I still love you, blog.

Ohhh blog.  My poor, poor blog.  Here it sits, all on its lonesome, with no one to love it, and no one to write in it, and therefore probably no one to read it.  Poor, sad, un-updated blog.

I will fix you, blog.  I will write in you right now while my apples bake in the oven and make my house smell like yummy cinnamon dessert.

Where to start?  It's been nearly two months!  (For shame.)  Well...

I spent two weeks in Berkeley at the end of November/beginning of December.  It was so nice to see everyone.  I mean, that's an understatement, really.  The nice thing about only having been gone for three months is that it was so normal to be back in Berkeley!  Everything was just as I left it, really.  The only weird part was that I didn't have an apartment anymore.  I kept thinking, "Okay, well, time to go home now..." except that someone else lives in my "home" now.  That was small potatoes, though.  I was surprised at just how normal everything felt, and it was very comforting, but slightly unsettling at the same time.  I keep bumping up against this feeling that I have multiple homes, and multiple places where I sort of belong.  In some ways, it's a nice feeling, obviously, because there are lots of places I can go where I mostly feel at home.  But the flip side, of course, is that there's literally nowhere in my life where I feel completely at home, and it's enough to start me down the path into Existential Crisis Land, if I'm in the wrong mood.

Anyway, we did Thanksgiving, and it was really wonderful.  I went to a conference, and I got to hang out with lots of people I had missed very much.  I sort of wasted a day driving down to Stanford to give a talk... "wasted" only because it wasn't particularly well attended, and I would have been better served by going to the last day of the conference I was ostensibly in town to attend... but it was okay.  I also submitted another research grant that probably won't get funded, but you never know!  And I had a great meeting with one of my advisors, where we set down The Grand Plan for how I'm going to get my dissertation stuff published.  That plan involved me submitting at least one (preferably two) papers by the end of January, so... ahem....  (There's still time, there's still time, I tell myself.)

Then I came back to State College for a few weeks, where I must have done something, but I can't for the life of me remember what.

And then I drove to Illinois for Christmas, which is a freaking long drive, in case you were wondering.  It was a nice drive - at least until you get past Columbus, Ohio, at which point it turns into cornfields-cornfields-cornfields-flat-flat-flat.  Christmas was also nice, but I found myself missing J a lot and really looking forward to heading back to Berkeley.

So, then I headed back to California and spent two more weeks in Berkeley.  Well, sort of; we actually drove down to Santa Barbara right away and spent a few days hanging out in the glorious sunshine, running on the beach, and doing the sorts of things that feel like you're rubbing it in people's faces if you tell them about it.  Suffice it to say that I adore Santa Barbara, and we had a wonderful time down there.

We drove back up to Berkeley after a few days, and I started to get myself back into work mode a little bit.  I was having a very nice time, in fact: walking to a nice cafe in the morning, working for a few hours before meeting up with a friend or two for lunch, then maybe going out for dinner or just hanging out in the evenings.  Then - BLAMMO - food poisoning.  Nooooo fuuuuuuun.  I think it must have been leftover Thai food, because a few hours after I finished it off, I suddenly started getting really nauseous and uncomfortable, and then I was up all night violently ridding my body of all its contents.  Thankfully I had someone who apparently loves me very much who was willing to go out and buy me popsicles and Gatorade, but that was the only remotely good part about it, and my gastrointestinal tract was noticeably messed up for close to a week.

And here I am back in State College!  It's been nice to be back, and it's nice to start getting back into the swing of things.  I've been trying really hard to finish up one paper and get to work on a different paper, and have been making decent progress on both, so that's pretty good.  I've also been enjoying being back in my own kitchen so I can cook to my heart's delight; I baked some really nice bread yesterday, and I've been roasting lots of veggies to eat over baked potatoes, and baking lots of apples to eat over cold, tangy yogurt.  Maybe it's the aftermath of the food poisoning and feeling so out of whack for a week, but I've mostly been craving healthy stuff, so I'm just rolling with it.

Oh!  Speaking of nutritional anomalies, here is a doozy: I think I have a sensitivity to eggs!  Isn't that the lamest thing ever?!  I love eggs!  I eat so many eggs!!  Maybe that's the problem, or something; I've been trying to reduce the amount of empty carbohydrates in my life and have been largely replacing them with eggs for a while now.  Scrambled eggs and veggies instead of oatmeal for breakfast, lentils and eggs instead of beans and rice for dinner, that sort of thing.  But, when I was in Illinois for Christmas I realized my skin totally and completely cleared up, and it hadn't been that clear for a while.  So I realized that two major things had been removed from my diet as a result of not being at home: eggs and dairy.  I decided to experiment when I got back, and went back to eating my normal amount of dairy but still not eating any eggs, and my skin has stayed clear.  I guess the thing to do now would be to have scrambled eggs for breakfast and see what happens, but I'm worried that if I do that, I'll have incontrovertible evidence that I have a dietary sensitivity to eggs, and I kind of just don't want to know, so I haven't eaten any eggs for like a month now.  It is bumming me out a little bit.

The other thing that's been a little weird lately (going back to what I was saying before) is that I keep forgetting where I am, which is a very strange feeling.  Not like, "wait, am I in the kitchen or in the living room?", more like, "wait, am I on the East Coast or the West Coast?"  I never in a million years thought that would be an issue in my life, but here we are in 2014 and I'm one of those annoying jet setters who commutes across a continent and can't keep her time zones straight.

Anyway.  In conclusion, I guess: life is weird, and it only gets weirder.  But that's not a complaint: life is very, very nice, too.  It's just really not what I thought it would be, and right now I feel like I'm very much along for the ride.  So I'll keep baking apples and trying to write papers and living half on one coast and half on the other for the foreseeable future.  Quelle vie bizarre et inattendue que je mène!