Tonight it's foggy in Berkeley. At around seven it started getting gray, and now the tops of the hills are covered in white fog. Nero is lying on the floor snorting, and Jake is awake for the first time in hours, with huge swollen wisdom-tooth-less cheeks. My night consisted of baking a sweet potato, changing Jake's gauze, and making slow progress on my AMCAS shit. I'm still a bit jet-lagged from Boston even though we weren't there long enough to get adjusted. There's a mysterious cricket sound outside that I've never heard before. I don't think I've ever heard the classic east coast summer night cricket sound out here at all.



bodega bay

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drunken wii-ing on july fourth

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grizzly peak

redwood regional park with sandy, jake, and dog. many attempts at getting nero to pose for a picture with us.

Indian Springs

Indian Springs in Calistoga, up in Napa. Heavenly. My pictures don't do it justice, and focus mostly on competitive GAMES, which seems to be the theme of the post-standardized test month. I have my heart set on going back for a night to float in the mineral pool and play cut-throat ping pong and bocce ball before I leave for Sweden.

You won't like me when I've changed

This is what we did in Ann Arbor post-LSAT and MCAT.





Also, we pined after this house for sale on Olivia Avenue. There were a million fireflies and it was really warm, the heavy humid kind I really miss. I met with two professors at the med school who were very nice and helpful but it sent me into a sort of tailspin.

Point Isabel with Jake, Zach, Ben and Nero

Arizona

scottsdale, saguaro desert, valley of the sun.

Alluvial

Here comes the last few months in pictures. Strawberry plum pie in the oven, snoring dog, motor city reggae, full sail pale ale, and pictures.

First, I am in love with my new camera - the Nikon 40x digital SLR. You could take photos of almost anything and look really smart. These were the first pictures I took, on a walk around the block. Look at them big, the image quality is sick. The flowers in California are so striking and pretty.

something marvelous

I'm taking the MCAT on Thursday. I just finished a practice test and my score became lopsided in the opposite direction that it was last time. It's so intense to be so consumed by a test. In the end my scores on the sections are being greatly determined by getting or missing one, two, three questions. I know that supposedly all these testing people have done extensive studies and whatever to make sure results are consistent and reliable, but past a certain baseline it feels so fucking hit or miss to me. Saponification? I didn't know what the hell saponification was, but I got all those questions right. Yet I got multiple basic questions about solubility and pressure wrong. At least some of the passages were vaguely interesting - lizards in Puerto Rico with dewlaps that absorb UV radiation, rickets, Aristotle's ideas of violent versus natural motion. Anyway, the world will be a better place starting Thursday afternoon as we drive off into the Sacramento rush hour sunset. Now, off to Matty's house for poker and a beer and a brief reprieve.

On my honest tea bottle cap today it had a quote from Aristotle - "In all natural things there is something marvelous."

frozen into coats, white girls of the north

today it's hot. almost ninety degrees, not bay area weather at all, at least not east bay. most people i've talked to today are grumbling about how awful it is, but i can't get enough of it. there's not much air conditioning out here because it doesn't usually break eighty and even then it's always breezy and pleasant. i love it, i love the humidity, i love the still, hanging heat, i love the warm breeze coming in through the windows.

i feel like i have finally been won over by it out here. i can't imagine not having every single day be beautiful and comfortable, with the exception of like ten days of rain, most of it not even during the daytime anyway. i like the east bay better than san francisco because the fog rolls in over the hills but then always lifts by early morning.

i miss the extreme weather of the east coast, mainly the humidity and real summer weather, warm rain and most of all thunderstorms. there was thunder and lightning ONCE in the almost two years i've been here. i miss blizzards and the first snow and ice storms, but my fondness for extended winter weather is rapidly disappearing. plus, we get earthquake excitement in exchange for an otherwise fairly homogenous climate. winter in sweden is going to be pretty funny.

