The Nadine Scene

As a general rule, I work from home on Mondays.  I don't need to be on campus and it helps me ease into the week, getting things done before all mayhem cuts loose on Tuesdays.  Plus, I like working from home - it means I get to do laundry while I'm getting some writing done (or, in today's case, blogging).  It also means that I feed myself real food, as opposed to the take out that generally keeps me alive most days (assuming, of course, I've gone grocery shopping).  Which brings me to today's discovery: while making lunch (soup), I discovered that  there are 11 boxes of pasta in my cupboards.  That's right, eleven.  For clarification, I am a single woman who lives alone with two cats (insert bad spinster joke here), so why in the world do I have 11 boxes of pasta? It doesn't stop there.  I have 3 boxes of rice and 2 of quinoa. I have 2 boxes of gluten free bread mix, 4 cans of coconut, two bottles of BBQ sauce, and two bottles of curry sauces. ...

As any athlete knows, watching the Olympic games brings back a rush of all of the old emotions, good and bad, that come from a lifetime of participating in sports.  For me, watching the women cross the finish line of the marathon was one of those moments where the flood of memories was stronger than ever and I was once again appreciative for everything that running has given me over the years - friends, confidence, the ability to set and achieve goals, and even a free dinner or two (hey, those gift certificates to fancy restaurants for winning races in grad school were always welcome!). For me, these last few years have also meant that there has been a lot of pain associated with my running, by way of surgeries, severe injuries, and generally, feeling like an arm chair quarterback.  In a run a few years ago - with people who knew me as a slow runner who was always injured - I started to feel a bit like Al Bundy, reliving glory days while everyone around me rolled their eyes ...

My apologies to all of my vegan and vegetarian friends, but this post is about an amazing dinner I had in London at a restaurant called Burgers and Lobsters.  Seriously.  Turns out, the name is everything that you need to know.  This place is fantastic and my kind of place - quality food, not a lot of fancy pants stuff, and pages and pages of a drinks menu.  How is that not fabulous ? I ended up there because my friend Jen, with whom I went to high school, has been living in London for the past two years while working on a post-doc (working on cancer research, which makes her pretty cool).  She thought it would be a fun place for both the bar and the gluten free options (unless my lobster was snacking on cupcakes in a former life).  It was an inspired choice! After all, the four of us (me, Jen, Steph - also a high school classmate - and Martin - Steph's fiancee with a funny accent) know our way around a drink's menu and since 3 out of 4 of us are New Engl...

I know, I know, you probably aren't supposed to blog about something an entire month after it's happened.  But hey, it's my blog and I make the rules.  Deal with it. When planning my summer travels this past year, I was fortunate enough to hear about a conference in northern England in early July. The conference, put on by the European Mentoring and Coaching Council, was an opportunity for me to do more research on a topic that I have started to research this past year, by way of a federal grant sub-award at the University of Texas at Dallas with a colleague (by the way, UTD - that's where I work now).  It turns out that mentoring and coaching are pretty big research areas in Europe, above and beyond the work we do in the States, so it was well worth a trip to see what was happening on this side of the pond.  But I can't go to the UK without visiting friends, so first, I had to stop in London. Here's an exerpt of what I wrote in my travel journal the morning...

I just realized that I haven't posted anything to this blog in over 2 years.  Ironically, my last blog post came while I was living in an apartment in southern Spain and now I am writing this from my hotel room in Malaga, a mere 60 minutes away from that apartment.  The universe is a funny place sometimes... So what has happened in the last two years?  Well, both a lot and not so much.  The basic update - I'm still a professor, I still love to travel, and I still can't cook.  But the details have definitely changed some, such as the part where I moved to Texas (Dallas, to be exact), am finishing up another summer abroad, and have only managed to learn how to make one dish in the intervening years (well, two if you count perfecting a Pimms Cup Cocktail).  So why pick up the blog again?  Fair question.  Let me think about it. One thing that my moving to Texas has really underscored for me is how much I miss the people in my life that I've met ov...