Maggots

    Ok, first off, don't read this if you are squeamish. It contains numerous references to maggots, as indicated in the title. Consider yourself warned.

     This morning, I woke up, got ready for work, and walked into the kitchen to make my lunch. Spread across the floor was what looked like about a cup of rice. I was like “CAITLIN!!!!!” She's one of my roommates, and she's a lovely girl, but she isn't very neat sometimes. And then I stood there for a bit, annoyed at her and wondering if she'll clean it up today or next week. The I noticed that the rice was moving. Fast. It wasn't rice. It was maggots. Big ones. On my floor. MAGGOTS. I didn't scream, I didn't barf, I didn't panic. I let a few choice words fly. Several times. I was in major oh-my-god-there-are-maggots-on-my-floor-get-them-off-my-floor-why-are-there-maggots-on-my-floor-where-did-they-come-from-clean-it-up-I-have-to-go-to-work-maggots-maggots-maggots-on-my-kitchen-floor-maggots-on-my-dining-room-floor-oh-god-maggots-in-the-living-room-maggots-in-my-house-oh-god-why-me mode. I also only had about 15 minutes to clean it up, make my lunch, and go to work. It wasn't going to happen.

     Luckily, one of my other roommates, Kevin, woke up and slouched into the hallway, where I waited with a dustbin and a panicked litany of “Kevin, THERE ARE MAGGOTS ON THE FLOOR MAGGOTS FREAKING MAGGOTS ON THE FLOOR WHY ARE THERE MAGGOTS ON THE FLOOR I HAVE TO GO TO WORK AND THERE ARE MAGGOTS WHERE DID THEY COME FROM MAGGOTS ON THE FLOOR!!!!!!” Poor guy. What a way to wake up. He mumbled something about putting clothes on and left while I tried to sweet the maggots into the dustbin.

     Here's the funny thing about maggots – they don't sweep. They are also very fast. Faster than you'd think. So I sort of rolled their gross little squishy bodies across the floor with a broom and piled them into sort of a central location in the middle of the kitchen floor. I turned my back for a second to get the small dustbin AND THEY ALL INCHED AWAY FROM MY NICE NEAT PILE. It was gross. Thanks to Francisca's Genetics class, however (and her delicious brownies), I had learned to eat a brownie with one hand and stare at a vial full of squirming maggots with the other. So I wasn't so much grossed out as I was panicked as to how I would get this cleaned up and prevent them from spreading to other parts of the house.

     About that time, Kevin came back with a mop and some bleach and started sloshing it around while I threw some food into a bag, apologized profusely for my inability to help out much, and went to work. That day, there was a deluge of emails in my inbox regarding maggots. I have never learned so much about maggots in such a short amount of time.  Nor have I ever written or read so many emails containing the words "maggots."  Kevin and my fourth roommate, Danny, had bleached the floors in three rooms, cleaned out the garbage pail (which was found to be the source [we empty it regularly, I PROMISE {just not this week, apparently}]), and looked up Wikipedia information on maggots. Evidently it took 3 hours.  Poor guys.  So now our garbage pails are all sitting outside, we are cleaning everything as soon as we use it and making sure the drain trap is always clean (occasionally an issue here) and hoping that we starve the disgusting things out. They also left a helpful sign on the way into the (maggot-free!) kitchen.  

No maggots here!  

    And that was my day. It was unnecessarily eventful.  

Gee, thanks, I made it myself!

    When people compliment you on clothes you're wearing that you actually made yourself, what do you say? “Gee, thanks, I like it too!” “Gee, thanks, I made it myself!” “Gee, thanks, it's my favorite!” The first one is like “well duh I like it, I'm wearing it!” The second one is like “Why yessss, I am a person who is obviously digging for compliments” and the third is probably the best way to take a compliment, I guess. Because when you say “Gee, thanks, I made it myself!” then you basically condemn the complimenting person to being like “OMG REALLY YOU ARE SO TALENTED THAT IS AMAZING WOW YOU ARE THE COOLEST PERSON EVER!!!” which is just kind of a weird position to be in. Like on the one hand, yeah, I have some mad sewing skills, and I am proud of them. On the other hand, I'm a Mennonite, and pride is pretty much as bad as one-bun zwiebach on the scale of zero to sin.

