Last Chance!

I just realized it's my last chance for a November 2009 blog post! Yikes! Time has been shrieking away from me like it's the kid who scares easily and I'm the questionable stranger offering it even more questionable candy outside my windowless van. I'm almost giddy at the nearness of the end of finals. Sure, I still need to study and partake in the actual finals, but I'm focused on the yet-unread novels that are lustily purring: "rrrread me." Roll that "r" in "read" like you're a voluptuous Brazilian tango dancer named Lola.

Unable to bear the wait, I cracked open The Wings of the Dove and snuck in a few chapters when there were a kazillion other things I ought to have done. No terrific harm has come of it yet. Aside from my itch to say things like "thither" and "ought" in a high, funny accent.

T had his nasolacrimal roto-rooting last Tuesday, so he's been an invalid for the past week, but my nursing instincts have long since evaporated, leaving him shall we say, pouty. To be fair, he's improved marvelously, but still tries to squeeze an extra couple of drops of sympathy out of me from time to time. I was a class A caregiver for the first few days when he really needed it. Truly, I went above and beyond. But like my feelings toward fibromyalgia: if you look fine, you're fine -- so goes my zealous coddling. Done when my work is done...like a thief in the night.

Mock Interview

Today was mock interview day! I knew it was just a mock interview, but they were writing a letter of recommendation for me based on my performance, so I was still nervous. I got there early and chatted with the secretary while the panel convened and reviewed my file. My nerves slowly cooled their jets as I walked into the conference room, realizing that these were just people who wanted to groom me for a good interview, and that I looked fabulous:

I felt pretty good about most of the questions and most of my answers, but I definitely could have done some better preparation. So after an hour of questions and answers being fired back and forth, they asked me to step out of the room as they discussed my performance. A little nervous, I stepped out of the conference room and went back to chatting with the secretary (thank you, oh thank you dear, kind secretaries for allowing me to chat away my anxiety) until all of the interviewers but the two pre-med advisors left. I went back into the room and girded my well-dressed loins for some intense feedback.

"In the eight years that I have been doing this for all of our pre-meds, you are in the top two of everyone we have interviewed."

WHA!?!?! Did I misunderstand your German-ish accent? Did he say top two ever interviewed? YES that is what he just said! All of that fretting, not for naught, but for being one of the best EVER! I am happy? Excited? Jubilantly flabbergasted? The repeated capital letters would suggest yes.

To top off a joyous moment, when I finished the interview, it looked like a blizzard outside. Like God was weeping soft, frozen flakes of fluffy pride for my sole pleasure. Not one person I spoke to expressed anything remotely related to my own glee at the white glory building up on the ground. Some people just don't see the beauty in the most beautiful season of the year! Winter! It's the best season of them all, just stop your whining already and go make a snow angel! If I had the time this weekend, I would be skiing until class on Monday morning. But homework and the Free Clinic are beckoning...

By the way, the poor quality of the picture is because I took it with my iSight camera from a few too many feet away. You see, when I held out the camera to my husband, explaining that I needed a picture of me in my outfit for my grandma and for my blog, he looked at me like I had just asked him to eat the gum off the bottom of my shoe. So I said "UUUGGHHLLLLFFFDDDwhateveri'lldoitmyself." There weren't any batteries in the camera anyway, so I used my computer.

Robin

Friday we went over to Yakima and did some studying at a coffee shop before I got my hair cut. The lady who cuts my hair (Robin) used to go to my grandparents’ church, and I’m always amazed at how she is able to handle the things life throws at her.

Her daughter is a druggie who has had two children, one of whom Robin and her husband (who is coming back from the brink of vegetable-hood after a terrible car accident and subsequent drug reaction) adopted and now raise, the second they gave up for adoption because they couldn’t handle another child. Last week, their neighbors got into another one of their usual fights (physical and verbal), and it ended with one of the neighbors shooting himself in the head, on the other side of the wall where her 5-year-old granddaughter was trying to sleep. A few days later, her still not-quite-right husband left the stove on and started a fire in their kitchen.

