1.  Long time no type.  Buried in schoolwork and life.  Not necessarily in that order.  Attempting to force myself to come up for air.

2.  Chemistry is hard.  Like, fail-out-of-class hard.  (Not me, but you know what I mean.)  I knew there was a good reason to fear it back at Penn State!  Anyway, I’m doing alright, but a recent bombed quiz has shown me I need to devote more time to Chem and less to Anatomy.

3.  In all my busy-ness today, I decided I needed to make bread.  That’s so like me.  Why?  I had to “revive” my starter that’s in the fridge.  And have I forgotten about the GAJILLION things of bread we brought home from our Thanksgiving trip?  (No fewer than 1.5 loaves of rye bread, 10 bagels, 8 onion rolls, plus crackers.)  Our house is carb central!

4.  My Thanksgiving pumpkin pie was the ugliest thing ever (thanks to my impatience with store-bought crust), but tasted great.  Get the recipe here.

5.  Speaking of recipes–I just managed another blog post for the co-op.  It’s about cranberries and I included the cranberry brisket Andrew loves so much.  Read it here.

6.  I am now “officially” a New Yorker; I took care of getting a new license and registering the car.  License should be here in about a week!  It’s kind of exciting, in a really anti-climactic sort of way.  I think if we’d moved into a house we were excited about, everything would feel different.  Instead, everything still feels very temporary.  But, nonetheless, it’s still neat to see the Pilot with its new yellow and blue license plate.

7.  We named our plants.  Well, I named our plants.  Andrew just went along with it good-naturedly.  My dear friend, Emily, inspired me.  She has such beautiful, healthy, vibrant house plants.  I am so jealous.  She and I recently traded some plant clippings and she mentioned one of them was named ‘Stella.’  Now, I’ve heard of people naming their plants before, but I just never have.  I mean, mine don’t normally last that long…it was never a good idea to get attached.  However, I do have one that has lasted FOUR years now!  Andrew and I were in disbelief when we realized it.  So, on the way home from our Thanksgiving holiday, I used my phone to look up names and their meanings (again, such a ‘me’ thing to do–we’re talking the significance of the names of HOUSE PLANTS) and we decided to call the big, four-year-old one “Gerard” which means ‘hardy.’  (We’ve been calling it ‘hardy’ since I hadn’t killed it yet, so we figured why not?).  I have one other plant, an orchid Andrew bravely got me for Valentine’s Day this year.  (I don’t know what he was thinking.)  Anyway, it did alright for awhile, then the blooms fell off, then I panicked until I found out that was normal, and just when it was growing another stem and bloom, one of the movers bumped into it on our table and broke it off!  I was heartbroken.  I looked up ‘long-suffering’ and ended up with “Patience.”  She’s been through a lot, that one, and just the other day I noticed a tiny bud getting ready to sprout from the moss–hurray!  And now, I have Emily’s purple one to re-pot, who I have been calling “Stella 2.”  Between the animals and now anthropomorphic plants, we have one full house!

8. I’m supposed to be working on psychology homework.  Must hurry!

9.  Hadrian has been down for the count all day today–GLORIOUS!  I’ve been so productive.  (In case you’re wondering, any time he returns from ‘puppy camp’ he sleeps 24/7 for about two days.  Totally normal.)

10.  We have 7 pints of ice cream in our freezer, plus the remnants of two Jeni’s that Emily and Dan brought us, plus a tiny bit of homemade Jeni’s vanilla.  SEVEN unopened Graeter’s and Jeni’s pints.  That’s like $45 in ice cream (hey, don’t judge my expensive taste in ice cream!).  My brilliant plan: tiny scoops, both to make it last and keep it off my hips.  I’ll let you know how it goes, but I’m not terribly optimistic…