Something the cat dragged in

Well, clearly I picked the wrong day to walk five blocks to the coffee shop. It is RAINING ... and now I am pretty much drenched but at least I have a warm cup of coffee! Still no pictures... sorry :( I was going to bring my camera with me to upload them but I forgot.

Yesterday I bought a TV!! This is the first TV I have ever actually owned - the one I have now is just on loan from my sister. Her current roommate has a TV and they were using that one, but now she's moving into her own place and needs it back. But, this TV is definitely more along the lines of what I need... hers is pretty tiny which wouldn't be a problem except that Ben and I love watching foreign films and on such a little screen, we couldn't read the subtitles from the couch! So now I have a 42" Insignia Plasma TV which the dudes at Best Buy said is great for watching sports.

Tomorrow I'm having some friends over for brunch and to help address some wedding invitations. I haven't cooked anything in the new place yet (except oatmeal) and I'm pretty sure most of my measuring cups and spoons are still at the old place. The menu for tomorrow includes:

Red Lentil Soup (ala Heidi Swanson)
Fruit Salad (also ala Heidi Swanson, but from her new cookbook, Super Natural Every Day)
Bread (likely from Lucia's)
Brown Butter Bars (ala Deb) - I was going to do cupcakes for dessert, but the thought of frosting individual cakes with all of the unpacking/organizing/laundry I have to do in order to make my apartment remotely guest-ready sort of made me balk, so I opted instead for something I can just put in a single pan and cut up later. I don't think I will regret this decision.

I'm sorry these picture-less blogs are so boring. I will attempt to make this one more interesting by using pictures of rainbows and unicorns:

Which actually reminds me... finals are upon us (or at least upon me). If you're looking for a good way to procrastinate:

Giant Slacker

Wow...it has been a WEEK since I posted anything! I think that officially makes me a blog slacker...but there definitely have been a few things preventing me from doing stuff like "writing for fun":

1) Moving!
I'm in my new place now, but most of my stuff is still in boxes everywhere. I moved everything myself except the large furniture, so packing and hauling carloads of boxes took up most of my time over the last week. I also had a night planned with my sister to have dinner and move two carloads last Tuesday... but then I discovered I had a flat tire so it ended up being like, half a carload.

2) School!
Does that deserve an exclaimation point of excitement? Not sure.
We're entering the home stretch, but now all these projects are ramping up so I have to, like, work on stuff... so powerpoints are another thing that have been keeping me away.

3) Easter!
Easter means holy week at church, which means lots and lots of choir obligations. We usually have rehearsals with orchestra, a Maundy Thursday service, a Good Friday service/concert where we performe a large work with orchestra (this year it was Faure's requiem), and two huuuuge services on Sunday. Easter is not subtle at my church - there are trumpets and lots of high notes

I'm also pretty sure the good folks at Bull Run coffee think I am homeless... I show up every day with my entire backpack and computer. But really it's jut because a) I don't have internet yet, and b) I haven't unpacked my coffee grinder. So they serve sort of a dual purpose. Plus they have great coffee and are pretty close to my new place.

Off to work I go!

Hijacked!

Ways in which my classmates hijacked my ethics class:

~~~~~

Professor: So what did Shell do that was unethical?
Classmate 1 (immediately): NOTHING.

