Wonderin' Wanderin' Wednesday - Of Beards, Dinners & MFA Packets #1

A Map to the Heart of London

Much of my weekend, nearly all of it, was spent working on my novel A Map to the Heart of London, as my first MFA packet ever was due. Saturday and Sunday I logged in twelve hour days trying to finish up the 20 pages that I needed to get done. I hadn’t gotten a lot of writing done before the weekend, but it wasn’t because I was slacking. You see, I’m the type of writer that needs to know where he’s going. The very end of Map to the Heart of London is ambiguous, so I’ll have to have the characters speak to me, but aside from that, I need something of a course mapped out. It doesn’t have to be on a street per street basis, but I need to at least know the neighborhood I’ll be visiting.

Saturday night I took a quick break from writing and Chika and I went out for dinner at Pho 99. It  was quite good food, but a bit tough for veggie heads like ourselves.  The menu look a bit like this:

Pork

Pork

Pork

Pork

Pork

Beef

Pork

Pork

Chicken

Pork

Sunday night we went to one of our favorite restaurants, Red Bowl, for their happy hour.  Half price sushi and hors d’ oeuvres! I had the usual: veggie pot-stickers, two avocado sushi rolls and one sweet potato tempura roll.

Still Life - Chika's Wondrous Dinner & Cat

Monday I started reading The Fault in Our Stars, which is the new John Green novel. I put it on my reading list for an MFA critical response paper. So far it’s grand, and everything that I like about John Green is present. His other fabulous books are: Looking For Alaska, Will Grayson, Will Grayson (with another author who’s name is slipping my memory), Paper Towns and An Abundance of Katherines.  Alaska and Will Grayson were my personal favorites, but they’re all good.

Chika made fantastic meal on Tuesday night, which consisted of brown rice, salad (with arugula that she bought specially for me!), edamame, savory daikon & carrot pancakes, miso, lotus root and carrot salad and a cold kale, carrot and sesame salad. Yum!!

Today was really fun in school, as we’re having a roller coaster unit with the 8^th graders in physical science, and we used this game (Jason Roller Coaster Creator) to help design the real ones that we’ll build tomorrow. I thought I was the winner, spending a fair portion of my afternoon alternating between grading/correcting and this ridiculous game trying to get a high score, but then a student came in at the very end of the day with a higher score. Drat! He had 3,000+ points. Now I’m doing that stupid game now to try and beat his score. (PS: Just beat it! 3,444!)

Rockin' the Beard - Kinda' Miss the Chops

In other news, I’m growing a beard (started probably two weeks ago, give or take). My love affair with beards is a dodgy affair. I really like the way they look in my photos, but don’t really like the way they look in the mirror. They can be itchy, like right friggin’ now for example. So, you might be asking, why are you growing one? Well, it’s a twofold answer. It saves time, which is at a premium because of the MFA work and working full time, and also because Chika really likes one I have a beard. We’ll see how long it lasts.