More Reading Material For Your Pleasure

Today I added links to two blogs (o.k. one and a web magazine) which I have spent several hours browsing and reading some very interesting material.

Other than that I'm afraid I don't have much time for a proper post. We're going on a family field trip this weekend and I haven't started to pack yet.

Coming and Going

Well these past few weeks have flown by because I have been busy visiting potential grad. schools. I just got back from a very nice visit at the University of Minnesota. Located in downtown Minneapolis this campus has a very different feel than Ann Arbor. I'm not sure that I really want to go to school in a major metropolis but the school has lots going for it including a great Epi. program, John Piper's Church, a Navigators group, and it seems there are lots of cute guys in the Epi program (just kidding).The bad part about this school is that housing is expensive and good housing seems to be few and far between.

After visiting the school mom and I paid a visit to the Mall of America. Ever since I was a little kid we have wanted to go and we had lots of fun walking around and around. We ate in this great little restaurant that reflected the regional cuisine of Napa Valley in CA. We even paid a visit to lego land where I saw the coolest lego ever, a huge replica of the incomplete death star from Star Wars Ep.4.

Of course we had plane problems returning home, which seems to be an constant problem whenever we travel. Overall it was a very good visit, now I'm just waiting to see if I get into the school.

In other news I did get into the U of Michigan, so it's pretty definite that I will be going to school somewhere.

Today Everyone is Irish

Today is the day when everyone who is Irish (or pretends to be Irish) wears green and eats corned beef and cabbage. It's no different around our house where St.Paddy's day is almost a holiday equal to the 4th of July. Even as I write this I can sniff corned beef wafting up from the kitchen.

So to everyone out there who is Irish (even if only for today) happy St. Patrick's day. Erin Go Braugh!

Why I Love Jane

I wish that I could have met Jane Austen, she seems like she would have been a very interesting person to know. I love how she makes such astute observations of human beings and then proceeds to record these observations (with a flair for the dramatic) in her wonderful writings.

I recently finished Northanger Abbey and there are few fiction books that I have enjoyed more. I mean how could you not like a book where the girl gets the guy in the end while enduring the social class in bath, a dark Gothic abbey, mysterious passages, and the scandal of the heroine being litteraly kicked to the curb for no discernable reason almost in the middle of the night.

I can picture Jane silently smiling to herself as she writes lines such as "To come with a well-informed mind, is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing any thing, should conceal it well as she can". How can you beat that?

Future Wolverine?

I just returned from a visit to the University of Michigan. Ann Arbor is a beautiful town and I can totally picture myself living there. Of course I won't have much time to do anything other than studying, especially if I go the molecular epidemiology route, but I think that perhaps a change of scenery will be good for me. I'm really excited about the possibility of going back to school, however I'm also a little intimidated at thinking of myself as a graduate student studying such serious topics.

It also snowed several inches while we were in Michigan and I must say that those people know how to clear snow from the roads! I was very impressed.