I guess it's time for an update. I'm sitting on my living room floor watching the Lakers game, enjoying the feeling after a good hard run followed by a large, nutritious meal. Good times.

The last week has been good for me. I finished up in Dr. RH's lab on Friday, and found out that I was assigned to Dr. MR's lab for this week. Apparently I won't receive a full schedule for the summer. Instead, I have to ask every Friday where I will be the following week. I'd definitely prefer to know before that (I'm a planner), but I guess I'll have to live with it.

On Friday we had a Jackson Free Clinic orientation, which went fairly well. We ate lunch at the school and then hopped on some buses and drove over to the clinic. There were about 40 in attendance. It's nice to keep meeting people before school starts so that we won't all be strangers come orientation. At the clinic, they split us into 5 groups and cycled us through a number of "stations," where they talked about taking BP, drawing blood, performing a lunch and heart examination, measuring nerve responsiveness, etc. Most Saturdays I work at Fleet Feet, but this weekend I'm going to spend the afternoon volunteering at the clinic. I'd like to go as much as possible over the next two years, and possibly during my PhD work.

The research in Dr. MR's lab is interesting (deals with lupus, and the inflammation and hypertension that accompany it), and a lot of the techniques are the same as in Dr. RH's lab, but I'm not enjoying myself quite as much. It's not bad, but I think I got spoiled by the amazing people I was working with last week. I had an awesome teacher who was very willing to let me practice doing the procedures. This week I'm working mostly with college students who aren't exactly eager to teach.

On an odd/interesting note, I've started practicing writing left-handed. I want to improve my manual dexterity, and I can tell a big difference between my left and right hands.