AH, the joys of USCIS bureaucracy, the joys of permanent residency applications involve getting finger printed. Turns out midwesterngal has the fingers of an 80 year old lady!!! We had to go to the superfancyshmantsy computer, cause turns out i have too many lines on my fingers for an ORDINARY computer to handle. hm...things to ponder. I asked the ( Read more... )

Midwestergal arrived back in the Hamlet late last night. Today she went to a Pilates class that seriously left her feeling like she had never exercised in her entire life. Clearly, things that don't kill you make you stronger. But, perhaps that's a myth. I'll keep you posted on that one ( Read more... )

Happy Turkey Day ( Read more... )

Friendly Greek, this one's for you ( Read more... )

OKOK! No more harshing on the bad brown-water-coffee I buy every single day @ the student center because I'm too lazy to walk all the way to the library! Guess what? for the past two weeks, Midwesterngal's been getting a FREE coffee for every 4 that she buys! just like that! No questions asked. No comments made. I thought it was a fluke the first 2 ( Read more... )

I kid you not. I laughed so hard I almost cried. I was also moderately repulsed in places, but that only seemed to add to the enjoyment. It was wildly offensive, but it worked on an aesthetic level -- it implicated the viewer the way Tolstoy implicates the reader in "Sevastopol in December," when he writes the entire story in the second person, and ( Read more... )

Why is it that I can't communicate with hair stylists? Funny, I'm able to talk to 150 students twice a week, even able to get them to understand what Ivan the Terrible's Oprichnina is all about, and have them write reasonably intelligible papers about the Petersburg myth in Gogol's Overcoat, but i'm ENTIRELY UNABLE to get a hair stylist to ( Read more... )

Hamletissimo is now officially BLUE! A Democrat senator! Whodda thunk?!?! I'm excited. It excites me almost as much as the effortless 15 mile bike ride i went on yesterday. When I first moved out here, 2 miles felt like a lot ( Read more... )

I arrived in the Northern Metropolis at noon today, and I felt like I could breathe easier. Not sure why, exactly, but it was palpable. On the plane, I met a 62 year old Danish woman who had just completed her THIRD IRON MAN triathelon in Hawaii! When I told her about my rocking aspirations to do a 1-1-1 triathelon she stared at me blankly. Not ( Read more... )

I highly recommend these as a conversation starter! Even (especially?) at the Symphony in the BIG CITY, people came up to me left and right to inquire whether my shoes were Merells and to coment on their utter coolness. WOW. I had completely forgotten that my clogs also matched the BIG CITY's World Series winning baseball team! So those not in the ( Read more... )