super duper giant update
Ho-lee smokes, it's been a while.
The Conclusion of the Grad School Saga: Episode 2
What was Episode 1, you ask? That would be the preparation and sending of the applications. Episode 2 was waiting to hear back from the schools and making a decision of where to go. Episode 2 hit an unexpected bump as it neared the finish line - that being the replacement of John's boss's boss by some new guy who most likely will not agree to letting him move with me to New Mexico in the fall. Stupid new boss. I don't care if he invented Power Point. He's got negative points in my book.
(No, I'm not kidding. He invented Power Point. Can I be mad at a man whose product I use all the time? I'll most certainly try.)
In an effort to deal with this highly unpleasant news, I began to look into deferral - for legitimate reasons, this time. Ironic, isn't it? But, as suspected, if I don't begin classes this fall, all my funding goes bye-bye. So, one way or another I'm beginning classes in the fall. John thinks I will probably only have to be on my own for the first semester, so I'm hoping I can find a room mate or two to mooch off of during that time. That way I can head out there with the bare necessities (...are mother nature's recipes...yea I listen to too much disney music...), and we don't have to do much actual moving until John's ready to join me out there.
There's still a chance that things may turn out for the better, and Power Point man might be more lenient than he's expected to be, so I'll hold off making any permanent plans for a month or so. And thus concludes Episode 2. Either way, I'm looking forward to digging in. My professor told me that they aim to have students finish in five years, and I'm going to push myself to try and finish in four. In a good way, of course.
Three Blind Mice and Their Odyssey of Freedom - And the Fate of Their Less Fortunate Compatriots
Our friend Jeremiah had told me a while ago that he'd been wanting some pet mice. And I had just the thing for him - our lab rescue mice.
Every now and then, mice are born with little quirks that happen to endear them to our hearts. My coworker San had a black mouse with a white belly - I had a particularly pudgy brown mouse, whose weight exempted her from further testing, with a W shaped bare spot on her back. When the order came down for these mice to be killed, we despaired, and hid them in a corner of our mouse rack, waiting for the chance to spirit them away. When I told Jeremiah about them, he was quite excited about getting some real life lab mice. So I put them in a cardboard box one day, and took them home, whence Jeremiah met them, and took them to his house.
Then, as I was checking on some of my recently born pups, I came across a particularly small black female. Who had no eyes.
At first there was a crisis, because it was possible she was transgenic, and if taken away from her treated water, her muscles might have wasted away to nothing until she couldn't move and sge would die from being unable to drink her water. But after some tests she was in the clear, and I took her (and her momma) home with me, whence Jeremiah met them once more, and took them to freedom.
(OK, so it's four mice, only one of which was blind. Gimme a break.)
Meanwhile, in more serious work news, I've finished compiling all the data that I've accumulated during my year here - which was basically a summary of all the various mean things I've done to the rest of my mice who I did not steal away to a new life. My boss will be presenting the data at a meeting this Sunday and I'll be presenting it at the Poster Day here at the hospital next month, and presenting it to the whole lab in June. I'm fairly satisfied. And it means I have a lull in the pressure at work because I've passed this threshold. I have more work to do of course, but it's not as urgent anymore.
Reading Like the Man Whose Old Job Was Given To Mr. Power Point
Yep. John's old boss's boss is moving up in the world, and the fact that his old job was given to the man who invented Power Point, well that says something. The exact status of his new position is a little fuzzy to me, but John tells me that people who have previously held that position later became Microsoft VPs. And we got invited to a private dinner party at his house.
He's really an admirable person - he used to be an emergency room doctor, was awarded Physician of the Year, and is just in general very very learned. A lot of that learnedness, I found out last night (the night of the dinner), is the fact that he can read a 400 page book in one hour, so he's read oodles upon oodles of books. How does he do that, do you ask? He doesn't read the same way most of us do.
So (according to what he told us), most people are taught to read phonetically - we're taught to look at a word, to break it apart, and sound it out in order to understand what it means. Number one, this process itself is relatively slow, and number two, it requires us to use the auditory part of our brains when we read, which is also much slower than the visual part of our brains.
To explain how he reads, he explained how his father taught him to read when he was young. His father made all these flashcards, with a word on one side, and a picture of what the word was for on the back (cut out from magazines and the like). His father would just quiz him with these flash cards over and over again, and eventually he just knew that a word that looks like "HOUSE" represents a house, etc. It was just visual pattern recognition. When he started going to school his teachers got mad at him because he'd confuse words like betty and bunny - because they looked similar to him.
He told us that in order to change the way we read, we have to break our minds from the habit of reading phonetically. He said, read a book the way you normally would, and time yourself. Then, take another book of similar length - and make yourself finish it in half the time. You just have to read it super fast, and yes you probably won't actually take in most of it at first. But after a while, your brain will begin to do what it does best, which is pattern recognition, and it will learn to visually make sense of what you're seeing. He says it takes about 60 hours of this. For him, he says, reading is kind of like watching a movie. His eyes just scroll down the middle of the page.
I really want to try this. I'm going back to school after all, and can you imagine what an advantage it would be to be able to (comprehensively) do all your homework reading that fast? And I have so many books on my personal reading list and I'm having trouble making headway. Unfortunately, it will probably be particularly difficult for me, because I'm well ingrained in the traditional phonetic method. I was a always a good reader and speller in school. For someone like John it will probably be easier, because he's not that good of a phonetic reader - he's somewhat dyslexic, and he reads slow. But, I still want to try.
Phew! I think that's all I can do for now. That was more exhausting than I thought it would be, haha. Hopefully I'll have the strength for more later!
