Brooklyn Ave
Rose Ave
Granger
Geddes
Some of the midwestern interior design choices are a little hard for me to stomach, but I am getting better at imagining the rooms completely empty and thinking of polite ways to say "rip out that godforsaken beige carpet and find me some hardwood."
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Gå blå
"Gå blå" sounds silly and may not be how you would actually say it, but it's the literal translation for "go blue."
.
Today was another excellent day, despite the killer headache I've had all day which is only starting to fade now. But I don't really mind, because it's from all the champagne we drank last night after finding out that I got into Michigan! I guess it's too early to say for sure what will happen, and I do have my Berkeley-UCSF JMP interview on Monday, but my mind is made up. I'm ready for a house with a porch and a kitten for Hazel and train tracks and the Roadhouse and getting back to hot humid summers and cold snowy winters. One of my interviewers at Michigan is the head of thoracic surgery and he told me about the surgical interest group he has for med students, and how he has them over to his house for dinner and they have a guest speaker each time and afterwards he teaches everyone how to tie knots and sets up styrofoam on the kitchen counter for practice with cutting. That sounds pretty excellent to me.
This morning I got an excellent facial at Supple, and now my skin feels clean and appears to have forgotten about the twenty-something dirty airplanes I've been on in the past few months. Nero and I went to Point Isabel with Liz and Roxie, and tonight J and I are going to see No Country for Old Men.
Yesterday we did the first round of design for the wedding invitations, went to look at wedding bands on Union Street, where I discovered that unfortunately I like bigger diamonds better than smaller diamonds, and went to Marc Jacobs where I bought the shoes I had been ogling at Barneys in New York for the wedding. Sandy came to save Cocoa from life with Benjamin the terrorist cat, and we cooked mashed potatoes with parsley, rainbow chard with little pearl onions, and striped bass with grappa. Yesterday morning consisted of checking my Michigan status page approximately every ten minutes for four hours.
.
Nero inherited this hideous denim beanbag chair from Rich's house, where he stayed for Christmas. It's ok because I live far far away right now and Jake is able to zone out aesthetic issues like that, but it will be hard to take it away from him later because he desperately loves it. He noses around in it to make a good spot for himself, then curls up in it.
.
.
.
.
.
Today was another excellent day, despite the killer headache I've had all day which is only starting to fade now. But I don't really mind, because it's from all the champagne we drank last night after finding out that I got into Michigan! I guess it's too early to say for sure what will happen, and I do have my Berkeley-UCSF JMP interview on Monday, but my mind is made up. I'm ready for a house with a porch and a kitten for Hazel and train tracks and the Roadhouse and getting back to hot humid summers and cold snowy winters. One of my interviewers at Michigan is the head of thoracic surgery and he told me about the surgical interest group he has for med students, and how he has them over to his house for dinner and they have a guest speaker each time and afterwards he teaches everyone how to tie knots and sets up styrofoam on the kitchen counter for practice with cutting. That sounds pretty excellent to me.
This morning I got an excellent facial at Supple, and now my skin feels clean and appears to have forgotten about the twenty-something dirty airplanes I've been on in the past few months. Nero and I went to Point Isabel with Liz and Roxie, and tonight J and I are going to see No Country for Old Men.
Yesterday we did the first round of design for the wedding invitations, went to look at wedding bands on Union Street, where I discovered that unfortunately I like bigger diamonds better than smaller diamonds, and went to Marc Jacobs where I bought the shoes I had been ogling at Barneys in New York for the wedding. Sandy came to save Cocoa from life with Benjamin the terrorist cat, and we cooked mashed potatoes with parsley, rainbow chard with little pearl onions, and striped bass with grappa. Yesterday morning consisted of checking my Michigan status page approximately every ten minutes for four hours.
.
Nero inherited this hideous denim beanbag chair from Rich's house, where he stayed for Christmas. It's ok because I live far far away right now and Jake is able to zone out aesthetic issues like that, but it will be hard to take it away from him later because he desperately loves it. He noses around in it to make a good spot for himself, then curls up in it.
.
.
.
.
Monday, January 21, 2008
järv
Järv appears to be the Swedish word for wolverine. Tomorrow at noon California time I'll find out if I got into Michigan. Since Michigan has been my top choice for something like three years now, I'm slightly anxious, but based on how my interviews went when I was there on Friday, I'm feeling good. I also found out that I got into USC, before going to Michigan and after being at Duke and Columbia, so I'm going to be a doctor somewhere! I loved Duke also, though, and the thought of huge beautiful converted red brick tobacco warehouses and big front porches (well, one of the houses we have our eye on in Ann Arbor has a front porch and a screened-in back porch) and driving to Wrightsville Beach in the summer and that heavy hanging heat. The only question now is when I can schedule the Berkeley/UCSF Joint Medical Program interview. I waited to hear from them for so long and despaired and finally let it go, so now it's almost too much to handle.
.
