Anne has priorities

From conversation last night:

Anne: OUCH! OUCH! OHHHH!
David: What's wrong?!
Anne: I just dropped my laptop on my toe.
David: Well, is it ok?
Anne: Yes, because I dropped it on my toe.
David: No, I meant your toe.
Anne: Oh.

Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of HPV Vaccination vs Pat Smear

From Wikipedia:

"Pap smear" redirects here. For the similarly named guitar player and actor, see Pat Smear.

Grasping at Frozen Straws

From GChat:

Katherine: omg dude

its so f-ing cold here

me: yeah, it's a cold day =\

Katherine: 12 F, feels like -1

i cant believe theres 2 more months of this

me: ok, i don't have shit on that

it's 26 here

Katherine's new status message - ok, im ready for winter to be over 5:30 PM

me: but it feels like 13...

WE HAVE THE SAME WIND CHILL!

Katherine: it was 30 the other day ad people were like taking off their jackets and smiling

yay!

the country is united

me: we're frostbitten sisters!

united kelvin-is-a-more-appropriate-scale-for-this-kind-of-coldness states!

Sent at 5:31 PM on Saturday

Katherine: ugh

yeah i really felt like a different scale was necessary when the high was 0 a few days ago

me: oh, gross

we haven't had a high below 10 yet, only in the teens

well, think about all of the... ummm....

how there's no malaria in chicago

...

Katherine: thats very comforting

Midnight Oil

I'm burning the midnight oil, which I hear is relatively clean-burning.

I have an epidemiology quiz in 6.5 hours, and I've studied approximately 1 hour for it. The good news, though, is that I've read about 100 pages in Kenji Yoshino's Covering. Which is better for my overall quality of life?... Yeah, you decide causality using the Hill Criteria.

It finally feels like winter.

iPhone, wtf - Part 3

So I went to the Apple Store on Boylston today in order to get a new phone. The building was... unique, to say the least. It's a three-story glass structure with a glass spiral staircase. It also appears to be staffed primarily by people under the age of 20.

Anyhow, I got by new phone and even purcahsed a new matte-finish screen protector to commemorate the occasion. Supposedly, my screen is now less susceptible to getting smudges on it. Unfortunately, the "expert" I enlisted to help me adhere it managed I attach it off-center. Regardless, it was a smooth transition overall.

Once I got back to my room, I restored my old phone's settings and content and was ready to go. I even have my old wallpaper back. Woohoo.

This post brought to you by my new iPhone.

Happy Birthday, Nina!

iPhone, wtf - Part 2

My iPhone is now physically broken. The problem isn't major, but it's significant.

I was turning my phone from silent to ring when the associated switch got loose and actually fell off. Unfortunately, it fell onto the floor, and I haven't been able to find it. Like my previous problem, this issue appears very, very common. It seems that the "solution" is to get a new phone at an Apple Store after talking to one of Apple's "geniuses" at the "genius bar." (I mean really?...) I hope that I don't have any issues because I don't have the physical switch anymore.

In other exciting news, my phone also malfunctioned last night in another way. To cut a long story short, my iPhone somehow got stuck on a blank screen even though the phone itself was completely functional. I even managed to take a screenshot:


Yeah, that's the actual screenshot... After trying to resync the phone, etc., I finally managed to get it working again by cold restarting. (Hint: Hold the home and sleep buttons for 10 seconds.)

I hope that my new phone doesen't have as many issues...

Match-[with professors?]-dot-com

One of my classmates recently created a profile on a dating website. Soon after, she received a message from a guy with the screen name "Professor." He was an older man, and his profile made it clear that although he was married, he was looking to have an affair with a younger woman. (Wow, what a winner).

The conversation went something like this:

Professor: I'm a professor.
Classmate: Oh, it'd be funny if you were a my professor because I'm a student.
Professor: Well, I'm a professor at a medical school, so probably not.
Classmate: I'm a medical student, actually.
Professor: Well, I'm a professor at a good medical school.
Classmate: Um, I go to a good medical school.
Professor: I teach at Harvard Medical School.

And at this point, my classmate cross-referenced his picture on the dating website with the pictures of all of our professors on our courses website. To her chagrin, there was no match [yet]. But Professor, you just wait... One of these days, you'll probably be exposed...

Update: Ok, so after hearing this story first-hand, I've learned that there apparently was not photographic evidence of the identity of our "Professor." Alas. Nonetheless, the douchebaggery is monumental, and I still hope that he gets exposed.

Kiss the cooks

Ok, two things:

First, I cooked last night for the first time in about two months. I ended up making some chicken and dumping in a jar of Trader Joe's green curry. Yummy...

Second, a prospective student emailed me for advice. He felt that going to medical school straight our of college may burn him out, so he was interested in deferring and going to... culinary school. I'm not optimistic that the medical school would be supportive, though he could call it a "hunger fellowship"...

This post brought to you by my iPhone.

Narcolepsy is contagious (over GChat)

Me: ok, i took another nap
this is silly
...
N.: omg me too!
i just fell asleep on the futon
for like 3 hrs...

C.: okay, i took an unplanned 5-hour nap
Me: heh, welcome to the club.
C.: i've been in this club for weeks, dude. ;P

Get it together, peeps! We've got things to do...

Staples says YOU FAIL

I just went to Staples to pick up a notebook for my epidemiology class. (On a side note, they are having a $1 "Dollar Days" sale, and I got some binder clips. The degree of happiness I felt was kind of embarrassing...) Anyhow, I paid for my purchase with a credit card. As I was signing my name on the electronic signature field, the screen suddenly flashed red and warned me to restrict my signature to the area within the box.

In other words, Staples literally just told me that I need to learn to color inside the lines.

I'm glad that the 16.5 years of education that I've had since kindergarten have done nothing for my ability to succeed at Staples. Good thing they didn't have No Child Left Behind in the 1990s.

Closet Synchronization

No, I didn't somehow figure out how to sync my closet with my iPhone (though that'd be cool).

From Facebook:
These people don't know each other, which makes this even better.

More on why I hate Delta and the Top o' the Year Spectacular at Nina and Jacob's later. I have a problem set due tomorrow. This is new...

Push Ups: Update 1

Nope, no Flintstones or bras. We're talking about those things that they made us do in high school gym class ("non-honors gym" for some of us).

For months, I've been talking about starting this program called "100 push ups" in which a person can train for [supposedly] 6 weeks to obtain the ability to do a set of 100 continuous push ups.

I just finished week 2, day 3 on the higher level (rightmost column). Thus, I just did sets of 16, 17, 14, 14, and 20 push ups with a 2-minute break in between. (Actually, I suck at counting, so I think that I actually did 17 and 19 push ups in the first two sets.) So far, it's been very difficult to actually ramp up the number of reps since the last set is extremely brutal. I barely managed to get up from the 20th push up just now. In all likelihood, I'm going to have to take the program slower and stretch it out longer than the advertised 6 weeks.

Regardless, I've decided to track my progress on my blog in order to pressure myself to complete the program. It honestly took me about 3 months of procrastination to get to week 2, so I'm hoping that blogging about the experience will create some type of accountability--or at least lots of shame. (I should have been Catholic or Jewish.)

Wish me luck :).

Cookies

In holiday exuberance yesterday, I baked cookies. After poking around the internet earlier, I decided on Butter Pecan cookies from Elise's Simply Recipes website. The results were pretty tasty! Also, there is something very satisfying about making a mixture of just butter, sugar, and vanilla.

Some pictures to document the occasion:

Before I flattened them with a glass

Right out of the oven

Cooling on the iRack

Yay, domesticity.