    That being said, why thank you, I did make this dress myself, and if I may say so, I'm damn proud of it. I may have actually followed the directions on this one. By which I mean I didn't make any super huge alterations (except for the bust, because again, I am not build like Marilyn Monroe). I did cut it out in a size twelve for some reason. That was stupid. So I had to take a lot in on the bodice. And then the armholes! Gah, the armholes. They wanted you to use bias tape to bind the armholes! BIAS TAPE. Barbarians. So I found another similar pattern, used the armhole facing, modified it slightly, and used that to bind the armholes. Then of course, that created way too much facing on the shoulder strap, which was kind of stupid, so I had to do some kind of creative cut-and-stitch to get it to lie flat.

     But the pattern is great and I love it (I'm currently making another dress out of it). It's a great, cute little A-line that goes pretty well with my Toms or a pair of tights and heels.

Educational Update

    My blood pressure just dropped a few more notches.   I am SOOOOO relaxed right now.  I might just slither out of my chair and onto the floor. 

    So my application to osteopathic school is one more step closer to actually being submitted to my schools of choice.  It’s a long story.  And a long blog post.  Sorry about that.  If you don’t want the back story, just skip to like, the last paragraph.  To apply to medical school, one has to fill out a primary application, which has all of your grades, all of the classes you’ve ever taken for college credit at any institution, a stress-inducing, vaguely-termed “personal statement,” and all of your demographic information.  Then, once you submit that application, it goes to the schools that you designate, they look it over, and pick people that they think will be a good fit.  Then they invite these people for interviews, and then pick out of that pool in order to find the class of 2017 for the University of Wherever.  It’s a grueling process and takes a very long time.

    So.  I started my application in June, right after I found out my MCAT scores.  I spent a long time thinking up and polishing my personal statement (with lots of help from Ben, who is a wonderful person for putting up with my incessant demands for his editing skills), so by the time I submitted it, it was the end of June.  It’s supposed to take like 4 weeks for the application to get spammed out to the individual schools, so after 3 weeks, I logged onto the application site every day to check the status.  After 4.5 weeks, I bumped it up to twice a day, in hopes that my vigilance would convince the nebulous pool of application service employees that I really really REALLY wanted this.  After 5 weeks, a member of that nebulous pool sent me an email being like, “hey, we noticed you took a class in Guatemala and listed it on your transcript for Bethel… but you need documentation from the Guatemala school.  And until we get that documentation, your application is just going to sit and wait.”  That was on the same day (and the same hour, I think) that one of the managers for General Medicine at UCSF called me and told me that, because I was a UCSF employee, I actually couldn’t shadow their doctors, which was my last hope of finding someone in the Bay Area to shadow and to write me a letter of recommendation.  It was a bad day.  I sat in the bathroom over my lunch hour and just cried.  It was very pathetic. 

    But then I got my act together and spammed out a desperate-sounding email to the school in Guatemala, being like “OMG YOU GUYS I NEEEEEEED YOU TO HELP ME!!!”  I was expecting all of my med school dreams to come crashing down around my ears because of this stupid transcript, because the staff at this school is kind of bad about returning emails.  Like, when Roxanne and Ruthi and I went in 2010, they took a month to get back to us.  But, miracle of miracles, they returned my email in ONE DAY.  I was totally blown away.  So I responded to the email in Spanish, foolishly, because then they responded in Spanish, of course.  So here I was, panicking about my transcripts, trying desperately to convey what needed to happen (which I’m sure they were already aware of), in a second language, at work (because of course my Internet was also out at my house.  Of course), and then trying to read their emails enough to respond to them.  It was a rough week, but eventually we got it figured out. 

    Meanwhile, I sent a Facebook message of the daughter of my high school biology teacher (who happens to be a D.O, and had offered to let me shadow) being like “OMG I NEEEEEED YOU TO HELP ME!!!!!!”   She lives in K.C, and I live in the Bay Area, so it was not really a plausible solution until I had run out of all other possible solutions.  She very graciously agreed to help me out, for which I am eternally grateful. 

    AND FINALLY, after the Guatemalan school agreed to send my transcripts, after my D.O. Facebook friend agreed to let me shadow, and after my Internet at my house had been turned back on, THE PINNACLE occurred.  2.5 weeks after being sent, after checking my application twice a day for two weeks, my transcripts arrived at the application service, and somebody in the nebulous cloud of application service employees entered it into my application.  Thank goodness I decided to check today!  I decided over lunch that I wouldn’t, because it would just be disappointing.  BUT IT WASN’T.  So I clicked the “submit” button.

