Eat Your Vegetables

I'm going to preface this with the important information, which is that my blog is going to pick up and move for a couple months to a new address: https://sillytimesinchina.blogspot.com. Because some people (my grandma, for example) would like to know what silliness I'll be up to in the Eastern Hemisphere, but I don't necessarily need them to read all the posts I usually make in here at 4 am when I'm full of late-night angst. Hooray!

Ahahahah so it's the small hours of the morning and I think I am finally completely packed, or at least as completely as I'm going to be at this point. I haven't packed my computer yet, and I realized a little while ago that I completely neglected to find electrical outlet converters or even figure out what kind of outlets they have in China. Hahahaha. Also I failed to apply for summer jobs while I was home. Doing that from China is gonna suck a whole bunch I'm pretty sure. I'll work it out somehow. If not, I'll be a hobo in China for the summer. Wouldn't that be awesome? It would be good practice for being a hobo later in life, since that's my current career path. Woooo! And I didn't balance my checkbook before I left like I meant to, and I didn't arrange any new songs for After Hours (I have failed at this sooo much this year), and I didn't vacuum my car, and I didn't polish my silver jewelry so I decided just to leave it at home, whatever! Oh, and I forgot to learn Chinese. Whoops. Hahahahahaha I don't remember ANYTHING of my Chinese except "hen hao" and the random little phrases I like to say a lot. I meant to review my travel words, so I could at least know how to say important things like "luggage" and "passport." What did I do in the past 2 months? I made a couple road trips, and I was sick for a while, and I think I played the piano a whole lot. So I may not know how to speak Chinese, but my jazz standards and Avenue Q repertoire are really sharp. The rest of my break I think I mostly spent sleeping and eating and reading the newspaper and procrastinating on the internet. I had a tighter relationship with Facebook than ever before, because THAT is something to be proud of. I spent like a bazillion hours making valentines for MIF, which was probably the most productive and completely worthwhile thing I did this whole break. It was highly fulfilling.

So right now we have no running water in our house, which resulted in me going to the diner for 2 out of 3 meals today, mostly for the awesome perk of using the infamous Clinton Station Diner bathroom with the BEST HAND DRYER IN THE WORLD, the one that is like a JET ENGINE. That hand dryer never fails to make me smile whole bunches. It is worth going there to eat just to use the hand dryer. And it was nice to see a bunch of diner people, since I hadn't been there since August. Not having water makes you appreciate bathrooms a whole lot, though. I view this as training for when I go to China and never go to the bathroom again because of my fear of squatty potties. I researched them a little bit today (I know that I am a huge dork), and I'm less intimidated now. Oh, my life is going to be so silly.

On a lot of the traveling-to-China websites I read this afternoon, they were like "yeah dress conservatively in dark colors and whatever because as a foreigner you will already attract a lot of attention." Maybe somebody should have told me that before, but I totally realized as I was packing that like EVERYTHING I own is red. Okay, maybe that's a lie, but basically soooo much of what I own is red and green. And my raincoat is a sweet sweet bright yellow poncho with a huge picture of Mickey Mouse on the back, for those times when my normal bright red coat is not enough. Or those times when being tall and white and blonde and curly-haired is not enough. Yay!

I really need to go to sleep, and probably cram some Chinese vocab. Hen hao!

So I had a silly dream last night, and I knew I'd forget it in the morning, so I got up and wrote it in dry erase marker on my mirror, and then tried to decipher it later when I woke up for real, and it was a pretty silly time.

