clap hands!

So I had myself a wonderful break---got to eat dinners with the family, visit the Field Museum with a hilarious boy (AND buy mold-o-ramas!), rock out at a concert/laser light show, fly to Minneapolis for a wedding shower and drive back in the same day (yeah Ya-Ya road trips!), make scarves, play with my dog, celebrate birthdays, go on dates, laugh heartily with old friends, party-hop for New Year's, and, of course, get tipsy in bars with cherished people I see not often enough. Heck, I even got to compare feet with three of my best girl friends! I had myself quite a time.

Oh but what I did NOT do over break, such as truly work on my MSR proposal. Which is what I'm attempting at the moment and have been attempting all the livelong day. To make things just a tad more hilarious than they are right now, this proposal's deadline is Friday, and if I don't make deadline, I can't apply for next year's classes. And if life wasn't funny enough, it turns out I will have to attempt to fill out even more forms for the submission of my project to the Institutional Review Board....something I found out TODAY! Woot!

I think my current treatment of this state of affaris has to do with my having about 4 hours of formal sleep (my own doing---I just can't stop hanging out) before taking one of the bumpiest flights I've ever taken. I "slept" through most of it (I bet I got a bunch of stage 2); but I remember seeing a blurred, no-glasses vision of the back of a panicky elderly lady sitting bolt-upright, two rows ahead of me. She should have followed my stupendous method of anxiety control: pretend you're on a really bumpy car-ride and drift back to sleep! Seriously though, at one point I was shaken awake enough to be groggily thinking "I should've worn a sports bra." And if you know me, that IS a feat.

So life over here is just silly. And here all I want to do is skip on over to the Fitness Center for a week of Team-Based Learning (another adventure! Let's get all 136 of us separated into groups of 5-6 based on our complimentary learning styles and compete for answers AS a learning-game! ) and relax before starting up Pediatrics. Oooooo I cannot wait for this week to be over!