MIT Open Course Ware

It is entirely possible that I have blogged about this before and can't remember...but I have spent a bit of time looking at yet another very exciting website. MIT has put the syllabus online for pretty much all of their courses at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm through MIT open course ware. This means you can basically take any of the courses that MIT offers. Say you wanted to teach yourself Differential Equations?? You could go on, download the course, buy the textbooks and take the test that MIT students have to to take. I remember coming across the site about six months ago and thinking it was very cool - but I haven't really taken a look at it until now (because I was too busy with real school). I think any nerd like me couldn't help but get very excited about the possibilities of self education through this program. It makes me feel all warm and tingly inside. Tonight, I downloaded both Major Poets and Introduction to Cancer Biology.

On the homefront, we are all getting very geared up for Christmas; my family is coming over on Sunday and then we will spend Christmas Day with Ariel's family. Ariel has been reading the Christmas story to the kids each night and then letting them open up a stocking stuffer. If I can get off in time, I think I am going to take the kids to the local Methodist Church's Family Christmas Service. We don't have a regular church and I happen to be missing some of the traditions this year.

Whom to Vote For?

I passed my final exams, the kids are asleep, and thanks to a brilliant suggestion by my friend Matt to use Google Reader, I am finding myself with an extra twenty minutes today.  I am going to use that time to contemplate my choices for president - and I hope, maybe to start a bit of dialogue about what others are thinking. 

 I need to start the sorting of my thoughts with total honesty; in the deepest, darkest recesses of my heart I really want to live in Sweden.  I want everyone to have quality health care, I want children in inner-city schools to have AP and music classes, I want poor elderly people to have decent housing, I want prisoners to have gardens, and I want to cut our military-industrial complex to help eliminate poverty and build schools throughout the entire world. I am also completely comfortable with the idea of being taxed like crazy to pay for it. I also understand that this isn't going to happen anytime soon, and there may be a lot of really good reasons why it shouldn't - but it is still what I want. 

 So whom should I vote for? There are a lot of things that come to mind right away. I want someone who I feel is competent, and who I don't think would make me nauseated every time I heard them on television. I am trying to separate out my emotional reaction to individuals and see a bigger picture. I really like some of the policies John Edwards has put forward. I feel a little fluttering of inspiration in my stomach when I listen to Barack Obama. I think Hillary Clinton could be a very competent president (and she's a Seven Sisters Alumna, too), but there are a lot of buts to the idea of her as a candidate. I kind of secretly love Dennis Kucinich. I have been pretty impressed by both Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee at times. 

 While my Dad is a major political junkie, I get worn out very quickly, but I still am excited about the coming election, especially if I can avoid watching any campaign commercials. 

A breather

School is finished for three weeks. I found out that I got on A on my evil, hated research paper. I don't yet know the results of my final - but I think that karma is lining up for me. In the meantime, I feel as if I have a bit of breathing room - and I am loving it. This weekend I didn't have to study, I slept in until 9 (Thank you Ar!) and ate a lot of Christmas goodies. We went to Ar's family Christmas party. I baked bread and made soup and our lovely friends Ryan and Elizabeth came over to eat it. I watched an entire DVD of Veronica Mars (judge not) and have begun to contemplate my presidintial choices. I read an entire New Yorker. It was wonderful. I don't think I realized quite how stressed and tired I had become until it was over. Above is the picture of the Isaacson cousins at the family Christmas party.

Sing O Muse.....

My Sister in Law, Aimee is a genius. I have known her since she was a dreamy ten year old, and I cannot believe how talented a cermacists she is. She made all of these projects for her community college ceramics class after only one year of classes. She has just the amazing combination of artsiness and a detailed perfectionism that makes her work incredible. I hope these pictures do her project's justice, because they take my breathe away, they are so good. She is going to have her own solo show sometime in the next year, hopefully.

I am actually the model for this one - which is why I consider myself her muse, although that may be a bit of stretch. I cannot wait to see what she produces next, or what her future will hold.

If you are interested in purchasing any of her work or commissing something, just let me know.

Pop Quiz

Which thing makes a day the least fun;
1) Having to take a really tough final and not knowing how you did
2)Having a not-so-great day at work afterwards
3) Getting a call from the ER saying your Mom is there (she is totally fine, she just had some chest pain that turned out to be pleurisy)
4) Coming home, trying to make a margarita and spilling the entire jug of mix all over the kitchen??

