Ghosts Don't Like Lamps

   Halloween isn't until next week, but some of our friends had a party anyway. Getting a jump on things, I guess. Ben and I went as Calvin and Hobbes, since that strip was both of our favorites to read when we were kids.

   I made my Hobbes costume by hand-painting an orange top and jogging pants that I bought at Thrift Town for super cheap. I didn't have a tail because I forgot that tigers have tails until Thursday night, when it was too late to do anything about it. Ben borrowed one of Jonathan's striped red-and-black shirts and we spiked his hair with liberal amounts of Alyssa's hairspray. As it turns out, Ben knows more about hairspray and hair styling than I do!

Angry Calvin face

   The rest of the VS house went as the genie from Aladdin, the Tin Man, Tinkerbell, and some character from Pokemon. 

We left the house planning to catch a couple of buses to get to the party, but when we spotted a nice Oriental rug by the side of the road, I decided that Sara (the genie) had to pose for it. As I snapped the photo, the bus we were planning to take roared up over the hill, headed for the bus stop two blocks away. If you would have been walking through the Lower Haight the other night, you would have seen six people running pell-mell down the sidewalks and catty-corner across intersections, one with ludicrously spiked hair, another in tiger-stripe pants. It would have made a better story if we had caught the bus, but we didn't. So we ended up walking a long time to get to the party.

The photo that cost us a bus ride.

   My favorite costume was either “American Gothic” or my friend Meg, who dressed up as a deviled egg. Most of our young adult friends from church were there as well as a couple of people we'd met at previous gatherings. 

Deviled egg!

Tinkerbell and Miss Euphegenia Doubtfire!

Clue!

It was a good time, but by 11:30, I was pathetically pooped (too much late-night Netflixing while painting, I guess). I fell asleep on the BART home, and still had to bike a mile and a half back to my house. I slept with my light on because I read some scary ghost stories while at work. That has nothing to do with the rest of the evening, I just thought it was really funny when I woke up and my lamp was still on.

The New Normal

Not a whole lot of interest has been going on lately.  Ben and I finished our engagement photo shoot with Alyssa (it was a two-part thing - partly because I love pictures, partly because of the locations involved, and partly because Alyssa was willing to take loads of photos of us).  We went to the Embarcadero and Civic Center for the first half the week before I left for Kansas.  We had planned to do the second half the Sunday after I returned, but wouldn’t you know it, the government shut down!  So now it’s personal - THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IS RUINING MY WEDDING.  Whatever.  We rescheduled for this past weekend, and everything was fine.  We ended up going to Fort Point (which is right underneath that first, weird little arch on the Golden Gate Bridge).  It was FREEZING COLD.  The fog has come back with a vengeance again, and since we were right on the water, it was even colder than usual.  But the fort was very beautiful - old brick, with lots of repeating arches and columns and such.  And right under the Golden Gate Bridge, too!  So we had a lot of fun (well, I did, anyway - Ben doesn’t understand the concept of “suffering for a photo”).  ALSO WE SAW DOLPHINS!!!! Apparently that's a fairly rare thing and they haven't been seen in quite awhile.

My primary application for medical school FINALLY went through.  BEST DAY EVER.  This whole time, I’ve been like “OH MY GOD WHAT IF I CAN’T GO TO MEDICAL SCHOOL EVER BECAUSE OF THIS STUPID STUDY ABROAD THING THAT I DID ONCE, I’LL NEVER BE A DOCTOR, JUST BECAUSE I WAS TRYING TO HAVE AN INTERESTING LIFE, WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DOOOOOOOOOO?!?!?!!?!”  But the application has been verified now, and I’ve gotten two emails from schools that I’ve applied to, being like “Yeah, we got your application, so we’ll look at it to see if you’re interesting enough/diverse enough/smart enough/doctor-y enough to be in our program, and then we might send you a secondary application. But don’t hold your breath.”

