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Hmm, that was a long blog hiatus. I've been busy -- there's been a lot of schoolwork as the end of the semester approaches, and I went away last weekend to visit Matt and Risa in North Carolina, and I went to New York Saturday.

It was great fun to visit Matt and Risa in Carrboro. The advantage of going down there to visit them (as opposed to them visiting me) is that I had no option but to forget about schoolwork, and it's nice to totally disengage for a change. We ate a lot, including an evening of dinner and games with some of their grad school friends.

The impetus for the trip, the Super Furry Animals concert, was quite enjoyable. The opening band (Caribou, formerly Manitoba) was really impressive. They play electronic-y music that has a lot of live instrumentation and an emphasis on drums -- there were two drummers on most songs, playing ferociously. It was good enough that I was moved to buy a t-shirt (well, they were also really cool) and pick up a used copy of one of their albums when I found it at a music store we went to the next day. I'd recommend you watch the videos for Yeti, Skunks and Jacknuggeted if you're interested.

Saturday I went to New York to see Amanda while she was there staying with her friend Tara. I took the train up, which I really love. The sun was coming up, I set myself a nice playlist on my iPod, and it was very pretty and relaxing. I got to the city rather early (before Amanda and Tara woke up) and went to Doughnut Plant on the Lower East Side, which has by far the best doughnuts I have ever had. When I went there last year with Erin, they hadn't debuted their jelly doughnuts yet; I tried one (strawberry jam with vanilla bean glaze) and it was amazing. After meeting up with Amanda and Tara, we went for brunch near Gramercy Park, and then wandered around for most of the day, hitting Central Park, an Israeli coffee shop and a frenetic knitting store. I stuck around through dinner (Thai food) and then trained back to Baltimore. Despite the fact that this was another weekend day out of town during frenetic schoolwork, it was worth it to see Amanda while she was nearbyish and spend a day in a place more bustling and cosmopolitan than Baltimore.

Meanwhile, my dad's been ill. He lost sight in one eye a few weeks ago, and it turned out to be a stroke in the eye. He got a procedure that mostly restored it, but it's obviously still rather alarming. He hasn't been feeling well since shortly after that incident, and has been getting lots of tests to find out why -- hopefully it'll be something easily fixable. It will be good to see him this week at Thanksgiving.