Orientation is a WRAP!

After three days of orientation we are officially ready to start school.  We were inundated with tons of information, went on a tour of the school and got to meet some great students/professors/faculty. 

On the first morning we were greeted by Dean Hill and she definitely got us excited about what we were about to start.  "The world is our plate" she explained and with our degree and experience in and out of the classroom we will be able to take on the world after we graduate the program. 

One of the things I a most excited about is getting involved with SOURCE, the Student Outreach Resource Center, which places students from the nursing, medical and public health schools with community agencies who are interested in service learning and community based experiences in the community.  This is a great way to combine the skills/knowledge I picked up in undergrad and grad school and combine it with my new nursing skills/knowledge (and I can get a Federal Work Study job through them too). 

One of the things we were reminded of was the history of the school, as well as the legacy we are about to join.  While it is a little daunting, I am definitely excited to start this journey and see where I will be at the end of three years. 

Quick breakdown of the class:

• 161 students from 33 different states
• There are 9 people who have recently wrapped up their Peace Corps Service
• 7% male which is above the national average of male nurses (2-3% of the workforce) 
• The majority of students graduated with a Liberal Arts degree (me included!!)

This weekend will hopefully be a mix of exploring and studying - yup tons of reading before I have even stepped into a classroom, but c'est la vie. 

Joys of Summer

Sure there are tons of great things about the summer ... longer days, no coats, BBQ's, fireworks.  One of my favorite things would have to be farmers markets and then going home to make dinner with whatever I found that morning.  Tonight's recipe ... Tabbouleh

Ingredients:

• 1 cup bulghur wheat (usually with the dry bulk items)
• 1 1/2 cups boiling water
• 2 lemons, squeezed
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 1 clove of garlic minced
• 1 cup minced scallions, white and green parts (1 bunch)
• 1 cup chopped parsley (I abhor parsley so I leave it out)
• 3 cucumbers, seeded and diced
• 2 cups tomatoes, seeded and diced
• 1-2 sweet peppers, medium diced
• hothouse cucumber, unpeeled, seeded, and medium diced
• 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• Salt to taste 

Place the bulghur wheat in a large bowl, add the water, lemon juice, olive oil and two large pinches of salt.  Stir together and let sit until almost all the liquid is soaked up.

Add all the other ingredients and stir.  Check to see if more salt is needed.

Let the Tabbouleh sit for a couple of hours in the fridge (I like over night best). 

Almost Saved a Life

1 Pint of Blood Can Save Up to 3 Lives

Every 56 days or so I will find the nearest Red Cross blood bank/blood drive and give a pint of blood.  Unfortunately after a trip to the Dominican Republic I was benched for a year due to the possibility of contracting malaria.  When I was able to donate again, I decided to postpone it due to my bike trip; I was going to need all the red blood cells I could get to pedal over 4000 miles to the West Coast. 

Today I headed out to a local drive and after being checked in I got a new phlebotomist.  Needless to say my needle stick missed the first time and after several minutes my vein had hardened before I could donate my full pint of blood.  Now dear reader don't let this scare you off.  Of all my donations, this was the first bad experience I have had - if your person does not look too confident you can always ask for someone else. 

Here are some fun facts:

• Every two seconds someone in the U.S. needs blood
• More than 44,000 blood donations are needed every day
• The number of blood donations collected in the U.S. in a year: 16 million (2006)
• Share of the U.S. population eligible to give blood: Less than 38 percent

Ready to take the plunge and get stuck?  Check out the American Association of Blood Banks website to find a place to donate near you.

Getting Ready to Fly with Some Blue Jays

With orientation in a little over 34 hours, I have been trying to get lots of last minute things together.  Today's sojourn was downtown to the medical bookstore to pick up some books I could not find online and get my scrubs.  Trying everything on definitely made everything real - maybe a little too real.  Pardon the bad Craigslist/online dating picture, but none of the roommates were home to capture the outfit.

Best part about clinical uniform is that I get to wear a pair of Dansko clogs.  You should read this as uniform shoes which feel like you are walking on clouds.  The JHU uniform handbook reminds me of the one we got in upper school describing what exactly we can and cannot wear.  Nothing too out of the ordinary.  I will have to wait to dye my hair blue until after I have graduated - too bad. 

