Had a great weekend.

On Friday night, Amy and I went up to Baltimore to watch the Peabody conservatory perform. It was supposed to be this hauty-tauty event with a reception with HOR-dervs and wine and stuff (since the Peabody Conservatory is a sister school in the JHU system), but Amy and I dispensed with all formality, and showed up just for the concert. In reality, though, this was more out of feet-dragging and being late (much in both of our characters), and barely got there in time for the concert after having completely missed the receiption. The concert was good. They played this modern Chinese piece, an italian violin-bass double-concerto, and Holst's The Planets. The chinese piece was really good. It wasn't completely atonal - it sounded very Russian (Stravinsky, Amy said), with bits of Copland and other stuff - I'm a bit out of the loop these days with Classical music, so it's hard for me to say. In any case it was nice to see some represntation of music out of the mainstream that isn't at the same time complete crap. Complete crap, however, was the violin-bass double-concerto. Although the piece itself wasn't the greatest, I was mostly disappointed with the violinist. I forget his name, but he was a staff violinist, former Galamian student with an impressive resume. The problem was that he didn't seem to give a rat's ass about playing the concert. At times it seemed like he was struggling to sight-read the music, played with zero enthusiasm, and then every now and then put in some trite cliche-ish pseudo-flair that the audience ate up, and which made me puke. It seemed insulting to his partner bassist (who played excellently), to the audience, but most of all, to the student orchestra. Pity. Most enjoyable, though, was the Holst. It was very well played, very clean, and demonstrated the high caliber of the Orchestra.

After the concert, Amy and I, having missed the HOR-dervs, were famished, so we went down to the bar district of Balitmore, Fell's Point, found a really small but yummy sushi bar, and chowed down.

Saturday we spent most of the day moving [to be continued...]

So, a quick update before i go to bed (so i can wake up 4 hrs later to go to class)...

I had a shitload of schoolwork to do today, but I think I'm getting better at cutting the corners that I can cut (e.g. reading the 1st sentence of every paragraph in a useless article to get the "idea" but not to waste my "time").

I spent a lot of time today talking to professors - mostly about my academic plan and career goals, but also just a lot of chit-chat. I went in before lunch to talk to Prof. Lampton who's the guy everyone in the US govt turns to for China issues. Then at the end of the day, I went in to talk to Prof. Thurston, the author of the famous book, "The Private Life of Chairman Mao". I have cool teachers :). Besides having really cool credentials, they're really cool people.

After I got home, Amy and I had "serious talking" for a bit, but then got really hungry, and went out to Red, Hot & Blue out across the river to eat yum yum BBQ. Well, the ribs were yum yum, but the brisket was yuk yuk. Only then, after I came home, was I able to dive head-first into my school work. Somewhere along the way (sometime after Elimidate and Blind-Date), she started drawing little happy faces on the bottoms of my toes (I had my feet proped up on the couch arm next to where she was sitting), and then started talking to me via my 10 new ambasadors. Later on, I had to reciprocate by drawing 10 cuter faces on her toes. Then we had a serious discussion (I think it was about the US bombing Iraq) via our toes. We're wierd.