Here are some of my grad school friends that I've managed to capture on film. Heh heh...
The picture above is from a day when some of us attempted to help with a car wash for the school organization the three of us are affiliated with. Not enough people showed up to help, so we, along with about four other classmates, ended up standing in the sun on a 100-degree day for about an hour before deciding to call it off. To cool off, we had smoothies before going home - they were good! :o) Tara recently bought a house sort of near school, so she'll be moving off-campus after the Summer 2004 quarter is over. While I'm sad she's leaving, she keeps saying she's going to bug me to visit her a lot, so that'll be fun. :o)
We're both freaks for baseball and vintage cars, and I often ask him questions like, "Why do all the Diamondbacks except Craig Counsell (ooh la la) intermittently suck? They should teach Craig how to pitch and then he can do everything!!!" and "In your opinion, is it better to have an overhauled, possibly crappy engine original to a car, or a new one installed by someone who may or may not know what they were doing?" (His personal opinion is that it's better to have the original engine, and the more I find out, the more I tend to agree with him!) We're also both freaks for Disneyland (one of my top 5 favorite places on the planet) and AC/DC (one of my top 5 favorite bands!) He's also a semi-professional poker and blackjack player, and often has to go to tournaments in Las Vegas on the weekends. He apparently wins thousands of dollars while his wife loses hundreds at video poker, etc, but he of course doesn't really mind. :o)
He constantly jokes around which I of course appreciate, and has uttered a few comments that were seared into my brain for years to come. Example: there's a girl in our class who has a lot of extra skin, and from certain angles, she can look pretty saggy. One day he started talking about it, and how we should all pitch in to get her skin-reduction surgery. I started sticking up for her, and he blurted out "You could play hackey-sack with her boob for Pete's sake!!!" I think all I could do was shrivel up in terror / laughter and repeatedly slap him - it was pretty funny though..... I've also been known to set him off, though he usually laughs loud and uncontollably, so I have to pick my moments...
UPDATE: He recently told me he thinks my hair looks really nice every day. Either he's blind or extremely nice (I think I know which one)!!! ;o)
A bunch of my friends and I belong to the American Pharmacists' Association (APhA), and we pal around at different events...
Random photos of my classmates and I having fun...
Back row (l-r): Sam(antha), Rob A, Dave (a year ahead of my class), Inger, Josh, Keith, Seth, Rick (a year ahead of my class), Lindsey, John, Viet, me, and Dr. Huxtable (a teacher who was joining)
Middle row: Adam (a year ahead of my class), Luis, Michelle, Kristy, Jennifer, another Samantha, another Michelle, Jessica, Violetta, Christina, and her fiancee/husband(?)
Front row: Jamie (a year ahead of my class), Peter, Joe, Payal, Yennga, Yumi, JoAnn (a year ahead of my class), and one other girl a year ahead of my class whose name I can't remember right now!
As part of the getting-to-know-each other process, we had to do silly dances. Here are some pictures:
Karen and Tara
Here are Karen and Tara (left to right). I don't know Karen very well yet, but hope to become better friends with her! (We're scheduled to do a rural rotation together in Summer 2006, so yay!) Tara has become one of my best friends here at school, and we often sit together in class, along with our mutual friends John, Dan, and Scott (she went to another school with them for about a year before they all came here). We're both dog-crazy (she recently got an Akita puppy and it's adorable!) and like to get involved in school organizations. In fact, we're both officers in one of them! We used to go walking every morning at about 5am, but as our school-work load got bigger, it became too early for us to get up. We also used to have a study group with our friends Jen and Kirk (see below), but we've strayed from that habit too!
Me and Tara during the last week of classes as photographed by John (see below)
UPDATE (Fall 2005): Tara and I have become extremely good friends, and we sit with John in class every day and joke around and in general have a great time and keep each other awake. We have so much in common we often come in wearing matching outfits (accidentally of course) and are constantly mistaken for sisters. I always say we're like a matched set or salt and pepper shakers or something! I definitely consider her my best friend in the class, and we've spent countless hours talking, laughing our heads off, etc. She's one of the kindest and most genuine people I've ever known!
Jen
This is Jen from the study group I mentioned above. She used to be Tara's roommate, so when I became friends with her, I naturally became friends with Jen too! One thing about her - she looks about ten years younger than she really is - not fair!!! She has an adorable Jack Russell terrier named Jax who LOVES to play and bark. When I get a hold of him I gently pet him until he starts to fall asleep, but then he realizes what's going on and starts racing around again! The above picture was taken on our way to a study group at Kirk's house. Jen hadn't finished her dinner yet, and was eating it in the back of Tara's truck on the way to his house, despite the wind whipping through the bed of the truck - lol!
John
I became friends with John through Tara, and he has become one of my favorite people of all time. When I first met him I was actually really intimidated, since he's older and wiser than I am, and he was pretty serious a lot of the time. It took me a while to figure him out, but now he's probably the person I most feel like I can be my true geeky self around! (While most people look at me like I'm a weirdo when I let my true self show, he's usually amused by it.) Now John, Tara, and I sit together every day, and when John and I end up next to each other we often joke around during class.
Greg
Greg was one of my preceptors during rotations in late 2004, at the end of my first year/beginning of the second year of school. We bonded pretty much immediately, and I learned a great deal from him, both about our profession and life in general. He told me countless stories about his life - some were funny, some were heartbreaking. Seeing his attitude and all the work he puts into his family (and his students!) is truly inspiring, and made me think a lot about my own life and the way I COULD be living it. I was in his town for 10 weeks. The first five I worked with him, and then the next five, I worked in the basement of the hospital. However, once my shift would end I'd usually sneak back upstairs and visit! There are barely words to convey what a good experience it was. Not so surprisingly, he was hospital employee of the year for 2004! I've thought about him and Cindy (the pharmacy's technician) every day since I left, and can't wait to go back in summer 2006!
