Matter, Energy, and Life of Michaela A. Castello.

Tag: review

  • Burrito Envy

    I have been craving a burrito for weeks. My friend Caitlyn goes to Chipotle for a burrito nearly every day for lunch (between 10 and 11 AM Eastern, or around when I’m leaving for the lab), leaving me with burrito foodlust and a packed turkey sandwich for my own noonday meal. This was heightened when…

  • Graduate Productivity

    For me, digital task management began with Microsoft Outlook somewhere in my “tween” years. By the time middle school came around, I was syncing it with a Windows Mobile PDA, awkwardly carrying it around wherever I could. Today, I find myself using Producteev to try and wrangle the myriad of to-do items that come with being a married…

  • Down with the Sickness

    Down with the Sickness

    Because any writing vaguely resembling a movie review needs some sort of pseudo-wit based around a pun. I saw Contagion over the weekend. It’s not often I make it to the theater for a movie (last time was Midnight in Paris, before that I think it was Black Swan), so I try to do my due diligence and make…

  • The Wise Man’s Fear

    I first heard about The Name of the Wind from a post on Penny Arcade, and I was quickly impressed. Perhaps more telling is that I excitedly shared it with Rachel and she was impressed, reading it at a pace at least double mine as is her fashion. A while back I finally finished reading…

  • Scott Pilgrim

    My friend Jeff first introduced me to Scott Pilgrim when we were still in Maryland. Jerks that we are, we moved before the movie came out. It seemed like a good film to invite my fellow first year MD/PhD students to come see with me, but it turned out they were in Canada, Japan, and…

  • Date Night

    Chicken pot pie has a lot going for it. When you’ve got creamy chicken and vegetables inside a warm flaky crust, what’s not to like? Peas, as it turns out. They’re all but universally included in pot pie. Couple that with peas’ number two spot on my allergy ranking and pot pie winds up on…

  • Mouth-Watering Barbecue

    A bunch of us in my class wanted to have a post-test celebration, but since the exam was on a Monday we had school and lab obligations all week. Thus, our Post-Test Party was a kind of extended lunch at the creatively-named “Korea House,” a Korean barbecue forty minutes away from Loma Linda. I’d never…

  • Numbing the Mouth

    Last week Rachel and I went with some friends to the Red Pearl, a new Chinese restaurant in Columbia. Our server, Ben, was able to immediately tell me which dishes contained peanuts—an excellent start. Even with so many peanut allergies this is a rare trait; most of the time they have to go back and…