First Day of School

Belated...This was intended to post last week. Sorry all!

Well, it is official.

I survived my first day of teaching undergraduates!

Of course, I forgot to take a picture of myself on my first day (insert an imaginary photo of a Lilly Pulitzer dress here)...

And forgot to photograph my students working on their presentations of the syllabus (imagine another consolation photo of some of the finished posters).

But, I did make it through and it went pretty well. And my lesson plan is done for Friday, so my students can look forward to learning all about what inquiry is.

As for my own classes, they started today. I had my pedagogy class this morning, and I take American Lit 1800-1860 this evening. Pregnancy and Prisons will have to wait until next Tuesday. All in all, it's been a pretty great first week of school.

Moving In

It's been a crazy few weeks with moving from North Carolina out to Kentucky, getting my apartment set up, and starting orientation (1 week down, 1 left to go!). Now just a week and a half left until I teach my first ever college class. This could be awesome or it could be a miserable failure. I suppose we'll find out in a few weeks.

In the meantime, I have returned to share some pictures of my almost-completed apartment! There are a few projects left to finish up, but nothing that needs to be done in the immediate future.

And so, without further ado, or unnecessary wordiness, here are the newly taken photographs of my teeny tiny apartment.

My living area and dining area

the other view of my living area

My kitchen

My study

My bedroom

And my bathroom!

That's all I have for today. Hopefully soon I'll have a more complete update on life here.

Until then,

Emily

Monday Manicure 7/28

I offer my apologies that this post is actually a week late, since this is the nail polish that I had on for the past week. 

Summertime calls for bright polish that shimmers in the sunlight, especially when one is planning a weekend trip out to the coast to visit a friend for the first time in about two years.

It's hard to believe that my next manicure will be the one I wear when I move to Lexington! 

Baking Wonderland Chronicles- Challah

Sunday afternoons are simply the perfect time for experimenting with new bread-making recipes. Today's experiment- homemade challah! I developed quite the fondness for this type of bread a few years ago, and when I saw a recipe for it in my bread cookbook, I knew it had to go on the list of things to make.

And so I began by mixing the batter. The dough desperately wanted to stick to the sides of the bowl. Finally, I managed to coerce it into cooperation, and turned it out onto the table for 10 minutes of kneading. 

And then it was time for braiding. I'm pretty proud of the fact that I only had to restart this process once! Unfortunately, I spaced and did not remember to take a picture of this process, so we will all take a moment to close our eyes and imagine the dough above split in half and arranged into two beautiful braids.

...alright, we'll move on now. 30 minutes in the oven, and the apartment smelled absurdly good. It was physically painful to wait those last 10 minutes, but the waiting was oh so worth it.

The crust was nice and crunchy, but the dough was so soft and sweet. I may up the sugar the next time I make it, but this recipe will definitely make it onto my regular rotation. Nom nom nom. 

And now time to finish my Harry Potter movie marathon. Until next time!

Monday Manicure (a little late)

It had been a long week of traveling and the future doctor's nails were not in the best of condition. Her green nail polish had chipped off and just did not look very pretty.

She was sitting in an empty apartment, waiting for the cable guy to come set up the cable and internet (spoiler alert- he didn't show up), and had a shoebox full of nail polishes sitting next to her.

And so she did what any reasonable person would do- she made her nails purple and sparkly.

Happy end of vacation!

For those who are interested, the purple color is Essie's Under Where? and the sparkle at the tips is Zoya's Tomoko.

The Future Doctor and Her Tardis

To really tell this story, we have to backtrack about 3 years, to when your lovely narrator the future doctor, as she shall be known for the duration of this post, had just returned to the US from London and was running out of things to watch on netflix. She had an eccentric, brilliant friend J, the future MD, who was, as many brilliant people are, a huge fan of Doctor Who. J was baffled by the fact that the future doctor had lived in London for an entire school year and had never seen a single episode. 

The future doctor, however, disillusioned by her pretty miserable experience in that city, just rolled her eyes and said that there was no way that she was watching a popular British show. And so they moved on. 

Just over a year later, the future doctor was at her parents' home on winter break when her brother forced her to turn off her beloved wedding dress shows so that he could watch some absurd episode of that same Doctor Who show. The future doctor was not pleased about this edict, but as her episodes had been pre-recorded, she agreed to turn them off and return to them later.

And thus began the future doctor's experience of the Doctor. The first episode she ever saw was The Snowmen, and as that episode was 7 seasons into the current run, needless to say she was puzzled by much of what happened. However, she was also intrigued.

When she returned to her apartment in New Orleans, she found that the first few seasons were on Netflix, and so she sat down to watch them in a moment of procrastination from grad school. The rest is history. Since then, the future doctor has forced everyone she could to watch the show, and now owns many cheesy items of Doctor Who memorabilia, including an awesome Yahtzee set and several Christmas ornaments (thanks Mom!). 

And so when she heard that she would have the opportunity to visit a Tardis, her brain shut down from excitement. She spent two days planning the perfect outfit, trying to determine what she would wear if she were to actually run away with the doctor. There were so many considerations, but she finally went with a spring dress because it photographs well and she figured that she could run in a dress if she needed to.

The warehouse was full of incredible things...

But nothing was more incredible than the big blue box (which, unfortunately, was not actually bigger on the inside, but did house folding tables!).

 

And the future doctor was united with her Tardis. And it was wonderful.

The End.

I have returned!

I know I've been gone for a long time, and I offer my sincerest apologies for my absence. In May, I started the process of moving and am now currently in transit, and will be for the next month and a half. Would you ever think that "where do you live?" would be a difficult question?

This may be crazy, but I actually think this process is really fun! I'll be travelling around and seeing new states for the next few weeks. I have a trip lined up (starting next Friday!) to see Charleston, SC and Williamsburg, VA. There will be beach days and fancy restaurants and historical adventures. Basically, it'll be an amazing trip. 

And so for now, I'm spending my days hanging out in a hotel room in Georgia. And what better way to help the time pass than to watch tons of netflix and paint my nails the most obnoxious shade of yellow that I own? It's summer after all, the perfect season for being overwhelmingly bright! Plus, doing my nails at home is a major way that I save some money (although  from time to time, I may end up spending a lot of that savings on buying cool new polishes...you didn't hear that from me).

So, until I have something more entertaining to talk about, here is my manicure with Butter London's Wellies polish!