oh, awkward moments

so i'm working at my desk, minding my own business this afternoon, when a voice begins to penetrate my concentration. it's a loud voice, irritated, argumentative, coming from the lobby of my building. now that i can hear the voice, it's the only thing i can hear, the only thing i can focus on. it goes on and on and on and on. finally, i can't stand it any longer. i get up and close the door between my program's offices and the lobby. i have to leave the door partially propped open however, because it locks from the other side and people need to be able to enter our offices. i see the man sitting in the lobby, talking on his cell phone. it's been at least ten minutes and he hasn't stopped talking. loudly.

ah, sweet bliss. the sounds of the loud, agitated man are muted and i can concentrate on work again. after awhile, i notice the voice has completely stopped, there is silence in the lobby. i get up, glance through the glass door i had closed, and see the previously occupied chair empty. triumphantly, i knock on a co-worker's door. "someone was not using his inside voice out there!" i say to my co-worker, whose office shares a wall with the lobby. we chat about the loud man and his inconsideration and such for a minute before i go back to work.

a few minutes later i need to use the restroom. i open the door, this time propping it fully open and as i rise to a standing position from setting the doorstop, i see the cell phone talker sitting in the chair in front of me. he's looking at me and i know he heard every word i said to my co-worker. i smile politely, walk across the thousand-mile lobby, use the restroom, and walk back across the endless stretch of tile, all the while knowing he's there, watching me, planning his next cell phone conversation, his next volume level, his next audience, all in retribution.

odds and ends

today i had the pleasure of attending an irb training with my supervisor who slept through the entire thing. whenever you do research, you have to submit your proposal to an 'irb' - something review board - which allegedly are in place to protect human subjects (participants in your research). the truth is, these irb's serve to protect the university from liability issues but they don't say that. the timing of this training was a little late as 1) i have already completed the on-line, much more comprehensive, irb training; and 2) i submitted an irb application 2 weeks ago. but, as a lowly grad student/project assistant, i had to attend per my supervisor - who, did i mention, slept throughout the training??

ziva's crawling and oh man, is she cute. of course, she won't crawl on command so if you put her down, wanting her to perform, she looks up at you as if you've betrayed her and tears fill her big blue eyes causing your heart to break and your arms to reach down and pick her up again. she may never learn to walk.

it was 0 degrees when i woke up this morning and 5 degrees when i got to work. and no, i don't get tired of reporting the weather to you all.

i'm starting a new study group. i sent out the invitation to everyone in my classes and got a pretty enthusiastic response. i had to find a meeting room large enough for us and we start meeting next monday. we'll see how it goes.

my laptop has a virus even though i have anti-virus software. i need to take it to the computer doctor on campus and see if he can do anything. i know antibiotics won't work because it's not bacterial but maybe they'll have something to knock it out.

someone stole my coffee mug at work.

and so, my friends, now you know why i haven't been posting a lot lately. while i've been crazy busy, nothing very exciting has been happening. school is intense and all-consuming and when i'm not at school, i'm working and when i'm not working or at school, i want to sleep. it's not yet 8:30 pm and all i can think about is crawling into bed and closing my eyes. of course, then i'll lie there for two hours thinking of everything i need to be doing (like bringing in the trash can from the street that i've left out there for 2 days, shoot!). so it's homework for a few hours before i get to fall into that beautiful bed upstairs. i'll leave the trash can for tomorrow.

joke of the week

tourists visiting a natural history museum were marveling at the dinosaur bones on display. one of them asked the guard, "can you tell me how old the dinosaur bones are?" the guard replied, "they are 65 million and eight years old." "that's an awfully exact number," said the tourist. "how do you know their age so precisely?" the guard answered, "well, the dinosaur bones were sixty five million years old when i started working here, and that was eight years ago." - contributed by my quantitative methods professor (suspender-wearer at right) in an attempt to illustrate the relative meaninglessness of too many digits after the decimal. he is a funny guy.

winter lesson #173

you can't leave soda in your car here.

compassionate friends here responded by saying, "well you know you can't put soda in the freezer, right?" yeeeees, but i don't think of my car as a fuh-reezer, thank you very much. a motor vehicle that gets me from point a to point b, yes. a food-storage appliance intended to reduce the reproduction rate of bacteria, no.

