Learning the hard way

Every evening Sunday through Friday one or two of us is assigned to cooking dinner for everybody. On Saturdays we are on our own or can go out somewhere in the area. This Saturday Dylan (the local) is throwing a house party for the whole class.

So far I have cooked two meals. The first was a browned butter and cheese spaghetti dish. I had never actually made it before but I guessed on the best method and apparently looked like I knew what I was doing. It turned out wonderfully.

The second meal I did was a Thai stir-fry in peanut sauce for last night. Being a vegetarian I made it with tofu and let the guys do their own thing with some chicken that they wanted to add. Dylan brought his electrical wok from home, and once again I guessed on the best way to use it.

Let me start off by saying, I have always had a fear of adding ingredients to pans with oil in them. The splashing and sputtering terrified me as a child, and I still avoid being the one to dump the stuff in whenever possible. So after putting a fair amount of oil in the wok and turning the heat on, I tried to add the tofu extremely carefully. Little did I know that its high water content meant that it was more likely to splash the less of it was added. So when I hesitantly held the container of tofu cubes over the wok and a few tumbled down, the wok went berserk. First the oil just popped loudly, but as I backed up it quickly turned into an 18" fountain of hot oil, forcing poor Melanie to flee the couch on the other side of the island. Luckily no one was injured, and the entertainment of the scene and marvelousness of the peanut sauce made up for my mishap.

We have been eating really well. Everyone has done a great job with cooking the dinners, and we've all been making ourselves nice breakfasts and lunches. Debbie (our staff resident who visits during dinner) told us at the beginning of the program that we would all gain an average of six pounds during the on shore component. I believe it. She also said we would lose it again at sea, both because of the physical activity and because we'll all be seasick and vomiting for at least the first week. I believe that too.

Oscar

Oscar is our house fish. My new roommate Meg brought him when we moved in. He sits on our kitchen table swimming his counter-clockwise laps around the fish bowl, and pauses whenever someone moves something nearby so he can watch.

There are eight of us in B House, four gals and four guys, divided into doubles. Meg and I share the only downstairs bedroom, which is huge. A House and C House each have 9 people, and thus a larger food budget, but we are the only house with a pet.

The houses are of the fairly standard New England boxy version, with a couple steps up to the front door and both floors arranged around a central staircase. There are five total on the SEA campus, located about two miles from the seaside town / global oceanography capital Woods Hole, but only three are occupied this summer. The small campus is beautiful, as is the rest of the region here on the southern end of Cape Cod. It's quite the shift for me, though, having just come from New York City, to suddenly not be able to get wherever I want by convenient public transportation. But the biking easily makes up for it, as the Shining Sea Bikeway is just down the road, offering a short but exciting mountain biking trail on the way to a nice paved path along the beach.

Today, however, this fine Memorial Day, I am not out biking or hanging out in town. I am sitting on the couch in our common room with a couple of my housemates and doing work. We have homework ranging from a reading response on Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, to a navigational report on sailing from Honolulu to San Francisco, to a research proposal draft for our oceanography projects (which for me looks like it might have something to do with the effect of pollutants on the phytoplankton population in the Pacific Ocean). And to top that off I still have a considerable amount of work to do for NASA, which I have been putting off since Reading Week. Meanwhile Oscar continues his laps.

Cheers mates. Expect more nautical nonsense soon.