It is nice to have a break from Sweden. The past week - Stockholm to North Carolina to New York to Michigan to San Francisco (via Las Vegas, where I lost $20 in about two minutes in a slot machine while waiting to board my next flight) - has been exhausting and fun, and it is like paradise being back in Berkeley for a week. There is the same old echeverria growing across the street, there are calla lilies outside our front door, Benjamin is grazing on cat food, Nero is passed out in bed with Jake, Hazel is walking around squeaking, Chloe is lounging in front of the heater, and Cocoa (just a guest!) is sleeping on the tall chair in front of the window. Yesterday it was warm, blue, perfect weather, and this morning it is gray and dewy.
Yesterday was a very good day. We went for a nearly 8 mile run with Rich along the Bay Trail, up in Albany by the marshes. There is some cool little island called Brooks Island which maybe everybody knows about but I'd never noticed it before. Anyway, Rich talked about kayaking over there sometime. The run was good and not that devastating. I took two advil before we started so my shins barely hurt at all, and it made me feel hopeful about doing a ten or eleven mile run in the next few days without too much effort.
We ate lunch at Herbivore, went to Fourth Street, saw Juno, got a beer at Triple Rock, and drove up San Pablo to buy the Cuisinart Prep Plus 11-cup food processor and a Breville electric water heater like the sleek ones everyone has in Stockholm and a new hand mixer because the last time we used our old one it started smoking. I have extensive cooking plans for this week, including edamame hummus, Lussekatter (St. Lucia cats, aka buns), and the striped bass with grappa recipe from the NYT magazine a few weeks ago.
Yesterday we went on a hike with Nero. We were trying to go to the Redwood park but part of Skyline was closed so we ended up at Sibley Volcanic Preserve and there were grazing cattle! We thought maybe Nero would be excited since he's half cattle dog, but he didn't even notice.
Today is the best day of all - Warriors at 1 pm.
.
It is nice to have a break from Sweden. The past week - Stockholm to North Carolina to New York to Michigan to San Francisco (via Las Vegas, where I lost $20 in about two minutes in a slot machine while waiting to board my next flight) - has been exhausting and fun, and it is like paradise being back in Berkeley for a week. There is the same old echeverria growing across the street, there are calla lilies outside our front door, Benjamin is grazing on cat food, Nero is passed out in bed with Jake, Hazel is walking around squeaking, Chloe is lounging in front of the heater, and Cocoa (just a guest!) is sleeping on the tall chair in front of the window. Yesterday it was warm, blue, perfect weather, and this morning it is gray and dewy.
Yesterday was a very good day. We went for a nearly 8 mile run with Rich along the Bay Trail, up in Albany by the marshes. There is some cool little island called Brooks Island which maybe everybody knows about but I'd never noticed it before. Anyway, Rich talked about kayaking over there sometime. The run was good and not that devastating. I took two advil before we started so my shins barely hurt at all, and it made me feel hopeful about doing a ten or eleven mile run in the next few days without too much effort.
We ate lunch at Herbivore, went to Fourth Street, saw Juno, got a beer at Triple Rock, and drove up San Pablo to buy the Cuisinart Prep Plus 11-cup food processor and a Breville electric water heater like the sleek ones everyone has in Stockholm and a new hand mixer because the last time we used our old one it started smoking. I have extensive cooking plans for this week, including edamame hummus, Lussekatter (St. Lucia cats, aka buns), and the striped bass with grappa recipe from the NYT magazine a few weeks ago.
Yesterday we went on a hike with Nero. We were trying to go to the Redwood park but part of Skyline was closed so we ended up at Sibley Volcanic Preserve and there were grazing cattle! We thought maybe Nero would be excited since he's half cattle dog, but he didn't even notice.
Today is the best day of all - Warriors at 1 pm.
Saturday, January 5, 2008
Juldag
Christmas morning at my old apartment in Kungsholmen. Jake really likes Christmas. He is sampling the whisky truffles we bought for him in Göteborg.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
location lottery
+ In California in November, Zach described an aspect of the whole med school/law school process very accurately - while Jake and I have very strong preferences and ideas about where it is that we want to be living for the next 4 years, there's an aspect of the application process that is amazing, because it's a location lottery, basically! Obviously, odds are that we'll end up in a pretty normal place, perhaps even one where one of us has lived before (Michigan, New York, San Francisco, not that I've heard a word from UCSF yet), but I am totally floored by the idea of ending up in a place that I would otherwise have no reason to go, like Duke in North Carolina.
+ Which leads me to my upcoming trip. I fly out of Sweden in one week, for my interview at Duke. Then I go to Michigan for my interview there. Aside from Jake being from Ann Arbor and me being obsessed with it in a Dexter, Washtanaw Dairy, front porch kind of way, my grandfather also went to medical school there. That's cool. Then, to Columbia! My alma mater, or "alma monster" as someone recently joked. Maybe they're just giving me an interview so that I feel like I had a fair shot and that they respect me so that in the future I'll give them loads of money, but whatever. I'll take it. And, last but not least, UC San Diego, which is a weird one since there isn't a decent law school in San Diego. It doesn't seem realistic to a) make Jake commute to UCLA two hours each direction or b) make Jake, who will likely have his choice of top 10 law schools, go to a school that will be limiting for him. I am going to withdraw my application from Iowa, I will be interested to get my letter from USC soon, I will keep an open mind about pursuing Brown even though there's the same issue with no law school in Providence and Jake having to commute to Boston or New Haven probably, and Cornell blew my mind but I don't understand how we could go back to New York right now and be happy in the same way.