that said, let this be a lesson to us all.

the parking gods are smiling

first of all, it was negative 2 degrees when i got to work this morning. it's eleven o'clock am now and the temperature has risen 8 degrees. that's right, it's 6 whole fahrenheit degrees. now onto my good news.

just got an e-mail from transportation services - i'm up for a parking permit for next school year!!!!!!!! happy days are here again! no more riding the bus! no more illegal parking! no more parking tickets!

i accepted the offer, paid for it (well, i will, as i pay off the credit card debt i'm accruing), and all i have to do now is pick it up. can't use it until september, but yay! i have a parking permit!

btw, the high today is 15. i don't think it'll get anywhere near there. it's 6.

heteroskedasticity

it's a real word and it's my favorite. i read it in a journal article a couple of years ago, immediately wrote in on a little yellow post-it note, and stuck it on my desk so i could look at it whenever i wanted to. yes, i had to research what it meant, and no, i have not been able to use it in a conversation yet, but - and here's where it gets exciting - since i've been back in school, i've had two, count 'em, two! professors use the word. and since the semester has only begun, one has to assume i will be hearing, using, and correcting for heteroskedasticity on a regular basis. doesn't it just give you tingles?!

spring semester 2010

i have three classes this semester: quantitative methods, epidemiologic methods, and health services research. these classes are supposed to prepare us for the qualifying exam this july that phd students must pass before we can move on in our academic careers. so not only do we get the stress from the difficulty of the classes themselves, we get the compounded stress of preparing for a test that determines the course of our lives for the next few years. fortunately, it's only the first week of classes, and the oppressive weight of mental and emotional tension has not yet set in. i still possess the capacity to find humor in things, so while this lasts, let's review:

professor 1: a small man with a columbian accent so thick, it takes all of my accent-sorting listening power to stay focused. it's hard not to get mentally stuck on words like 'kuh-myoo-luh-tiv' (emphasis on the 'myoo'), roll it around, play with it, stretch it out. you just have to think, he means 'cumulative' and keep following the lecture, otherwise you'll miss half of what he's saying - because half of what he's saying are mispronunciations like 'in-stant-tin-ay-ose' (emphasis on the 'stant') (instantaneous); 'pope-oo-lation' and 'huh-sard' (emphasis on the 'sard') (hazard).

professor 2: first day of class wore boots over his gray trousers, held up with suspenders, a blue shirt, and a pea-green plaid, tweed sports coat. oh, and glasses. nice enough guy, reads from his notes. no accent but uses words like 'multivariable regression analysis' so i'll probably have as much trouble understanding him as i do professor 1.

professor 3: will farrell-look-a-like (see 10nov2009 blog entry). i only pictured him as a giant elf once during the two-and-a-half hour lecture; i consider that a success. this class only meets once a week, which is nice, but it's two-and-a-half hours long, in a small, overcrowded classroom, so a bit painful.

so the first week is done (sort of. tomorrow, i have a full-day seminar on sas, statistical analysis software) and the semester has officially started. the anxiety really only goes up from here.

this week in review

ok, so it's really a review of last week.

monday - went to the eye doctor for a routine eye exam, ended up in emergency retinal surgery. turns out i had detached retinas. left the doctor's office that day with the right eye fixed and the anticipation of another surgery to fix the left eye.

tuesday - got to recount my story for everyone in the office and received lots of empathy.

wednesday - met with my new therapist. i think she's the reason i haven't posted a new post in a couple of weeks. my blog has been my personal therapy (remember, most of what i write, i don't post), and now that i'm meeting with her, i haven't felt the need to write as much. i've also been on school break so there hasn't been as much to write about. also went to the dmv to try to get my wisconsin driver's license, title, and plates but i didn't have my passport or birth certificate so i took the forms i needed and vowed to return.

