in britannia

So yesterday was a huge day - sang the 3rd and final Boston Pops concert of this year, and then went off to massive amounts of Christmas party stuff. Also, Diana came: it was nice to be able to introduce her to friends.

Christmas was most delightful this year, not to mention profitable! More on that later.

Meanwhile, we're holding a Christmas party at our house to commence in about 10 minutes, so I should probably get back to cleaning and such. Wheeee!

Merry Christmas, everyone. :)

It's settled, by now, that Johnny Damon is going to the Yankees. He passed his physical, cut his hair, and is now inserting funnels into his pockets for Steinbrenner to begin pouring gold doubloons into them. ESPN's page 2 has the "Here's Looking At You" feature comparing Benedict Arnold and Johnny Damon. Bill Simmons' page is rife with angry fans asking 'why would the great Damon do such a thing?' and loudly condemning him for favoring money over loyalty. The Boston Globe and the Boston Dirt Dogs have been screaming that they were caught unawares. Says Gordon Edes of the Globe, "Until the last few days, even the Yankees never thought it would happen."

Sure they didn't. It's not like we haven't seen Johnny Damon sitting out on his street-corner like a hooker just waiting for the Yankees to drive by. He's been flashing his goods and hoping that the Yankees pick him up for months. I, for one, am happy enough to see him gone: I'm tired of having to explain away his behavior off the field to my Yankee-fan friends (Derek). "Damon's a complete jackass," he'd say. I honestly have to agree. And, as one poster on Bill Simmons' page said, "watching him throw goes from tragedy to comedy overnight."

Now, certainly, I wish he weren't going to the Yankees. He's a good hitter, and it'll be tough to beat the NYY lineup come May. But I believe that we can. Sportscenter was comparing Damon to the likes of Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio in terms of the great center fielders in Yankees history. That's a load of hogwash and they know it. Damon's a good player, and he remains a legend in Boston no matter what these morons on the bulletin boards say, but he's not Mantle quality, and he's not going to amount to a whole lot in New York. And there are people who I'm more sad to see go: Bill Mueller, for one. John Olerud. I'll be mad when we acquiesce and trade Manny Ramirez. And there are those leaving who should never have been signed (Renteria).

And while I'm ranting about the Red Sox, this whole 'co-GM' thing smacks of High School. I have visions of two dumb as rocks cheerleaders declaring themselves the "co-chairs" of the "We Love Johnny Damon Fan Club". I remember having to announce two co-captains for the Quiz Bowl Team at the P. school because the two students in question were incapable of functioning apart from each other. And I recall my own High School experience, in which every graduating senior in the Asian Cultural Society (not a club, darn you; a society) was granted "co-president" status, so that they could put it on their college applications with impunity. Co-GMs? Stupid.

So it's been a long time...

I am reminded that I wrote in after term ended, hoping that I might actually post more now that I'm not so busy. Well, certainly term ended, but it's been awful busy all the same. Let's start with the dinner party I wrote about earlier. AWESOME.

I even got our conductor, Owen, to show up, which was outstanding. In addition to all of the food that I made, my friend Bill also brought a hummus, and a loaf of bread on which to slather it. Claire brought store-bought mince pies and a brandy-cream sauce, which was really yummy, but the winner might have been Julia, who soaked jalapeño peppers in vodka overnight, then cut them open, de-seeded them and filled them with dark chocolate. Then froze them and dipped them into chocolate as well. It was a curious and bizarre combination, but I loved them.

And the shots of pepper vodka afterwards were, shall we say, intense...

I learned a few things from this, of course. The first is that no matter how hard I try, I'll always over-cook. There's pretty much no way around it. I cooked *way* too much food: I think it might just be genetic - my father does the same when we throw parties at home. The second is related to this: since I know I'm going to over-cook, it's a bad idea to throw such a party two days before leaving the country, as there is no way I can finish all of the leftovers. My friends were thrilled to get such bounty.

