Baby how long

16 cookies down, 16 cookies to go. 8am and my breakfast consists of a variety of cookies for the second day in a row. In front of me sits my evaluation form with a list of my classmates' names and the cookies they baked and my comments on the cookies' taste, flavor, texture, size and color. 32 cookies...I think I'm going to be sick.

Cookie homework during Cookies, Tarts and Mignardises Class is a task much envied and ridiculed by the culinary students. "Eating cookies for homework? Wow...that must be tough." Not really, but the sugar coma kind of is.

School is whipping by. I feel like everyday is packed, even the weekends. I have been horrible at keeping in touch with people. I don't know if I have been this busy on a regular basis for years. I love it, but I definitely have a list of people to call this weekend to chat with.

In a little over a month I will be back Wisconsin-way and have been planning out where to visit...I don't know if anyone I know will even be in Madison anymore...

If you let me stay

um...I have a feeling something has definitely hit the fan...

who can take my hand, yes I do

Depending on where I am, I find myself missing home, Madison, AIESECers, and especially family and friends on certain days of the week. When I was in Door County this past summer/fall, it tended to be Friday nights. Here, it seems to be Mondays. I have no idea really why this is...

Today I had my first day of Pastry Techniques. We made pastry cream, inverse puff pastry and did a lot of piping practice. I think I'll enjoy the class. The chef knows a ton, is hilarious, has an incredibly thick German accent (yes this is my third German chef in a row) but is also a bit of a hardass who will tell you when you royally botched something. I really like being in the baking department here. It seems like much more of a community than the culinary side, mainly because there's so many more culinary kids (4 times as many to be exact). As bakers we stroll down the hallway, making faces at our old chefs through the windows, getting offers of freshly baked pretzels and asking the chefs if their new crew is as good as we were ("Of course not" with a wink). It's lovely really.

I am the walrus

Well the weekend sans conversations about education quality was more or less upheld. Friday night turned out to be a wicked night of dancing our legs out. Then I got 3 hours of sleep, drove Danny to the train station so he could trail at an incredible restaurant in the city, and rounded up a small group to go to the farm.

Picking weeds from around raspberry bushes for 2 hours in the rain is much harder on your body than you might anticipate. My entire backside, from the crown of my head to the heels of my feet, is aching. But Lena and I dried off with some Mexican food and hookah at our cigar bar, a sushi dinner in celebration of a friend's birthday and an absolutely mediocre Saturday night out.

Today I woke up and decided I wasn't leaving my bed until someone called me to do something.

Lunch at a thai place at 1:30pm. I don't know if I ever felt so fine with being a waste of space for such a long time.

Wink at the man

I'm exhausted...how many times have I begun a post with some variation on that line?

There is a scuffle a-brewing on campus. Actually it's a mid-boil barrage of no-confidence votes, information with-holding, email and newspaper censoring explosions among the faculty, president, administration and students. Which hasn't really affected classes and half the student body probably doesn't know what's going on, but adds a nice dollop of stress onto daily life because of the constant stream of information I keep handy around me.

So I'm exhausted and looking forward to a weekend I have declared as headache free, which means it can include farming and hookah but cannot include discussions on bills of particulars and the decline of education quality.