Airport fun!

People are funny. If you ever forget this, go to an airport.

Behind me on the plane were some kids talking about getting accepted into college. This is what I heard for 10 minutes while we waited for our plane to taxi into the gate:

"I'm freaking out. What if I don't get in? He didn't get in and he's, like, perfect. I'm just freaking out. Would you check for me? Wait, I want to do it myself. But I'm just freaking out! Did you look? No, I wanted you to look but not tell me. Wait, I want to do it myself. Well, maybe you should tell me. I'm freaking out!" And so on.*

Then I was just chilling, writing my paper during my 3 hour layover (which was only supposed to be an hour and a half), and the only plug I could find was right next to one of the moving sidewalks. There, a cute 10-year-old boy was walking backwards and watching his "unmoving" reflection in the windows. He was completely enthralled. A few minutes later, another cute boy did the same thing-- except he was 20- or 30- something.

Then there was the random gentleman who smiled at me and said, "Whoa, slow down there!" as I typed furiously, undoubtedly with my brow furrowed in intense concentration.**

And the best one yet, a final boarding call over the intercom: "We do love you here at Southwest, but we will leave you." Amen, brother.


*Not that I don't feel for her. I hope she gets in...

**If you are planning to do a paper at the last minute, in the airport, I advise you to reconsider, even if you want to leave right after your last final and have arranged your work schedule to make it possible. Not my best plan ever.

Sometimes life is kind of ridiculous

Today was funny. I turned off my alarm and went back to sleep at 5:30a instead of getting up to finish my paper. Fortunately, I woke up at 7:25a... just "in time" for my meeting at the health department at 7:45. Fortunately, I still had a friend's car from dropping him off at the airport last week. Fortunately, I was only 7 minutes late, and the meeting doesn't officially start til 8:00 (I just have to be early since I have the agendas). Fortunately, I left my hair done up after the party Saturday (and after church yesterday), so I took a shower in 2 minutes. That's five blessings in 35 minutes. I am so loved!

I almost got sucked into staying late for a project again, but I put my foot down because I still have a paper to finish before my final on Wednesday and my flight home Wednesday afternoon! Yay for being assertive.

When I left school tonight, the bus wouldn't start. But then, 5 tries later, it did start and we went on our merry way.

Days like today are amusing and make me realize how far I've come as a person-- I'm much more able to roll with the punches than I was a few years ago. Sometimes the type-A part of me is annoyed about that, but when it comes down to it, some things just can't be helped. And in a few days, or even a few hours, it won't matter that life didn't go exactly according to my perfectly-orchestrated plan. Jazz just wouldn't be jazz without some dissonance.

Snow... sort of. Rhode Island is trying!

So it finally snowed here!!! I was very excited, mostly because I grew up out west expecting December to look like this:


Or this:



But not everywhere can have the Rockies. I was just excited it snowed! There's always something great about the first snow, especially when there are kids around. The kids at church (especially the younger ones) were absolutely enamored. :)

And for good reason. I plan to go home and do this again:



I'm so excited to go back to CO! Merry Christmas, everyone!

Work of Art

So for the last couple of weeks I've been craving homemade pizza. I mean, you'd think after a few days I'd just stop thinking about it, but no. I definitely wanted homemade pizza.

Sadly, it takes a long time to put a pizza together. But I was determined, so one day I made the dough and shredded cheese. I was afraid the dough wouldn't rise because it's been so COLD around here, but I let it rise while I had something else in the oven, so it turned out fine. It took me two more days, but here is the actual finished product:

Lest you think I have lost any of my crazy flair for healthy food that tastes good, I'll tell you a secret: Under the red onions, green peppers, and cheese, there's also zucchini... and tofu spiced with garlic herb spaghetti sauce and fennel seeds. :) Still the same quirky Rachel. It was so good! Scoff if you will, but you know what they say--don't knock it 'til you try it!

So much to update...

This is me and my wonderful friend Ashley. She's in my MPH program.
She's always a great friend but has been especially helpful while my car looks like this:

I feel pretty blessed that my car looks so bad and I was not hurt badly-- these are some pics I took yesterday on a light hike just outside of Boston, just a week and a half after the accident:

I'm pretty grateful to be alive and kicking. Life is good!