   And now we wait.  And exhaaaaale.  It’s been a rough two months in terms of med school applications.  

Sustained Silent Reading

    Ladies.  Gentlemen.  I have finished all of the books in my house.  I finished reading the Harry Potter series about a month ago, so sadly, it’s not quite time to start re-reading it.  So I need some recommendations.  I’m not super into the extreme fantasy books with half-naked women swooning into the arms of a muscled youth waving a blazing sword at a looming dragon on the cover, nor am I into poetry at. all.  If it’s written in a weird format, (“Everything is Illuminated” or that weird book about the liver we read for C.I.C, with the George-Bush-in-the-TV-static), I’m not going to read it. I like books with a quick twist at the end that turns the whole book on its head.  If the book is about communicable diseases (i.e. “The Hot Zone”), so much the better.  But really, I’ll read almost anything.  For real.  When I was a kid, I read all of the home-restoration magazines in my house (over 100 issues) before I went to bed.  Twice.  Or maybe three times.  And all of the sewing magazines, at least twice.  And boxes of National Geographic magazines.  And when those all ran out, I used my mom’s library card to check out years of old Reader’s Digest magazines.  This was all in addition to having one book in my desk at school (for reading under my desk during the math lesson and spelling tests), one in the living room at home (for post-school, pre-supper reading), and another in my bookbag for the 45 minute bus ride. 

    So.  I need recommendations.  Please, nothing with vast amounts of symbolism.  I just don’t get it. 

Operation "Get Hot for Wedding"

    As part of Operation “Get Hot for Wedding” (hereafter referred to as Operation Hot), I joined a climbing gym.  I had already planned to join at some point, since I do enjoy climbing a lot, but now I have a legitimate excuse to spend money on a membership fee.  I wanted to be sure that I actually wanted to commit, so I tagged along with Greta from church when she went a couple of weeks ago.  That sealed the deal.  It was so awesome!!! 

    So this week, on Monday, instead of going to Supper Club, I went to the gym in downtown Oakland and got a membership from a long-haired climber-dude behind the counter.  He had the kind of biceps that bulge even when he’s just standing still.  Then on Tuesday, after grocery shopping, I biked down to the gym in Berkeley.  I checked at the front desk to see if I could do the “Intro to Climbing” class that started in 10 minutes, but I was by myself, and the girl at the counter said I should do it with a partner, so in the time between learning and practicing with someone, I don’t forget how to belay and end up killing my partner.  So I just bouldered instead.  Which is, in my opinion, really boring.  Basically it’s climbing without a rope, to a maximum height of about 10 feet.  Like I said, really boring.  And hell on the forearms. 

    So I just stood there and stared at the wall for awhile, then puttered around on some of the easier routes.  Evidently I was doing something BLATANTL Y wrong, because this dude came up and was like “Hey so….. you’re gonna want to do it this way……..”  and that was kind of embarrassing.  And then he insisted on sticking around while I heaved and huffed and puffed my way up one of the easiest routes on the wall.  I was like “um go away please.”  He was actually super nice and I’m sure he meant well.  I just don’t like it when people recognize that I’m obviously totally bad at something. 

    After my fingers got so cramped and tired that I couldn’t hang on to even the easiest holds, I decided to check out the weight room.  There were so many ambiguous-looking machines!  I haven’t been in a weight room since middle school, so I pretty much walked around like a creeper and watched all the other people so I’d know how to use the weights.  I did find a pull-up bar, and struggled my way through a grand total of …………….. 3 pull-ups.  I could do like 10 or 12 two summers ago!  Something to work on, I guess.  And then I found this other thing that you sit on and hook your feet under one part and grab onto another part with your hands and then pull your feet and your hands together.  Supposedly works your abs.  Well, I don’t know what I was doing wrong, I even set the weights to the lowest setting, but I heaved and yanked and couldn’t get the darn thing to move even a little bit! 

    And now, a day later, all of my muscles are like “WE HATES YOUUUUUU!!!!”  




   Edit: I was going to use Operation "Get Hott(-er) for Wedding" but I didn't want to sound vainglorious.  That's not true.  I've just always wanted to use "vainglorious" in a sentence. 

