This week, I attempted the impossible: trying to make a meatloaf as good as my mother's. As all who have tasted her meatloaf know, it's almost always perfect (except that one time where it all fell apart, but it still tasted delightful). Of course, Texas grocery stores are not similar to Washington stores and thus I could not find Lipton Onion Soup Mix (yeah, seriously?)...so I settled with Meatloaf Mix--it sounded right! I made half of a loaf, and look how great it turned out! It tasted just as great as it looks, too! I had it for leftovers two times, and although I'm not a fan of my parents' meatloaf sandwiches, it tastes just as good as plain ol' meatloaf the second and third time!
In regards to the Chlo-ster, I haven't put up any good recent pictures of her lately, and she's getting so big! At her third round of shots, she weight four and a half pounds! Big girl! She also has gotten into the habit of eating breakfast at 6:45 or 7:00am, so if I try to sleep in, I get a kitty meowing right by my ear or sitting on my face. It's quite cute, really, until I can't fall back asleep!
Probably my favorite picture of her ever, she looks so sweet and innocent!
This is just screaming, "Pet my tummy!"
Her new favorite "toy," a rolled up pair of old socks. She dangles it in her mouth like a trophy! She'll play with it in my room, attacking it, chewing it, trying to "kill" it, and then will ruuuuuun all the way into the dining room to do it again. This cycle continues for about 45 minutes until I get annoyed of hearing little kitty feet sprinting back and forth from room to room and take away her socks, but she sure is cute!
And that's really what's been going on! After hearing Bonnie's stories of skydiving (jealous!), Amanda's stories of meeting R.L. Stein (almost as good as Ann M. Martin!), and Jenna's tales of rock climbing, I've gotta say that my "adventures" of a new place sure aren't as adventurous as theirs! However, next weekend Robyn, Nathaniel, and I are going to the Society of Psychophysiological Research conference in Austin and we're told that there's a band of neuroscientists that everybody goes to listen to and drink, so I'm sure hilarity will ensue (Bonnie, I'm hoping they blow the pants off Nagate!). Watch out for pictures! Miss you all!
Since the majority of the people who read this blog are family, I've decided to put up my favorite video I own. Last year for a graduation gift, my parents took me to Mexico. To make a long story short, our plane was delayed multiple times and so we went to Aunt Heide and Uncle Ed's house to hang out instead of waiting at the airport.
Heide and Ed had recently purchased a Wii, and Aunt Heide kept talking about how much fun it was. We ended up playing all of the Wii sports: baseball, golf, tennis, bowling, and boxing. Dad and I had a good time playing (and Uncle Ed had a good time kicking our butts in bowling), when mom decided she wanted to try. So they set it up to have mom and Aunt Heide box. The following video was the result of this showdown. There's no sound due to me using my old digital camera, but it's funny regardless. Please note that Aunt Heide wins and raises her hands in victory, while mom thinks it's a boxing move and tries to copy until she realizes that Aunt Heide kicked her butt.
After reading the Kitsap Sun website for 30 minutes in an outrage over people bad-talking a Judge whom I'm rather fond of, I found the funniest Letter to the Editor that I will share with you:
http://www.kitsapsun.com/news/2008/sep/04/letter-to-the-editor-hey-if-palins-qualified-so/ "LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Hey, If Palin's Qualified, So Am I
Over the last few days I have listened to an endless stream of voices justifying the nomination of Sara Palin by virtue of her superior executive experience. Persons ranging from from Katherine Simpson in South Kitsap to Sen. McCain himself have joyously proclaimed that Gov. Palin's 20 months of Alaska governorship plus four years as Mayor of burgeoning Wasilla, they calculate, gives her a huge edge, as Sen. Obama has not served as an executive.
This is happy news for me. Using that calculation, Gov. Palin has 48 months leading a town of 9,000 people, and 20 months as head of the 675,000-population state. This equates to an average experience of 290,000 people/months over 48 months. I presided in our fair county as a commissioner for a term, giving me an average experience of 240,000 people/months over 48 months. Given that I also have 40 months working for the state of Alaska, I figure we must be really close.
Therefore, given this readily attainable standard, I am hereby announcing that I am changing parties and will seek the Republican nomination for vice president of the United States.
Really, I never dreamed I was so qualified.
Tim Botkin"
Another Letter to the Editor was written in response to this (not nearly as fun or as nicely written) about how he was voted out of office--although it's important to note that he lost to another Democrat. ;)
Note: This is for humor and entertainment purposes only, not for a politcal agenda.
So as far as graduate school goes (errr, all four weeks of it thus far), things are going pretty well. I've got a grasp on the material covered in class, my lab students seem to love me and my teaching style (I've gotten two emails saying that they appreciate me, and a few students have sought me out in my office just to stop by and say hi), and the experiment that I'm doing for a woman at the Center of Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia is keeping me busy. I also accepted a tutoring gig for a student in the introductory psychology class (that's just an hour a week, but will help me brush up on intro psych and give me another thing to do to ease my boredom).