The dream was in two parts, and in the first one I was in the school bookstore with Caitlin and Holly, except it didn't look like the U of R school bookstore (just like the other night when I dreamed that I lived on the top floor of a dorm that was one of two towers, but they weren't Anderson and Wilder). We were browsing the merchandise, and I found a display of pink and grey hats with Andrew Bochenko-related slogans on them (the only one I remember said "Andrew Bochenko is the man." It was embroidered in pink) and the price tag said that they were different prices at different schools, the way they have Canada prices on stuff, but all the prices were $10 except at Lehigh where they were $7.61. So far this vaguely makes sense, because I was talking to Andrew right before I went to bed, and MIF people had come up in conversation, which is probably why Holly and Caitlin were there in my dream, and I had talked to Sarah, which is where the Lehigh came from. The random part was when a cell phone started ringing, and it was coming from the pocket of a sweatshirt on display. I reasoned that someone had left their sweatshirt at the bookstore and those slippery bookstore employees had straightened it out and put it back in a display. Anyway, Caitlin was like oh man we could buy the sweatshirt and get a free cell phone! And I was like whatevs, I wanna know who's calling, so I took the phone out and it was an awesome huge old flip phone of amazingness, and I answered it. It was the dad of the person whose cell phone it was, and the mom got on the phone too, but they were both speaking really indistinctly, and the only information that I caught was that their son was named Stanislow Cmilos (I wrote this on my mirror and I know it's right, but I have no idea whatsoever where that name came from in my brain) and that they lived in France. Slash Canada. Maybe they were French and lived in Canada, but I swear they told me both. Anyway, I was like "oh I'll give your son his phone back" and they were like "okay, see you in Canada!" and I was like whatever, because presumably their son went to U of R so I could just give it to him, but I did get a little worried because hey, Canada is a little bit of a hike.

Then my dream left Rochester and ol' Stanislow and switched over to being at my house. We had gotten a new rocking chair in the family room, and it was squarish and dark brown and not very lovely, and my mom was sitting in it with these three gold animals that looked like small long-haired dogs and she was saying to me look how many we can fit in this new chair! And then she picked one up and when I saw it better it was more like a ferret. My mom said that they were rare golden beavers, and that once we raised them people would want to "reclaim" them (I guess people would pretend that they had lost their golden beavers and wanted them back? just presuming) and they would give us money and diamonds for them. I don't know why diamonds, but that's the way it was. Anyway, then I woke up, and there was pretty much no point to either dream except to be totally unconnected and silly.

I didn't do anything interesting today except have silly dreams, since I felt weird and sickie after I got up so I pretty much just read the paper and slept some more. I should probably be working on getting an awesome summer job, but instead I started making a scarf, which is also productive, so it's all good.

It's Silly Food Craving Time of the night, and I really want broiled zucchini with parmesan cheese, but I know that there is no such thing in my house...phooey

Oh man, so it's been a silly time recently...on Friday I went into the city and we had a going-away party for Joanna at Nick's place and there was lots of making friends and general silly silly silliness as tends to happen. It was the second weekend in a row in which I slept on the floor next to various random people using my coat as bedding. Sweetness. And this time the random people sleeping next to me kept changing in the night and I was sleepy and confused. Ohh silly times.

Saturday afternoon I met the Pu Danni (arriving late, as is my wont) and we went down to Chinatown, sadly Tina-less, in search of dim sum. If Tina had been going there probably would have been a plan and a specific place and an address and a knowledge of how to get there, but since there was no Tina we had none of these things, and we even had a little trouble finding the main body of Chinatown. After lots of walking down random roads in our quest for delicious dim sum, we finally ran into a big map of Chinatown that pointed us to the right neighborhood, where there was a place that said 'DIM SUM' in neon lights. That was a big clue. We didn't ever even look at the name of the restaurant, just went in and ate delicious foods off carts, and, in one of my proudest moments, I asked a waitress where the bathroom was IN CHINESE! And she understood me! And answered back in Chinese, and I understood, and it was awesome. Now if only I can make that happen like 8 zillion more times, in a couple weeks...I have my doubts, but whatevs. For now I shall feel triumphant! Hen hao! Gua huzi! Wo jieshao yixiar!