The day after the dinner party, I attended the Boar's Head dinner. Actually, not the dinner, just the procession beforehand. My friend Paul was the soloist, marching into the hall while singing the Boar's Head carol. The boar's head carol is based on Queen's College: in the 1500's, a student was walking in the woods while reading Aristotle when he was set upon by a wild boar. Instead of falling back or running away, the student waited until the boar charged and opened its mouth, at which point he jammed the Aristotle down the boar's throat, choking it to death with the words "hic est Graecus!" Running triumphantly back to Queen's, he requested that the entire college share in his good fortune by throwing a feast, and a song was written to commemorate. So the choir, in cassocks and surplices, march into the hall while singing. We are led by the soloist, then the stewards of the hall, who carry candles. After them, the three chefs of Queen's College, bearing on their shoulders a platter with a giant (and real!) boar's head. As the song makes reference to, the boar's head is decked out in herbs and holly branches. After the platter is set at high table, the provost plucks the orange out of the mouth of the boar and hands it to the soloist. And then, in pairs, the rest of the party (stewards, chefs, and choir) come forward to claim our bit of gilded garland. At which point, we are shuffled out the door to a smaller room where we enjoy the Queen's College customary cold buffet of poached salmon and such.

I'm back home now, and it's great to be back. There is snow on the ground, it's freezing, and I love it. Saw Diana twice in the past few days. She knitted me another scarf for Christmas! It's nice and soft and green. Many thanks to her. :)

The Christmas tree is up and I should probably be wrapping presents now. But anyway, I hope to be posting a little more often. Yeah, like that'll happen.

Posting from the Apple Store in London. I came to London to see my brother in his last Eton function of this term: he was in a choral carols service at St. Luke's in Chelsea as part of the Alice Martineau appeal for Cystic Fibrosis. It was a wonderful service: readings by Jenny Agutter, Dame Judi Dench, Henry Blofeld, and Bear Grylls. Which was weird, really.

Gorgeous, though.

Also went down to Iffley Village to record a few bassoon tracks for my friend John, who's doing a strange but very interesting music project in his home studio. Very cool stuff: he's a neat composer and a good friend. Great times.

OK. Heading back to Oxford today. Got some work to finish up.

A couple of random thoughts.

I've been cooking a lot recently. I'm having the entire choir of the Queen's College up for dinner on Friday and have been testing recipes. What stinks really is that while I can whip up just about anything with meat in it, aside from roasted vegetables and salad, I have literally no idea what to make for vegetarians. Aside from, perhaps, a glass of water. Over the past two days, I've tried out five new dishes, and I think I've got a menu for Friday. Starters: chili prawns, curried ground beef in lettuce, poached chicken breasts with green onion, ginger, and soy sauce, roasted winter vegetables, rocket salad with goat cheese, and store-bought hummus and olives. Mains: roasted butternut squash with spinach, lemon, and almonds, soy-glazed pork loin roast with mushroom gravy. Sides: vegetable pan-fried noodles, vegetable fried rice (unless I can find some nice chinese bbq pork), wilted spinach with shallot, maybe one more. It's a large undertaking, but I'm psyched to be in the company of friends, and I think I can pull it off. The chili prawns and curried beef I've done before. I tried out a new recipe for poaching chicken (my father can poach a whole chicken and slice it up like they do in Chinatown amazingly. I'm lucky if I can poach chicken breasts on their own. This recipe is from the Gourmet cookbook, but the sauce is my Dad's). The rocket salad I tried last night with spinach, but that's just too much spinach in one meal. The roasted squash and the pork loin were both out of the Gourmet cookbook as well. Many thanks to my three tasters who gave me helpful suggestions on each of the dishes: Dave, Angela, and Justin.

While doing my Christmas shopping, I went down to the Westgate Centre Mall on Sunday afternoon, where there was a small brass band playing Christmas carols. When I came out of the supermarket, I walked by again, and there was a different ensemble: bagpipe, two sets of african drums, and rhythm guitar. There is no chance that a bagpiper would ever find himself issued a permit for indoor mall busking in America. Those things are LOUD.

Which reminds me of the band concert I went to at Eton with my parents. Matthew's in the band as well as the orchestra (more on the orchestra in a minute), and the band concert occurred while my Mom and I were in town, so we figured why not. The band was amusing enough, but the real killer was the bagpipe ensemble, which comprised, oh, nine bagpipers and a bass drum. I have never been anywhere that loud in my life. Granted, I don't go to heavy metal shows, but I have sat next to the percussion section for Verdi's Requiem.