However, I was introduced to a ridiculous fact of graduate school that I will probably be faced with for the entirety of my career at Baylor. About two weeks ago, I received an email about our weekly Brown Bags. Usually, this is a grad student or professor who wants to present their research for practice or fun. According to Robyn, it's technically not mandatory but the year before, nobody ever attended so the grad students were told they were supposed to attend. Anyway, I've been to two of the three and for the most part, they're pretty entertaining. However, two weeks ago, we were told that a man who graduated from the PsyD program at BU in 2006 was coming to talk about Suicide Assessment/Prevention, and as psychology graduate students, it was "strongly recommended" that we attend. So, yesterday, I went to the presentation. Instead of being about Suicide Assessment and Prevention, it was about how the speaker (Craig...something or other) has developed a new way for patients to go through treatment for psychosocial diseases. Now, besides the fact that he kept saying PCP in reference to "primary care physicians" but I kept thinking about the drug, I basically had no interest in what he was saying whatsoever because I'm not a clinician, I am not going to graduate school to be a clinician, nor will I ever be one. The speaker spent 57 minutes (yes, I counted) talking about his new treatment plan (and to tell you the truth, I tried my hardest to pay attention but didn't find it new or interesting--in fact, everything he said made complete sense, so I'm not sure why it was supposed to be innovative, a lot of "We need PCPs to have more mental health training since insurance doesn't cover it"...uh, yeah, really?) and only 15 minutes at the end (yes, this is an hour talk, so it went over) talking about how it could be related to suicide assessment. Had I known the real topic, I probably wouldn't have gone; it's not related to anything I'm interested nor really care about it at this time. I could tell my main professor was a bit tiffed about it too, he did not look like he was happy about the topic difference either. A lot of people left early, though, so at least I was polite and stayed the whole way through.
Needless to say, it was pointless. Figures.
:) If you read all of that, I'm impressed!
Random. :) Hope you all are well and are enjoying your weekend!
I am loving my memory and cognition class for a couple reasons: it's so darn interesting and the professor is hilarious! For instance, two classes ago, he was lecturing about hearing phonemes (the smallest unit of speech; the sounds you can hear, such as [p] or [b]). Our brains automatically "hear" things in phonemes regardless of if they have meaning or not. Then he said that there was an Ozzie Osborne song that apparently, when played backwards said something like "Do it! Do it! Do it!" and "caused" a teenager to commit suicide. Thus, the logical thing was for the parents to sue Ozzie and his hidden messages! So Dr. Weaver said the following, "The song played forward said something like 'Kill your mother and dance on her grave,' but we're worried about what the message is when the song's played backwards saying 'Do it, do it, do it'?!" :) Multiply this by 100 and you have an entertaining professor that keeps the interest in cognition!
Today in class (mom, you'll get a kick out of this) Dr. Weaver was saying that the minimum amount of time to be "skilled" at something is 1000 hours of practice--and you can't really cheat this number. To be a "beginning expert" at something, you need at 2500 hours of practice. He mentioned that this is about as many hours as a child needs to read to get to college. He said that he'd argue the main factor of a child's performance in life stems from the amount of time they read when they were growing up. He said that it's not necessarily content, but hours practiced. He said he let his children read Goosebumps stories (remember those?!) because he knew that they were gaining reading skills regardless of the lack of "educational value" the books really have. Two things came to mind: One, Amanda Wilkins and I, trading Baby Sitters' Club books when one of us hadn't read a book the other one owned (and now look at us, both off on our own life goals at grad school!). Two, he joked that all of us in the class were probably "nerds" like him, reading the backs of cereal boxes while eating in the morning...mom, does that sound like us or what?! :) It's practice!
Since it's a post about funny professors, my stats professor is just a lovely, wonderful man. He's funny in a whole different way, but I laugh at least five times every class period. He was lecturing and a student asked a question, and Dr. Kirk called him by the wrong name. So Sean politely corrected him, and Dr. Kirk said, "I'm so bad at names. So's Jane! I should've married someone that was good with names instead of Jane." Then another girl said, "Well at least you remember her name!" and he responded with, "Well there was this one time where I called her by another name...and of course it was one of those intimate moments..." Uhh...:/ Everybody tried to keep a straight face but it was too hard! We burst out laughing, Dr. Kirk's face turned red, and we all had a bit of a hard time getting back to statistics!
In other news, Sarah and I went to our first BU football game last weekend when they played Washington State! Let me tell you, NOT a good representation of Washington as a whole, but Baylor won, so there's the upside! Here's a video of a "Sic 'em," which is the big Baylor chant. It's a lot of hoopla and then finally the actual "Sic 'em" (and it's pretty anticlimactic) but it's fun to see anyway!
Note: This is extremely loud, as I'm in a stadium full of screaming BU students, so turn your volume down low before you watch!
Also, here's a video of Chloe (again, rather loud, but in this one, I'm just giggling at Chloe. [Mom, notice that the antennae on the toy you bought her are about half the size as they used to be? It's 'cuz Chloe thinks shes a dog and ate them.]
Week 2, so far so good, but I'm already ready to go back home to Washington!
Since I don't really know anybody here and I have a lot of free time (so far, anyway) on the weekends, I decided to go to Hobby Lobby--for all of those of you who don't know what that is, basically it's like a huge Michael's or Jo-Ann's Fabrics. Anyway, apparently I happened to hit it on the right day, because it seemed like everything was half off! So I found a big clock that I liked, regularly $50, on sale for $25! I bought that and then some cut-out letters that I painted and put up in my room. Here are some pictures:
The clock far away
The clock, close up! The colors match with the decor perfectly! Here's a picture of the "SARAH" art project, complete with mini-clothespins to hold pictures!
I also got to decorate my office a bit more, and so I took pictures so you could see the layout. Remember that you can click on the pictures to make them bigger to see more detail!
Here's the actual desk space, pretty empty because I won't have a computer unless it's my laptop.
Here's the view if you walked into the door of the office and then turned right (if you turned left, you'd see the same thing but backwards, that's Robyn's side of the office).
Here's a close-up of the neat cloth-covered corkboard that Robyn made me as a "Welcome to the office" present! The chipboard pieces say "Sarah in TX."
One last picture before you go, here's Chloe's new favorite place to be in my house. It's in the tiny space between my desk and the sliding part that the keyboard goes on. She climbs up the back and then jumps up and sticks her cute little head through the hole. She looks pretty pissy in this picture, but I'm pretty sure it's because the flash is too bright for her bitty kitty eyes.
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