My work has been interesting lately.  One of my coworkers has been sick for a week, and her mother (whom she cares for) is in fragile health, so she’s been in an out for months now.  My other coworker was just reassigned to another department, so lately it’s been just me and my supervisor running the place.  And she has to leave early a lot because she’s taking a night class, so in the evenings, it’s just me a lot of the time.  I guess it’s good because it shows my bosses that I am a competent individual who can handle things on her own, but it’s also nerve-wracking when this clinic and that clinic are calling me last-minute to schedule interpreters, the interpreting agency is calling me to tell me that they can’t cover assignments, my interpreters are calling in sick, and I still have to recheck all of the schedules for 200+ patients.  It can get hectic.

There was also a BART strike.  So that was fun.  They walked out on Friday, which was nice, I guess, because impact was significantly less than it could have been, but they didn’t get back on the job until early Tuesday morning.  So I spent several days riding home with one officemate or another in stop-and-go traffic.  It didn’t actually take much more than about 30 minute longer to get home, and I guess it was actually cheaper for me to carpool than take BART, but stop-and-go traffic makes me carsick, finding a carpool buddy is a PAIN, and Ben had to come pick me up from Wherever, East Bay once I’d managed to fight my way across the Bay Bridge.  Anyway, the unions realized they were being a huge pain and that if they didn’t voluntarily go off strike, legislation was going to be passed to prevent them from going on strike ever again, and BART management realized that everyone was super pissed and they just needed to fix it and eat the costs.  

This weekend is Halloween.  I was up late last night making a Hobbes costume out of thrift-store clothes and fabric paint.  Ben is going as Calvin.  We’ve been planning this costume for months, but it just now occurred to me that the Halloween party we’re attending is this Friday. So… EEP!  I have to put a few more stripes on and then I should be done.  

And that’s about it, I guess.  Like I said.  Not a lot going on.  My life has become significantly more boring since I got a “real” job and a do real adult things, like staying up late Netflixing “Breaking Bad” while handpainting a tiger costume.  

Crushing Butterflies

   Our climbing trip to Arkansas was also just the BEST. We left Bethel on Saturday evening, stayed the night at Eric's house in Independence, then drove the rest of the way Sunday morning. That way, we didn't have to waste an entire day driving, but also didn't have to drive all night and set up in the dark and cold (been there, done that, it's miserable). Eric's older brother Ryan came with us, as well as one of their McPherson friends, Mikael, whom I had not met before the trip. We had a good time on the way down listening to Broadway soundtracks in Eric's truck and admiring the fantastically beautiful Arkansas scenery. Right before we hit Horseshoe Canyon Ranch, we stopped off at Low Gap, which is either the name of a restaurant or the name of a town, I'm not sure. If it was a town, it consisted of the restaurant, as far as I could tell. Their buffet line was DELICIOUS. They had catfish and frog's legs, which I have never tried before. They are a little tougher and chewier than chicken, but otherwise quite good. And their pumpkin cheesecake was amazing. I had two slices. If you're ever in the Jasper, Arkansas area, you have got to stop there. It will be the best decision you make all day.

   After arriving at the Ranch (which is really like a high-falootin' dude ranch for clueless city folk, with some of Arkansas's best climbing routes thrown in on the side), we paid our dues for the next four days, rented shoes, and immediately hit the walls of the canyon for some warm-up routes. There were a lot of campers still hanging around, since it was Sunday afternoon, so we thought it would be best to let them all trickle on home while we climbed and then picked over their camping spots for the best location. Once it started getting darker and chillier, we decided it was time to pack up and head back to the campsites. As soon as we got there, we noticed a group with THE BEST spot in the whole camp – down on the side of the hill, sheltered by a bunch of trees, with a great fire pit. So we snagged it as soon as they left, and started setting up the tent. Eric discovered that of all the things he had so responsibly packed, the one thing he'd forgotten was the pump for the queen-sized air mattress. Some talk was made of using the truck exhaust to blow it up, but thankfully, better sense prevailed and no one died of carbon monoxide poisoning. As Eric used his tuba-playing skills to manually inflate the air bed (sounding like a dead-ringer for Darth Vadar), Mikael built a fire and we started on supper.