The orchestra concert was on Saturday, and it was a real pleasure. The pianist for the Beethoven 3rd Piano Concerto was really quite good. The winds were on the pitchy side, but overall, very nice. Matthew played in a symphony by Vasily Kalinnikov, whom I had not heard of before. It was a playful and fun symphony, and I found myself laughing at times, much to the consternation of those around me. It was performed really well, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. The train ride home was what almost did me in.

The gentleman at the ticket counter for National Rail at Oxford told me that the last train directly back from Slough would leave at 10:32. All later trains would go to Didcot Parkway and then we would catch a replacement bus service to Oxford. Evidently, there have been massive signalling problems just after Didcot, and National Rail was using the night hours to fix the problem, thus diverting as few trains as possible. No worries - I figured the concert (8:30) would be done in time to get to the station, but even if not, I don't mind catching a bus. Well, the concert ended at 10:45, and I had to stick around to take photos of Matt at the end for my parents, who weren't able to stick around for the concert. I caught a train out of Slough at 11:26, but it was delayed about 10 minutes. So when we get to Didcot Parkway, the replacement bus is nowhere to be found, as it was sent off on time, which also means empty. A rather forceful man with a heavy Scottish accent attempted to ascertain the whereabouts of this bus from the busdriver of an empty and idling bus which was not our bus. He managed to convince the driver to allow us to pass the time on his bus while we waited for the Oxford bus which, we were assured, would be coming some time in the next 20 minutes. Becoming more and more forceful, this Scotsman ended up hurling abuse at both the bus driver who was present (he'd been treating all of us with a rather short temper, despite his kindness in letting us sit and wait on the bus), and the railway manager, who had been having a really bad day, I guess. Profanities were exchanged and the rail manager came on board our interim bus to collect tickets after stating that Mr. Forceful would not be allowed on the bus at all. Unfortunately, he did so in the rudest and most unacceptable of manners, and even the well-dressed and posh-looking of my travel companions spoke up in protest. All protests were met with the same statement: "fine - you. Off the bus too!" We finally make it to our replacement bus, but it can't leave, because it has to wait until the appointed time (even though there are no trains due to arrive in the intervening space). And the Thames Valley Police had been called by the rail manager, and the two parties proceeded to haul of Mr. Forceful (by whose skilled negotiations we had been allowed on the interim bus to begin!), much to the dismay and disapproval of all of us. So a few of us (myself decidedly not included) went to his defense, and after several minutes of negotiation and what appeared to be browbeating of the rude and insensitive railway manager, the Scotsman got back on the bus with all of us and we were off. At this point, I dozed off, to awake in Oxford at about 1 in the morning.

By the way, went to Cambridge last week. Gorgeous! I suppose they've got to make up for being a lousy school somehow...

Today marks the official end of the Oxford full term. Actually, yesterday did. And the end of the Cambridge full term. The actual Oxford term doesn't end for another week, though. I guess there's some difference between "full term" and "term". Probably administrative.

It occurs to me that I've not been blogging as much this term than I did in a comparable amount of time last year. First off, yes. That's correct. I went through and counted the term timeposts to discover that this term, I have posted 18 times in 2 months. Last year, I posted 45 times. I think there are two reasons for this.

a) I'm not new to this anymore. I had a lot more of a sense of wonder when I was brand new to Oxford. Now that I've been here a year, there might not be as many things to gripe about.

b) that first reason is complete hogwash. While I was writing it, I remembered just in between my last post and this one, I've had two concerts, gone to London to see my family, had about 3 days of work negated, been mentioned by name in an Oxford lecture, been to two carols services, and had Thanksgiving dinner with my family. Oh, and I finished my thesis.

Which might actually allow me to tack on the actual second reason for why I've not been posting so much.

b.2) I'VE HAD A THESIS TO WRITE!!!! Seriously, I've been working like a dog. A very hardworking dog. Who has a thesis to write. It's not very poetic, but it's an explanation. I've been doing a chapter each week, either writing or revising. As well as turning in an outline of the next week's chapter. Without the bibliography, title page, table of contents, etc., this first draft comes to exactly 70 pages. If I include the footnotes (which my advisor tells me to do), it's 29,039 words. If not, then it's 24,853. The thesis is supposed to be 25,000 words, and my advisor keeps telling me it still feels kind of thin in areas. ARGH! But it's done. I don't really have a definitive count of how many books I've used or checked out of the library for this: I think it numbers in the 50's. I can't really look at the bibliography, since that's only the books I've actively used. There were a lot more that I checked out, looked at, and realized would be useless.

