Taste of the World... and procrastination.

Right now I'm taking a break from writing my exegesis paper. It's going to become a great paper by tomorrow at 4:30. That means that from the present moment, I have almost exactly 24 hours. I'm upstairs at school, eating my wasabi cashews and pb and celery (the pb and cel go together, but not the cashews) and drinking my coffee, since they're not allowed in the library, but I really needed a boost in brainpower. I was writing great guns this morning, but I've definitely slowed down. I think I'm at about half my word-limit, with a little less than half of my content in. It's looking like I won't have to do too much cutting... this is good. There's nothing more frustrating that cutting major points out of your paper to reduce the word count.

It just so happens that our school, a lot of the population is from somewhere interesting. 40% are American (shocking, for a Canadian school!), 30% are Canadian, and 30% are from elsewhere in the world. In addition, a lot of the Americans and Canadians grew up in another country.

So... that means a potluck can be really fun! One of our favorite things about our school is meeting people from all around the world... and also learning to cook their food. We've especially learned a lot from Carla of the Jungle (she's from Brazil... and her house there is full of plants)...


...and also from Izumi of Japan's Great White North (she's from the island of Hokkaido).


I've learned a lovely way to prepare salmon with onions, miso paste, and mirin, and I am now able to assuage my ramen and/or udon cravings with a healthy vat of miso ramen or something like that. (I'm not talking about the icky packaged stuff that college students usually eat. When you eat ramen with meat and veggies and good noodles and miso broth, ramen cravings are pretty understandable...)

So anyway, we have this fun potluck every year called "Taste of the World": everyone brings their native food to share! I don't really feel that we Americans have much to offer in terms of "native food" since we borrowed from everyone else, and there are a lot of us, so, like last year, I joined Carla and the Latin American group!

Carla and I got together to cook all afternoon! We made feijoada, kale, and farofa, and also took some time off to drink Brazilian coffee out on the porch, since it was one of the first nice days this year (March 1).



Our table was the most popular again!



(Although I did particularly enjoy the hand-made spring rolls at the SE Asia table! Those were awesome! I guess I need to make friends with some more Malaysians and Singaporeans.)


Keith brought spam. Again. That's right, representin' the good ol' US of A. (Thanks to Keith's mommy for the can of spam and the recipe book.) The funny thing was, he wasn't the only one.


The wasabi cashews were delicious, by the way. Okay, enough procrastinating, and back to the library I go. Toodles!

Waiting to take a final.

My studying is done. I'm all set... and I really don't feel like getting out all my stuff to work on the paper that's due on Tuesday that I haven't started yet. So, I thought I would write a little message on my poor neglected blog. I have lots of interesting pictures and other such things that I could post, but it just hasn't happened. It's shaping up to be a busy summer, too... 3 classes (for a total of 5 credits, 2 of which will be for audit), TA for a Hebrew class (and Keith will be doing Greek), continuing to teach cello and plan worship services at church, while trying to get started on my thesis and going on vacation a couple of times. Yay! Oh well, it's all stuff I like, so hopefully it won't be too overwhelming.

When I got up this morning, I was surprised to see that it had snowed a couple of inches last night. It won't last, though, since it's a beautiful, sunny day. But, to prove that it is, in fact, spring here, here's a couple pictures from a recent walk in the park. Actually, it wasn't all that recent; it was over a month ago. It smells really good outside in the spring. I like to pet the daffodils. Sorry, random thoughts from one who spent all day yesterday translating some things from Isaiah from Hebrew into English. Isaiah, which you may know is mostly poetry, is not exactly easy to translate; weird vocab and whatnot. Okay, it's time to me to go take my final. Wish me luck!