Basically, today was another day of great silliness but eventual triumph...it was No Heat Sunday at church (an accidental but reliable annual event at Pattenburg United Methodist), so we ended up having the service in the basement because it was slightly warmer than the sanctuary. Fortunately, this was the Sunday I chose to wear two layers of shirts and long underwear and my huge long black down coat and my fuzzy mittens. How convenient! It's hard to turn the pages in the hymnal with mittens on, but we tough it out. Anyway, it was a classic Pattenburg moment, the hallmark of our peculiar small-church brand of disorganized religion, as we like to call it. It was a good sermon, on the Beatitudes...blessed are the chilly, for they shall end up having a pretty silly but good church service in the basement; I'm pretty sure that was one of them. (I feel like I deployed that semicolon a little recklessly, but whateverrrr)

Oh man, I really want Chex Mix right now but I'm pretty sure my house is unfortunately free of Chex Mix. Arrrrrrrrr.

It's been a nomadic and adventurous time recently...I went up to Roch to rehearse with After Hours for ICCAs and hang out on MIF, and I ended up going to some classes and making random baked goods and having dance parties and wearing stick-on mustaches and writing a song with Miffers and going out for delicious Japanese food with linguistical ladies and never going to bed before at least 3 am. I realized last night that it was the first time in about a week and a half that I had actually slept in a bed at night (and at a vaguely decent hour). I slept like 12 hours, the result of a massive built-up sleep deficit in the past week. Here is my trip, summarized from the sleep perspective:

Places I fell asleep in the course of my Rochester/Pennsylvania trip:
-couches in the 910, 930, and 940 lounges (sorry 920 couch for neglecting to grace you with my somnolent presence!)
-The Couch in Mark & Ezra's room aka Ezra's bed
-Arjun's bed while watching people play Guitar Hero
-the orbital
-the floor of the Hetzel Union Building at Penn State
-the floor of the smallest, ghettoest hotel room ever in State College, PA, with 12 other people in the same room
-in my car on the side of the highway somewhere in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania

Places where I almost fell asleep on my trip but fortunately didn't:
-the middle of the highway somewhere in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania
-the middle of the highway on the way home from Philly

Ratio of time spent sleeping to time spent driving this past weekend: closer to 1:1 than I like to think about

We were pretty awesome at ICCAs, and while I was surprised and a little disappointed by the scoring, the whole time was an amazing experience and I love After Hours times one million!!!! China is just so inconveniently far away... I think I am going to have major singing withdrawal this semester unless I can somehow join a choir at Beijing University, although I don't know how well I'd be able to follow along with my limited Chinese knowledge. Ahahahaha.

Also, I pretty much love MIF to small little pieces, and I even forgot for a little when I was visiting that I don't actually technically live there anymore...I needed to fix my windshield wiper, and I was like oh well I have my own tools in my room...then a lot later I realized that I don't have a room, and my tools are not in Rochester. Aw. But then I had a wrench in my trunk that I remembered, so I fixed it on my own anyway.

I didn't do squat today and I don't even feel guilty about it. Ha!

I did a lot of important things today. I went to the park, and I explored a creek, and I walked on a couple small ponds (the ice broke on one of them, but there was only like an inch of water under it and my foot barely even got wet), and I skipped and frolicked and danced to my iPod, and I climbed a really big stack of hay bales and got poked by thorns and posed on top of the stack to make fun shadows, and on the way home I accidentally stepped in some deceptively-grassy-looking mud and got my pants and shoes all muddy, and it was fun. Also I made banana muffins. Basically, I was wildly productive.

The moral of the story is: if you're going to have a community park, it's kind of cool to have one that's a) big and full of interesting nature and b) doesn't have much in the way of other people in it. Because then you can listen to your iPod and dance like a complete fool (and trust me, I do) and nobody will care.

The other moral of the story is: if you bake banana muffins in a convection oven, they come out looking strangely pale, but they taste okay.

Going to Rochester in...about 14 hours maybe? Wooooo!

