Facelift!

I've been a little down about my rough and tough school schedule and lack of results in my lab the last little bit, and haven't gotten to blogging....or have even wanted to really. So, the only remedy I could think of for fixing that was getting a new facelift on the blog! With the help of my talented friend Aarean from LaDitta Design, this was the result. Aarean hand-drew my header design! You likey?

Anyway, I will get back to you later tonight with a post of whats been going down in the Kressin home lately. Today we're off to go to the Natural History Museum! :)

Blog? What blog?

Wow its been almost an entire MONTH since I've last posted!--Sorry.

My excuse is that school has pinned down all of my time, and I have also been busy with catching multiple colds (New Yorkers: Stop giving all of your germs to me!).

School and lab are just about as boring as ever. We're learning about cell signaling and the cytoskeleton.....and boy I had no idea there was so much information on such boring topics!! Each class is just a fight against my will to stay awake. Also, I think the snow and lack of sun is starting to make me depressed! I'm so used to endless Hawaiian sunshine that all of this darkness and snow is getting to me. I need some sun and vitamin D!! Luckily today is somewhat warm (~45 degrees?) so its not that bad. Really all of this just has me counting down the days until Spring break, where hopefully the combination of a cheap plane ticket and some scrounged up savings can get us somewhere sunny (Florida?).

So other than school, we haven't really done much because of the weather, but this weekend Seth took me to Hoboken, NJ to go get some cannolis from Carlo's Bakery (from Cake Boss)! Cannolis are my all-time favorite food, so I was excited! The weather was terrible! It was raining ice and mush, and I had just caught another cold, but I went anyway (thats how much I wanted my cannolis!). It was interesting trying to find our way over there. You have to buy a separate pass for the trains that cross the rivers, and it was a couple of stories underground to get there...but eventually we found it and made our way over.

Apparently the line is just as long on a rainy day as a sunny day..it went all the way around the corner!

But no line/sleet/cold virus will keep me from a world-famous cannoli.

I couldn't believe how crowded it was inside. You could barely move and you had to shout your order across like 5 other people! The only person I recognized from the show was Frankie. He was walking up the stairs carrying a cake.

And we made it out with a box of glorious fresh cannolis!

These were hands down the best cannolis I've ever had! You can bet that box was eaten pretty fast. Just looking at these pictures makes me want more.

Anyway, so that was our weekend. I was so sick by the time we got home I almost passed out. But I managed to eat a few cannolis and went back to my sick bed for the day.

And guess what, I am going to have the best Valentine's day EVER next week...

because I'm going to go see Jon Stewart on the Daily Show!! YESSSS! We're so excited to go. I'm seriously going to wait in line all day so I can get in the front row. Look for us! Or listen--I'll be the one screaming like a crazy person when Jon Stewart comes on.

YUCK!

I have officially experienced winter!

Today was some of the worst weather ever. It snowed overnight and early in the morning, and then we were graced with ICY rain that fluctuated between hail and slush all. day. long. It literally took all of the willpower in me to get up out of my warm and cozy bed to trudge through the slush and rain to get to school!

The absolute worst part is the street slush. It is sooooooo nasty! And today when I left for school and was waiting to cross the street, a taxi cab rushed through a yellow light and threw up a HUGE wave of brown street slush onto a group of us (so sad because that was the only part of the day that I was dry.)! There was a unified cry of "OHHHHHH!" from all of us as we realized that we were all now covered in who knows what!! I seriously almost died when I felt it on my face.

Nasty city slush:

That jerk. I wish I could carry around rocks to throw into the windows of cabs that run through the puddles/snow/slush and splash me.

To make everything worse I got an email from JetBlue about suuuuper cheap flights from JFK if you fly this weekend. Palm beach is looking reeeeaaalll good right now! :)

Once there was a snowman...

It snowed like crazy last night! We looked out the window and there was a thick layer of fresh snow everywhere!

We're lucky enough to have a little patio/backyard all to ourselves (totally unheard of in Manhattan), so we ran outside to make a snowman at 11:30 at night! It was actually a little hard because the snow was so powdery. This was actually like our 3rd snowman...the other ones just fell apart.

This is Seth dancing in the snow...ha!

I love the snow! Its so pretty to see everything covered in fresh snow! I wanted to go into central park today, but I had to do lab work all day long. I saw people heading there with sleds and tubes this morning--I bet they had so much fun!

The gross stuff is the city slush after the snow. It gets all watery and brown (and yellow...from all of the dogs peeing on it!) And you have to stay away from the curb because it kicks up when cars drive by......all I can say is that I learned that the hard way.

Here's the view from my lab as I was wishing I was playing in the snow instead...

I hope it snows some more! I especially hope it snows hard enough that we're snowed in and I don't have to go to school/lab. hehe.

I'm back!

Wow it's been a while! And we've celebrated so many things since I last posted.

We flew back to California to visit our families for Christmas!

I actually didn't take many pictures of our Christmas visit...we even took family pictures with the Kressins and I didn't get any of those!

My mom took this one:

Oh wait I did take one picture:

My faaaavvvooorittteee FATTY!! It was so much fun to see him, and he is SO FAT now! He's completely lost his neck and waist and is now a big white blob. I love it!

So we had a great Christmas, and had fun seeing both of our families! We also celebrated our 4th anniversary on the 28th of December. We tried to go to Disneyland, but it was actually sold out. I've never had that happen before! It was so lame! To salvage the day we headed over to the Irvine Spectrum and spent some Christmas giftcards and went out to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory. I had started to get sick that day, so we headed home so I could get some rest.

We finished celebrating our anniversary by spending another day in Seaport Village in San Diego. I've never been there before and it was a cute little town to hang out in!

We also had a great new years, but I didn't take any pictures of that either. Oops!

While we were in California, New York had a huge snowstorm and we were so lucky to miss it! However when we got back we got to see all of the leftover nasty city snow/slush. This city can get so dirty!

But it just started to snow again today, so we got to run around Central Park and see the pretty snow, not the nasty slush! I'm always amazed at how gorgeous Central Park is. This is my first time in the snow and I had a lot of fun! The snow is so pretty!

We also got free tickets to the Late Show with David Letterman this week, and that was a blast! Technically he was the first celebrity we've seen in NYC! When we went to get our tickets, we acted super excited to be in the audience, so the stuck us in the very front row so we could yell and fake laugh really loud! It was sooo much fun. They told us a million times to laugh incredibly loud at every joke, and that was actually kind of hard to do. hahaha. I felt really ridiculous just yelling HAHAHAHAHAHA at everything everyone said. The guest was Jennifer Connely, which wasn't too exciting to be honest...but it was still fun! Dave came out before the show to talk to the audience and he seriously stood like 4 feet from us! I resisted the urge to reach out and touch him haha! It was just really cool to see all of that in person!

Here's me and our tickets with our "special" yellow stickers!

I started school this last Monday, and Seth starts school in a few weeks. School was just as difficult as I remember it..haha. My PI didn't waste any time catching me up on my lab work and had me working in the tissue culture room for hours on my first day. I'm also taking more specialized classes like adv. immunology and 2 journal clubs. Ok, the name "journal club" makes it sound like a happy little get-together, but journal club sucks. Every week we meet to each present and discuss a recently published article for a specialized topic. Its the most boring thing ever. Really. Anyway, I'm tired of talking about school. I'm just happy that its the weekend! Even though I'm still sick, I plan on having a great time and SLEEPING! [oh yeah and studying].

And guess what else! I scored 2 tickets to the Colbert Report for March 1st today! YESSSSSSSS!!