~~~~~

Professor: So...wait what was that quote again.... the tragedy of the commons...something about good men....
Classmate 2: It's a tangent let's move on.
Professor: OK.

~~~~~

I can't think of anything to write so I'll let Rumi and Ghandi do it for me:

Out beyond the ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase "each other" doesn't make sense. Today like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don't open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down the musical instrument. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
- Rumi

Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.

—Gandhi

(p.s. the quote the prof was trying to remember is from Thomas Paine: "The only thing required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing")

Nerd Alert

We now interrupt your regularly scheduled programming for some late night rambling. This is just a quick follow-up from the earlier post involving mountains of books sitting on my coffee table. I received an e-mail from a friend who, looking at my pictures, saw that I own several books by Ayn Rand as well as some Christian literature and wondered if I had any insight on how to reconcile the two.

I guess the answer is, I don't reconcile them. I think they are both interesting, so I read them both. I love thought experiments and reading material that challenges me to look at the world in new ways, so even though I don't fully agree with either viewpoint I want to hear what they have to say. Reading something is not the same as accepting it.

I'm not Christian (yes, I do sing in a church choir...yes this probably makes me weird...) but I do believe in God, or at least in a higher power. I have nothing against any one belief system but I feel like ascribing to a single religion suggests that I have the answer to an unanswerable question. Whatever spiritual power is out there in the world, I do not think we can ever truly know or understand it.

(In a related story, Ayn Rand hated agnosticism and referred to it as the "enshrinement of ignorance" or just plain cowardice... so obviously we don't see eye to eye on everything. I feel like you can believe very firmly that you do not and never will have the answers, and that belief is just as strong as any other.)

One of my favorite quotes on religion comes from Osho:

All words are just fingers pointing to the moon, but don’t accept the fingers as the moon. The moment you start clinging to the fingers – that’s where doctrines, cults, creeds, dogmas, are born – then you have missed the whole point. The fingers were not the point; the point was the moon.

Marcus Borg also discusses this quote in his book Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, which is one of the few books from college that I kept as a reference. Don't worry about which belief is right or wrong, or how to decide what to believe - just enjoy the beauty of life.

And if you didn't already know I was a huge giant nerd, now you do.
Boom.

It's like the things never end!

Sorry for the lack of posting, we had the second weekend of immersion 2 so that combined with starting to move stuff, combined with a few wedding things put me a bit over capacity. I even backed out on some things, including a school-related event that I was actually really excited about but that would have involved a *late* night, when I realized that I was totally wiped out about halfway through the day on Saturday, and Sunday started with a 2 hour arm balance class at 9:30. You can't do everything though right?

Yesterday was school-free so I planned on having that be a day full of moving and accomplishing many things. I started out being super productive and adult like - I organized all of my clothes for packing, changed the battery in my smoke dectector like a motherf***ing champion (in the words of Hyperbole and a Half), set up my new Xcel account, took an entire load of boxes over to the new place, and drove up to my parents house to pick up some more boxes. This was when I realized my wedding invitations came in.

Wait what? I have to address all of these? AND move my stuff from one place to another? AND get DirecTV and internet set up? AND read for class tomorrow.

The critical mass of responsibilities had been reached; system failure ensued. I drove home, sat down on my couch, listened to the Twins game and played my guitar for three hours and went to bed without accomplishing anything of value. It will all get done eventually...just not right this second.

Also, in the process of packing I've realized I may need a 12 step program:

And yes, they are organized both alphabetically and by genre. And this isn't even all of them.

Philosophy...

Various nonfiction....

Music books and opera scores...

Poetry...

....and fiction....

...more fiction...

....even more fiction....

My name is Kristina and I have a problem.

......

OK possibly two problems.

New Condo!

I picked up the keys for our new place today (and my mom came with me because she hadn't seen the condo yet)! This weekend/week are getting kind of crazy - Immersion 2, starting the move, various end-of-year school events (official and unofficial), and 2 choir concerts coming up... I'm trying to just take everything as it comes and not get overwhelmed. Have I mentioned I hate moving? Packing, unpacking, repacking... blah. Not fun. But anyways, because I know you're all waiting with baited breath... here are some pictures of the new place!

Looking from the kitchen out into the dining room/living room

.... and back from the living room into the dining room/kitchen. And there's my mom.

Bathroom...self explainatory but I like the block glass.

Guest room/yoga room :)

Bedroom, looking out into the hallway.

fancy track lighting in the hallway.

Blurry pic taken by my mom

Complete absence of furniture makes for the perfect makeshift yoga studio...

...my Urdhva Danurasana isn't feeling too bad lately! Whatever was making my lower back grumpy a few months ago has totally cleared out - I'm going to credit Anusara and the principles of alignment. But, does anyone have tips for getting your arms fully straight? I always feel like mine are but obviously they're not... maybe it's a matter of getting my shoulders plugged in better. Who knows! Mysteries of yoga.

I'm going to try to start actually moving some of my stuff tomorrow before the immersion starts...although that may be trying to do too much. We'll see. Happy Friday!

A little story of me and my laptop

4/8/2011, 10:00 AM - Something is clearly wrong. Random things are popping up everywhere on my screen and something called "Windows Restore", which I'm pretty sure is not an actual Windows program, keeps trying to run willy nilly and when I try to stop it it only gets worse.

4/8/2011, 10:30 AM- Further examination reveals all of my files and programs have been wiped and Windows is flashing something called a "critical hard drive error". I freak out.

4/8/2011, 10:40 AM - I realize that only the files and shortcuts from programs not currently running have been wiped, and luckily my itunes was running at the time of the incident. Heart attack averted.

4/8/2011, 11:35 AM - After making sure all of my music files are backed up on discs, I throw my defunct laptop in my backpack and drive to school to meet up with a first year student who wants tips on interviewing with my employer. I am 8 minutes late.

4/8/2011, 12:45 PM - After my meeting I head over to the laptop repair center with my sad little computer. The guy working there looks shockingly like Zac Efron from High School Musical but with shaggier hair and a much lower-cut shirt. The low-cut shirt weirds me out. I explain to Zac Efron that there is a virus on my computer which has wiped out everything since the dinosaurs, and then open up my computer to show him said virus and the weird "Windows Restore" malware program. "Oh yeah," he says. "You've got problems."

4/11/2011, 9:14 AM - I get a call from the repair center that my laptop is ready to be picked up. Oh joy! Unfortunately I don't have class on Monday and wasn't planning to be at school at all that day. It's been a rough weekend without my computer and I feel utterly usesless and unproductive, but I figure one more day won't hurt, and if I can make dinner plans with my parents maybe I can mooch off of their computer.

4/12/2011, 8:30 AM - I go to the laptop repair center again to retrieve my hopefully fixed computer. Zac Efron greets me and hands my my laptop. He explains that they ran a bunch of diagnostics on it and it looks like nothing was even wrong with it. I am skeptical. I sit down and open my computer to see if the malware is still running. It is.
"Hey," I say pointing to the screen. "Remember this virus thing that the whole reason I brought my laptop in in the first place? Yeah... it's still here."
Zac Efron scratches his head. "Huh. I have no idea how they missed that."
Yeah me either.
"Well, it looks like we're going to have to re-image your computer."
Awesome.

4/12/2011, 3:00 PM - After a few meetings in Burnsville for one of my school projects, I head back to campus and pick up my laptop. Good as new.

4/13/2011, 9:35 AM - I decide to get all clever and try to restore my files from dropbox. However, it turns out backing up on dropbox is not the same as backing up on an external hard drive - when you just drag and drop an entire folder into dropbox it only saves the .lnk shortcut, and not the whole folder. Also it turns out that if you foolishly decide to act like you know what you are doing when it comes to technology and attempt to convert the .lnk file into another type of file you can actually open, it will f up all of the .lnk shortcuts on your laptop and turn everything into an encrypted word file. Oops.

4/13/2011, 9:35 AM - After another short stint in the laptop repair center, sans Zac Efron, everything is fine. Never again will I attempt to fix something on my computer by myself. Never.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Also thank god for disc backup.