So my parents came back from Mexico, and the crazy adventures of me being in charge were over. My dad actually only got to have one day home and then had to leave for 2 more weeks on a business trip to Texas, which kind of sucks for him. But I'll still be home when he gets back, because I'm home forEVer. Seriously. But I have a renewed devotion to productivity (I pretty much have to renew my devotion to productivity a whole lot because it fails so frequently), so hopefully I can make good use of my time so I don't have to hate myself for being a waste of oxygen. I really need to read up on my Chinese, seeing as it's all I'll be allowed to speak in a month or so and I'm WAY not fluent. Ahahahahaha. And I swear I'm going to finish cleaning my room, for real. I took a bunch of stuff to the thrift shop last weekend, so I'm feeling pretty good about the whole thing, but there's still the question of what to do with the stuff that is too weird or beat up for the thrift shop to want, but too functional for me to throw away, but I don't want to actually keep it anymore. The big questions in life.

I still haven't gotten Josh a Christmas present. I'll do that one of these days, I promise. I'm gonna visit Joshie in February! It will be sweet Porterly times.

It's snowing here, which is cool, except that it doesn't seem to be sticking, which is unfortunate because then it will not cause everything to look pretty. I wanted to walk to the park and take pictures of everything covered in snow.

Ooh, maybe I will make all of my yarn into neat balls! If my life was any more exciting I just don't know what I'd do. I found a lot of yarn when I cleaned my room. I also found a whole box of awesome colored paper, which is way exciting because you know how much I like gluing and scissoring and making pretty things with paper and markers and stickers.

Tonight is the Board of Ed meeting where they decide if they'll approve me for substitute teaching. I really need to work, but apparently it takes a really long time to jump through all the hoops to be able to sub. Arrrr! Well I'm gonna be here for a while, hopefully I can pull it off.

I wonder if we're having lunch soon...

DISHWASHER FISH

So when the Porter relatives were visiting at the end of December, there was a conversation between my dad and his siblings about how their mother once cooked fish in the dishwasher. Naturally, we were intrigued. Then my parents left the country for a week, leaving me and my brothers to hold down the fort, with me in charge of grocery shopping/cooking/hassling the brothers to do their stuff. Ahahaha. Anyway, we immediately realized that this was our opportunity to make fish in the dishwasher. Mom and Dad knew about the plan beforehand, but were skeptical, and seemed to think that it was safest to be out of the country when the dishwasher fish-making took place. Smarsh, the only other person who's still in Hunterdon County these days, was more adventurous and agreed to be my accomplice in Mission: Dishwasher Fish.

There had been a lot of building excitement from the brothers about DISHWASHER FISH, so the pressure was on when this evening I began the culinary endeavor. I bought a nice big ol' piece of salmon, and I sliced it into individual-type pieces and Smarsh and I wrapped them in aluminum foil, using careful methods to ensure that the packets were airtight and wouldn't get soapy water in them. Then we put them in the dishwasher with the dirty dishes and the soap, set it on the normal dishwashing cycle ('economy' isn't hot enough to cook the fish, but I hear that 'pots and pans' is overkill), and let 'er rip. While the fish was cooking and the dishes were getting washed, we mixed up some brown rice pilaf (made more exciting by a small cinnamon-related mishap), broiled up some zucchini, and made a delicious sauce for the salmon with pesto, olive oil, garlic, lemon, and parmesan cheese as well as a sweet, highly colorful salad. This is mighty fancy for the week when the kids are making all the food themselves. We were quite proud of our handiwork, and delighted when the fish came out cooked quite nicely and not spattered all over the inside of the dishwasher. Defying all expectations of the adults to whom we had previously put forth the dishwasher fish idea, the whole escapade was marvelously successful. Nice work, Smarshical.

To conclude: life in the Porter house is AWESOME, especially when my parents are away and I'm in charge. Send the boys off to school, and it frees up the entire morning and early afternoon for important activities such as blasting music and dancing around in my pajamas like you have never seen me dance before. Seriously, if you think I dance silly in public, you should see my home-alone pajama-dancing.

The only unfortunate thing is I have an increasingly unhappy cold in my head and nose and throat and chest, and I'm pretty much the world's leading consumer of tissues at the moment. Also, I wash my hands like 95308954032 times a day as a result, so they feel really weird. Whatevs. Took some Nyquil, time to hit the sack so I can be up to kick Jake out the door in the morning...

DISHWASHER FISH!!!!!