Thirty Books for My Thirtieth Birthday

I love books beyond just about anything else (non-living) in my life. Since my thirtieth birthday is coming up (June 27th), my MIL suggested that I write out a list of thirty books I would like to own, but don't. It was really, really fun and a huge waste of my precious time :). So I finally finished the list, and here it is.

1. Virginia Woolf The Waves
2. Virginia Woolf: Women and Writing
3. Virginia Woolf: The Virginia Woolf Reader
4. James Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
5. Vladamir Nabakov: Speak Memory
6. Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
7. Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions
8. Jorge Luis Borges: Aleph and Other Stories
9. Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary
10. The Complete Short Stories by Ernest Hemingway
11. Spoonful of Ginger by Nina Simmonds
12.A problem from hell –Stephanie Powers
13. Crime and Punishment – Dosteovsky translated by Pevear/Volokhonsky
14. There is No Me without You – Melissa Faye Green
15. Middlemarch by George Eliot
16. A History of the Arab Peoples by Albert Hourani
17. The New Book of Middle Eastern Food by Claudia Roden
18. The Complete New Yorker on CD ROM
19. The Complete National Geographic on CD ROM
20. The Proper study of mankind by Isaiah Berlin
21. The complete poems of Emily Dickinson
22. Stories of Anton Chekov translated by Pevear/volokhonsky
23. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
24. Plutarch’s Lives Vol. 1 of The Modern Library Classics
25. Harry Potter; Books 1-5 and book 7
26. Ahead of All Parting: The Essential Poetry and Prose of Rainier Marie Rilke
27. The Portable Walt Whitman
28. The History of the Ancient World by Susan Wise Bauer
29. The Isles, A History by Norman Davies
30. The Polish Way by Adam Zamoyski

Fishy and Sharky

We added two more vertebrates to our family. Two nice little gold fish that Isaac named, you guessed, Fishy and Sharky. I would post their pictures, but I am supposed to be writing a paper. Isaac has wanted fish for awhile, and one day, I just gave in. My biggest concern is how two tiny fish in a 3 gallon tank manage to stink so bad. We have a filter. They had all clean water. Yet, after only a few days, the tank is murky and smells terrible. I also know that I am not going to clean out that stupid tank after one week.
On Friday afternoon I had my first patient have anaphalyctic reaction to a chemo. I started his very first dose of chemo and five minutes later he was not breathing, or moving, and his heart wasn't beating.
It is funny in t.v. shows (I am think of House, in particular) anaphalyaxis is very dramatic - the patient clutches at their throat, and maybe gets a scream out. This man just slumped over. After our code team descended and took over, though, he revived and was able to leave the hosptial two days later, about the same time I stopped shaking. I am proud to say I did what I was supposed to and didn't completely lose it, though. I can now put, "made it through a code" under my accomplished before I turn thirty list.
Tonight Ariel and I pick up my parents from the airport, where in their mid sixties, they are returning from their very first trip abroad. They went to Austria, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy for two weeks.

Sooner, Rather than Later

I have been horribly impatient my entire life. I get things done as soon as I can, and am ansty when I have to wait for someone else. So it is no suprise that I dragged Ariel through the adoption paperwork at warp speed - that's my way. Everything only started with Ariel saying last December "Maybe we should think about adopting". At the start of the process, we were told probably 12-18 months, which meant no sooner than this winter.
Now, because of my quickness and deciding on the girls who are already avaiable, we have been notified that we can expect to travel to Ethiopia in July to pick them up. JULY! I am incredibly excited to have them come home with us, but I am in no way ready. Imagine if you were expecting a baby and then got told, oh BTW, your baby is really due three months after you concieved her. So now Ariel and I have some serious scrambling to do - bedrooms, clothes, oh - and money to fly us all to and from Ethiopia by JULY. Yikes.
I think that we are going to resort to sending out letters letting people know what it is we need help with. We have kind of resisted doing this...who doesn't get a little annoyed by a letter asking for stuff? What do you think about the whole letter fundraising thing?

