Wow, just like that August is over!! The weather is cooling down ever so slightly and I’m actually already done with my first contract term, wow! I can’t believe it. It really feels like I haven’t been here that long (which I guess I haven’t). Looking forward to the next three months and getting a glimpse of what might lie beyond.

All roads lead to Rome work

So there was one night after work where they closed the on-ramp to Ritchie Highway (MD-2), the main road that connects Glen Burnie (where I live) and Annapolis (where I work). It’s about a 15-mile stretch of local highway that is literally a straight line between the two locales. It normally takes me about 20-25 minutes to commute. At night, I don’t normally have to have maps up because the roads are pretty empty by midnight so there’s not really any traffic to have to avoid. But when I got to the ramp, it had been blocked by a set of police flares. No worries, I’ll just take a different way to get on.

Loop around.

You probably can see where this is going, right?

The other way is blocked also.

Hmmm. I keep looping around. I’m on the phone with my mom, she’s keeping me company while I try to figure out how to get on the road home. I have trouble getting up my navigation because I’m driving. I get Apple Maps open but it doesn’t realize that the ramp is closed so it keeps trying to get me to go back on at the same place. I loop around.

And loop around.

And loop around.

I’m in the middle of nowhere, in some sort of back country residential area with no street lights or anything. I’m really not sure where I am anymore. There’s actually another car in front of me that is clearly just as lost as I am trying to get back on Ritchie Highway. They’re following all the same loop arounds as me.

I loop around.

Suddenly… I am on a familiar road. I literally looped around so much, I ended up back at work!!! It was the strangest feeling ever. But the nice thing was that I had a well-lit and safe place I could pull over and use Google Maps to get an alternative route.

Here is a diagram of the route I normally take, in green, and the approximate route I ended up taking, in red, plus or minus some loop arounds.

In the end it took me almost an hour to get home! Tobi was indignant I was so late coming back. I’m just glad it was blocked for only one night. When talked to my coworkers the next day, my manager suggested that maybe there was a downed power line because there was still some sort of crew activity there in the early morning when she was going in to work. They had been doing construction on Ritchie Highway, repaving it and all, so I thought it might be something related to that and I’d be trapped every night until they finished it. Luckily, that was not the case, but they haven’t finished paving the ramps so I’m not sure when I’ll be surprised with more blocks.

Important food updates

I know it feels like I post the same pictures of ramen every week but they’re different I promise!

I even tried their shumai one week which wasn’t bad. Then they updated their menu and offered a new “Curry Ramen”. I hadn’t had it before and I wanted to try everything I could (reasonably) have on the menu, so I decided to get it last week.

“Is it spicy?”
“No.”

I even asked twice. BUT LOOK AT HOW MUCH CHILI OIL THERE IS. It was so spicy. I couldn’t finish it.

They totally nailed the flavor and it was super good of course, but it was just so spicy my poor pansy self couldn’t handle it. I apologized profusely for not finishing it, but they also apologized profusely for not realizing how much of a baby I was when answering about whether or not it was spicy. But hey, it’s a good experience, maybe my tolerance has improved ever so slightly through all of these spicy encounters (doubtful).

Things I made

I also tried making something new recently, which is curry! I’m not a super huge curry fan, but I was walking around H-mart and saw the little box of golden curry blocks that I’ve seen my roommates use before in the past and figured it might be something I could make. With plenty of step by step advice from my mom, I was able to make my first batch of curry! It wasn’t really something I could mess up, but it was good and I’m happy with it nonetheless. Chop up onions, potatoes, and carrots, and cook it all together, add the blocks, and … curry. It looked kind of like a soup at first, but the curry blocks really do a lot of work, hahaha.

I ate the curry for like a week straight, but it was fine. I noticed I tend to choose convenience of having a meal already made over the desire to have something more varied in my life.

And of course I made more gyudon, because it’s too yummy not to have! My onsen eggs were a little bit overcooked though so they weren’t as runny as I would have liked. I think because I boiled water in a kettle and I was faster to submerge the eggs maybe the water was too hot or the time too long. More experimentation will be needed.

I was also inspired to start making onigiri after my trip to the sushi restaurant last time. I found this amazing sushi seasoning at HMart that takes out all the guess work out of trying to figure out the sushi seasoning for you. You just mix 5 tbsp of the seasoning with 2 cups of rice and it’s perfect. So good. Last time I tried to make sushi seasoning from scratch back in college for a club event we were too impatient and didn’t mix all the stuff evenly and then it wasn’t very good… so I’m all for convenient portioning XD

And then I went home for Lazy Daze and other Jasmine and I made sushi!! Apparently Jasmine’s mom really likes this one specific brand of crab stick so we got some of that and some avocado and rolled up so sushi for a snack. But it was so much we basically ate it for dinner too instead of making rice. It was a lot of fun!! I wish we could’ve eaten more because I would’ve made more. But we had enough trouble finishing that roll and everything else as it was.

Other food

I had a day off where I treated myself to a nice day off after a particularly rough stretch of work and some difficult family news. I took the day to go down to Annapolis and have some yummy food. Lunch at Yama Sushi and follow-up ice cream at the Annapolis Ice Cream Company!

