Baking Red Velvet Cake and Other Pastimes

I write this blog entry in a haze of jet lag: I just got back from a 10 day trip home, which was wonderful in every way, and I will spend the next few days trying to recover. (Why is jet lag worse every time I travel?)



The trip was great. I am also proud to say that I managed to visit Vermont and Connecticut along with Massachusetts, which almost makes me feel like a world traveler (though I spent most of the travel time sleeping). I saw my wonderfully talented sister perform (twice) in a crazy and entertaining play - The Increased Difficulty of Concentration by Vàclav Havel - including a mistreated fish and a robot.

My mother and I made another famous red velvet cake. It looks scary in the early stages.



But it's amazing when finished.



Thanks to generous friends and family, I ate my fill of raw fish and all the wonderful things that I can't get in Bologna.



Raw fish and raw egg together: super protein. No salmonella.



Vermont was super beautiful. It was cold enough to wear a jacket in the house, but everything was turning green and it was nice to see spring arriving.



The landscape was somehow more wild than usual. And there were lots of animal noises, though luckily I didn't get too scared at night when I heard them from my bedroom. Without Rosa there to protect me, it could've gotten a bit hairy.



Other exciting adventures included buying my first powder-based makeup, being reunited with pickles, and trying to make a dent in the debris of my bedroom in Cambridge (which is a high-school time capsule).

My friend Natasha became a doctor, or more specifically, a PharmD, and I saw 99 people take pharmacy's version of the Hippocratic Oath. I didn't even know that such a thing existed, but Natasha's wealth of pharmacy knowledge has helped me realize that she can be my on-call doctor. We got her a cake to celebrate, since she turned 24 the day before she graduated.



Wish-making is very stressful. But spending time with close friends is not.



And we're trying to become more normal as we age.



It's always bittersweet to go back and forth between homes. There's always something on one end that you can't have on the other. If only there were a highway that connected Bologna and Cambridge. The trip would be that much easier, and maybe I could even get my family to come back and forth with me.