Emuzines

The holiday season has officially begun (in David’s and my opinion, the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday seasons begin on November 1)! The next few weeks hold a lot of excitement–a lot of celebrating.

Nik and I head to Amesbury on Wednesday for Thanksgiving. We are SO excited, and have been so for weeks and weeks. It will be Nik’s second time to New England. Seeing as how he was swayed enough by the area last time to hint at wanting a house out there, I know he’ll have a good time again. He also gets to be reunited with my cousin Billy, who he gets along really well with. Good thing Billy is bringing his girlfriend so I’ll still get some Nik time in! And I always have a great time there. It always feels like home. I get to see everybody, relax in Memere and Pepere’s house, and eat Memere’s wonderful food!

The week after we get back to California will be hectic, but with a lot of fun things. Class wraps up that week as well. On Friday, my friends and I are going out to Bistro 33 for our thrice yearly quarter-end celebration. We have developed a tradition of going out–always to Bistro, it seems–at the end of every quarter to celebrate. It’s even more welcome now since we’ve dispersed a bit in terms of classes. I only have classes this quarter with David, Abby, and Kyle. Not enough time to see Maciel, April, and Natalie. Here we are at one of our old quarter end celebrations. This is actually at the end of our first quarter–the bootcamp of the program. We had shots this night. We earned them.

As you can maybe see, the fall quarter quarter end happens to be our gift exchange too. Last year we did a White Elephant, and exchanged and “stole” the gifts. This year, since we know each other so much better, I organized a Secret Santa, and we’re shopping for a specific person. Nik drew names and passed them around.

The next day is our second monthly First Saturday Dinner and a Movie. This one will be chili in bread bowls, cornbread, and apple turnovers made with Memere’s homemade apple jam. We’ll probably watch a holiday movie, but votes on which one are pretty spread around, so I have to tie-break.

Lots of other things are planned–drinks with our stats professor, the Mind Institute Thank You party, etc. Can’t wait!

Today is a relaxing day for me, and a productive one. I had class in the morning, but get to spend the afternoon working from home, writing. I love to be in the office–the M.I.N.D. Institute is still magical to me–and I love to be out in the field doing intervention with our babies and kiddos, but I always feel so relaxed when I get a whole afternoon to write. I punctuate my writing with errands or cleaning tasks, so I get double the amount done.

Tonight one of our professors is throwing a dinner party for us to celebrate passing prelims. I just swung by the market to pick up sparkling lemonade and French berry lemonade to bring, as well as a frozen pizza for Nik since he is being abandoned tonight.

Tomorrow will be another class-errand-writing type of day, and then Saturday is the first monthly First Saturday Dinner and a Movie. I’m so excited about it. I have a whole meal planned and the movie…should be…arriving in the mail today.

Now time for lunch!

Our chapter was just submitted to Amaral (research director at the MIND Institute) and Dawson (prominent autism researcher out of U of Washington).  So cool!  My name is right up there next to Sally’s at the top.  I am so proud of myself!

Hi Everyone!

It is Fall now and things are getting really busy!  My mom came to visit me last weekend.  We had a great time, and packed as much fall fun is as we could.  We did some shopping, cooked some scallop chowder, baked some pumpkin pies, and visited a flower farm/pumpkin patch!  I enjoyed showing my mom around my new home and most of all just enjoyed being with her, hanging out at home at night, etc.  I hope she had as much fun as I did!  Here are some pictures…

School has gotten incredibly busy.  There is an extraordinary amount of reading.  At USC, I often got away with not reading…but here, I have a prelim exam at the end of next summer, covering all of the first year’s readings…so I have to know them all.  And the class structure is much different than anything I had in undergrad (predictably) or even at USC.  I feel as though maybe the professors tried to get this sort of feel at USC, a true seminar/interactive type of conference…but it never really happened.  We basically run the entire class, and have to be all smart-sounding and bounce ideas against each other…the professors rarely talk.  I think this type of class is pretty new to all of us, and so we meet 2 hours before each class to warm up!  I feel now that we’ve settled into a good groove and classes are feeling less awkward, with less silences…  Today David found some cricket chirps on his phone to play in case we hit an awkward silence, which would have been great (we should have been quiet!), but we didn’t hit any of those today.

My cohort is so wonderful!  Tomorrow we’re going out to a place called Little Prague, for happy hour and some appetizers and things.  It’ll be the day that Nik meets them all.  April and I have a plan to “set up” our boyfriends, since both are new here and a little lonely.

