Oklahome

As I get closer and closer to leaving for Budapest I find it hard not to reminisce here at home. I cleaned out my room and found a lot of my old writing (including a hilarious old portrait poem). A lot of the writing I found from my middle school years (arguably the worst time in anyone’s life) expressed extreme distaste for Oklahoma, the people around me, and the culture I was raised with. I had a rough time being one of the weird kids growing up. I never could do my hair the way all the pretty straight-haired blonde girls did, or say the right thing to get people to think I was cool. I just wasn’t cool and did not really think about changing. I spent a lot of my time wishing and brainstorming about how to make the world cleaner and more peaceful. I was a young, academic hippie who wanted to help NASA and/or Spacex colonize Mars when we finally exhausted Earth’s resources. My idea of a career quickly turned to computer science when I realized I didn’t get physics, but I always had big dreams that meant I needed to get out of Oklahoma. And out of Oklahoma I got, but then I realized I was a little foolish to spend all my time with a chip on my shoulder thinking I didn’t belong or have an ounce of Okie in me.

When I left Oklahoma for Wellesley I brought Oklahoma with me like the red dirt that covers the back of every pickup truck on the streets. I quickly realized that little pieces of Oklahoma were tucked into everything I did. I left thinking I did not belong in Oklahoma and had been unaffected by the culture here. It took getting out to see just how much this place has given me. Some things are so bad they’re good like Folger’s burgers, Sonic, Braum’s ice cream, and Sunday brunch at my grandfather’s (the cinnamon rolls he made last week had heavy whipping cream in them). Some things are just good like the family and friends here that I love dearly, my childhood pets (dogs named Muffin, Lucy, and Luna), and the friendliness of the people that makes you feel like you’re being hugged by the community around you. Being home this week I realized how wonderful it is to turn around and know every other person you see; of course this is a curse too but at least I know what it feels like to know everyone’s name. It’s funny that a lot of the things that I used to hate the most about this small, old town are now the things I treasure. I just think I realize now how everything bitter may start to taste sweet after you miss it for a while.

I had a lot of fun with my family and friends while I was home. Sometimes it was just sitting around watching sad Nicholas Sparks movies with my mom, or bowling with my father and brother. I also got to experience Ada’s first music festival (Ada Fest). I kept making fun of Ada Fest by calling it “The Party of the Year” and inviting everyone I knew like Ada Fest was being thrown as a goodbye party to me. Of course, it really was like the party of the year and I saw tons of the people who I grew up around. People from the girls who were cheerleaders in high school and never spoke to me to friends I was very close to and kind of lost touch with. It was good to see everyone and remember a bit about what Ada’s all about. I still don’t always feel like I belong at this home I have, but I do know that it is my home and I can always come back to eat Folger’s, walk around Wintersmith Park, or go to Ada Fest (and see my family of course).

Feel Better Soup

Unfortunately, this week I have found myself with a cold. I do my best to ignore every time I may be a little ill, but it doesn’t always work. I could drink 10 cups of emergen-c and this cold would still be around. So, I chose to just live with it. Since I was feeling icky I spent the day just hanging in my pjs, watching Orphan Black (thank you Ada Taylor for getting me addicted), and making feel better soup. I just made up the term feel better soup and ad libbed the recipe, but I thought I’d share it just in case anyone needs some culinary inspiration. I have always liked eating leftovers, but was once inspired by an episode of the Tyra Show that cooked leftovers in new dishes. So, now I do that all the time. I started this thinking I would just cook a can of chicken noodle and then take a nap, but only found chicken broth. What I ended up with was much better than chicken noodle so I have no regrets. I’m going to share my recipe with you all, but know that it is extremely flexible (I’m not a campbell’s ad or anything). 