+ This whole process is insane, applying to med school. I sort of knew what I was getting myself into, but not really. I'm about to have 11 discrete flights, but at least this time it will be over the course of 2 weeks, not 1. I've been hanging out with a bunch of people who recently graduated from med school here in Sweden, and the process is completely different. I'm exaggerating slightly, but basically you click a button to apply to med school here. If you have the top grades, you will be considered, lottery-style, at the school you choose. If you don't have sufficient grades to apply that way, there's a different route that does involve writing an essay and having interviews with a doctor/professor and a psychiatrist. There are 9 million people in all of Sweden, which makes the process fundamentally different than in a place like the US, but it makes me think of some of those bootstrap decision making process theories in psychology. I mean, despite American med schools' best efforts to truly evaluate candidates holistically, as individual people, I wonder if the decisions they would make based on preliminary qualifications akin to what the Swedish programs judge on, would actually be any different than the decisions they make in the end, after reading thousands of our essays and having us spend thousands of dollars flying all over the country to interview. I'm excited for my next trip, though. I thought North Carolina would be super warm but apparently in Durham it gets down to below 20 at night sometimes! During the day in January it seems to vary between the 60s and as low as the 30s. I think it will be cold and cozy in Ann Arbor, and then I get to spend probably a whole week in Berkeley, which will include my first dress fitting at Jin Wang in San Francisco.
+ The point of this is that I have no idea where I'll end up, and this process is really horrible and gut-wrenching, but it's also exciting.
+ Which leads me to my upcoming trip. I fly out of Sweden in one week, for my interview at Duke. Then I go to Michigan for my interview there. Aside from Jake being from Ann Arbor and me being obsessed with it in a Dexter, Washtanaw Dairy, front porch kind of way, my grandfather also went to medical school there. That's cool. Then, to Columbia! My alma mater, or "alma monster" as someone recently joked. Maybe they're just giving me an interview so that I feel like I had a fair shot and that they respect me so that in the future I'll give them loads of money, but whatever. I'll take it. And, last but not least, UC San Diego, which is a weird one since there isn't a decent law school in San Diego. It doesn't seem realistic to a) make Jake commute to UCLA two hours each direction or b) make Jake, who will likely have his choice of top 10 law schools, go to a school that will be limiting for him. I am going to withdraw my application from Iowa, I will be interested to get my letter from USC soon, I will keep an open mind about pursuing Brown even though there's the same issue with no law school in Providence and Jake having to commute to Boston or New Haven probably, and Cornell blew my mind but I don't understand how we could go back to New York right now and be happy in the same way.
+ This whole process is insane, applying to med school. I sort of knew what I was getting myself into, but not really. I'm about to have 11 discrete flights, but at least this time it will be over the course of 2 weeks, not 1. I've been hanging out with a bunch of people who recently graduated from med school here in Sweden, and the process is completely different. I'm exaggerating slightly, but basically you click a button to apply to med school here. If you have the top grades, you will be considered, lottery-style, at the school you choose. If you don't have sufficient grades to apply that way, there's a different route that does involve writing an essay and having interviews with a doctor/professor and a psychiatrist. There are 9 million people in all of Sweden, which makes the process fundamentally different than in a place like the US, but it makes me think of some of those bootstrap decision making process theories in psychology. I mean, despite American med schools' best efforts to truly evaluate candidates holistically, as individual people, I wonder if the decisions they would make based on preliminary qualifications akin to what the Swedish programs judge on, would actually be any different than the decisions they make in the end, after reading thousands of our essays and having us spend thousands of dollars flying all over the country to interview. I'm excited for my next trip, though. I thought North Carolina would be super warm but apparently in Durham it gets down to below 20 at night sometimes! During the day in January it seems to vary between the 60s and as low as the 30s. I think it will be cold and cozy in Ann Arbor, and then I get to spend probably a whole week in Berkeley, which will include my first dress fitting at Jin Wang in San Francisco.
+ The point of this is that I have no idea where I'll end up, and this process is really horrible and gut-wrenching, but it's also exciting.
first snow
First snow of the year in Stockholm, at least the first snow that didn't disappear when it reached the pavement.
.
.
.
.
The pictures are from right outside my new apartment, which is heaven. You can hear the wind, and birds chirping even in the dead of winter, there are huge windows looking out onto the water from every room, and even though it's sort of a bizarre view out onto some industrial areas, it is spectacular and everything is lit up and twinkling at night. Plus, the bathroom floor is heated and there is a heated towel rack. Totally sick!
.
.
.
.
The pictures are from right outside my new apartment, which is heaven. You can hear the wind, and birds chirping even in the dead of winter, there are huge windows looking out onto the water from every room, and even though it's sort of a bizarre view out onto some industrial areas, it is spectacular and everything is lit up and twinkling at night. Plus, the bathroom floor is heated and there is a heated towel rack. Totally sick!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)