Beowulf

While I usually avoid using a blog for ranting - I feel I have some worthy diatribes built up over the last sixteen hours or so.
First off - In celebrating my friends Catherine's completion of the Capital City Marathon (go Catherine!) I managed to make myself sick on one half of a normal sized margarita. I don't have the highest alcohol tolerance in the world, but that is really ridiculous.
Then, Ariel and I watched what truly might be the worst movie I have ever seen, Beowulf and Grendel. It was much, much worse than the last Star Wars, and made 300 look like an Oscar winner. Beowulf is supposed to be a monster movie and the first rule of all monster movies - DO NOT SHOW THE MONSTER! Especially if you are a low budget film and your Monster is just a big ugly guy with a bushy mullet. Even worse - do not give your monster a back story where they only eat people because of childhood trauma. Monsters are evil and we do not need to understand where they are coming from. Also, they had a woman in the movie say "I know he is not so bad.... because he only raped me once". That is so offensive on so many levels I just can't psychologically deal with it. Finally - if you are going to have actors speak with an accent, please, please, please have them all just pick one and go with it.

Last, but not least, our family had quite the adventure today - it began at 5 am when we all got up to got Immigration and Naturalization Services. We had an appointment to be fingerprinted for our adoption process. Two and half hours after our appointment and three long lines later, we emerged intact - although we still have no idea why on Earth they needed our fingerprints to process the adoption.

It's a girl!

After many roller coaster moments, which I luckily didn't post about, we have accepted our refferal. We are going through with adopting Shakur, 6, and Hamada 4 1/2 from Ethiopia. They are actually Somalian refugees, but we will be adopting them from an orphanage in Ethiopia. It will be from between 3-5 months before we go and pick them up there. In the meantime, I think Ariel and I are both going through a bit of shock, wondering if we are completely insane. I just know we just can't imagine what it will be like to have four children and to welcome them into our family, but I know I can't wait to find out.

Salvaje

The Perfect Loaf

I have been baking bread on and off for about ten years or so - a few times I have gotten ambitious and made my own starter using Nancy Silverton's methods in a quest to make fancy European style rustic bread - it was never worth the effort. But now I have fallen for this lovely bread recipe, which makes flawless perfect loaves each and every time with almost no effort at all, just a little planning. Thanks to Mark Bittman and Jeffery Steingarten for publishing the recipe.
3 cups bread flour
2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. instant yeast 1
1/2 cups water at room temp

Combine the first three ingredients in a 2-quart bowl. Pour in the water and and mix for 30 seconds until a wet dough has formed and all flour has been absorbed. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap adn let sit at warm temperature for about 18 hours (you can get away with ten-24 hour raises).
Invert the bowl onto a floured surface, and stretch the dough into about 10 inch per side square. Fold the square into thirds, like an envelope. Let rest for 15 minutes.
On a dish towel spread flour and wheat bran on on ehalf of the towel. Fold the dough into thirds again, so that the dough looks like a cube. Stretch the top layer of the dough over the seams of the bread. PU thte dough onto the prepared towel and cover it up. Let rise for 2 hours.
One hour into the rise turn on your oven to 500, and place a heavy casserole dish (I use a clay pot with a cover) into it. After the dish has been in the oven for one hour, pull it out and invert
the loaf into the casserole. Cover the casserole and bake loaf for 30 minutes. Uncover the casserole and bake for 20-30 minutes more. Remove and cool until it is barely warm.

Procession of the Species

Olypmia is a weird place. A lot of the people who live here drive volvos with Dennis Kucinich bumper stickers, and someone is protesting something at least every week somewhere in the town. While I often mock the overt tofu-iness of the town, I must say most of the time I like it here; we have a really good film society, a nice farmers market - and two used bookstores.
Instead of a normal parade we have Arts Walk and Procession of the Species - a fairly loosely organized collection of dancing people in homeade costumes, paper mache animals, and some people that just seem to jump in and walk around because they feel like it.

Procession is the last part of Arts Walk - a weekend where downtown stores host local artists, the symphony has a musical instrument petting zoo, and lots of street performers (including Leif, everyones favorite juggler). I don't actually get to go inside and see the art because you don't go anywhere near a store with a bulldog and two young boys.
The whole day was lots of fun - Chester was extremely popular, and he ate it all up. He stopped for every random person to pet him and take his picture with their cell phone. The boys got
to run around and draw in the streets, and they love the parade.
Here are a few pictures from the parade itself to give you an idea of what it looks like.
It is just fun to watch - mostly it is people dancing around in bright costumes with their kids. There are groups, but other than the samba and belly dancing groups, it is a little hard to figure out who they are. It is definitely all very weird, but there is something very fun about watching a 65 year old belly dancing her heart out, really not caring that it isn't an appropriate thing to do, but having a good time all the same.