New Family Member

Mood: Relaxed
Music: Jack Johnson--In Between Dreams

Kyle and I had today off school in honor of MLK Jr. Day, so I had a little bit of free time tonight to write to the blog. I thought I should write a post about my mother's adorable new puppy, if for nothing else than to put up a picture of this very cute and cuddly golden retriever named Maggie. This picture is from when mom first brought her to our apartment for a visit, and as you can see, Kyle totally fell in love with her. I have officially been replaced as the love of his life. :)

Another small piece of news--I now have a blog page of poetic pieces I have written since high school. The link for the page appears to the left under the links section. If you get a moment, check it out and tell me what you think! I will post more poetry on the page as time goes on.

I had a nice end to Christmas break. Amber came to visit me for lunch on New Years Eve and we had a fun time eating mexican and laughing together. Then on January 2nd, the day before we started classes again, Amy came for lunch and to spend the day together. She stayed for dinner and Sarah and Tiffany joined us. I threw a French-themed dinner party, complete with french cheeses, ironed cotton napkins folded into goblets, and placecards for the table settings with pictures of the Eiffel Tower on them. After dinner, we had a blast playing Crazy Slap Jack and opening Christmas presents. About a week later, our new dining room set arrived. I was hoping that it would get here before my guests came, but no luck. Oh well...I'm just happy that we have a real dining room table now that has plenty of room around it, instead of our "toy" table that we started with. The new table is very bistro-looking with Mission style influences and a high curving back to the chairs. The best part--I got it from Macy's for a killer price. That's me, the bargain hunter.

The semester is off to a good start, although if they throw any more modules at us at once I think I'll scream. In one 40 hour week, we have the following classes: Crown & Bridge w/ lab (x2), Orthodontics w/ lab, Complete Dentures w/ lab, Endodontics w/ lab, Facial Pain, Radiographic Interpretation, Fundamentals of Clinical Medicine (x3), Clinical Pathological Correlations, and PBL (x2). Eek! The material hasn't been too difficult, but it's hard to keep track of what is due when, etc. So far I'm really enjoying ortho and endo--root canals are actually fun to give from a technical perspective! And no, they aren't as painful as urban legend would have you believe. One of the scarier parts of this semester is in Clinical Path Correlations, where we are given several clinical pictures of different cases and minimal history on these patients, then we have less than a week to come up with a differential diagnosis and become an expert on every disease in the differential. During our weekly class, we might get randomly chosen to come to the front of the class and get grilled by the professor in front of all 100+ of our classmates. This guy is brilliant, hilarious, and a great professor, but he takes immense pleasure in humiliating people. I am really not into public humiliation, thank you. Then we lucky students get to repeat the whole process for the next week. AHHH!!! Wish me luck!