Monday, March 16, 2009

Geez Louise.

I came home to an ear-splitting fire alarm in our hallway. My quite undomestic roomate tried to "deep-fry" breaded pork loins in our crappy Ikea pots, and ended up setting the oil on fire. Like, there was actual FIRE, like flames flying out. The firetruck was just leaving as I got home. Fortunately, my roomate and the apartment are okay. Not okay: our pots, the freaking AIR in our apartment, the bathroom tile which got burned through? (I don't even want to know what happened.)

Yep. Dumpsta's Paradise just got demoted to Dumpsta's Inferno.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

This is not March.

At least not weather-wise. I've been dressing kind of how I think the weather should be like in my head and since I have no windows in my room it's not really that hard to do. My feet were not happy today.

There is a guy at my gym who I swear looks like the yuppie version of Stephen Malkamus. The gym thing has worked out quite well so far, surprisingly. I need to invest in some new sportsbras that will actually support me but otherwise the maternity pants have been living up to their full potential and I'm getting a lot stronger. I think I should have lost more weight than I have but being a wino and a foodie and all, I'm not particularly compromising.

On Saturday I had a wine and cheese party at my place. I made sure there was enough wine and cheese to feed a family of 10 (twins). We had aged Gouda with walnuts, Gruyere, two things of Brie, Raclette, blueberries, strawberries, pita chips with garlic hummus. Two bottles of Malbec, two different kinds of Cab, Chardonnay, sparkling Pino Grigio, and normal Pino Grigio. And everything within budget thanks to Trader Joe's! Enough people came so that it was easy to mingle, and people started leaving before I made a fool out of myself. Interestingly, the boy I have a crush on came, as well as the boy who is interested in me (not one and the same, unfortch).

I am going to Virginia next week for work, Monday through Wednesday, hopefully getting back in time for my 7:35 class. We're spending a few days at the University of Virginia, attending a staff meeting, training some staff, and recruiting patients straight out of the waiting room for a recorded interview. We've been conducting the same interviews over the phone at Mass General with a mostly Caucasian upper-middle class population on how people understand the various medical terms pertaining to colorectal cancer screening. It should be interesting to see how a underserved, low-literacy population such as the one in Charlottesville will understand what a barium enema or sigmoidoscopy is. I'm excited to see what happens because it's too often that we take basic anatomical knowledge and the various things we just hear on the news or read online about health and cancer screening for granted.

The new Dmouth prez is ridiculous. He is not only going to save the world of medicine and public health, but also the sector of higher education. Go him!