Fellow grad school friends: do you ever have those days where. . .

you feel like you can't graduate fast enough?  I am having a lot of those days.

A shout-out

I want to send a shout-out to our friend Matt who is taking the NC Bar exam today and tomorrow. Go Matt! Kick some butt! We're praying for you!

Adventures in Maryland

Last week, we went to visit Ben's brother and family in Maryland. Ally got to play with her cousin Simon who is also 2 years old, as well as Javi, the big black lab.  I think she had a lot of fun with both of them. Here are a couple pics of Ally and Simon at Adventure Playground, where they kind of look like they could be hosting a talk show.

We also took a trip to the Baltimore Aquarium.  I had heard a lot of good things about it, and Ben had gone when he was younger and growing up around the area.  Despite the crowds of people, we got to see some cool sea life.  Ally's favorites were the blue crab, the sharks, and the sea turtle. 

We did have one unanticipated adventure:  a trip to the ER.  Ally took a pretty serious tumble down a flight of stairs and got a large gash on her head and an abrasion on her back.  But a couple hours, 11 stitches, and 2 popsicles later, she seemed to be back to her old self.  Now she talks about how she fell down the stairs,  got booboos on her head and back, that she cried when she got the stitches, and that she has to be careful on Simon's stairs. 

La Fête Nationale

I will start off with a disclaimer. I am not French. The closest I come to French in my blood is my French Swiss relatives on my dad's side. I think one of my cousins might be from Belgium but I'm not 100% sure. But I did take French from 7th-12th grade and I minored in it in college, and we did learn about French history and literature. So July 14th always comes to mind because it is Bastille Day, or La Fête Nationale. I would say the celebrations are probably pretty similar to our July 4th celebrations. And of course, it's not complete without listening to La Marseillaise, the French National Anthem. If you need to get yourself pumped up for something, just listen to it a few times; it is pretty rousing. Vive la France!

IRB approval, part 1

I just got the approval letter from the IRB at the Cancer Center regarding my dissertation project. Now I will submit everything to the Biomedical IRB so they can review my project too (since I'm using both cancer patients and healthy people, I have to go through two IRBs, and the reviews have to be done consecutively). It took about a month and a half to get IRB approval from the Cancer Center, so hopefully the Biomedical IRB will be about the same.

In other news, our lab is finally getting cleaned up from the flood.

Quiet summer

Summer has been quietly rolling along. Ben is working in his lab mentoring his two summer students and I am working in the vicinity of my lab writing a review paper. (The facilities crew still has not put our lab back together since the flood on May 27th, and my protocols are still in the hands of the IRB, so I can't do any dissertation work right now.) It is so nice though to have a relaxed schedule; we go in when we want and come home when we want and don't do any schoolwork once we're home. Therefore, we've been spending lots of family time together playing at the park, going out for ice cream, and scouting out the annual inventory sale at A Southern Season, or "Sample Time" as Ally calls it (for obvious reasons). But one of our favorite activities has been going swimming at the free community pool. I can't believe we did not figure out there was a free pool around here until this summer. It has been amazing. We go every Saturday morning with our friend Victoria and her 2-year old daughter (and Ally's best friend) Elaina. It is such an amazing way to beat the heat. I'll bet you're thinking, "Free pool, must be crowded." I was afraid of that too. But it is the opposite, at least in the mornings when we go. There is also a kiddie pool, so the girls can wade around without flotation assistance. And an unexpected but very much welcome bonus after the morning swim: a long nap!