July mid-month wrap-up

July has been a great month so far, well....minus having summer school.  However, I did get some students to switch clinic shifts with me during the 4th of July week so that I could make it to Ohio to spend some much needed vacay time with my boy and his family.  We went to a amusement park, rode go carts, climbed rock walls, went in bumper cars, played laser tag, and much more!  It was a ton of fun, and I never thought I would like all of those things so much!

His family also has three birthdays that they celebrate around the 4th, and now our anniversary.  They got us a cute little cake with our wedding colors on it!  It was sooooo good.  I'm still craving it.

Mike also took me on a mini-second honeymoon to Bar Harbor...............
Road.  Haha!  He found a Bar Harbor Road near us, and took me there to celebrate our "second honeymoon".  That boy is so sweet I can hardly stand it. 

In prep for the Color Run, we needed to get Mike out and running during our little vacay.  The easiest 3 miles in my life turned into the most painful because I tripped over something and scraped up my knees pretty bad.  They were bandaged for a while due to bleeding, but now they have bruised over.  It's almost three weeks later and they are still sore.  Just my luck!

Ever since that little vacation we've been back here at home relaxing.  I've been studying late for exams (hence the gigantic coffee that I was drinking at 9pm), we went to a Coldplay concert (my dream come true, it was AMAZING!!!!!!), and I got a haircut!  First one in a very long time. 

 Hope all is well with you!

xoxo

Happy Holi-dazzze

What a daze it has been.  I've been so busy lately, and I'm very sorry for ignoring my blog family.  I have had exam after exam, and practical after practical.  Good thing is, I've done well on all of the above.  Now I can take a short break before I start the last of my finals.  And what am I doing during that break?, well, writing to you all of course!

I've made a photo mash up of all of the things I've done in these busy weeks.  And after looking it through, I definitely don't look like I've been too busy...hah.  I guess it is possible to have a life while trying to become a doctor.

In order of appearance:
Lily helping me study.  Thanksgiving #1, Pilgrims and Indians.  Medieval Times.  Thanksgiving #2.

Thanksgiving was definitely a week of thanks.  Two dinners = lots of good food!  Plus at Thanksgiving #2, we sang karaoke and danced for almost four whole hours!  Who says turkey makes you tired?  The kitties even got turkey for Thanksgiving.  We are insane. 

Hope everyone had a good holiday, and I can't wait for Christmas!  I'm going to NYC Saturday.  I just know that will get me in the holiday spirit! :)

xoxo

peaches for me!

I almost forgot!  I made peach pie last weekend.  I know....I can't really believe I baked anything either.  It turned out surprisingly scrumptious.  It was even better warm with some vanilla bean ice cream over the top.  Mmmmmm...

  

Recipe

Necessities:

10 fresh peaches, pitted and sliced

1/3 cup all-purpose flour

1 cup white sugar

1/4 cup butter

1 recipe pastry for a 9 inch double crust pie

Instructions

1. Mix flour, sugar and butter into crumb stage.
2. Place one crust in the bottom of a 9 inch pie plate. Line the shell with some sliced peaches. Sprinkle some of the butter mixture on top of the peaches, then put more peaches on top of the the crumb mixture. Continue layering until both the peaches and crumbs are gone.
3. Top with lattice strips of pie crust.
4. Bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for 45 minutes, or until crust is golden. Allow pie to cool before slicing. Best when eaten fresh.

...okay okay...I have a confession to make.  I didn't make the crust from scratch.  Something to work on for next time I guess.  Not having a ton of time = not enough time to make the crust from scratch!  And there ya' have it!  Not everyone can be perfect...except Martha. 

Updates

I know you've all been on the edge of your seat for the past couple of days waiting to hear how my practical went...;)

I passed!

That basically seals the deal of first year. I just have to pass my finals, and I'll be done with my first year of optometry school. I don't see any problem with doing that!

Still studying for my exam on Monday, but then I have four weeks off before finals! I'm participating in a dodgeball tournament with some friends during that time, going to one of the boy's family member's house for Easter, and hopefully making the trip to D.C.

In completely unrelated news, I still fail at cooking. I couldn't microwave cream of wheat for some reason. It said two minutes, and I was talking to the boy as it was cooking. Came back after two minutes and its all lumpy and still super soupy (haha). Got all mad that it wasn't working out, start reading the directions out loud so the boy could see it wasn't my fault, and that I can actually follow directions.....somewhere "stir every 30 seconds" showed up. Whoops.

Hope everyone has a good weekend! I'm going to be studying my brain off. I really think it's going to fall out soon...

Boston

Well hello again! It's been a very long time since I've been able to blog. Life got pretty busy. Three exams in two weeks meant that studying was the only thing I was doing. The boy guesses that I probably studied 60 hours per week. Icky.

I had a neuro exam, cardio exam, and clinical skills exam. Did great on them all! Now I've got the same sort of schedule again, except it's three exams in three weeks. Hopefully that makes all the difference! Neuro, respiratory/renal, and optics. After that we have four weeks without an exam. Good news except we also need to study for finals because we have five exams in three days or something crazy like that.

