Life Like That

I heard this song on the radio yesterday...it's pretty much amazing.  Life Like That - Sidewalk Prophets

Leap Year

Happy Leap Day!  My day started with the usual cup of lovely coffee on the way downtown for class.  After my brain was as full as it could be I headed back home for the ladies to come over to celebrate the fact you only get this day once every four years.  We obviously needed chips, salsa, and chocolate because that is our standard operating procedure.  I promptly locked my keys and cell phone in the car.  Thankfully I have a spare at the house and the grocery store is only 5 minutes from the house so Brandy came to the rescue.  And now we are enjoying the movie Leap Year and dreaming about a Christmas trip to Ireland/London/Scotland...no really...we are feeling it.

Zzzzzzzzz

My posting history is tragic and the year is barely started...apparently PhD students don't have blogs.  Either that or they don't have jobs.  I barely have the energy to type but I feel obligated to at least let everyone know that I am in fact still alive.  I finally went to my blog list and started reading the blogs I used to follow all the time and realized that it's been since...wait for it...November since I read any of them.  Which then made me realize it's been quite some time since I posted my own.  So, here are a few of the highlights and lowlights from the past month...



- my grandfather died

- all my cousins and aunts and uncles had a beautiful celebration of his life

- I'm loving the job

- in a very scary way I'm loving statistics...I know, clearly I need mental health assistance

- it just took me an hour to organize my list of things to do...that is NEVER a good sign

- I've eaten my weight in s'mores and ice cream as rewards for just getting through some days

- I've drank my weight times 8 in coffee as rewards for just getting out of bed



A few facts I've learned in the past month...

- the word occupation in occupational therapy means the things that 'occupy' your time...it makes so much more sense now.  By the way OTs are kinda amazing I figured out in the process of learning about them.

- reviewing 9233 articles to find the ones that relate to my literature review can actually be just one of the to-do items on a list of 20 things to do this week...tragic

- it seems as though literature reviews may be a pretty standard 'oh, I need to do a literature review real quick' thing in my life for the next 4 years...and beyond

- you can in fact listen to the same Jesus Culture DVD over and over again every night while you study and it never get old

- Words with Friends and Scramble are spectacular ways to take a mental break from studying...again, the fact my 'break' is a word game likely lines me up for the mental health assistance

- Emoticons are very addictive...if you do not know what this is get yourself an iPhone and download them, I'm in love (I would insert an emoticon with hearts in it's eyes here if this was a text)



So...happy random Thursday.  I'm giving up on accomplishing anything else tonight and instead I'm going to head to bed.

Panama 2011...at long last

It's January.  We went to Panama in June.  It's absurd, I know.  But, I will not be deterred.  There are a lot of people that sent me money or supplies or prayers for our team or notes that they were thinking of me!  And because of them I WILL post pictures from Panama 2011!  In the interest of sanity, you will unfortunately not get the in depth story of the past two years.  The amount of reading is already stacking up on my desk and the semester is only 3 days in.  But, before I begin, I am doing this!  

In some ways the Kuna Islands in 2011 were the same as they always are.  The people are beautiful.  The trip is hard.  The islands are hot.  You feel motivated and exhausted at the same time.  But the trip this year was also very different.  The islands were more commercialized because they were closer to the mainland - in fact one of the Silas actually spoke English.  And the islands were smaller, we were usually done clinic half way through the second day on each island.  Because we were closer to the mainland we drove to the boats instead of flew...that will likely not be happening again now that we've lived through the experience to see another day :)  No soldiers this year, and the team was bigger so there was a different group dynamic.  In some ways that was sad because we had such an amazing group dynamic last year, but in other ways it was good.  You learn different things when you are in different groups, and part of what I love about going on these trips is how much I learn.  We had a service team this year, which was really cool because they did different tasks around the island as people needed help.  We had more translators which was wonderful.  And at the end of the trip we stayed for an extra day in Panama City which was a nice way to decompress and see part of the country that we never get to see other than out the window of the plane.  

Every year, it is a privilege to be part of the missions team.  I am blessed beyond measure to have been able to go, and to those of you who gave me support in so many way, thank you.  

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The 2012 Wishbone

Apparently it's 2012. Classes started yesterday, which means all those good intentions for all those exciting blog posts and all those long talks into the night to catch up with friends and all those to do list items that didn't make the priority list when the semester were in but I was sure would get done during break are back on the back burner. Last semester I was taking 12 credits and could barely keep up with the reading. This semester I am taking 15 credits and working 30 hours a week...riiiight.

So, expect blog posts to not increase readily, however, I am planning to try to post short funny stories to remind everyone who cares to know that I am still alive that indeed I am still alive :) The first of these stories you get today...

When Brandy and I were cleaning up the beach house getting ready to head back home we found the wishbone from the turkey we had cooked that week. We figured we may as well break it and each took a side to pull. 30 seconds later the top of the wishbone that tells you who gets their wish came flying off the top and flew across the room and Brandy and I stood there laughing at the broken pieces in our hands. And that is how 2012 began ladies and gents...expect a rather random and unexpected ride :)

Simply remember

...I simply remember my favorite things and then I don't feel so bad...