This is a woman who has had some curve balls thrown at her by the game of life, and she still manages to welcome the day with a smile and an unshakeable faith. She inspires me and causes me to look at my own life in grateful humility. As stressors go, I have it good.

The gene

There is some odd, but blessed little gene that persists within my body that is keeping me afloat. Now, genes are tiny. I mean really tiny. We're made up of around 30,000 genes, all of which are found in chromosomes. For an idea of how small chromosomes are, here is a great scaled drawing (scroll to go deeper into the picture). So whatever this gene is (ok, to be fair, it's probably not a gene, but that is a different discussion altogether), it has given me the gift of optimism. I am so optimistic about my future contributions to the world that it may be bordering on unrealistic.

Even in the face of my rejection e-mail from the University of Washington, who somehow managed to be polite but a little condescending -- I think a red REJECTED stamp might have been a little less hurtful, I have hope. Hope that I will get in to PNWU this year, and become great. I'm excited about the idea to start a student-run free clinic, meet people with common goals and new experiences, and learn and learn and learn. It's a program whose philosophy resonates with my own: hands-on healing medicine. Just get me to the interview and I'll convince them!

I must be making up for something today...

How do I describe today...especially when it's not even over yet. It was just one of those days where all you can do is shake your head and laugh.

I woke up at FIVE THIRTY because it's daylight savings time or the end of daylight savings time or something. All I know is that I get to feel like I control time for two days out of the year to get back at it for controlling me for the other threehundredsixtythreeandonequarter. So I tumble outta bed and stumble into the kitchen, pour myself a cup of ambition, and yawn and stretch and slowly come to life. Then I remember...the bike trainer is here! Yesterday, Travis drove to Portland (and back...in the same day...poor guy.) to pick it up and now here it is. Glorious fluid-filled contraption letting me ride my bike during the time when roads and temperatures are utterly inhospitable!

So it's 5:36 and I'm trying to figure out how to put the darn thing together. I took the legs off, put them in a different spot, realized that didn't work, so put them back to where they were originally. I swapped the rear skewer out of my bike, then backed it into the trainer to try and figure out how the mother of crap this thing is supposed to fit. I finagled. I wrenched. I screwdrivered. Then out shuffles my husband from his sleeping lair to see what kind of mechanic-ing I was attempting that involved the clanging of so many tools. I was sorry I woke him up, but glad he called me handy...in his own special way. So he started monkeying with the trainer too, coming to the conclusion that, yep, it would not work with my bike.

I have been obsessing over the arrival of this thing for weeks! And it doesn't work with my bike?! Come on. So T sent an email to the company to ask what modifications could be made to get this to work for my bike. By the way, his bike works fine.

Onward.

My computer started freezing up after T and I were messing around with some file sharing stuff, so I decided to restart it. It turned off and turned on...but it didn't get very far. The gray startup screen was stalling. I restarted again. And again, and again. Nothing. So T started doing some hacker stuff to try and get it to work. He ended up reinstalling the whole OS, then was going to restore to one of my backup points in our Time Capsule (blessed time capsule, you have saved me much pain and suffering). Except...no full backups were found. Eventually, my backups were found, but not before I nearly had a stroke. After 4+ hours not knowing if I had lost everything on my computer, my magician husband fixed it. Ahhhh.

So after snuggling my newly-restored computer, I ran out to the mailbox to see if my Jillian Michael's 30-day Shred had arrived and it had! Excited that I would get to do some new exercise routine today, I ripped open the package and there it was! .....The Little Mermaid 2-disc special edition. Seriously? The Little Mermaid? That's pretty much my least favorite Disney Princess. She's so whiney. And no exercise video!? You've got to be kidding me.

I only burned one of the sheets of cookies that I made today (and I never burn cookies), so I guess that could have been a little worse. But now, I am tired. All you can do is laugh when these days happen, but let us all commemorate November 1st as the day that things most certainly did not line up for ole me.