   The next day, we got up with the sun, had some packeted oatmeal, and headed out for our first big day of climbing. We went to the North Forty routes, a long chain of moderates that kept us occupied all day. I don't know how many we did exactly, but it must have been eight or ten. I learned how to lead climb and belay, leading a 5.8 route and top roping a 5.9+ with a difficult crux right at the top. The higher the number after the five, the more difficult the route. 5.6 is the easiest at the Ranch, and is like walking up a ladder. 5.13 is the hardest and is best left to people like Will Nagengast. The hardest part about the routes at the Ranch, at least initially, is that I was used to climbing bouldering routes at the gym, which are like 10-15 feet, not the 50-60 feet outside. More like a marathon than a sprint!

   On our second full day, we went to the Cliffs of Insanity and the Far East to climb a 5.9+ route called Orange Crush. Well, our book called it a 5.9+, but other people's books had upgraded it to a 5.10a, so we called it a 10a because it made us sound cooler. It was 80 feet, which is about twice as long as all of the other routes we'd climbed in the last two days. It was exhausting! Thankfully, the crux was in the middle, before we'd run out of all of our energy! The view from the top was absolutely amazing! We could see the entire canyon and at least a 270 degree panorama from the corner of the route. Very, very beautiful. 

After spending an hour or two wearing ourselves out on Orange Crush, we took a very long break and had some lunch, then got back to climbing some easier routes. I led one with a layback finish, which I'd never done before, and is kind of weird and awkward. My arms were really tired by the time I got to the last couple of bolts and I wanted to quit and just go back down, but Eric, who was belaying, wouldn't let me! So in the end, I had to finish it if I wanted to get back to the ground. It was annoying, but I'm glad he made me do it. We ended the day at Magoo Rock with a couple of easy, fun routes that involved a lot of swinging back and forth between two rock faces and a lot of bicep comparisons. 

 Supper was canned chili cooked in tin cans over the fire. Happily, we managed to scavenge a grate from another campside, so we didn't have to reach directly into the fire to place the cans, which was a nice change.

   Our third day was only a half day, since we had to drive back to Kansas in the afternoon. By the time we finished packing up the campsite, we only had time for a few routes before we had to leave, so while Eric and Ryan finished folding up the tent, Mikael and I went to Titanic boulder to practice leading. 

 A couple of groups were there already, and we had a good time talking to them. The climbers that we encountered were always SUPER friendly and willing to lend out advice or direction. It was really cool to get to know them a little bit. Some of them came from as far away as Minnesota! They said it was a 13 hour drive, which made us very happy that we only had eight. 

 We ended our time at Horseshoe Canyon Ranch with a 5.10b that only Eric could do. It had about a 6' roof at the very end that involved planting one's feet on the wall and stretching out horizontally to reach up and over the ledge to secure the final bolt. By far the most difficult route any of us had attempted all week.

   On the way home, we blatantly defied the government shutdown in order to drive through a gorgeous state park. The ranger, who was tootling around in a golf cart just waved at us. I don't think he cared that we were there. The weather was incredibly nice, so we drove through the winding roads with the windows down, blasting “The Lion King” and “Children of Eden” and receiving some strange looks at intersections. After switching vehicles at Eric's and wolfing down some leftover chili, Ryan and Mikael and I drove the rest of the way to Newton, arriving back around 8:45.

   My last two days in Newton were spent sleeping in, stopping by Bethel for chance encounters with friends, eating at Mojo's, having tea and taking walks with Jacob and Martin, having supper with Gary and Carla, having supper with Zach, watching Glee with Ryan and Brian and Eric, getting cheese fries at Newell's with Evan, Brian, and Eric, and listening to Eric complain about how poor my computer's performance was as he tried to fix it.

   This was truly the best vacation. Thank you all for reading, and thank you all for making my trip to Kansas truly memorable. I love you all.      

Kansas Vacation!!