thursday - went in for the second eye surgery i had been dreading for three days. it was painful but since i knew what to expect this time, i employed mental imagery (i kept picturing george clooney) and it helped up until the very end when i couldn't ignore the pain. i didn't make my afternoon dentist appointment but i'm not blind so i figure it balances. i went home after the surgery, took a nap, grabbed my passport and got to the dmv at 4:05. the dmv closes at 4:00 on thursdays. i shook my fist at the locked doors and drove away with my california driver's license, california title, and california plates.

friday - drove to rockford, illinois to pick up flav and the kids. it's the tiniest airport i've ever seen and it has free parking. short-term, long-term, it's free. it's also an hour and a half away. on the way back we ate at a place called 'beef-a-roo'. not kidding. it's like a mix of arby's and a regular burger joint. despite the name, it was actually pretty good.

next week, classes begin. dun, dun, dun (you know, menacing, descending, song-like tones)

the search for church

i have been very productive during my school break so far: i made appointments with doctors within my new insurance plan, i changed my car insurance, i packed up my christmas decorations, and i made a long list of things that still need to get done. things like finding a church in madison; a church with good, solid teaching, not too big, not too small, not too short, not too tall - oh wait, wrong list, and available service opportunities.

there is certaintly not a lack of churches in madison. i like being an informed consumer so before i started the exhausting process of 'church shopping', i thought i'd do some research to narrow down the field of possible candidates. you might think this means looking up the distance from my house, service times, congregation size, etc. and perhaps i'll get to that at some point. but first, when a church proclaims to be 'reformed' or 'four-square' or even, 'non-denominational', i want to understand what that means. what do they believe, what do they teach? it's been a long time since i could rattle off the five points of calvinism, the arguments from lutheranism, and how arminianism felt about it all. i don't fall neatly into any of those schools of thought, but i want to know where a church stands. free will vs. predestination? limited vs. universal atonement? uncertainty vs. certainty of perseverance?

my grandpa told me that as long as the church is bible-based and preaches against sin and nancy pelosi, he would approve. with these standards in mind, first, a theological quest to understand the doctrine; second, service times. this should be easy.

banana cream pie blizzard flavored lip balm anyone?

'tis the season for giving. and, as a result, i cannot be the only one who received gifts that made me say, huh? (with love and appreciation, of course) and, for the record, the doggy socks, pictured right, are not 'huh?' gifts, they're adorable and i took the picture right before i put them on.

i had the honor of being visited not once, but twice, by santa; i must have been a very good girl this year. gum, post-it notes, pens, etc. and, oddly enough, each time, santa left me a food or beverage-flavored lip balm in my stocking. the first, a dairy queen banana cream pie blizzard flavored lip balm (not kidding), the second, a wild cherry pepsi flavored lip balm. they're both still in original packaging if anyone has a 'huh?' gift worth trading.

please feel free to submit your candidates for most random gifts via comments.
happy new year!

winter lesson #258

windshield washer fluid freezes.

it turns out there are two kinds of windshield washer fluid: the kind that freezes and the kind that doesn't. the former kind is usually put into vehicles driven in places that do not experience severe winter weather like, say, southern california. the latter kind is sold and used in vehicles driven in places like, oh, i don't know, wisconsin. being the responsible person that i am, i had taken my car in for a full inspection, oil change, tire rotation, new wiper blades, mani-pedi, fluid top-off, the works. in southern california. so i learned winter lesson #258 after my washer fluid reservoir was full of frozen washer fluid, one big hunk-a-hunk-a-chunk-a ice.

i also learned that if you leave your car in the airport parking lot for a week, the window-roll-down mechanisms freeze and you have to open your door to pay the attendant (lesson #259). winter is awesome.

let the recovery begin

written yesterday (sunday), posted today: sitting at the airport; waiting for my flight back to milwaukee. my flight is scheduled to depart at 4:28 but as i checked my bag the midwest lady told me the plane wouldn't arrive until 4:30. i told her i shouldn't have to pay the baggage fee since i was being inconvenienced by a late departure but she didn't buy it.