And I thought my car was kind of poetic in a half-empty, half-full sort of way-- from the back, you'd never know there was any problem at all. Bye bye car! It's been fun. :)

Fall is reason enough never to live in the Bahamas...

October in Rhode Island means beautiful fall leaves!!! These pictures were actually taken in Connecticut, but even the drive down to CT was beautiful-- the highway is lined with trees on both sides and the sunlight streams in to light up the colors. My favorite is the one in the middle where you can see what I'm talking about. :) Some of the colors along the highway were even more startling, but I wasn't really in a position to take pictures.

You may be wondering why I was randomly in Connecticut-- one of my friends from BYU lives in NY, so Connecticut is kind of a half-way point for both of us. Still close to a two hour drive, but that's better than a four to five hour bus trip (I refuse to drive in NY)! So we met up in New Haven and went to this state park called Sleeping Giant State Park. We took a nature walk up to the top of this hill where there was a cool stone building from which we watched the moon come up and the sun set. And, to top it all off, the weather was perfect this weekend. Once it got dark it was a little cool, but otherwise it was probably upper 60s or low 70s... nice enough to forego a jacket.

Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink...

I saw a really interesting documentary this weekend (called "F.L.O.W") on water access all over the world and how strange it is that we take a perfectly free resource, and instead of purifying it and making sure everyone has access to it (since water is kind of necessary for life), we instead allow companies to bottle it up and sell it for ridiculous amounts, creating tons of waste and burning a lot of non-renewable energy in the process (thank you, bottled water). Even worse is the fact that bottled water, which most people assume to be safer than tap water, is actually less regulated than tap water. (I learned that in my freshman nutrition class too.) I still drink bottled water every once in awhile-- sometimes you need a bottle to carry around! But it made me feel sorry for my roommate who only drinks bottled water. And it made me feel sorry for the world since some scientists estimate that several places will run out of potable water in my lifetime...

It's interesting that water access should be such a huge issue when RI has been practically immersed in water since Friday... I now know the meaning of the famed "Nor'Easter" storms. We're talking torrential downpour-- I've never owned galoshes, but I need to get some!!! There are giant puddles and several inches of water on the ground. Every time the water evaporates a little, it starts to rain again. But there are two things wrong with these crazy storms: 1) There's no thunder and lightening-- just rain and clouds! and 2) It doesn't really cool down that much! In fact, it's been hotter this weekend than previously, and it's so muggy!!! It's very strange because I feel like I should be wearing dark colors-- but it's hot. So my fashion crisis continues... ha ha!

Food Fun

So I am already slacking on keeping this up to date, but I think I can use school starting as a reasonable excuse... I'm taking three classes, which doesn't sound like it should be that bad, but grad classes require way more reading than I was prepared for... My favorite class is Eating Cultures (surprise surprise). It's a humanities class that explores racial/social/other issues of food production and consumption, so I got it approved as one of my electives since eating is never just a science issue-- emotions, prior life experience, culture, even the economy all play a huge part in what people will eat. And since my save-the-world mission is to get people to eat well so they feel better, I figured this class would give me a better foundation for working with patients/clients effectively!

As my public health "good deed" today, here's an example of what not to eat:

Can you identify this object? Give up? It's a nectarine (or maybe a peach?), but you'd never guess that since apparently it decided to develop a thick winter coat after being accidentally abandoned in my cupboard for too long... So sad. :(

But maybe you can identify this:

It's pita bread!!! But not just any pita bread... Mostly whole wheat (I used a little white flour) and made by me!!!!!!!! I was so proud of myself. Of course, this is one of the best ones... They were not all round, and some of them didn't open very well since I used a cookie sheet instead of a pizza stone. But over all, success!

NY museums

The museums were my favorite though. I went to the Natural History Museum first and spent a long time there. The aquatics floor was awesome; there was a gigantic blue whale hanging from the ceiling in one room and tons of specimens were together on a wall-- shells, fish, etc. Random trivia fact: Sea turtles have a different swimming pattern than other aquatic turtles. They flap their "arms" up and down, more like flying instead of the scooping (breaststroke) kind of motion used by other turtles.