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God Damn it, you've got to be kind."
- Kurt Vonnegut

O Valencia

I think I have blogged quite a bit what a slog the last few weeks have been - but tonight I felt like I had a breakthrough. Instead of being cooped up at home, I took the kids to the local Y to go swimming. Ar thought I was stark raving mad to take the four kids myself - but it ended up being a blast, and on the way home we sang Old Macdonald at the top of our lungs. Then they actually went to bed without protesting too much (although I can hear them whispering very loudly to each other)....now I am embedding myself in front of the computer to finish working on my evil paper. I decided to post the video for The Decemberist's O Valencia. I have been playing this album the entire time I work on my paper. It is by far my favorite album this year (well, it came out last year, but I am not very hip, so it's okay)

Last year's Christmas Pictures

Hmmm...I was really hoping to have our new family Christmas card pic's to post today, but Ariel's business Christmas card from last year is just going to have to do. We were going to take the pictures on Sunday at the zoo, but it snowed, and we didn't make it. I didn't leave the house or my sweats the entire day. In the end, it all worked out for good. We had a wonderful day at home, the kids had a blast in the snow, and I managed to finish the rough draft of my major nursing research paper. At one point, I actually liked the subject I had chosen (prenatal screening for major depressive disorder), but now I consider it an evil beast that I must kill. It is due by Friday, so I have a few days to polish it up and turn it in.
After the paper and one test, and I am home free until after Christmas break :). I am already salivating at the books I want to read, and fun I plan to have with the kids.

Today at work was very slow...and so I wasted a bit of time on the internet. One thing I came across was the National Outdoor Leadership School's Wilderness Medicine Institute. I really, really hope that some day I can go to some of it scares me. I no longer freak out about people not breathing, or A-Fib, or vomit, thanks to plenty of experience, but I want to run away if there is a major injury invovled. Wilderness medicine training seems like a great way to start to get some experience.

I posted quite awhile ago about how our dog Itchy had had a seizure. Given that he is around 20 years old, we didn't think he had long to live - but he seemed to be doing okay for several weeks. Last night he had another seizure and took a turn for the worse. I am pretty suprised that he lived through the night. He is doing a little better today, and he isn't in any pain (we would have him put down if seemed to be suffering), but he is definitely dying. Neither Ar or I go crazy over our dogs, but now that we are saying goodbye, I am really suprised at how sad it makes me. He is such a good dog, and we all really love him. Isaac was having a hard time for awhile, and gave Itchy a stuffed puppy to keep him company.

Feeling sad at saying goodbye to Itchy has made me feel all contemplative...a big part of my job as an oncology nurse is to watch and help people with their dying. I love that part of my job. I know it really bothers some people, but it just doesn't scare me anymore. Sometimes there are people that I am just angry about their deaths, people that are just too young to die, or people whose families are in turmoil, which can bring a lot of ugliness.

I feel like it is a real privelege to help people and their families through it all. Dying can be pretty awful, but it is also a wonderful thing for people to be able to say goodbye to their loved ones. I hope that when those that are closest to me die, I have time to say good bye. I like my life messy, and being able to be with people when they die opens me up to so much that is real and special about being human. I don't think I am a very articulate contemplator, but that will have to do.

I am Atrayu.

I fear that this is how many of us in Washington have either felt or actually looked like in the past few days. Our family was lucky enough that our only ill effects from the big storm and flood was the loss of the internet for a few days. Today Ariel and I actually had enough sunshine to take the kids and dog for a walk...Combining that with have one big paper turned in and another test under my belt, kids in bed, and a half hour of reading time, life is starting to look up a bit. By the weekend it might even look like......

'Tis the Season

There was great celebration at our house tonight - just in time for the opening weekend of Christmas celebrations and it started to snow!! Shkuri was especially excited about her first glimpses. She has been asking about snow for several weeks now - she somehow knows that snow and Christmas just go together. Today we made and decorated Christmas cookies and tomorrow we are going to go get our tree and bring out the Playmobil Advent Calender I bought in Berlin last year. The kids watched Home Alone for the first time this evening, while I caught up with some much needed studying.
Ariel went on his annual Christmas shopping trip with his Dad and Brother. He is spending the evening with them and Isaac watching the best of The Banff Mountain Film Festival. A bunch of his Mountain Biking friends got him to go last year and he was very impressed.
I read something the other day that was hysterical - Ben Harper (the singer) was being interviewed in Outside magazine. When asked about what sports he does, he said "I have four kids. Having four kids IS an extreme sport".
In that vein...Ar and I have been dealing with a new bump on the adoption road. We knew going into this what the girls had been through....they come from a war torn region of Somalia called the Ogaden Desert, their Mother died in childbirth with a third child, and their father brought them to an orphanage, telling the social workers "he didn't know if he would make it". We also knew that young, adopted children often deal with their grief and anger in not so obvious ways. Over the last few weeks Shkuri has been expressing some rather scary rage; she completely flies off the handle at the smallest incidences. In a house with three siblings who like to annoy each other - there are a lot of small incidences. I basically deal with it by holding her in her bed until she is calm enough to talk to, which sometime takes up to a half hour. I suppose that in some ways it is progress - she does not do anything like this anywhere else, so I know she must be feeling fairly safe with us to act out like that. It is really, really hard and exhausting, however. I do feel like I am learning something from it - I think I may emerge from all this completely Zenned out. I am learning how to not get upset and react when she lashes out, but wait it out. Somedays, Ar and I feel like we are in way over our heads.