Ukrainian Easter Eggs

This year, I decided that I wanted to make Pysanky, also known as Ukrainian Easter Eggs. I used to make them every year for Easter when I was younger, but stopped doing them when I went off to college. They're absolutely gorgeous, and although it takes several hours to make only one egg, it's well worth the effort:
Aren't they pretty? Note: I did not make the above eggs. I may be good at art-related stuff, but I'm not that good!

People in Ukraine make pysanky every year in the week before Easter, so that's when I'm going to make mine too. I ordered a kit from the Ukrainian Gift Shop and it arrived this past Wednesday. I'm super excited! The eggs are really fun to make - you put a design on the egg using melted beeswax, then dip it in a light-colored dye, then repeat the process with each successive dye bath being a darker color than the previous one, At the very end, you melt all the wax off of the egg by holding it next to a candle flame. It's really amazing to see the design suddenly spring to life. Oh, and the best thing about the eggs is that you can keep them and display them for years, unlike the hard-boiled Easter eggs that are usually made during Easter.

World Down Syndrome Day

Happy World Down Syndrome Day, everyone! In honor of the day, I bought Choosing Naia at the bookstore and am looking forward to reading it very much. I remember first reading the original article in the Boston Globe that this book was based on many, many years ago...I must have been 12 or so, and I remember wanting to hear the rest of the story and hear about Naia after she was born. Well, now I get the chance to do so! Choosing Naia, for those who haven't read it or heard about it, is about one family's journey on deciding whether they did or did not want to continue their pregancy when their baby was diagnosed with down syndrome and a major heart defect in utero. So far, the book is pretty awesome. You should check it out! In fact, after I finish it, I might decide to hold a raffle as a fundraiser to raise grant money for one of the Reece's Rainbow waiting kids and have this book as a prize along with a few other goodies. Thoughts?

Yummy dining hall food!

Lately, I have been loving the food the dining hall is serving us. At most colleges, my own included, it's second nature to hate the food served in the dining halls and I hear people complaining about it constantly. Some of the complaints are justified (like the time one dining hall served only fried foods for lunch with nary a vegetable in sight) and some are not (isn't it enough that one dining hall on campus serves nutella? That stuff is too expensive to stock in all 7 dining halls). Anyway, all that aside, I simply find that I can't complain when we're being served restaurant quality food. To provide a few examples:

Baked brie (puff pastry, brie, and a spicy apricot jam baked together to crispy, gooey deliciousness)

Cookies on a stick! Champagne! (But only if you're older than 21 :-P )

A variety of thin-crust pizzas and stuffed-crust pizzas including prosciutto, fig & rosemary pizza, feta, mushroom, & wilted spinach pizza, and sundried tomato, basil, & fresh mozzarella pizza (pictured, with pasta).

And, finally, the best dish of all. There's a saute station in the dining hall which always serves fresh, made-to-order food. It rotates between burritos, Thai saute (with 7 different sauces and chose-your-own veggies as well as coconut rice), risotto (again with choose-your-own veggies, fresh mozzarella, basil, and broth), and my favorite, the pasta toss. Pictured here is the option I chose last week. I asked Tim, the guy who does the made-to-order stuff to steam broccoli, caramelized onions, roasted garlic, spinach, and shrimp, which he then put over pasta with homemade alfredo sauce, homemade pesto, fresh mozzarella, and basil. He garnishes each dish with a fresh orchid. Isn't it beautiful? It tastes even better than it looks!

One last thing. Tonight, I had to miss dinner which I was super bummed about because the dining hall was serving butternut squash ravioli which was one of my favorites. When I rushed into the dorm, 10 minutes after they stopped serving dinner, Tim, the dining hall worker I mentioned above beckoned me into the kitchen. He knows how much I love those ravioli, so he had saved me a plate! My heart melted - it was so sweet. Pictured below is the plate he set up for me, including the butternut squash ravioli with sage butter, rotisserie chicken with parsley and heirloom tomatoes, and green beans with garlic. Yum!

Busy day!

Today was spent running around and trying to get things in order for my British passport application. I've had my American passport for 22 years now (since I was about a month old), so I've never had to deal with the hassle of a first-time application before. All I can say is WOW! It wasn't so much the paperwork (4 pages and I really only needed to fill out 1.5 of them) as it was the photo specifications. Which are very different from U.S. passport photo specifications. I spent about an hour down at CVS trying to explain that my photo needed to be 35 mm by 45 mm, not 2 inches by 2 inches and that my face needed to take up 60-75% percent of the photo (which was so hard to do - the difference between the two head heights was a matter of 2 or so millimeters! Oh, and my eyes needed to be within a certain range for the photo. Eek!

