long time no blog

the past couple of months have been busy and eventful. this has been the craziest semester yet, with four academic courses and clinical placement all day mondays and wednesdays. i like my placement at st. john hospital. it's a mix of acute care and outpatient. in acute care, slps usually get consulted for swallow assessments, whether it's at the bedside or via x-ray. after a stroke, many patients have trouble coordinating all the muscles necessary for a safe swallow, so we assess them and determine if they need to be put on a modified diet that's easier to swallow or if they need to receive nutrition through alternative means. there's also the odd communication eval here and here. in outpatient i've been seeing a lot of videostroboscopies, where a camera is put into a client's mouth to view the vocal folds. it's pretty cool. i'm hoping to get strobed sometime before the end of my placement. in terms of coursework i'm taking language disorders of school age children, motor speech disorders, voice+cleft palate and acoustics of speech. i love the material that i'm learning but i've been complaining a lot about a couple of my professors, and i should stop. ah, pride. last year i read this prayer that was really helpful in showing me what my attitude should be.

so highlights of the past 10 weeks:

egypt! i had a great time. saw the pyramids, swam in the nile, climbed mount sinai and snorkelled in the red sea. i met a girl from arizona who is applying to med school at wayne state so if she comes for an interview i'll definitely see her again. anyway, the trip was awesome and i think i really like being in arab countries. pictures can be seen here.

my car broke down. i was driving home from church and suddenly the stereo went out and wouldn't turn back on. then i had my window down to swipe into the parking lot and i could hear the engine was pretty loud. then, as i pulled into a parking spot and put the car into park the engine just shut off on its own and wouldn't restart. it was actually the perfect way for my car to break down--in a parking spot in the lot outside my building, not out on the road somewhere. totally blessed. so i called josh, my engineer friend who knows a ton about cars, and he figured it was either a problem with the battery or the alternator. i bought both parts and he came over to look under the hood and ended up putting in a new alternator for me.

i gave a presentation in my acoustics class. half an hour before class started i was eating lunch and going over the powerpoint slides with my group members. as i was having a drink of water from my nalgene, some of it splashed onto my pants. wonderful. turns out it saved me from a worser fate than wet pants. i looked down at my lap and saw that there was a huge hole in the crotch! the stitching running down the centre of my pants just below the zipper had come undone and there was a gaping hole through which you could see my underwear. thankfully, i live on campus and i had time to go home and change. on my walk back to the apartment i had my roommate's jacket tied around my waist with one of the sleeves hanging down just so in order to cover the hole.

had a fantastic thanksgiving at home. lunch with the girls on friday, family dinner later that night, dim sum with grandma, dinner at uncle jody's, community service at jaffray, hiking with the family. during the hike coco got lost but then was found. crazy dog running around like a maniac. pictures: here.

saw regina spektor in concert at state theatre downtown. she sang even though she had a cold, which is bad for your voice, but i guess it's an occupational hazard that you can't really avoid when you're on tour. anyway, she is super talented. it was just her and a piano, then just her and a guitar. she has great control of her voice and her music is delightfully quirky.

i'm a CRush member for the detroit symphony orchestra, which enables me to buy student tickets 48 hours in advance for $15. it's a little steeper than the tso $10 student rate. anyway, since i'm on their email list, i got a notification of this free simulcast they were showing of verdi's requiem last friday. basically the orchestra was playing in the main hall, and there was live video feed in a separate hall with food and an open bar. it's this new thing they're promoting to try and bridge the gap between the symphony and people under the age of 40. anyhow, me and a friend ross from citadel went and watched for a bit, but then decided to get late tickets which i had read online were $10. however, the box office people had no idea what we were talking about, so we couldn't get the tickets and went back into the free simulcast, which was still fine, but not nearly as good as being in the main hall. anyway, towards the end of the night, this dso public relations guy came up to us and started asking us what we thought, etc. etc. and we told him what we liked/didn't like. the main thing that came up was that we would rather be in the main hall, but even $15 was a little more than we were willing to pay. i told him that in toronto tickets were only $10 and he was like "i know, i work for the tso as well". his name was tom allen and he has a radio broadcast too, or something. anyway, he said he would let his people know that the $5 difference was significant. two days later, i got another email from the dso and tickets for several shows in the next couple of weeks are only $10! haha, i like to think that we were the direct cause of that, but who knows? back to friday night. after tom allen spoke to us, a manager of some sort came up to us and handed us his business card. he said "i heard you were trying to get late passes to the performance but weren't able to, so here are two free tickets to any other subscription show for the rest of the season". woohoo! so in december we have $68 tickets for a performance of the four seasons.

okay, those are all the updates for now. blogging takes too much time! anyway, things to look forward to in the next little while: missions conference happening at citadel this weekend, visiting london in a few weeks, going to boston for an slp convention mid-november.