   What a great vacation. I mean, wow, it was the best thing ever! SUPER HUGE thanks to everyone who fed me and let me sleep on their couches for the last 10 days.

   So I think I'm going to break this up into a couple of installments, because otherwise it will be like 10 pages long and ain't nobody got time for that. First installment – Fall Fest. Second – climbing in Arkansas.

   I  left San Francisco on Thursday. For some mechanical reason, the jetway at SFO crapped out and it took them a super long time to fix it. So I missed my flight, despite running full-tilt down the entirety of the Denver airport. Good thing I gate-checked my suitcase, I guess. After standing in the customer service line for an hour with everyone else from my flight, I got a later flight to Kansas City. The whole time I was hardcore panicking because I was supposed to shadow a physician the next day, and if I couldn't shadow her, I wouldn't get her letter of recommendation, and then my entire med school career would be over before it had begun. Dark times. On the bright side, because I left Denver so late, the plane flew through a lightning storm! I SAW A LIGHTNING STORM FROM 33,000 FEET! 

It was totally worth missing my flight. It was absolutely gorgeous. Grace picked me up, drove me back to Lawrence, gave me a tour of the pharmacy school, and then I crashed onto the sofa and tried to sleep. Didn't work. I might have gotten four hours of sleep that night, between sleeping on a sofa, the blinking router light that I eventually covered with a sock, and the blinds that flapped in the wind.

   The next day, I got up SUUUUUUUPER early (especially considering I was still on California time, which is 2 hours earlier than Kansas) and drove BACK to Kansas City to do my shadowing. IT WAS SUPER AWESOME!!!!!! The doctor I shadowed is actually my high school biology teacher's daughter, so it was really great to have that hometown connection. And let me tell you – she does a great job of making a point to sit down and talk to her patients without spending the whole appointment staring at her computer screen and checking little boxes. It might take a little longer, but I really think it's the best way to do healthcare. She is a family practice physician, so we saw a really wide variety of cases. I walked in that morning knowing that I really wanted to be a family practice physician, and I walked out that afternoon being like “OH MY GOD I HAVE TO BE A FAMILY PRACTICE PHYSICIAN AND I SERIOUSLY DON'T SEE MYSELF DOING ANYTHING ELSE AND IF I DON'T GET TO DO THIS FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE, I MIGHT DIE.” So that was a very helpful experience.

   Grace and I drove from Lawrence to Bethel after a quick boba tea pit stop. We drove through some super heavy rain and a great sunset, which just reminded me how great sunsets are – what with the buildings and the hills, sunsets are hard to come by in the Bay Area. Upon arrival in Newton, I went over to Jackie and Ben's to meet the mod. We all managed to get together with ONE DAY'S notice, which is super impressive, considering that's something we had never been able to do when we actually all lived together. Half-price apps at the 'Bee are sort of our “thing” (and really, it's one of the only things to do in Newton after 9pm), so we headed out that way. It was really good to see all of them again, and to catch up on everything. It was a pretty late night by the time we eventually got out of there.

   The next morning was FALL FEST!!!!!!!!!!!! Melissa Volk said it best when she said “Fall Fest is kind of like Mennonite Christmas.” Everybody is all on campus again, everything is decorated and looks really nice, there is a ton of food and lots of hugging. Seriously, so much hugging. I just sort of walked in a circle around the Green about 6 times throughout the day, stopping and talking to everyone. It was the best feeling ever, and definitely one of the top five happiest days of the last year or so. 

New Year's cookies!

Lauren's first Fall Fest!

 At three, I met my family for the play “You Can't Take it With You.” It was VERY funny. I especially appreciated Jacob's steamboat noises – I guess he's gotten a LOT of compliments on that.

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrmphhhhhhh

   After a quick supper at Braum's, the family headed over to the football game. I could only stay for an hour or so because Eric was coming to pick me up to go climbing. The start of the game looked really good – from what I've heard, the team is really getting somewhere this year. Around 830, Eric showed up with his friend Mikael and we headed off on our climbing trip. More on that in the next post.

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.