6 Blocks

    As most of you can see from my Facebook page, my parents visited me for the weekend.  They left super early Wednesday morning, taking the Amtrak from Hastings, NE and arrived in California around 4:30 on Thursday.  We had supper, I showed them their hotel, we sat around and talked for awhile, then turned in early.

    Friday was a lot busier.  We got up early, sat with the commuters on BART, and arrived in downtown San Francisco around 9am.  I took them to the piers at Embarcadero, then to Yerba Buena park (I told them it was the best park in SF and they said “………really…..?”).  Then we went to THE MOST FANTASTIC FABRIC STORE IN THE WORLD.  One of the Spanish interpreters at work told me about it.  FOUR FLOORS of fabric.  It was SO AWESOME.  I found some adorable fabric with matroyshka dolls on it (hello new dress!) and another chunk with pileated woodpeckers (hello new skirt!).  The fabric store was close to Chinatown, so that’s the next place we visited.  It was close to lunchtime, so we stopped at a restaurant off the beaten path, where our waitress knew next to no English.  The food was pretty good, but they got literally every part of our order wrong.  Oh well, I guess. 

    After lunch, we walked back down the hill and took a bus out to UCSF, where I work, then took a light-rail out to the ocean.  Mom and Dad had a pretty good time walking around in the water, and I had a great time keeping my feet dry and picking up about 50 sand dollars that were just laying around on the beach.  We also saw a dead sea lion.  Next on the schedule was Fisherman’s Wharf.  We wanted to take a bus, but for whatever reason, none came for 20 minutes, so we decided to just hoof it.  Good thing, too.  A bus never did show up.  Fisherman’s Wharf is kind of a giant tourist trap, so we just skimmed the surface, looked at things, and did manage to find some reasonably-priced clam chowder for supper, and a 3-way split of a Ghiardelli sundae, which was totally delicious. 

    On Saturday, Ben was available to drive us around, which he did with much good humor.  We got up early to go to Muir Woods (tip: if you get there before 9am, you get a good parking spot and you don’t have to pay the $7 admission fee!).  We took a 3 mile tour of the forest, admiring the redwoods, and trying to spot birds in the canopy, and then left just as hordes of people descended on the park.  Ben took us up the coast on Hwy 1, where we encountered a bike race.  Passing bikes on the wiggly Hwy 1 is a terrible idea, but driving behind bikes on Hwy 1 (or anywhere) is worse, so we risked life and limb and managed it. 

Mom wanted to see some shorebirds, so we tried to find some, but it was mostly a fail.  We saw a long-billed curlew, and she was pretty excited about that, but that was about it.  Stinson Beach was the next stop.  But it was cold and windy and kind of miserable.  The most interesting part of that stop was a big grey Suburban whose panic button kept going off.  Two ladies were desperately trying to get in, but each time they tried, the panic went off!  Turns out they had the wrong big grey Suburban!  Theirs was parked (exactly like the first) between a large white CRV-type car and a small black car.  It was easy to see how they’d be confused.  We laughed about that for a good long time.

    Then we drove back down the wiggly Hwy 1 to the Golden Gate Bridge.  Like every trip back from Muir Woods, I took a nap.  Idk what it is about that place, but I get sleepy just writing about it!  Mom and Dad decided to walk all the way across and back, just to say they did.  I said “well phooey with that!”  and sat with Ben in the shelter of one of the towers.  It was cold and windy and my feet were just about walked off. 

Sunday was church at FMCSF. Mom and Dad met all the Kansans there, of course, and Dad ended up having a 20 minute conversation about broken ankles with this guy from Moundridge.  Afterwards, we went to the dog park and tried to spot some Austalian Shepherds, but there weren’t many.  Dispirited, we climbed to Alamo Square to see the Victorian houses, walked through a farmer’s market, and then finally headed back to the East Bay.  We tried some more birding, with limited success, then walked around Lake Merritt a bit, saw where Ben worked, and crashed a mass at the Cathedral of Christ the Light.  We had more success at Fenton’s Creamery, however, where we ordered half burgers and GIANT AMAZING SUNDAES.  The one I split with Ben had chocolate in every ingredient.  Delicious.