So school has been busy and good, but work has been busy and wonderful! I have gotten deeper into understanding the ins and outs of the MIND, and learning what I’m doing and what my choices are. Right now I’m working on an intervention study with little ones (12 months old!) with autism, and I’ve also started work on a chapter which will be published in a book by 2 researchers I really admire…and then which will be published in a journal, hopefully. I know that the chapter is due after Christmas, but I’m not sure when the book plans to be published…but in any case, I’ve gotten started! I’m really excited and love going to work. Every day there…I can’t come up with the right words…it’s like Christmas morning for me!
Anyway, all is well. Things are settling into a nice groove, and although some days are really long, they’re good. I have become addicted to TWO cups of caffeine everyday, though. Now, I’ve been to grad school before and I’ve had long work days…but never have I needed caffeine like I need it now! I am an absolute zombie without both servings. But, mm, at least coffee tastes great!!

I’ve written a lot of posts in my head, both during my week home and since we’ve been back here in Davis.  When I was home, I was too busy with fun to want to sit down and post, and in Davis, I don’t have internet except for the time I want to spend in the apartment Club House using their slow and oft-breaking wireless (in which case, I’m frustrated trying to send out work- and school-related e-mails, looking into LCSW licensure, trying to save web pages I need to print onto my desktop so I can come home and print them later…).  In other words, life without internet is sort of a pain.  Now, I’ve organized a free afternoon, and am using the time before our dining table gets delivered to write a post in Word, and I’ll somehow post it later.

As I usually say, things here are good.  They really are.  I haven’t started school yet, but I’ve been to some orientation activities (optional, how great is that?…hence my free afternoon…), had some TB testing, physical stuff at the UC Davis Medical Center (Employee Health Services, which makes me feel special), and yesterday I went to meet with my mentor at the MIND.  She introduced me around to everybody, showed me my office (!), and told me a bit about what I’ll be doing, or what my options are.  I talked to her about gaining hours to get my LCSW (clinical license as a social worker), and she’s really excited about making it happen for me.  She has no doubt it’ll work there.  So basically, I’m an employee at the MIND, getting paid to work there, getting my LCSW hours, getting course credit, earning my Ph.D., working on projects and papers and chapters (I can’t wait until I’m published) with some incredible people, and looooooooving it there.  I am so honored and so excited.  They do such great work and have really positive far-reaching impact on the autism field.  I love, love, love it.

School is there in my mind, too, but almost as a backdrop.  I’ll only be taking two courses this quarter and getting the rest of my credits through research at the MIND.  I begin classes next Thursday, late-night classes.  Like I mentioned earlier, I’ve been going to some orientation activities, the ones that I think would be helpful for me.  They really have been, for the most part.  And on the first day, I found myself lost in a building on campus, trying to navigate its twists and turns to find the correct lecture hall.  I saw another lost person out of the corner of my eye, turned around, and realized it was one of the two girls I already know.  Since this week of orientation is for all graduate students, masters and Ph.D., in all fields, to find her right away was pretty lucky.  She’s been my buddy all this week and that feels nice.

Last night Nik and I headed to downtown Sacramento to go to dinner at the Melting Pot.  We had tons of food in the fridge at home, because we haven’t quite figured out yet how to shop and cook for just the two of us.  Anyway, we still went, and it was delicious as always.  We missed our Melting Pot double date partners, though!

Something else that is still on my mind is my week of fun back in LA.  My aunt Sharon came to visit and we took her to Santa Monica and Pasadena…where we got stuck, literally, in the middle of a fight between an Apple Store security guard/police officer and a thief.  It was a long struggle and eventually a failed arrest (unless they caught his getaway car later), but we were really stuck in the middle of it.  We actually had to flee down the sidewalk, being at most 5 feet from the struggle, and run into another store to avoid getting held as hostage or shot or stabbed.  We decided to watch the fight play out from the store windows, risking the gun thing, when the police officer threw the assailant against the window right into our faces!  It was quite entertaining but pretty scary.  This all came right after Sharon was talking about how, despite its reputation, she didn’t really think LA was too crime-ridden.

Also last week, Mandi had a lot of really fun birthday celebrations.  I had sooo much fun at them and I hope she did, too.  Happy birthday! 

Time to wrap it up.  Just a side note to praise JoJo, who is being quite exceptional in good behavior in her new home.  I don’t know what to make of it.  She’s being so good.  She’s learned all the new rules (stay OFF the bed, stay OUT of the kitchen when Mommy and Daddy are in it, potty on the leash, be QUIET when Mommy and/or Daddy leave, NO trash, etc.).  She’s calm and she listens and she hangs out or plays quietly.  Maybe she’s growing up, or maybe all the walks every day are good for her.  In any case, I’m so proud of her.  Such a good girl.

