Ideally this blog post would have gone up right on the last day of my junior year of college, but here it is just in time before my senior year of college. Like in high school, junior year was my toughest year so far. Now I know why people study abroad during their junior year of college! Do I wish I studied abroad during my junior year of college too? Yes. But it’s not the end of the world. It would have been too stressful coming back and having to cram all the required courses for my double major. Anyways, I think I’ve made up for it with all the traveling I did this summer!
Sourdough by Robin Sloan
– I received a free copy in exchange for an honest review. –
To be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on 05 Sep 2017
Goodreads | Amazon
Lois Clary is a software engineer at General Dexterity, a San Francisco robotics company with world-changing ambitions. She codes all day and collapses at night, her human contact limited to the two brothers who run the neighborhood hole-in-the-wall from which she orders dinner every evening. Then, disaster! Visa issues. The brothers close up shop, and fast. But they have one last delivery for Lois: their culture, the sourdough starter used to bake their bread. She must keep it alive, they tell her—feed it daily, play it music, and learn to bake with it.
Lois is no baker, but she could use a roommate, even if it is a needy colony of microorganisms. Soon, not only is she eating her own homemade bread, she’s providing loaves daily to the General Dexterity cafeteria. The company chef urges her to take her product to the farmer’s market, and a whole new world opens up.
When Lois comes before the jury that decides who sells what at Bay Area markets, she encounters a close-knit club with no appetite for new members. But then, an alternative emerges: a secret market that aims to fuse food and technology. But who are these people, exactly?
August
Whilst writing up my junior year in review blog post, which I’ll be publishing next week, I browsed the archives of my blog and realised that I don’t give very many real-time updates. For example, my ten days in Europe in July were stretched out on the blog throughout August, and all other content got held off; I even posted more than two times a week in hopes of getting the Europe posts out in a timely manner. So starting September, I want to bring back weekly updates. I’m not sure if I’ll be taking you day by day or if I’m only going to share the highlights or if I’m only going to share about the one thing that’s been on my mind that week; we’ll see what I log naturally. I’m not sure how this will affect my month-in-review blog posts, but these month-in-review posts tend to get a little lengthy anyway, so it might be a good thing to splice things up. Also, this gives me an excuse to relax with live updates on Snapchat stories and Instagram stories and live in the moment.
21
I turned 21 yesterday! I just wanted to pop by and document the day real quick. No pretty or artsy photos. Just iPhone photos in janky lighting. But good good memories. I also vlogged the day as I’ve been challenging myself to vlog this whole week, and it’s been going strong since Monday. Hopefully I’ll make it until the end of the week so that you can you can look out for daily vlogs on my channel throughout next week!
Waterfront Sessions, Philly
I had hoped to get this post out earlier in the summer so that those of you in Philly would have time to pop by and see this event for yourself if you didn’t already, but the blog got pretty crazy from my trip to Europe! It’s now the last week of August, but nevertheless, here it is!
Europe trip // summer break 2017
This entire month has been content from my Europe trip! I hope you’ve enjoyed following along. I know I enjoyed following along my dad on his business trip to Cambridge, which was the whole reason for this whirlwind trip through three cities in ten days. (You might be thinking, hold up Audrey, according to your blog posts, you spent two days in each city so how does that add up? Well, if you take into account travel days and the one lost day in London, it amounts to roughly ten days.)