    Ben had to work on Monday, so he couldn’t drive us around anymore.  So we walked.  And walked. And walked.  Through UC-Berkeley, down Telegraph Avenue (where we ate grilled cheese and tomato soup), to Berkeley Bowl (BEST PRODUCE EVERRRR).  After Berkeley Bowl, where I stocked up on “used” fruit, we had to make a stop by my house to sort it and freeze it.  Mom and I sorted through 4 clamshells of raspberries ($1.69 for the whole shebang!) and found maybe a pint’s worth of decent ones.  Not really worth the trouble.  The big gallon bag of strawberries was a significantly better investment.  So we cut those up and threw them in a few quart bags in the freezer.  Dad sacked out on my bed while Mom and I looked at wedding dress ideas on my Pinterest board and tried (and failed miserably) to find dress patterns.  Guess that means we’ll just wing it.  Surprise, surprise.

    Ben’s parents were unexpectedly delayed on their way back from China, so they ended up being in Berkeley at the same time as my parents, which, while unfortunate, was serendipitous in that we’d never had all of us together at the same time. So that was nice.  We met them for supper and milk tea in the Asian Ghetto near Telegraph.  It was a really good time. 

    So that’s about it.  My parents should have made it to Kansas by about now or so.  They took the train back (including navigating BART by themselves!). 

    I think this post is about long enough without adding photos to it.  You can look at my Facebook photos and kind of match things up, I guess. 

Engaged

Yep, that’s right.  Pretty straightforward, not too much to say on the matter.  

No, I’m kidding, of course you want to hear all the sordid details.  

So Ben has wanted to get engaged for like, EVER, but I’ve always been like “Eh, I don’t feel like it, it can wait.”  It was very frustrating for him, and annoying for me, because he talked about it a lot.  So I was like “Hey Ben, how about you just cede that responsibility over to me - then when I feel like I’m ready, I’ll ask you, and then you don’t have to put up with me saying no... over and over and over....”  So that’s what we did.  We had sort of been talking about getting married before we went to school next fall because logistics would be so much less complicated (and also because we love each other), but we just hadn’t made it official.  So it’s not like this was some spur-of-the-moment decision.  Ben continued to be his super considerate and kind self, and didn’t really push the matter too much.  Every so often he’d bring it up, but only about once every ten times that he thought about it (or so he says).  And every time, I thought “Eh, not today.”  I just didn’t feel it.  And every so often I’d think “Gosh, he is such a great person, how could I NOT want to marry him?” But then I’d chicken out and decide that it could wait.  

And then finally last week or so, I was like “Yeah, no, really.  How could I NOT?”  So when I went to the store on Tuesday for my weekly grocery run, I bought some ingredients for fish tacos (because somewhere down the line, I told him I’d make him fish tacos and propose to him) and cantaloupe (because he loves cantaloupe).  We usually cook together on Wednesday, so having him over for supper wouldn’t raise any suspicions.  And the next day, all the way home I was freaking out like “OMG HOW DOES ONE EVEN DO THIS TYPE OF THING?!”  So then an hour later, we had sweet corn, blackened (on purpose!) fish tacos, taco toppings, and cantaloupe on the table to eat.  

We started eating and I was like “Hey Ben, do you remember that one conversation we had about fish tacos?”

“Yeah, about how I had the BEST FISH TACOS EVER in Rockridge?!!?”  

“Um. No....... the other one....... nevermind...... do you want to get married?”  

“Like for real?  Are you asking for real?”

So then the poor guy was so excited that he couldn’t even finish the delicious fish tacos that I had made, let alone the cantaloupe!  And then we did the thing where you call your parents and text your best friends, and there was the predictable amount of “awwwww....” and “about time!” and “CONGRATULATIONS!!!!”  

Ben had to take a picture while I was calling my parents
and attempting to eat fish tacos at the same time

Oh, and I know you’re going to ask - I don’t have a ring.  Sorry!

So we’re engaged.  We don’t know much more than that, to be honest.  We’re going to probably get married sometime next June or July, before we start school.  

Cue planning madness.  My mod was like “OMG NOW YOU HAVE TO GET A PINTEREST!!!!!!”  Yuck.  Stayed tuned for lots of posts about which silverware I should use at the reception and whether I should have white or whole wheat zwiebach.

Oh, and in case you’re interested, here’s the fish tacos recipe I used.