After much hassle, I finally got the photos I need, and I pray that the British Embassy will accept them because otherwise I'll have to go to a special place that does international passport photos which will take a while and will be much more expensive.

On the bright side, the very important passport application package is now en route to D.C. via Fedex overnight shipping. Should be there tomorrow morning!

Thank you

I just wanted to thank everyone for their words of encouragement and sympathy regarding yesterday's post. Sadly, they haven't caught whoever did this, and I doubt that they will unless the person responsible has a sudden change of heart and confesses to what he or she did. I just continue to pray for them and hope that someday they will truly learn to love both God and the fellow citizens of this world.

I'm really upset right now

This weekend, somebody carved several swastikas into one of the chairs in my college's chapel. A symbol of hate. And it happened in the chapel, a sacred space. Where, above the altar, in foot high letters it reads "GOD is LOVE." Love, not hate. There should be no room for hate in a church, God is about love. This incident is really wrong, scary, and hateful for so many reasons. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around why someone would do something like that. I cried when I heard about it...and I'm not even Jewish so I can't even begin to imagine how threatened, victimized, and frightened the Jewish students on campus must be feeling right now.

I'm trying so hard right now to take the high road on this one. It would be so easy to universally condemn the hateful person who did this, to hate, judge, and verbally skewer his or her actions. And yet, it would be wrong to continue the cycle of hatred by hating them for what they did. So, while I find it hard to forgive (and I certainly won't forget it), I'm praying that whoever did this will find the error of their ways and come to understand the meaning of "Love thy neighbor."

So I'm in an opera...

and the rehearsal schedule is crazy this week! I guess I hadn't realized how nuts this week was going to be until I looked at the schedule. I also have to fit in Community Dinner (each residence hall has a fancy dinner for its residents every semester) on Tuesday and Senior Soiree on Wednesday (where we'll find out who the commencement speaker is). Oh, and I'm now working 25-30 hours/week, still doing choir, and squeezing classes plus schoolwork in there somehow. Oy.

Monday, March 2 – 6:30-8:00 p.m. tech rehearsal
Tuesday, March 3 – 6:30-9:30 p.m. tech rehearsal and run
Wednesday, March 4 – 6:30-8:00 p.m. rehearsal
Thursday, March 5 – 6:00-10:00 p.m. dress rehearsal
Saturday, March 7 – 7:00 p.m. call, 8:00 performance
Sunday, March 8 – 6:00 p.m. call, 7:00 performance

At least I (mostly) have my voice back :-) and I'm actually looking forward to performing in this opera because it'll be a great experience.

Run for the hills!!!!!

Everyone on campus has The Plague, or at least that's what they're calling it (and it's pronounced THE PLAAAAAAGUUUUUEEEEEEEEEE). A cold with flu-like symptoms that EVERYONE has....seriously, more than 3/4 of the campus has it. It lasts for more than a week (usually takes 2 weeks to feel better) and includes coughing, sneezing, congestion, high fevers, aches, vomiting, and sore throats. Everyone has been sidelined by it, and classes are becoming sparse. My assigned reading for my medieval literature class this week is, ironically, the Decameron by Boccaccio which was written during Plague time in 1350 and features a whole section about it. Fortunately for the campus, this is only a really bad cold and not the plague.

A lot of people are going around with bottles of Purell, hiding out in their rooms and refusing to come near their friends for fear of getting this awful cold. When my friends fell ill, I couldn't in good conscience abandon them - they were miserable and desperately needed help. How could I turn away from the people I love? I left the matter in God's hands. I figured that if I was meant to get this cold, it would happen whether or not I wanted it to, so I decided to do whatever I could to help them out, regardless of whether it meant I would catch the cold. I spent the past two weeks running errands to CVS to pick up cold meds for my friends, bringing them chicken soup from the dining hall, and hanging out with them when they needed company. As a result, I now have this cold, but I wouldn't have it any other way. Being a friend is about caring for someone even when it's not convienient or pleasant. Or, to use an utterly hackneyed phrase: "a friend in need is a friend in deed."

And now, off to bed - I'm tired and sneezing up a storm. Hopefully, this post is coherent enough to understand :-P