Anyways! What's happened in the time since we met last? A lot I must say. Here we go.

My spring break is currently in session. It started March 4th. On Friday, the boy and I decided to take a trip to Boston to see our friend, we'll call him Harvard. (It was technically Cambridge, Mass because Harvard goes to..you guessed it! Harvard Law). See, NYC is a great quick weekend trip. Two hours and you're there. Boston....not so much. It's definitely within driving distance (especially since before it would be a plane ticket plus rental car away), but trusty google maps told us the total trip time would be six hours. I thought, "Google maps is always a little slow, it'll probably be 5.5 hours at the most."

Driving there was fun. The boy has never seen NYC, and we drove right past it. He got a great look at it, and I think he was a little taken aback at how he was actually seeing NYC. We actually got to cross over from Jersey into NYC using the George Washington Bridge as well! Something I've always wanted to see.
GW Bridge.

The rest of the drive consisted of me craning my neck to see the ocean for pretty much the entirety of the trip. I've never actually touched an ocean yet in my life (saw a few flying to China), so it was going to be an amazing experience when I did. I got excited a couple of times, but all of my "Oh my gosh! THERE'S THE OCEAN!"'s turned out to be bays or lakes. I could always eventually see to the other side. Once I saw on the GPS that we were getting further away from the ocean, I gave up.

The next exciting (not really) moment was when we passed into the "Boston area". See, we went through four metropolitan areas. Philly, NYC, Hartford/New Haven, CT, and Boston. I never really thought about it, but now when I do, we could have never avoided rush hour leaving at or before noon in Philly, so I should have expected it, but I didn't. We were enjoying the lovely Bostonian forests when we notice a bit more traffic. That bit turns into a TON, and this is what we're stuck looking at for eight miles {Read: ONE AND A HALF HOURS} Yes, it took us one and a half hours to go 8 miles, well 7.8 but who's counting now? This is what we got to look at for that amount of time.
We finally made it to Harvard's house after driving for 7.5 or 8 hours. We decided to relax there for the night (after eating some amazing thai food) because we knew we were going to have a big day walking around Boston the next day.

We started the day walking around Harvard Law and Harvard Yard. Pretty normal campus, except they have tours going around at all hours.


After Harvard showed us around his stomping grounds we rode the train into Boston. We followed the freedom trail around for most of the day. Here are some pictures of historical stuff.

Sam Adams Grave. Second Photo: This was the church all the Declaration signers attended.


Good shot of the boys in the church. Second Photo: Boy is obviously the best photographer seeing as he completely misses the statue, but gets most of the cement in this one.


This is the outside of the church we were in.

George Washington on his pony.

We got home on Sunday. It was a great trip. Can't wait to go back when it's not so cold/windy.

Other things that are going on. Rita's opened up again. Rita's is this amazing slushie/frozen yogurt shop that mixes it all together into goodness. It's weird in Philly though because they don't call it slushie, they call it "water ice". In a Philly accent it sounds more like, wooaauuter ice. It's annoying.

I also finished a painting over spring break for my friend. It let me tap back into my creative side for a moment which was nice and relaxing.

School starts again next week. Our friends from my undergrad are coming to Philly tomorrow! I cannot wait to see them. They are staying for a week (while being in D.C. for some of that week as well). That should be fun.

The girls are getting along just fine. They actually sleep on the same bed now, and the hissing has stopped. I knew they would love each other eventually!

I'll leave you with a shot of our new bed. If you look closely you will catch Lily trying to steal Tipsy's food.

Sweet Saint Valentine

Happy {a little bit late} Valentine's Day everyone!

This Valentine's Day was a huge cooking success.

I'm sure you're wondering how I got so good at cooking in such a short amount of time from my last cooking mishap. Well, I didn't get any better. The boy cooked. That was my lovely valentine's day gift :) Much needed I may add. Homestyle cookin' was exactly what the doctor ordered after all of this studying craziness. I have a neuro anatomy/neuro pharm test Monday. Super pumped for that. Not. Boy got a cute little hand-made (with the help of photoshop) Valentine's message.

Anywho, he made a super yummy chicken pot pie, and we had caramel carrot cake as dessert.
Here are some tasty photos of the meal.

Also, an unexpected Valentine's Day present for the both of us came yesterday. Engagement photos! I have such a life-consuming amount of studying left to do before Monday, so I'll leave you with a few to look at.

We've got a million out-takes of this one.

Enjoy the love!

{Engagement Photos by the amazingly amazing Sarah Schultz Photography}

Tasty sparkle

The other day the boy and I went to Bredenbeck's Bakery in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia. This is my favorite bakery in Philly so far. They are very reasonably priced, and they have the best cupcakes. We got two chocolate cupcakes, a vanilla creme cupcake, mocha cupcake, canoli, and Mr. snowman cupcake. They also make amazing pound cake. Incredible.
Mr. Snowman was my favorite. Not only was he cute, but he was covered in icing and frosting. And his head was a gigantic dollop of buttercream frosting. yum. I love sugar. As you know, so I figured this would be the perfect dessert. However, all of the sugar was bit much. I couldn't finish his hat because it was too sweet. Who would've thought.