i'm taking advantage of the my wait to begin the recovery process (and drink a delicious, over-priced pumpkin spice latte). i can't even imagine how i would feel right now if i didn't like my family. but i do (like 'em). they're funny and intelligent and talented. my emotional exhaustion is primarily a reflection of my inability to maintain a high level of pleasant, social contact for days on end. very little alone time, constant noise and interaction, crisis resolution, sleep deprivation (playing beatles rock band with my cousins until all hours of the night was a necessary activity), and being confronted with the reality of mortality as i saw the grandparents who raised me, now in their eighties, dealing with all of those things that come with old age. in five days i went through almost an entire bottle of midol, purely for its excessive-emotion-reduction capabilities.

yesterday, grandma and i, and then later, my cousins, cousins' wives, cousins' kids, and i went to the marion mall to check out the day-after-christmas sales. being as fond of shopping as i am, my willingness to go with grandma is a testament to my love for her; my eagerness to go the second time is a testament to my love of books and the going-out-of-business sale at waldenbooks. my suitcase ended up at 49.5 pounds after i shifted two of the i-won't-say-how-many books to my carry-on (one suitcase is $20, one suitcase over 50 lbs is $75!).

last night a fuse blew on one side of the house and one of my cousins and i spent an hour looking at three different fuse boxes to try to locate the culprit (with a flash light, in the freezing cold, in our pajammers). i finally ended up reading out types of and amp levels of every antiquated fuse the house possesses over the phone to my uncle who was shopping with my aunt and another cousin in columbus. how they found replacement fuses in the middle of the night is beyond me (they had to go to three stores i found out today). so the power's back on in that side of the house and now my uncle has to return the space heater that contributed to the power outage in the first place. it was a little like christmas at the oswalds.

this morning we all went to church and then the house of hunan for chinese food. the fortune in my cookie told me to remember the date three months from today because something important would happen. so in case i forget, would someone please mark 27 march in his/her calendar? thanks. my aunt and uncle drove me and one of my cousins to the columbus airport after lunch and here i sit. surrounded by people and blissfully alone.

christmas with the family

oh, the cacophany of noise. ten adults, a four-year old, a two-year old, a toddler, an infant, two dogs, and a partridge in a pear tree. and did i mention my aunt has a collection of easily accessible singing stuffed animals? the four-year old thinks these are immensely entertaining and likes to push the 'push here' buttons on as many as possible at the same time. i think it's equally entertaining to hide as many as possible at the same time.

we started the morning with stockings and then had a lovely breakfast. knowing how well i do with large numbers of people and small children for extended periods of time, i took midol as a pre-emptive strike against grumpiness. worked like a charm and, although no one took me up on my offer, it might have been a good idea for more than just myself. won't mention any names or particular incidents in the kitchen...

gift opening started in somewhat-organized rounds but quickly descended into madness and mayhem as my uncle decided things were taking too long and we should all open at the same time. two cousins playing santa, two cousins' wives trying to keep up with two small children each, four small children who didn't want to be kept up with, two dogs with new plush squirrels to chew on, one sick cousin, two great grandparents, two grandparents, and myself. it was awesome.

the kids were (and are) adorable; super excited about their new toys, more excited about each other's toys. three different sizes of batteries had to be found to begin playing - after scissors, twist ties, and teeth finally got the objects out of the packages. hours later, they're back to playing with the toys grandma and grandpa (my aunt and uncle) keep at their house and that belonged to their parents (my cousins) when they were kids.

we had a big, formal, yummy lunch of paella (rice, shrimp, chicken, olives, beans, clams, other stuff) and three kinds of pie for dessert: crapple (cranberry-apple), pecan, and mincemeat (surprisingly popular around here). i think there's some leftover pecan - sounds like dinner to me!

biostatistics

ode to flavia

she has two children I love to adore,
i'm hoping she'll have at least two more,
ziva is precious and smiley and warm,
blake is rambunctious and like a storm

blake's saying new words, he's a little man,
'daddy home' he says about her husband sam,
she likes volleyball and pizza from costco,
she doesn't like cold, 'specially the snow

she texts me pictures of the cute kids,
and recycles everything, even lids,
she makes me food and brings it to my house,
watches ncis and sneezes like a mouse

i'm glad she's nearby with sam, ziva, and blake,
one night she even made me a steak,
that's true, it's not just a rhyming line,
you should be so luck to have a sister like mine