The Conclusion of the Grad School Saga: Episode 2
What was Episode 1, you ask? That would be the preparation and sending of the applications. Episode 2 was waiting to hear back from the schools and making a decision of where to go. Episode 2 hit an unexpected bump as it neared the finish line - that being the replacement of John's boss's boss by some new guy who most likely will not agree to letting him move with me to New Mexico in the fall. Stupid new boss. I don't care if he invented Power Point. He's got negative points in my book.
(No, I'm not kidding. He invented Power Point. Can I be mad at a man whose product I use all the time? I'll most certainly try.)
In an effort to deal with this highly unpleasant news, I began to look into deferral - for legitimate reasons, this time. Ironic, isn't it? But, as suspected, if I don't begin classes this fall, all my funding goes bye-bye. So, one way or another I'm beginning classes in the fall. John thinks I will probably only have to be on my own for the first semester, so I'm hoping I can find a room mate or two to mooch off of during that time. That way I can head out there with the bare necessities (...are mother nature's recipes...yea I listen to too much disney music...), and we don't have to do much actual moving until John's ready to join me out there.
There's still a chance that things may turn out for the better, and Power Point man might be more lenient than he's expected to be, so I'll hold off making any permanent plans for a month or so. And thus concludes Episode 2. Either way, I'm looking forward to digging in. My professor told me that they aim to have students finish in five years, and I'm going to push myself to try and finish in four. In a good way, of course.
Three Blind Mice and Their Odyssey of Freedom - And the Fate of Their Less Fortunate Compatriots
Our friend Jeremiah had told me a while ago that he'd been wanting some pet mice. And I had just the thing for him - our lab rescue mice.
Every now and then, mice are born with little quirks that happen to endear them to our hearts. My coworker San had a black mouse with a white belly - I had a particularly pudgy brown mouse, whose weight exempted her from further testing, with a W shaped bare spot on her back. When the order came down for these mice to be killed, we despaired, and hid them in a corner of our mouse rack, waiting for the chance to spirit them away. When I told Jeremiah about them, he was quite excited about getting some real life lab mice. So I put them in a cardboard box one day, and took them home, whence Jeremiah met them, and took them to his house.
Then, as I was checking on some of my recently born pups, I came across a particularly small black female. Who had no eyes.
At first there was a crisis, because it was possible she was transgenic, and if taken away from her treated water, her muscles might have wasted away to nothing until she couldn't move and sge would die from being unable to drink her water. But after some tests she was in the clear, and I took her (and her momma) home with me, whence Jeremiah met them once more, and took them to freedom.
(OK, so it's four mice, only one of which was blind. Gimme a break.)
Meanwhile, in more serious work news, I've finished compiling all the data that I've accumulated during my year here - which was basically a summary of all the various mean things I've done to the rest of my mice who I did not steal away to a new life. My boss will be presenting the data at a meeting this Sunday and I'll be presenting it at the Poster Day here at the hospital next month, and presenting it to the whole lab in June. I'm fairly satisfied. And it means I have a lull in the pressure at work because I've passed this threshold. I have more work to do of course, but it's not as urgent anymore.
Reading Like the Man Whose Old Job Was Given To Mr. Power Point
Yep. John's old boss's boss is moving up in the world, and the fact that his old job was given to the man who invented Power Point, well that says something. The exact status of his new position is a little fuzzy to me, but John tells me that people who have previously held that position later became Microsoft VPs. And we got invited to a private dinner party at his house.
He's really an admirable person - he used to be an emergency room doctor, was awarded Physician of the Year, and is just in general very very learned. A lot of that learnedness, I found out last night (the night of the dinner), is the fact that he can read a 400 page book in one hour, so he's read oodles upon oodles of books. How does he do that, do you ask? He doesn't read the same way most of us do.
So (according to what he told us), most people are taught to read phonetically - we're taught to look at a word, to break it apart, and sound it out in order to understand what it means. Number one, this process itself is relatively slow, and number two, it requires us to use the auditory part of our brains when we read, which is also much slower than the visual part of our brains.
To explain how he reads, he explained how his father taught him to read when he was young. His father made all these flashcards, with a word on one side, and a picture of what the word was for on the back (cut out from magazines and the like). His father would just quiz him with these flash cards over and over again, and eventually he just knew that a word that looks like "HOUSE" represents a house, etc. It was just visual pattern recognition. When he started going to school his teachers got mad at him because he'd confuse words like betty and bunny - because they looked similar to him.
He told us that in order to change the way we read, we have to break our minds from the habit of reading phonetically. He said, read a book the way you normally would, and time yourself. Then, take another book of similar length - and make yourself finish it in half the time. You just have to read it super fast, and yes you probably won't actually take in most of it at first. But after a while, your brain will begin to do what it does best, which is pattern recognition, and it will learn to visually make sense of what you're seeing. He says it takes about 60 hours of this. For him, he says, reading is kind of like watching a movie. His eyes just scroll down the middle of the page.
I really want to try this. I'm going back to school after all, and can you imagine what an advantage it would be to be able to (comprehensively) do all your homework reading that fast? And I have so many books on my personal reading list and I'm having trouble making headway. Unfortunately, it will probably be particularly difficult for me, because I'm well ingrained in the traditional phonetic method. I was a always a good reader and speller in school. For someone like John it will probably be easier, because he's not that good of a phonetic reader - he's somewhat dyslexic, and he reads slow. But, I still want to try.
Phew! I think that's all I can do for now. That was more exhausting than I thought it would be, haha. Hopefully I'll have the strength for more later!