Melissa wrote me a letter (thank you!).  In it, she noted that I handle stress and change serenely, and that if she was doing what I am doing right now, she’d have written lots of “oh my gosh I’m so stressed out” blogs.  I thought, huh, maybe I’m not honest enough in my blogs.  I do, as explained earlier, try to actively ignore the negativities of my move.  But I have had moments of sheer terror (ok, fear…intense fear), I walked into Nik’s room last week, burst into tears, stamped my foot like a 4-year-old denied chocolate (or me as a 25-year-old denied chocolate), and cried, “I don’t wanna move!,” and I have had a pretty consistent stomach ache.  Whew.  There it is.

However, I DO feel pretty serene right now and I’m ready to begin my studies.  And I am happy that my perfect school ended up being in California.  I remember considering such places as Baton Rouge and Albany and other northern New York cities I can’t even remember now, and THAT was pretty scary.  Then I walked into the MIND Institute and met with my future mentor.  It just clicked into place.  She is an icon in the autism field, brilliant, friendly, available, and wonderful.  She is enthusiastic about autism and research and even about ME.  She had all these great ideas for me and planned out my involvement and, heck, she brings her dog into work on the weekends.  As I was leaving she said that she hoped to meet my mom one day, and offered me a job.  I left, stunned, and said to my mom in the car, “I think I have a grad school, a mentor, and a job.  At THIS PLACE!” (it’s gorgeous and, risking further bragging, reputable).  It was just perfect.

I’ve mostly given up on my obsessive fear of forgetting something I’ll desperately need the moment I arrive.  I am armed with toilet paper, Clorox wipes, detergent, and soap.  I am less stressed and finally get Nik’s point that…Katie, we can buy it when we’re there.  I *am* a little nervous about the drive, not breaking down or anything, but about the sheer boredom of it.  I have not done that drive without being a sleeping passenger.  I don’t even GET how I can drive so far as to use up my whole tank of gas and more.  That’s a lot of minutes sitting in the car, awake.  So everyone, please feel free to call me tomorrow afternoon.  I would desperately appreciate the distraction.  And Mom, I’ll call you when I get there.  You can call me after your classes, too, or at lunch.

I took a great picture of JoJo frolicking through our packed stuff tonight (she used Nik’s pile of clothes and brand new suit as a springboard to jump onto the couch).  But, alas, I have packed my camera cord, and I can’t post it.  Lots of pictures to come of moving and settling in.

…is a big one!  We’re moving on Thursday.  I have been slowly getting ready (physically and emotionally, I guess) for awhile, so I’m pretty prepared.  Although…I have to admit I’m still half in denial, and half excited.  I think I listed random things that I’m excited about in another post…it’s the little things that get me happy.  I am also pretty hopeful about fall being a pretty season up there, and Nik said that he’d instruct JoJo to bring Mommy some pretty fall leaves home from her walks.  I want to do lots of fall-y things, not only because the fall scrapbook supplies are so cute (…), but because I loooove all things fall.  I already picked my pumpkin soup recipe.  So…I’m excited about a lot of things.  I’m actively ignoring the things I am scared about…and focusing on happy things and on planning things to look forward to.  We’ve arranged the move so that I get to come and see my Aunt Sharon next week, before out second trip up to Davis.  She’s always a ton of fun (i.e. human pyramids, rolling on pool tables, Scooby Snacks, and Twister) and will be in LA for just a little while for her friend’s wedding.  Hopefully, I’ll also be able to fit in some more birthday celebrations for Mandi (Disneyland!) and as much more fun as possible.

So here’s our adorable new front door.  I don’t know what it is that I like so much about it.  Maybe the turquoise frame (which sounds terribly tacky until you see it).  The apartment complex is beautiful and in a great area, and…it has a washer and dryer in unit–my greatest selling point which Nik was pretty neutral about.  I like to wash one shirt at a time…they’re delicate…  We’re within walking distance of downtown Davis and lots of restaurants, but far enough away that it’s very quiet and secluded.  We’re also a short jump on the freeway away from downtown Sacramento, where I’ll be working and which I fell in love with on my first trip up there.  It’s a really cool downtown.

Speaking of which, with all of the preoccupation regarding the move, I’ve barely thought about or prepared for what this is all about…getting my Ph.D.  When I think about that I am extremely excited, especially about where I’ll be researching, at the MIND Institute (Medical Investigation of Neurodevelopmental Disorders–http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/MINDInstitute/).  This place is the reason that I chose UC Davis.  It is the top-notch research institute for autism in the world, and I can’t believe how lucky I am to be able to work there from day one!  My Memere says that they’re lucky to have ME…but seriously, this place is incredible.  I can’t wait to start there and to find a cure for autism.  That is what this is all about…