Oh, the Adventures of Living in Ohio

Living on the wild plains of the Midwest has created a new set of things I have to think about.

For example, the act of putting on clothing is a far more involved process out here than back home. Instead of simply choosing my outfit with a moments consideration for weather conditions, I have to carefully plan. How far I have to walk across campus and how overheated the building that is my destination both factor into how many layers I will wear. Or when crossing the street you have to be way more careful about how far away the cars are. Cars take longer to slow down on icy streets.

Walking back from the dining hall this morning I had never felt such cold air in my life. It was so cold I had trouble breathing because that brought all the windy, icy coldness into my body. The wind whipped and twisted around me, shooting past, taking all the oxygen away and toward some icy destination. My lips felt like fat gobs hanging off my freezing face. My friend clutched my arm, her sleek leather boots slipping on the slick sidewalk as I hauled her along behind me, desperately, rushing towards the overheated warmth of the dorm. Yahoo weather informed me that with the wind, the air felt like -8 degrees. I didn't know those negative temperatures really existed. I thought that once you got to degrees in the 20s, that was colder than any Bay Area cold but manageable while the teens were horribly freezing, and the single digits hell on earth. Anything colder than that was unimaginable so I thought single digits and negative degrees, that once you got that cold it all felt the same, just icy and chilling. Two degrees was the same quantity of coldness as -15. Yeah, totally.

On an entirely different note, I had a classy college cooking experience last night. My friend and I decided to make flan but being cheap first year college students, we bought the bare minimum of what we needed, including dishes. Flan is supposed to be a very difficult dish with the exact art of burning the sugar until it is a deep amber but no more. But we had to walk all over the dorm, asking for measuring cups, oven safe dishes, baking sheets. In the end, we had to improvise with glass containers usually used for storing food, sieves we found in a back shelf on the second floor kitchen and a nalgene for measuring. And all that was before we even got started cooking. Needless to say, we burned the sugar too much so that it turned into a molasses type thing that caked our borrowed pot in a sticky and bitter tar which we finally boiled off and poured out the window. Today we will taste it in all its burnt, improvised glory. Well my mom said I should learn how to cook. Its got to happen somehow.