In some of my downtime, I have been getting some studying done ... 

lots of fun math bringing me back to my Algebra days

The Never Ending Quest

As my friends in DC will attest, I am always on a never ending quest for a great cup of coffee.  It took me two years to find my favorite, secret coffee shop and then a few months later it became the talk of the town; being voted the best independent coffee shop did not help matters. 

Usually my preppy, monogrammed self finds an uber hipster, fixie bike crowd; despite the strange looks I get while waiting online, nothing will stand between me and some good joe.  

After some googling and trial and error I think I have found my place, Artifact Coffee.  Despite it having just opened this summer, the place is usually packed.  While I would love to make it my regular study spot, it is a bit far to be lugging books for class so I will tuck this one away for light reading days. 

32nd Street Farmers Market

One of the best things about weekends, besides sleeping in and grabbing coffee at my favorite shop, are farmers markets.  Every Saturday everyone from the 'hood grabs their reusable bags and heads over to the 32nd Street Farmers Market.

This one is HUGE compared to the 10 stall markets I would frequent in DC and PGH.  

I still have some of my Food Stamp money left over from my AmeriCorps term of service which I can use here.  The best part was once I had collected my tokens I was given $10 in fruit/vegetable incentive coins!  AMAZING!!

While I missed most of the berry season because we were on the road, there were some great tomatoes and cucumbers so I am making TONS of taboule when I get home.

Bikes, Bikes Everywhere

In the local architecture

Bike racks 

Bike trails around town, between the local colleges and out of the city

On the local drinkware (let me know if you want one - I picked up a red pint glass) 

There are even a bunch of green bike lanes downtown

While I am not quite back in the swing of urban cycling, living near campus and on a major North/South road has helped. 

The Baltimore Museum of Industry

Today I set off for The Baltimore Museum of Industry.  Since the city's beginnings it has often been known as the working man's town and this museum depicts the history of the workers and small business owners who helped to make Baltimore the Greatest City in America. 

Baltimore has long been recognized as a major industrial center and is home to the nation’s first passenger railway, the country's oldest gas company and the creation of the larger tennis racket head just to name a few. 

The museum is housed in the old Platt & Company Cannery.  At the turn of the century, the Inner Harbor was home to 80 cannery's which processed everything from fruits to vegetables to oysters. 



Jacob Fussell, the father of ice cream industry got his start here in Baltimore.  As the owner of a dairy farm he would turn the extra cream into ice cream to turn a profit.  His ice cream was so popular that he ended up making the jump and started the first ice cream factory in the country.  The first ice cream "trucks" were filled with ice and salt; too much of both the ice cream would be frozen solid and could not be sold.  Here is a replication of the wagons which would roam the streets.


One of the coolest things in the museum was actually outside.  The Working Point was created out of 90 tons of left over machinery from a variety of Baltimore's industries.  My favorite part of the whole thing is the way the chain bends and folds giving fluidity to the rigid grouping of steel.  Man my art history professor would be impressed with that one. 

Happy 80th Birthday Memere!!

Happy Birthday to the best Grandmother a girl could ask for!!  xoxo

Bike Trip to Annapolis: 2 Emily: 0

This past weekend I had HIGH hopes of visiting one of my all time favorite places in Maryland, Annapolis, and was even more excited when I learned that I could make the 65 mile round trip travel by bike.  In preparation, I spent Sunday morning giving Bernard a thorough cleaning; after transversing 4,029 miles across the country it was the least I could do.*  Look at how clean that cassette is - looks like it just came out of the box. 

My hopes of a ride were dashed on Monday because I remembered I needed to get a drug test for school so today was going to be my day. I threw on my kit, printed myself a cue sheet, filled my camelback and tires and hit the road. 

Getting downtown was easy enough as I have made the trip several times since moving here.  At that point things became very complicated as my cue sheet did not line up with the bike trail signs posted.  Against my better judgement, I abandoned my cue sheet and decided to follow the signs.  Well let me tell you I got lost, very, very, very Alexandria kind of lost.  Thanks to my phone and some painted signs on the road I was able to get on what I thought was the right trail.  Who knew that three different paths came together and split off in different directions with no signage. 

The weather was great, I was seeing a lot of Baltimore I had never seen before and then I hit the Middle Branch trail.  Harmless enough, right?  WRONG.  The trail was in such bad disrepair I was nervous that at any moment I was going to blow a tire.  At one point I unclipped from my bike to walk it over some major branches.  In hindsight I should have taken it off the trail, but I forgot that I would not be doing out and back rides.  Also to add insult to injury this trail had taken me WAY out of the way. 