When I am in the need for a few I can simply remember some of my favorite things of Christmas Eve 2011...coffee with devotions, icing chocolate roll cookies and eating half of them, sneaking through the aisles of Walmart, little faces staring at the candles at service, singing carols while finding lights for the first time in charleston...in essence having a beautiful day to just enjoy Christmas.







Merry Christmas!

Belated Thankfulness

A few days ago in a devotional I am reading the author asked 'What opportunities have you been given recently to profess the goodness and faithfulness of God?'  As I thought about the question I realized I had a huge situation to profess the goodness and faithfulness of God but was so busy I never even mentioned it...which is generally the way God's goodness and faithfulness gets missed by the way.  So here it is...I just finished my first semester of a PhD program and although I had only one mortgage payment of savings going into it and no paycheck, my bills have been paid, I am not in credit card debt and I never once begged for food or gas.

Even just typing it, I can tell it's tough to explain just how amazing this really is.  As of August 10th I had no job, school started in 15 days, I had a prospect of a job but the process of actually getting it was going to take a while, and financial aid hadn't arrived yet.  When it did arrive it would have paid my tuition and given me about $500 to support myself for 4 months.  First I got an e-mail from my program director that I had been given a scholarship to help cover my tuition for the first 2 semesters.  That allowed financial aid to actually go to living expenses.  But the job situation still didn't move faster.  I was offered a contracting position to help write a strategic plan which would provide a few hours of work each week.  But even adding that to my work at church I wasn't going to be brining in enough to pay the mortgage each month.  Then it gets good.  I won my very first poster presentation at a medical conference which gave me a cash reward.  A friend asked me to give a presentation to one of her classes and had money from the school to pay me.  Three random refunds that I had been waiting on came through right when bills were due.  I found out that the little bit of money I had put in a Roth IRA 5 years ago could be used for school expenses.  Brandy moved in which meant that once she started getting paychecks we would be splitting expenses.  And then last week I won a random drawing at school and got a Visa card.  I mean honestly, that is random people.

So, perhaps this is not the funniest or most engaging story ever, but it is life, and it's proof positive that God knows what's happening whether it seems like it or not.  One of the things that is most amazing is rather than God just providing a big lump of money that made it so I didn't have to worry about it again, He just made money come in when it needed to be there.  My bank account balance spent most of the past 4 months in the 10s, sometimes in the 100s, but it never went negative.  $100 here, $50 there just in time to pay what needed to be paid.  I don't think I would have realized how amazing or been aware God was watching over me if He had just made a lump of money available.  And so, rather than ignoring it or saying a cursory thank you and moving on, I decided to give a verbal (well written) testimony of God's goodness and faithfulness.  I hope it encourages someone to trust that God's got your back even if you don't see how He can possibly pull it off.  Believe me, when I add up the numbers it still doesn't make sense, but it's December, my bills are paid, I have money to buy food and fill up my car with gas and I'm starting my new job on Monday just in time to get a paycheck to pay the mortgage next month.

Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good and his steadfast love endures forever. (Psalm 107:1)

An Eskimo Hallelujah Chorus

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Alive Again

I found this poem today:

God hath not promised skies always blue. 

Flower-strewn pathways all our lives through. 

God hath not promised sun without rain, 

Joy without sorrow, peace without pain.

But God hath promised strength for the day, 

Rest for the laborer, light on the way; 

Grace for the trial, help from above, 

Unfailing sympathy, undying love.

In case you didn't notice, it's December.  The second Thanksgiving without my mom was in some ways harder than the first.  Last year felt sad, this year felt empty.  We were all there.  We all had fun.  We all enjoyed each other.  But something was missing.  I think Christmas this year may be similar.  So, I'm prepping myself by reminding myself of what God has already done in my life since August 19, 2010.  If He can do all that he has done in a little over a year than certainly he can get me through the second Christmas without my mom.  As Matt Maher sings in Alive Again - I can see the light before I see the sunrise...The sun rise is coming at some point, right now I'm going to celebrate strength for the day and the light that is slowly chasing away the darkness.

The Journal Stacks

Today I was searching for articles for 3 projects I need to do in the next few weeks.  It's very handy if you search from on campus because the websites with journal access will automatically recognize you and allow you to download the papers as a PDF.  Occasionally you will find a paper that is in some random journal that the library doesn't have and that doesn't have online access and you need to request an interlibrary loan, which generally means I'll find a new paper, because I'm lazy like that.  But, for one topic I was looking at there really weren't all that many interesting papers and I have to read WAY too many journal articles to read non-interesting ones on purpose.  So, I went ahead and clicked the 'Find it at MUSC' link...which I found out was in actuality for this one how to find it in the physical bound journals on the shelves upstairs.  WHAT?  You want me to get up from the computer and FIND this thing!?  What century is this!?  But I felt like a bum if the only reason I didn't read an article was because I had to do some legwork.  So, up I went, with my copy card loaded with money that was given to us at the beginning of the semester (when I was SURE I would never need it).  I arrived in the journal region and stopped dead in my tracks as I saw something along these lines...

I'm pretty sure it's been a solid decade since I needed to find something in the midst of THAT.  I informed my brain that 'I really can do this, get yourself to finding the Journal of the National Medical Association Volume 101'.  To make a long story short, here I sit reading my article on exploring socioeconomic variations in diabetes control strategies, none the worse for wear but certainly distressed by how difficult I made that process out to be.  As Jen said when I told her 'what has technology done to us?'