Then I went to the Met (Metropolitan Museum of Art), but I was kind of tired by that point so I only spent a couple hours there. So I only went through three exhibits: Byzantine Empire, Near Eastern (like Syria, Iran, and Assyria), and a Superheroes exhibit. The Near Eastern stuff was cool because I’d learned some history about that area in a Writings of Isaiah class at BYU; Assyria had a lot to do with Israel’s issues in Isaiah’s time. Some of the images of people reminded me of pictures I’ve seen in Primary lessons…

The Superhero exhibit also really swept me away. It focused on Superheroes as icons in our society for ideals of power, speed, and everything that defies vulnerability. Giorgio Armani helped put together the exhibit, so there were several haute couture dresses in addition to actual costumes from movies. The old Catwoman costume was there, as was the newest Batman costume and the Superman costume worn by Christopher Reeves in 1978! Becca, you especially would have loved this exhibit—it made a lot of connections between visual images and the ideals they are meant to represent. It’s interesting to think about fashion as a cycle—ideas from comic books wind up influencing haute couture, but the same ideas trickle back down into the clothing that normal people wear too.

Statue of Liberty!

After Maddie got to see Providence, we went back to New York. We spent the first day doing every tourist thing possible—the things you see just to say that you’ve seen them. We went to Times Square (very crowded, as expected), took the Statten Island Ferry past the Statue of Liberty, and walked around in the biggest branch of the New York Public Library (which had painted ceilings reminiscent of, but not nearly as cool as, the ceilings in a lot of the universities in Spain).

Waterfire in Providence

I also took Maddie to “Waterfire,” which is Providence’s quirkiness at its best. There’s a river that runs through downtown, and every other week during the summer, the city lights fires all the way down the river. Half the city turns out, and random music plays the whole night while people walk along the riverwalk. This time, music included some Celtic ballad, Indian music, and salsa, as well as a couple of other things. Providence definitely has a small-town feel. As Maddie put it, it kind of reminds me of BYU where we do all kinds of random, quirky things to have fun (that don’t usually fit into people’s ideas of “partying”). The only thing is, Providence doesn’t have the excuse of being Mormon! That makes it even funnier.

Beach day with Maddie!

School's over for the summer! Maddie came to visit for a weekend at Scarborough State Beach. We didn't go until later in the day when people were starting to leave, so it wasn't as packed, and it was so relaxing!!! It was a nice break from the whirlwind week in which I had finished my final paper and presented my work at the MPH poster session, where my supervisor and two others from work showed up. (Unexpectedly, since it had been a busy week at work too!) I got tired of standing around and answering questions, but defending my project to other people got me a little more excited to continue work on the project (since I just took an ongoing QP project and tied it up into something nice for school) and reminded me of the reasons (e.g. helping people) for doing such a project.

Dinner on a train-- Aug 20

I’m doing my research assistantship at a company called Quality Partners. For our annual summer outing was a scenic train and boat tour of Newport (the original Rhode Island version, not the CA version). This is me having dinner on the train:

In my continued spirit of trying new random things, I also ate part of an orchid. That’s right, the flowers they used as garnishes were edible, so I tried one! The texture was good—thick and firm without being crunchy—but it wasn’t too flavorful. Much like iceberg lettuce, the most noticeable taste was water. However, it is cool to be able to say that I’ve eaten a flower.

Kayaking at Naragansett Beach

I have to take exploring one step at a time, because it's been a lot of change in was a very short time! But one weekend I was adventurous enough to go kayaking with a friend from school. She and I went to a place down south. The river was pretty tranquil, and we were lucky because the beach gorgeous, and we got to be in the part that wasn't crowded at all! (Unlike the other people who had to drive to the beach-- beaches are packed here, every weekend!)















I found a crab,
and Lexie thought it was the grossest thing ever, but I thought it was cool. :)

Opening Remarks...

Hi fam! I thought I would start a blog to show you some pictures of life in RI and keep you in the loop. Love you all!