Rainy Day

I'm loving the rain right now. Yesterday was a miserable 90 degrees with the sticky humidity permeating everything. Today it is about 70 and raining, which just feels like Portland.

I'm done with my first classes. I've written the last paper and taken all the tests. I have most of the grades back, but not quite all. Some are better than others, but I should pull at least an A- in everything, I think. I'm actually going to go talk to my pharmacology professor about my clinical paper assignment, because I either really screwed up something and can't figure out what, or the TA that graded my paper didn't do a very good job. I'll find out which tomorrow.

This weekend has been pretty lazy. I spent all day Thursday at Muddy Waters writing my genetics paper. Friday I lay around the house watching a really good stage of the Tour, then went for a ride in the rain that was sadly cut short by a flat tire. I changed the tire but the pump I carry with me is only powerful enough to inflate the tire to 75%. That's enough to get home on, but isn't fun to do any real riding on and any underinflated tire is more likely to flat again. After I got home I was covered in mud and grease and spent about an hour scrubbing myself clean.

I then ate lunch and promptly fell asleep while attempting to read. Luckily I woke up in time to get dressed and head over to Sarah's for a game night. Unluckily, I decided to pump up Johnny's tires before I left and managed to break the valve and let all the air out. That meant that I would have to change the tire, which takes a ridiculously long time on Johnny because his tires are kevlar and not very stretchy. So I called Sarah and she came to pick me up. She had Yasmine and Maya with her and Maya was not very happy at all. She's got a probable yeast infection, and was doing a lot of screaming. Anyway, when we got home Sarah took care of Maya while I got a lesson in cucumber peeling from Ronen. Apparently there's a very particular way to do these things in his family. Paul showed up at some point and we were all put to work getting dinner ready. Dinner involved the usual toddler-induced hilarity and chaos. After dinner, while the little ones were being put to bed, Paul and I made cookies and got Settlers out to play. We played the Cities and Knights version, which I had only played a couple of times before but really like. Paul beat us without too much competition, and then we just sat around chatting until Sarah looked like she was going to fall out of her chair from exhaustion. I got a ride home from Paul and immediately passed out in bed.

Yesterday was supposed to be my first day of working on the Fuld project. I met up with Elspeth, another friend from class who is working on the project with me, and we rode our bikes to an STD clinic in the "bad part of town." It's actually about a mile away from my house, but it's amazing how the neighborhood changes in a very short distance. It's not a dangerous place to be in the middle of the day, but I would never go there at night. We found the clinic and met with LaRon, who is running the study. We thought that we were going to be recruiting young moms to participate in the focus groups but LaRon informed us that they had been having trouble getting enough people, so they've hired a full-time recruiter. That was a big relief to me, since walking up to teenage moms in the street and asking them if they'd like to come talk about their sex lives didn't sound like much fun. So Elspeth and I just got a tour of the STD clinic, which is a cool nurse-run free clinic that offers a lot of really good services for free. He then gave us the software and stuff we would need to do transcription and emailed us the audio files of preliminary group sessions so that we could get an idea of what to expect. I started listening to one last night and transcribing it is going to be hard work. First of all, it's hard to understand what they're saying because of the way the talk and all the slang they use. Secondly, they all talk at the same time, and they have their kids with them to scream in the background. I'm one of the people transcribing next weekend, so it'll be very interesting to see how well I do. At least I don't have to recruit, but it'll be slow going.

Today I'll just be hanging out at home finishing up a lot of minor chores. I'll edit my genetics paper, do some laundry, maybe some baking, finish listening to those audio files, sew patches onto my scrubs, and maybe get to the assignment that we already have for our next class. It's not due until Wednesday though, so I'm not terribly worried. My schedule looks pretty manageable next week, it's the following week that things get crazy with the beginning of clinicals.