Speaking of sugar. We had a full health work up done in our organ lab today, and I don't have diabetes. Shocking, I know. I actually had no idea I needed to fast until about 10am, and by then I was starving (Cheerios for breakfast, makes for a bad fasting day). Another classmate enlightened me, and once I knew I couldn't eat until after our lab (Read: 5pm), the only thing I could focus on was eating.

By the time I got my blood taken, my blood glucose levels were at a hypoglycemic level. Oh, good.

Our lab doctor asked me if I had eaten. .....No...you told me to fast. Nevertheless, I lasted until I made it home. I have decided to try and cut down on the sweets. I'll keep you updated as to how successful this actually is. A few other interesting morsels from the lab: I have bradycardia (which I've known about for a long time, and it's because I run so much....{flex} strong heart), and I have super low LDL and super high HDL. Yay for health.

I also got a super amazing, incredible, awesome email the other day. It was regarding something I entered into a contest for, and somehow, I won! It involves the wedding, and it's pretty much my new favorite thing. I took a picture of a part of it. This accounts for the sparkle in the title.
Exam on Monday means I should probably stop being distracted by sparkly things.

I may have just given us Hypertension

Saying that my cooking skills are lacking is an understatement. A large one at that.

I had one amazing food day in my life. It was this years Thanksgiving with the boy and roommate. I made some pretty tasty yams. The boy actually likened them to his Grandmother's. Nice.

*I thought now would be a good place for a cooking picture of me, however, there are no pictures of me cooking that I could find, except one. And this isn't even a legit cooking picture. I'm just stabbing the knife into the meat to look like I'm doing something.*
Beyond that, I cannot cook. Well, I can maybe make a pizza (home-made actually), or even rice with teriyaki veggies (this got me through finals week). Still though, food is not my forte.

Tonight I decided I was going to cook Parmesan Crusted Tilapia with buttered noodles. Sounds good right? I thought so too.

I began by finding a recipe online. I settled with one of Rachael Ray's recipes. She seemed legit. Next I pulled out the frozen tilapia fillets from the freezer. I wasn't even sure you could bake frozen fish, so to Google I went. 'Can you bake frozen tilapia'. Enter. This was a good start. Next, I covered the frozen tilapia in "paprika", (That is in quotations for a reason, you'll see why soon enough) and parmesan. Just sticking with the recipe. Then I preheated the oven to 400 degrees, and waited.

After about five minutes, I decided I could probably start the noodles while I was waiting for the oven to preheat, so I put some water in the pan, and put the burner on high. Waiting some more. The oven finally beeps, and in go the tilapia fillets. I got sick of waiting for the water to boil, so I dumped the noodles into the pot, and swirled them around once.

Five minutes passes. I decide to flip the fillets and season the other side. As I'm coating the other side with "paprika", boy walks in and says "that's not paprika". "Yes it is." To my surprise, it was actually not paprika, it was seasoning salt. Main ingredient being...you guessed it..salt. Why it's the exact same red color as paprika is dumb, but I thought it would be okay because it also had paprika in its list of ingredients. Oh well. No harm done. Maybe...

I swirled the noodles again, this time they stuck to the bottom of the pan because I didn't originally add enough water. The boy grabs the pan and fills up the pot a little bit more so that it can actually cook all of the noodles. I also flipped the fillets to the other side again (at least I can flip). They seemed to be doing well. Five minutes left on those.

After a while the noodles were done, and I strained them. I put them back into the pot and lost a lot in the process. You see, the strainer was larger than the pot, so they just fell out of the strainer into the sink, missing the pot completely. Still okay I think. A 90% average is really good in some things.

Tilapia looked done, I plated both fillets. It smelled really good, so I was expecting the best.

Boy takes the first bite, and he makes all of these weird faces because it's really hot. Or so I thought. I laughed because, duh, hot food will be hot straight from the oven, but no...it was really just exceedingly salty. Oops. Here's where that "seasoning salt" comes back to haunt me. The fish was overall cooked very well, but the taste was almost nonexistent.

Here's a picture of the delectable dish.
To express how great the meal really was, the boy had a few choice words to say. "You would make any professional chef cringe because you have a complete disregard for technique." Compliments.

Food rating was split into three parts as to prevent an averaging down curve.
Noodles: 7
Fish tenderness: 8
Taste: no taste score because his tongue went into a salt coma, so there was no taste.

It was so bad, that he's even saying he'll be cooking tomorrow.

I never really thought I was a bad cook, or had a problem with cooking...until today. I guess I really do spend too much time studying, and therefore I've really never learned to cook. I didn't think it was something you needed to be taught, but I thought wrong. The boy's getting the short end of the stick when it comes to my wifely cooking duties.

Positive end note: "Noodles were top notch, I'm eating them tomorrow." Success.