I had gone at some point to Yama for dinner and had their shrimp tempura udon, which I was a little disappointed in because I only got one shrimp and it was very small and not tempura-fried very well, so I wanted to have a “redemption” meal of sorts and decided to stop by to get a lunch plate before going downtown to get ice cream. It was good and I felt much better after getting some good sushi.

Of course, ice cream at Annapolis Ice Cream Company is always a good time. They rotate their flavors every day so I tend to be paralyzed with indecision because something I might want may not be one of the two dozen flavors they have each day. I think I got vanilla nutella flavor? It was great.

One of my favorite parts of going to get ice cream in public is that little kids have the funniest reactions to you eating ice cream. There was a family-of-friends outing there and as you can see in the background, several children (and also many more not pictured). They were absolute gremlins. Just all over the place, but every so often I’d catch one staring at my ice cream cup slack-jawed. They fall silent and stare, dreaming of what your ice cream must taste like, and thinking of how much they want ice cream (even though they also had some). I can relate though, I almost always want ice cream.

Nerd cookies

One of the younger techs in our lab, Skylar, made these microbiology sugar cookies to share with the lab. They were so precious, everyone loved them.

Of course, the chocolate plates were chocolate flavor, MacConkey was strawberry flavor, and blood plates were plain sugar flavored. They were so good. She told us about how much fun she had making the streaking with the icing on top. “First quadrant, second quadrant, third quadrant, and don’t forget… isolated… colonies… [pop pop pop]”

I’ve seen a lot of hematology sugar cookies where people make them look like various white blood cells but I’m surprised I hadn’t seen micro cookies yet.

Tobi to the vet

And then we had a bit of a scare with Tobi. I was petting him and saying bye before leaving to go to work and he rolled over and there was a little bit of blood on the bed!

TOBI WHERE DID THIS COME FROM WHY ARE YOU BLEEDING??

Of course I was shocked and I gave him an inspection. He had a little bit of blood coming from his penis so I was worried he had some urinary tract infection or something awful. Cats are really prone to urinary issues because of their biology, and with Tobi getting older it wasn’t something that was out of the question. He never had any issues before, but it doesn’t mean that it would be a surprise if things started up.

I checked his litter box and he had peed but I couldn’t quite tell or see if there was any blood, which was a good start. I called the vet at Huffard where Tobi had gone earlier to get some “maintenance work” done and they asked me a lot of really helpful questions. Had he been a bit more attention seeking recently? (Yes) Has he been in and out of the box more frequently than normal? (Yes) Has he been able to pee? (Yes) Is he yowling when using the box? (No). In the end they gave me peace of mind that as long as he wasn’t completely blocked it wasn’t a RIGHT NOW emergency, and that I could do some more monitoring if I wanted before bringing him in to be looked at if things didn’t get better or got worse. So I went to work and resolved to go to the vet with him the next day on my day off (praise God I happened to have a day off the next day!).

The next day I took Tobi to the vet and we spent quite a lot of time there because I was a walk-in urgent appointment. The wonderful vet told me that male cats are less likely to get UTIs because of their anatomy and are more likely to get a condition called sterile cystitis (aka FLUTD, aka Pandora syndrome, aka feline idiopathic cystitis, aka …) which basically means they get UTI-like symptoms but don’t really have an obvious cause (like stones, crystals, infection). They did a radiograph to make sure he didn’t have any stones, and got a urine sample for urinalysis.

“We can also do a culture with sensitivities, but that’s more expensive.”
“Just give me some, I can do it myself.”

… and they did!

My lab was very concerned about Tobi because I ended up being late to work when trying to resolve whether he needed to see the vet the day before, so they were gracious enough to allow me two plates to culture his urine. As expected, the culture was clean. His UA was also clean, so the best explanation we had was probably some episode of sterile cystitis. And since he was a “first-time offender,” there wasn’t much to do other than help give him some medicines to manage the pain. If it happens again though, we’d look into management through diet and other means.

Either that, or he got bit in a very unfortunate place by one of the mega crickets I found with him earlier that day. It’s possible. But with the other behavior recently, I think it was probably cystitis. XD Fortunately after a few days of extra attention and the help of some good painkiller, he is back to his normal self. :)

Dream job saga continues!

I don’t even remember when the last update about the dream job was, but I got invited to interview for my dream job! The interview was over Microsoft Teams and my parents suggested I try to set up my camera in a place in the apartment with a very blank or boring background. My PC was in my bedroom, and the camera angle I normally use is a bit unflattering because I use my GoPro on my desk, but if I lifted it up more you could see a lot of the room, so I set up a kind of janky set up with my phone and a goose neck holder I happened to bring with me on a chair in my kitchen. Janky or not, it worked well!

And I’ve got one last round of interviews (in person) so I’ll be doing that when I head home in October. I am super super super excited about it! I feel like I’ve really found the opportunity that I’ve been looking for for years and after talking with the senior and manager of the team I really think I would do great and have a lot of room to grow.

Coming up next…

My parents came to visit me for Labor Day weekend! I’ll make that a separate post. But until then!

Jasmin