. I also want to drive out to Gettysburg. And Amish country! And Hershey, PA! Train tickets to New York, DC, and Boston are not too pricey, so there's another few trips! (this also means that you all need to come visit us in Philly and sleep on our really comfortable couch so that you can experience all of this cultural goodness too)

Any tips for things to do in any of those four cities? Restaurants, museums, etc?

Also, we'll be driving across the country moving all of our stuff, and I want to plan some strategic stops along the way. I'd like to stop in Nauvoo, Chicago, and maybe Kirtland. We'll need to stop somewhere between here and Nauvoo, however, and I just can't seem to find anything interesting. Any ideas? Favorite midwest cities? Is there anything in Nebraska?
How many times do you get to drive across the country, ya know? I want to make this awesome before we're $60,000 in debt and up to our necks in school and don't have time for this sort of adventuring anymore.

Any advice would be much appreciated. :)