While I did not make it to Annapolis, I did get to see some new areas of the city and can warn people NOT to take the Middle Branch trail. 

*full disclosure my bikes are pretty much like my kids and I refer to them as if they are living, breathing people

Flamingos EVERYWHERE!!

Mamadukes, a.k.a. my mother, will attest that I LOVED flamingos as a child.  Well I guess in full disclosure I should say that I LOVED fandingos, but that is another story all together.  Maybe the facination was because they get to hang out in the water all day or because they have backwards "knees" or because their color is dependent on what they had for lunch.  Who knows, but it was definitely a thing (and kind of still is a thing). 

Little known fact Don Featherstone invented the pink plastic lawn flamingo in 1957 and his pop art icon won him the the Ig Nobel Prize for Art in 1996.  

While wandering around Bawlmer, Murlin (that would be Baltimore, MD for us out of towners) I noticed these flamingos EVERYWHERE.  Very excited, and slightly perplexed, I contacted my good friend Erica who grew up in the area to ask her if the plastic flamings were a thing; she gave me a resounding YES on the gchats!  Unlike the rest of the country, it is far more common to see purple ones as opposed to the traditional pink flamingos.  I am going to go out on a limb here and use my fine skills of reasoning/deduction and chalk it up to the hometown pride/love/OBSESSION of the Ravens. 

They are all over the Hon store on The Avenue

Yes I even found a flamingo hat - dibbs for possible Halloween costume

There is even a two story one outside the Hon Cafe.  

Clearly I will need to start eating here. 

 

When I got home I did a bit more digging and I think I can trace the obsession back to the UBER low budget, cult movie Pink Flamingos.  The film takes place in Phoenix, MD and outside the protagonist's pink trailer there stands a pair of plastic pink flamingos.  From there the plot gets crazy, but it looks like there is a drag queen, some kind of a party and a kangaroo court to look into a homicide.  I am going to track down a copy of a movie and let you know if it is worth your time.  Apparently it did make a the list of the 50 Films to See Before You Die in the UK so I have high hopes will probably have to grin and bear it throughout the whole thing. 

Fort McHenry

Well it was officially my first day as a tourist here in Baltimore and unfortunately NONE of the museums are open on Mondays; being in DC with the Smithsonians will have forever spoiled me.  After doing a brief drive through the city to get a bit better acquainted I figured I should get my history on and visit Fort McHenry.

Fun fact about the Fort, besides its well known role in the War of 1812, it is the only place in the country which is both a National Monument and Historic Shrine.  Twenty points go to you if you know the difference between a monument and a memorial.  (see below for the answer). 

As I walked in the door I was able to catch the second half of the movie.  Some interesting points I picked up along the way about the National Anthem:

• The poem was set to a well-known British drinking song, "To Anacreon in Heaven." 
• The song has four verses (who knew?)
• It became the official national anthem in 1931 through an Act of Congress
• During World War II, the tradition of singing the anthem at sporting events spread

As the movie wraps up and the National Anthem begins, the movie screen rolls up to reveal a wall of glass windows which give you a fantastic view of the Fort.  Very AMERICA!

The weather was beautiful out so I took my time strolling around the grounds and Fort and then down by the water.  It is your standard fort, but the cool thing is that a different flag flies every day depending on the weather.  In order to recreate the straight flying flag feeling Francis Scott Key had when looking at For McHenry from the Chesapeake Bay, park rangers are very particular about the flag they hoist.  On sunny, clear days a full size replica of the Star Spangled Banner (30 x 42 feet) with fifteen stars and stripes is chosen.  At night, and on rainy days, a smaller, modern 50 star flag is hoisted.  Much like the flag which flies over the White House (trust me I was a DC bike tour guide), the flag at Fort McHenry flies 24 hours a day. 

Answer: a monument exists when the person is still alive/the event is going on and a memorial is built after a person has died/the event has passed

We Are Up and Running

Back by popular demand I am back in the blogging world and ready to tackle a new city, a RN/NP program, some new recipes and of course some AMAZING (bike) adventures.  See, I am just as excited as you are about this new project.  

Heard of a place I should try out in Bmore?  Let me know and I will go exploring for you.  Want to make a guest appearance on the blog - come visit!  But seriously, please visit me.

So go ahead, add me to your Google Reader, your favorites tab, etc.  DO IT!!!