babalu

kie: the house of mouse
kiel: majorly awake
kio: various "secret garden" tracks



holy shit!! snow!!!!
yeah. our house does not have a shuttle. did i say shuttle? i meant SHOVEL. weird. anyway so we're kinda screwed in this respect.

for those of you who don't know, on sunday/monday approximately 17 million tons of snow (seriously!) fell on baltimore city (approx accumulation: 24") and we had two snow days because of it. so this week hasn't been a real week.

now you may think, "well, if you had all those snow days stuck in the house, why didn't you update your weblog?". well, for your information i was too busy watching movies and drinking beer. so there.

first let me talk about weekend festivities.

valentine's day sarah and i went to cafe madrid, located in fells point next to latin palace, for some authentic castillian cuisine. prix fix, pick an app, salad, entree and dessert..... FREE CHAMPAGNE WITH DESSERT. haha not only that but chef pepe kept refilling the champagne glasses. nice.

saturday night sarah and i went to the rotunda cinemathéque to see "chicago". quality movie. excellent. i was impressed by the actors' (kzj, renée zellweger, richard gere) singing abilities. in classic hopkins fashion, sarah had her first legal drink at midnight at rocky run. note: if you ever want to see good movies in plush conditions, rotunda is the place to go. it's owned by the guy who runs the senator and goes out of its way to retain the "community movie house" style of the senator. very nice.

anyway, so sunday, monday and tuesday were rather restful. classes tentatively resumed wednesday in spite of narrowly plowed walkways and perilous street conditions. some people are still bitter about it. the current theory that i believe is that hopkins spent a buttload of money paying people to clean off walkways, etc. over all monday and tuesday and it felt that the only way to merit that expenditure was to have school open wednesday. i might mention that hopkins was the ONLY SCHOOL IN MARYLAND OPEN ON WEDNESDAY. (i'm not sure of that, but i know that basically all the public schools were closed, and all balto. city schools and colleges were shut down.)

of course professors are now all discombobulated. it would have been much better to have wednesday off, since then classes that meet on a MTW schedule would be behind a whole week instead of having to move things around on the syllabus. right. anyway...

thursday was medieval, then rehearsal and recording with notes. we laid scratch tracks for all the songs greg wants to record this semester, and broke jesse and ben in to the workings of the studio.

today i presented for journal club, on an article regarding the creation of a bacterium that uses a 21-amino acid genetic code. pretty cool stuff, since nature's code uses only 20 amino acids.

then the fun began.

sarah's mom is in town, so she wanted to, you know, paint the town, so to speak. spent the evening at power plant live! at the babalu grille (cuban comida), the improv (hilarious hypnotism hijinx), and then over to vacarro's (judicious gelato) for dessert.

i tell you what. if you ever get a chance to see a comic hypnotist you have got to go see him. today's guy was flip orley. i was crying laughing. literally crying. oh my gosh.

very enjoyable evening. i feel very comfortable with sarah's mom, free to basically say what i want. she's pretty young as moms go, so her connection with sarah is pretty strong and she still seems to be in touch with the reality that often escapes some parents with age (see previous weblog entry).

yup. all in all a very good week.

the show was cancelled last weekend (snow) and also this weekend because of roof problems (melting snow). so i'm free to practice for secret garden auditions tomorrow and/or sunday. i've picked a monologue from "uncle vanya" by anton chekhov (of star trek fame). not sure about my song yet. eh, i've got time to practice tomorrow.

oh and speaking of leaking rooves, the roof in my room is leaking. about a pint of water ended up in the glass i strategically placed after about 6 hours. this does not make me happy.

i can't sleep. i would attribute this to the "drunk monk" coffee drink i had at the improv (who did not card me) [!] good thing cause there was a 2-drink minimum, for i was not about to drink two cokes.

haha drinking with sarah's mom kinda proves that i'm comfortable with her. i guess....