Highlights from Year 2, Semester 3

I'm really enjoying my new built-in desk and decided to take advantage of this lovely Sunday evening by writing another catch-up post. Here are the highlights from summer semester of year 2 of Dental School.

1) CLOSING ON OUR HOUSE
After months of house hunting and paperwork, we finally closed on our first home in early June. Over the summer, we've worked on little projects here and there, slowly getting it decorated how we want it. There's still plenty of work to be done!

Move In day

Hanging some curtain rods. I love power tools.

Riesy loves her perch above the staircase

These are pull out drawers that have a base you screw into the cabinet. We found them at Wal-Mart and they made the narrow pantry so much more functional!

2) BEING AN AUNTIE
All three of my older sisters are now mommies which makes me super-Auntie. I can't get enough of those squishy little faces and every time we go up to visit Fort Collins, I'm shocked at how fast my niece and nephews are growing.

Went to the park with Ariane and Deborah

The niece and nephews with Altair and my mom

Holding my two squishy nephews

Grabbing breakfast with Deborah and Henry

3) COMIC CON
If you didn't already know Robbie and I were huge nerds, this will probably convince you. I had been to Star Cons as a kid (yup, I admit it publicly) but never a Comic Con. As this year marked the 75th anniversary of Batman, we decided we just had to go! My sister, Deborah, came with us along with my adorable nephew, Henry. Deborah dressed as Ripley from the Alien movies and made a sweet costume for Henry to match. Robbie and I ended up running out of time to make costumes so we decided to just sport some nerdy shirts and enjoy observing everyone else. We even almost got run over by Adam West in a golf cart! True story.

The cutest Xenomorph I've ever seen!

Robbie hanging out by the Batmobile

Me hanging out with Zangief from Mortal Kombat

A life-size functioning R2D2

I don't know which is better... the awesomeness of the Star Wars set or the fact that we got photobombed by Deadpool

4) NITROUS CLINIC
Robbie's class got to be in my clinic when they had their lab for administering nitrous oxide (aka. laughing gas). Everyone was laughing and saying silly things. It was probably my favorite day at work ever. Here's Robbie enjoying his turn:

5) CRAWDAD FISHING
Robbie's sister, her husband, and their two boys recently moved out of state. As part of their going away party, we had an epic water balloon fight followed by some crawdad fishing in the creek. I had never been crawdad fishing before, but it was ridiculously easy. All you do is tie a piece of hot dog to a string then throw the hot dog in the water and wait for the crawdads to bite. It doesn't take long before you feel a little tug on your string so someone gets ready with a bucket and you gently tug the hot dog upwards. The crawdad doesn't want to let go of it's prized hot dog so it lifts right out of the water with the hot dog! After playing a bit with the crawdads, we released them back in the creek.

6) ROBBIE SEEING PATIENTS
This by far is the most mind-blowing highlight of Year 2, Semester 3. Robbie has been doing fillings on real live patients! This part of school felt so far away when we first began the whole process but it has arrived in the blink of an eye. It's unfortunate that I don't have a picture to share (for the obvious reason of patient privacy rights) but he has already done 6 fillings and a crown! Hygienists can clean teeth and even Dental Assistants can place fillings, but only Dentists are allowed to drill teeth. He's officially Dentisting and I couldn't be more proud of all the hard work he put in to get here.

Painting for my Nephews

Last week I visited Robbie's sister and her family in Cheyenne, Wyoming to do a little more painting in my nephews' rooms. I have been up once before this to paint and they wanted me to add a few more images. Here's what I painted the first time:

A camouflage wall in Mason's room

The main characters from Ninjago for Avery: (left to right) Zane, Cole, Sensei Wu, Kai, and Jay

As you can guess, Mason loves all things military (probably stemming from his love for the Call of Duty videogames) so this time I was up he asked for a plane with paratroopers.

We decided to go with a cool silhouette effect which made it super easy!