The Recipe: 

1 can of chicken/beef/vegetable broth

1.5 cans of water (use the broth can to measure)

1 tbl olive oil

1 onion, chopped 

1 clove of garlic, minced

1 lemon

Your favorite hot sauce (I use Chalula)

A few stalks of parsley, minced

A few stalks of cilantro (unless you’re genetically predisposed to hate it), minced

Pepper (to taste)

Other preferred seasoning (I used something with Rosemary in it)

Any other vegetable you like and/or have leftover from something else

What I used: 

2 carrots

1/4 of a small red cabbage

leftover veggie kababs with red onion, bell pepper, squash, and mushrooms

leftover grilled brussel sprouts (cooked with lime soy sauce)

more mushrooms (fresh)

To Cook:

Put your broth and water into a pot, turn on low and add chopped carrots and cabbage (or whatever you want to cook in your broth the longest). Add your onions and garlic to a pan with a splash of olive oil, add cilantro, leftover veggies, and mushrooms, squeeze in half the lemon juice and sauté for a bit. When you’re satisfied with how your sauté mixture looks add it to the broth, add your parsley, the other half of the lemon juice, pepper, and all other preferred seasonings. Put a lid on your pot and cook for roughly 20 minutes (or however long you want to wait). Then eat and start feeling better!

The creative part of this recipe is that you can use it as a basis for making any soup ever. Which I guess is obvious, but also awesome. I’m super thankful I watched my dad make soup a million times and could make this in under an hour to feel better about fighting off this cold. 

Other than the bit of a cold, I have been having a great time home in Oklahoma. I’ll write a post about it soon so you can read all about it.  

This Summer - An Adventure of a Life Time

Most people start their study abroad blogs with their first day in a new country, but I wanted to start mine by telling everyone about my summer. I just ended one of the best summers of my life and I cannot start a blog without noting some of the things I did before I leave for Budapest. I spent my summer working for Google at their Cambridge, MA office. When I got a call offering me a summer internship at Google I’m not sure I processed what was happening until I had an ID picture taken and a “Noogler” hat stuck on my head. I have always been a little nervous about working for big corporations and had some reservations about “selling my soul” to Google. After I met the people who worked there I realized quickly that Google could not possibly be trying to do anything evil. Google’s ideas are all about giving information to everyone in the world, creating exciting new technologies, and empowering people to solve interesting, hard problems. Working there all summer was a dream.

My project was well-suited to what I love doing, education technology. I worked on a small team at Google to add new features on David Bau’s Pencil Code site. Pencil Code is a blocks-to-text and text-to-blocks based programming environment that supports coffeescript, javascript, HTML, and CSS. My job this summer was to help build a visual debugger that helped to explain how the code you create on Pencil Code actually works. We made a youtube video about our work. You can also play with our demo site at pencil.codes. And, of course feel free to check out pencilcode.net and learn something about programming!

I spent the majority of my time this summer working as an intern for Google, and eating at my favorite restaurants in Cambridge too often. Besides working, I fell in love with writing poetry, hanging out with new and old friends, and walking around Boston. I could sit in Boston common and eat Mike’s Pastry with a good friend every day and never get sick of it. That’s how this summer went. I coded all the time, ate great food, explored the city and never got sick of it all. It was likely because I spent my time with such amazing people. It seems like a miracle when I think about how many of the other interns this summer turned into fast friends.

This summer was great and went by really fast. I even traveled to the Googolplex for a Women Engineers Intern Summit, and went to Ottawa, Canada for the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security to present my work from a computer science course at Wellesley. It was exciting to get to travel and meet new people. I had never been to Canada or California before and it was cool to see a couple new places when I was spending the rest of my time in some place I had been for a while. Even though I had started calling Boston home I saw a lot of new things in town this summer. I ate at the Gourmet Dumpling House in Chinatown (I found out where Chinatown was), I sat in the Boston Gardens and wrote poetry, I played for Boston’s Ultimate frisbee hat league, I went sailing in the harbor, I discovered Flour’s breakfast sandwich (you should try it), and I found the beauty that is the Christian Science Museum’s Mapporium. There is so much more I could say about my summer in America’s first city, but I will just close out my summer by saying that I learned you could have an amazing, new adventure in a place that you already thought you knew most things about.

After I left the people and places I love in Boston I went home. First to my Aunt’s house in North Carolina just to hang out for a couple days, second to my best friends’ house in Norman to see them, and finally to where I grew up in Ada to go through my childhood room, hang out with my grandmother, and spend some time with my mom. Home to me is many places, and I’m so happy to spend some time in Oklahome before I fly away to make a new home in Budapest.