Free Will Astrology?

For the past year we have been ever so blessed to be read our Free Will Astrology horoscopes in class on Fridays. My friend Stacy is addicted to it. I just love the complete irony of the moronic idea that there IS such a thing as free will astrology. How can this be?
Well, to give you a taste of the fun I've had this last year, here is my horoscope from last week:

"The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place," said Pablo Picasso, "from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing stranger, from a spider’s web." Now substitute your own name for "the artist" in the above statement, Scorpio, and you'll have your assignment for the coming week. In other words, be alert for and open to the feelings flooding toward you from every direction. Regard the whole world as a giant classroom where you'll be taking a crash course to upgrade your emotional intelligence.

But my favorite has got to be the time when Stacy's horoscope foretold an immaculate conception:

Flora, a Komodo dragon in a British zoo, recently became pregnant and hatched five babies without ever having had contact with a male. This is the first recorded virgin birth among her species. She's your power animal for the coming weeks, Sagittarius. Whether you're female or male, you too now have the power to spawn a beautiful brainchild without being intellectually or emotionally fertilized by anyone. That of course doesn't mean you should avoid the kind of intimate interactions that would fructify you. On the contrary, I urge you to seek those out in abundance. But my point is that you don't need them in order to be a fount of creativity.

To partake in the absurdity, visit http://www.freewillastrology.com/horoscopes/
Trust me. it's hilarious....

There and back again

So I'm back. I needed a full six hour nap yesterday to recover from the craziness these past few days and now I'm about 90% functional. Bottom line - it was probably the craziest trip I've ever been on. And I think I consumed more alcohol in two days than I have all together since Jeff and I got married. Don't worry I didn't get drunk and act like a fool (unlike SOME people I know:), but I did enjoy myself. Here are some fun pictures:

This is the beach right by the Yakina Head lighthouse in Newport. We had a beautiful weekend, the weather was great!

We attempted to go tide pooling, but the tide was way to far in. We had a really good time anyway. These are some of my school buddies...

After quite a few in the bar the last night... and trying to get Mike to remove his hat. We've never seen his hair.

And the highlight of the evening? Our professor burning the intrinsic system of coagulation. If only we could do that to our tests!!

Aside from the fun we had during free time, the lectures were incredibly informative and very interesting. The NW Medical Teams lecture definitely reinforced my desire to go overseas. I was able to get some information to continue researching now that I'm home.

The body fluids lecture was given by the woman who wrote my textbook, which was pretty incredible. She was a very dynamic speaker, and I really appreciated the amount of information she was able to go through in that 3.5 hour time period. It was impressive, and really helpful.

The most interesting lecture I attended was the infectious diseases of biofilms. I'm still ruminating that one around in my head. It was a presentation of a very large problem in clinical microbiology that still has no answer. It made clinical research very appealing. I won't go into details for fear of boring you non-science people to death.

Last, but not least, the greatest thing I took away from this trip was a bit of advice given to me by Dr. Leclaire of the University of Massachusetts regarding extended education. She sat down and gave me and a few friends a large list of possibilities to pursue in the future. One of the programs she mentioned is in development by the ASCLS right now, and is going to be proposed in front of the legislature this July. It is a Doctor of Clinical Laboratory Science, a position that would be the liaison between the medical doctors and the clinical lab. It would require several years of medical training (making rounds etc) to be able to help MDs to order tests correctly, to explain the results, etc. I asked her how MDs feel about a position like this being instated and she said that all the feedback they have had has been extremely positive. How cool is that? I'm really really hopeful about this and would love to pursue it when it is started in a few years. In the meantime she suggested I look into getting a Masters in Public Health if I want to pursue the angle of infectious diseases, epidemiology, parasites, etc. since most graduate science programs don't necessarily educate from a clinical perspective. So I'm going to look into that.

It was an awesome trip, and I'm glad I went! I'm already looking forward to next year :)

The beach, and going overseas

So I leave tomorrow morning at 5:30 am to head to the beach! I'm attending a medical symposium in Newport with pretty much all my classmates. I will be sharing a room with a bunch of friends, and I'm so looking forward to it! We are required to attend a lecture for extended education credit, so I'm going to three. :) In case you care, I'm attending: Body Fluids, Infectious Diseases, and NW Medical Teams in Mali, Africa.
I'm most looking forward to the NW Medical Teams lecture because it is something that I've been wanting to do for a long time now. I've always wanted to go overseas and use my talents to help people, but it's never really seemed feasible (especially since my hubby isn't really into that kind of thing). But there is a lady at my church who is a coordinator for NW Medical Teams and now I'm super excited about the possibility of going overseas! They mostly do short-term trips, about 2-4 weeks long.
As a Medical Technologist, I'd probably be doing a lot more tropical medicine type stuff (looking for parasites etc), because I'm not sure how much chemistry you can really do in a 3rd world country. There is a lot of reagents and stuff for each test, I can't see it being really feasible! But that's ok, because I love parasites, it's so much fun learning about them.
Anyway, I've decided that I'd love to take at least one trip a year for two weeks or so to do this. Just thinking about going to some random country like Mali makes me super happy (By the way, the Putamayo Presents: Mali album is awesome. I got it this past summer and is so much fun to listen to, if you like world music...).
I'll be back on Saturday.