Avery asked for some more Ninjago characters. He actually had quite a list of characters he would like me to paint but for the sake of time, I told him he had to pick three and then I could do a few more next time. He chose Fangtom, Skales, and Lord Garmadon this time and for my next visit he wants the Golden Dragon. I seriously have learned more about Ninjago than I ever thought I would. He sat with me most of the time I was painting and told me all about the characters and their powers/weapons/personalities/etc.

This is Fangtom. He's the General of the Fangpyre snakes. They build their armies by biting people and/or objects and turning them into snakes.

This is Skales. He's the General of the Hypnobrai snakes. They have the ability to hypnotize people by staring into their eyes. Avery made a special request for Skales to have the black circles in his eyes because that is his "hypnotizing face."

Finally, this is Lord Garmadon. He is Sensei Wu's brother (duh duh duh!) and he's always trying to take over the land of Ninjago. His son, Lloyd, becomes the green ninja and eventually has to face him in battle. It actually is a total rip off of the Darth Vader/Luke relationship in Star Wars.

I had a great time painting and hanging out with my nephews. Here are the final products:

Robbie's Birthday

That is one happy man right there! Instead of getting a cake for Robbie's birthday, we decided to go to Gluten Escape to get a few cupcakes and some cookies. We ended up purchasing six cupcakes (a mint chocolate, two banana creme, a red velvet, and two vanilla chocolate chip) and four cookies (two Mexican wedding cookies, a ginger snap, and a sweet potato chocolate chip). They were all so delicious, especially the Mexican wedding cookies!

Yesterday, we went to see Man of Steel with two of Robbie's classmates and his classmate's wife. It was slightly disappointing overall, though I did appreciate the nerdy little references they sprinkled throughout the movie (such as the truck with Lexcorp on the side and his childhood friend named Lana). We both felt like the pacing was too quick in some parts of the movie and that the fighting scenes really seemed to drag on towards the end. Honestly, it had a lot of good ideas but just wasn't executed well.


As far as Dental School goes, Robbie had a test this past Monday in Pathology and two tests on Tuesday in Health/Data Collection and Operative Dentistry so last weekend was pretty jam packed with studying. I'm frustrated with the teacher for Health/Data Collections because he seems like one of those teachers who get off on messing with their students' heads and then ripping on them afterwards for not meeting his expectations. Apparently the test they were given had some answers marked down ahead of time ("by accident" of course...) but only some of them were correct so it was making all the students second guess themselves. The average for the test was a 78% but the highest score was only 92% and the lowest was 43%! The teacher recently sent out an email telling them all how he was so disappointed in them and how he had expected everyone to get 100%. I think this calls for the confused Jackie Chan meme.

I honestly would've emailed him back saying, "Maybe if you were a better teacher we wouldn't all have done so poorly," but that's why Robbie is in Dental School and I am not. I think I need to go look at my previous post about how I should respond to the Injustices of Dental School. Okay, I'm done ranting.

We just payed the $345 for Robbie to sign up for the Part I NBDE. I believe he is planning on taking them around July 20th. It seems like he's having mixed feelings on how well the first year prepared them for the material that's covered on the Boards (for some subjects he feels well prepared while others he feels will require quite a bit of study time). He has been using the NBDE app like crazy but he's also been pouring over old practice tests that were released a few years back. I know he is going to do just fine but we are both looking forward to them being over!

Baby Shower

What a busy weekend! My sister Deborah was in town from Las Vegas so my mom, my sister Ariane, and her husband Randy, and I went to Boulder with her to eat at Crepes a la Carte. We also got to have my favorite chai in the world at the Dushanbe Tea House.

My mom and Deborah outside of Dushanbe.

Me "smiling" for the camera, Ariane and her husband Randy behind me and my mom on the right.

On Sunday, we threw the baby shower for Ariane at my sister Altair's house.

That is in fact a giant uterus on the wall. I made it so we could play pin the sperm on the uterus! Everyone got a sperm to put their name on and taped it on the uterus, then the mom-to-be closed her eyes and taped an egg on the uterus. The person whose sperm was closest to the egg won $5 to a frozen yogurt place.