So by way of that very long-winded explanation I hope to have explained at least a part of why I haven't posted so much.

Now, on to the good stuff.

When we last left our hero (me), We'd just gotten done with the godawful Magdala service. And it was indeed awful. Not just awful: legendary-awful. Ugh. Painful.

On Wednesday, I made myself a nice pan-fried steak with port wine and shallot sauce for lunch (I've been making that sauce a lot: it's yummy). This involves swirling massive amounts of butter and shallot and minced mushroom stems around in the pan that I just cooked the steak in, then adding two cubes of frozen homemade chicken stock, and then a good amount of low-quality ruby port. Finish with black pepper and we're good to go. I've been using this homemade chicken stock since the beginning of term, when I made it in a giant pot that I actually had to go out to buy. Evidently, the people who stock the college kitchens don't think we're going to be doing anything sophisticated enough as making stock. Anyway, on Thursday, I went to the kitchen and was reaching into the freezer for my lovely stock cubes, and they were gone. Those took me 4.5 hours to simmer, another half hour to strain into pots, a day to chill and de-fat, then 3 days to spoon into ice cube trays. I left a very annoyed note on the door to the refrigerator which was probably a little angrier than I meant it to be. But they got the message - boy was I steamed. As it turned out, one of my neighbors thought it had been there since last year and decided to throw it out. Though I think she actually assumed that someone had taken the time to freeze their urine or something. Gross. We're definitely going to have a freezer-clearing day next week. And I'm also going to make more stock. I haven't decided if I'll do another thing of chicken stock, or whether I'll go all out for some veal stock. The difference, says the Gourmet cookbook, is about 10 hours (much of this is chilling time, though).

I was in a lovely concert on Thursday at Queen's. The Queen's Concert is always on the Thursday of 7th week, which is almost always American Thanksgiving Day. Family was in town again, and I had two nice solos which my friends tell me were very good. Great time. Then we went to the Old Parsonage Hotel for dinner. This was magnificent, and they do amazing food. No time really to list everything, except to say that the guinea fowl was exceedingly succulent.

Friday, by contrast, was an awful concert. Let's not talk about Friday.

I went to London to visit my parents and brothers on Saturday and much of Sunday. It was especially great to see Andrew who, owing to the fact that he's in medical school, has very little time to come up for air. You know all that whining I do about my thesis? I think it's safe to say that he does about 5 times the work that I do. On a side note, I've never really liked London. There are some nice places, but it all feels too much like a city. Like New York. Paris, on the other hand, is like a lot of really nice little neighborhoods strung together without much 'city' feel. Boston is much like that too (though there are some majorly urban areas of Boston as well). I think I like Boston and Paris much more than I like New York or London. Wow did that sound snooty.

This week launched into the last push for my thesis - an introduction and conclusion. The conclusion wasn't that hard to write, though I'm sure I have a few continuity issues throughout the thesis itself. The introduction, on the other hand, took me a long time to hammer through. Thank goodness my advisor liked both of them. On a side note to this, I think I might have hit upon a nice research proposal for a DPhil. I really hope so...

Thursday was the Carols Service at Queen's - I was disappointed not to have so many actually Christmas-y songs to sing. Lots of nice carols though, but in forms that were a bit foreign to me. Apparently, when we declared independence, the Americans also decided to write new tunes to a lot of the Christmas carols.

Before that, though, I had the pleasure of finishing out John Ma's lectures on 4th century Greek History. He mentioned the three phalanxes that he helped to reconstruct at Princeton his 2nd through 4th years at the university. I happened to have been in the first one, and he mentioned me by name in the lecture. He also cited that my shield had been a rather sharp stop sign, much to the disappointment and anger of my fellow phalanx fighters. Maybe, but it made for a very memorable afternoon. :)

Anyway, I will be fully done with Michelmas Term as of 1pm today, when I finish my last seminar with Prof. David Ibbetson. I'll go to Eton to see Matt and Mom before Mom has to leave next Wednesday.

Oh, and a quick note - I installed Mac OS 10.4 this week. I like it.