Manzanita

Manzanita is my favorite restaurant here right now. It took us forever to discover it, which is funny because it was exactly the kind of food we were expecting to find EVERYWHERE in Berkeley/Oakland, i.e. fresh, organic, vegan, Angelica Kitchen-style VEGETABLES and grains. Manzanita is a little more hard core than Angelica Kitchen but it is fabulous and I am obsessed. Tonight was rutabega & parsnip miso soup, black-eyed peas, dinosaur kale with a yellow vegetable gravy, etc. So good. Often Jake wants to go get ice cream or something really unhealthy for dessert afterwards, as though he bought healthy credits eating there - sort of like buying carbon offset credits...

Also, when dogs are happy, they wag their tails to the right!

Back to grading.

Iowa

The fat pumpkins.

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Hazel and her one blue eye.

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Chloe and her carrot.

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Yes, I'm like a middle-aged spinster who counts "photographing her cats" as her number one hobby.

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So Nero wasn't a good emperor, but one story I like is that he made his favorite horse a senator. Our Nero's name, when he showed up at the shelter, was actually "Negro" which is half horrifying and half hilarious. Apparently he lived with a Hispanic family that was really not treating him well, but at least it makes the name slightly less offensive. He knows his name, though, so Freba and Tammy changed it to Nero when he got there, so Nero it is.

a sunburn like a necklace

Today I got a sunburn on my shoulder, like a stripe from my left shoulder halfway around. I was sitting in the same spot for almost an hour in the bright sun at the post-bac lunch and I got bleested.

It was beautiful today, and it's pretty much going to be solidly beautiful the whole time until I leave in August. I feel like I've done maybe one percent of what I want to have done before I leave California. I'm applying to UCSF, UCLA, and USC but I don't think there's a big chance I'll end up at one of them. One thing I like about it out here is the way the ground is dusty, the hills are dusty and speckled with dry-looking bushes, but the plants are so succulent and lush, the cacti and the manzanita and all the plants I don't know the names of. There are two huge meyer lemon trees growing in our front yard (we actually tried to juice the ones that Laurel picked a few weeks ago and they tasted like vomit - oops), there are calla lilies and climbing honeysuckle. Two of my favorites are plants I don't know the names of - one looks like little cabbages but with pretty delicate shoots with flowers growing out the middle, and the grass-like plant with broad triangular shoots that are red striped with green and yellow. I'm still snobby and I think parts of life out here are silly, but oh.

Today was an infuriating physics lab where we were supposed to measure the earth's magnetic field but we couldn't even get the wires and things set up for more than an hour.

Some of the side trips I want to take from Stockholm: Copenhagen, Oslo, Helsinki to stay with the Danziger's friends with the girls named Tekla and Petra, my dream names, the Arctic Circle via the Inlandsbanan to eat cloudberries and see reindeer.

I hate this blog the way I hate every blog I've tried to set up over the past few years but I'm going to keep writing anyway, fuck it.

It is Jake's birthday in less than an hour. He's coming home from a tiny lights rehearsal now and is picking up slices from Lanesplitter. I am passed out on the couch feeling destroyed by my physics midterm earlier this evening, and Nero is passed out on his bed snoring. The test was hideous and I forgot most of what I knew about circuits and electric potential. I'm a little relieved that it's over but not much because I've done little to no mcat work this week, and that is the sole purpose of my existence right now.

In the meantime I've just discovered a blog called How to Learn Swedish in 1000 Difficult Lessons! It's great. His Swedish word for the day: bön (prayer) (vs. böna (bean)).

So. I got a Fulbright to go to Sweden next year, we got a dog named Nero, Jake is turning 26 on Thursday, my sister is having a baby in August, I'm taking the MCAT in a little over five weeks, and I am having a hard time understanding electricity.

I'm starting runner-runner-hearts mostly as a place to put things. I'm not sure how it's going to shape up. Mostly I have the ten months in Sweden in mind, but these last five months in Berkeley seem sort of exotic now too.

There's a big party going on down the block but I have to work on MCAT stuff - not that it's not urgent, but I am also lagging woefully behind on my weekly study hours required for the bribe I made Jake make of an afternoon at Supple.

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Pictures: Nero at Point Isabel, and a double rainbow in the Mojave on the drive to Las Vegas a few weeks ago.