Deborah made bubble bath punch. You put sherbet in the punch and it gets all foamy and bubbly.

We decorated onesies. These were the ones her guests made. The "Miso Cute" one was the winner and received a $5 Starbucks gift card. :)

An adorable fat kitty that Deborah painted

An olive riding a chicken (the baby's name is going to be Olive and Ariane has a bunch of chickens)

Another onesie I made just telling it how it is.

This one is my favorite that I made. It's Admiral Ackbar from Star Wars! Once it's dry I'm going to write "It's a crap!" on the bum. If you get this joke pat yourself on the back because you are a nerd.

As you can probably guess, decorating the onesies was my favorite activity. We also did a Mad Lib that Deborah and I wrote about Olive and we played Baby Scattergories. Overall, I think it went really well but by the end of the day I was absolutely exhausted.

I barely got to see Robbie at all this past weekend because I was so busy with family so it's nice to be back at home with him now. While I was at the baby shower, he got to hang out with his family and see the new Star Trek. Robbie's been hard at work studying for the Boards using that application I mentioned in a previous post. He also told me that they had their first periodontics lab today. Dental School just keeps moving right along!

Meeting Kate and Joe

Today we were able to meet up with Kate and her soon-to-be-Dental-Student husband, Joe. They are moving from California to Pennsylvania for Dental School so we were able to grab Starbucks with them on their way through Denver.

Joe and Kate, we had such a great time meeting you both! Robbie and I both think that Joe is going to make an excellent Dentist and that Kate will be such a wonderful help to him throughout the whole process. Thanks for stopping in Denver! :)


In other news, Robbie and I forgot that they were sweeping and re-striping our parking lot this morning so we went outside and our car was gone! VERY luckily, the office had only spot towed it to the other side of the apartment complex so we got to play hide and seek with our car for 10 minutes before we were able to find it. Definitely beats paying $300 if they had decided to have it towed for real.

Also, I finally decided to join Twitter today (for the sole purpose of getting more traffic for my blog). I haven't had enough time to really mess with it at all and I'm not at all familiar with how it really works. If anyone has any pointers for using Twitter, please feel free to leave them in the comments.

Lastly, I'm going to the eye doctor tomorrow for a check-up and *drum roll*.... to get fitted for contacts! I've tried contacts in the past and have never loved them, but I've decided to give them another try. I actually really like how I look in glasses so I'm getting an updated prescription for my glasses as well. Sometimes I like to think that my glasses make me look like Alexandra Cabot, the Assistant District Attorney from Law and Order: SVU. Especially when I get a really serious expression on my face like this:

 Maybe I should start wearing more pant-suits. I'm pretty sure everything I know about the law and my rights, I learned from Law and Order.

Settlers of Catan

I just have to gush for a minute about how much I love the game Settlers of Catan. If you haven't played it before, allow me to give a brief explanation:

Three or more players are competing to build settlements on an imaginary island called Catan. The board is made up of hexagonal tiles that have one of five resources on them-- brick, wood, ore, wool, or wheat. You gain points mainly by building settlements/cities, but you can also gain points from having the longest road, having the biggest army, etc. Each tile has a number on it. If someone roles the dice and they add up to the number on a tile where you have a settlement, you get to collect that resource. You can also trade your resources with the other players to get the ones you need.

The first time I played it, I was concerned that it was going to be too complex for me to enjoy it but it's remarkably easy to learn. Since you get to collect resources all the time (even when it's someone else rolling the dice) and because you are constantly trying to trade with the person whose turn it is, the game is more interactive than other turn based board games.

The game itself can be pretty expensive compared to other board games ($40 most places) but there are several downloadable versions of the game online. I do believe there's an app for smart phones as well! (In fact I know there is an app because I have it on my phone. haha)

I randomly came across this site which shows images of a giant homemade version of Settlers of Catan that someone made for their backyard and now I totally want to try to make one!

I also love this super-nerdy shirt I found online that says, "Don't settle for less." I will have to remember this months from now when Robbie asks me what I want for Christmas!