Madeline
We met through our mutual friend and classmate Josh, and have lots of fun talking about random stuff and telling each other funny stories. I enjoy hearing about her family's adventures and various stories about her husband. She also has the coolest hair ever - right now it's blonde with red stripes, sort of like a candy cane! :o)
Kirk
Kirk and I became friends through out mutual love of movies. He tells the funniest stories and knows more about weapons than probably anyone I've ever known! He told me a story once about a guy who tried to attack him with a knife - apparently the guy had such a funny stance (see above picture for his reenactment) that Kirk burst out laughing instead of getting scared! This freaked the attacker out and he ran away! He and his wife have a cool house about a mile from campus so we hang out there once in a while. Once we have a little free time, I'm going to help them design and build a vegetable garden! :o)
Brad
Brad and I were really good friends my first year of grad school, but then he got really busy with is program and as a result, we don't see each other too often anymore.
Viet
I got to know him through a carpool (well in the sense that he drove and the rest of us rode - lol). He's another one of the people I've met here at school whom you can be yourself with right off the bat. In fact, I can comfortably be a full-on tard with him! Hooray for that! ;o) [I even told him about the time I read online that the Diamondbacks traded Craig Counsell to Milwaukee, slid off my desk chair, and hit my head on my bed frame on the way to the floor, almost knocking myself unconscious] He's probably the most apologetic person I've ever known, and also happens to have a beautiful singing voice, even when he's singing along to teenage Korean girls' music (he's not even Korean)! At school, he has a certain mystique about him - he comes in dressed VERY snappily in his work clothes and then falls asleep in almost every class (he has become famous for this). Being shy, he usually doesn't talk to people he doesn't already know, but nobody knows this is the reason he's so 'strong and silent.' So everybody pretty much thinks he's the MAN (which he is, of course). He never believes me when I tell him everyone thinks he's super-cool and mysterious, but it's the truth!
APhA
Here is Jim (APhA VP of membership), Bryan (President), Tara (SPIN coordinator), and I (Secretary) at a Fall 2005 Diabetes Walk at our school. We were in charge of this table and giving info and advice to diabetes patients and/or their family and friends.
A bunch of us went to an APhA conference in October 2005. I'm the gigantor on the left (I'm not usually that tall - this picture just ended up a bit distorted), and next to me are (L to R) Tara, Dr. Bowman (our faculty advisor), and Molly (a second-year student). In the back are Dave and Paul (both first-year students). We had a lot of fun!!!
Misc fun
Steve, Tricia, and I hanging out on the evening of one of our last days of class, late October 2005.
Dave (a first-year student) and I hanging out on the evening of one of my last days of class, late October 2005.
Randomness
Here's a random picture I took before class one day!
Keith, Michelle, Rick, and Jim
Keith, Michelle, and Jim are in my class, and Rick is a year ahead of us. We all got to know each other when we were joining Kappa Psi, a professional fraternity at our school. Michelle and I were on shadow rotations together our first year of school at a local hospital's food bank. We pretty much put together huge boxes of food for needy people. While it was nice to do something helpful, we didn't quite understand how it related to our classwork. There was an icky guy at the food bank who would always stare at Michelle's chest when he was talking to her. Luckily, she didn't notice this until our last day! Sometimes the staff would have us do such icky jobs we'd end up laughing our heads off. For example, one day they told us to clean out a caged-in room in the warehouse that was so dirty, Michelle named it the "TB room." We had to pick up wood chips, bits of paper, and other pieces of filth off the floor with our hands because their vacuum didn't work. Then they wanted us to fold up some really gross old stained used blankets and comforters that people had donated, and put them on a shelf about nine feet off the ground. Michelle got on a ladder, and I proceeded to fold them and hand them up to her. They were so dirty and icky that dust came spewing out of them, so I ended up semi-folding and shoving them up to her as fast as I could. We ended up laughing so hard I could barely get my arms up to hand them off! She has two dogs, and I enjoy her stories about the crazy things they do.
Jim is super-nice and has a great sense of humor, and I first got to know him during second-year rotations in Prescott. I was in a separate part of the hospital than him and another guy from our class, but I carpooled with them most mornings, and it was nice to know they were there. :o)
Kappa Psi
In my 2nd (?) quarter here I joined the professional fraternity Kappa Psi. Above you can see our induction photo. There were about 30 people from my class and like 8 previous members from other classes! In case you're curious who is who, here goes...
JoAnn (in front row of induction photo) was my partner for my dance - our song was "Baby Got Back." Since I dislike being in front of crowds AND dancing, I didn't much like the experience. But we stuffed toilet paper in the butt areas of our pants and got through it. I named our skit "Baby Got Embarrassed" - after it was over though, it felt good to have done it.
This was one of the funniest things I ever saw... The guy on his knee is in my class, and here he is doing his impression of Tom Cruise singing "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling" in Top Gun. Neither of the other two people did anything - the guy on the right was laughing so hard he couldn't have even if he had wanted to! The guy singing didn't end up joining, and that was sad. :o(
This was taken after all the dances - the guy in front is a year ahead of us, and he won a prize for his solo rendition of "Kung-Fu Fighting." In the back are some of my classmates, from left to right, Luis, Inger, Lindsey, John, Josh, and Rob A. Luis lives on the same floor as me in the on-campus apartments and we talk when we happen to be walking to or from class at the same time. Lindsey lives one floor down, but we don't get to talk as much as I'd like, though we're doing rotations together in fall 2004. Josh and I are pretty good friends, though we haven't been talking much lately. He's from Tennessee (in fact, the same town where my great great etc grandpa was stationed during the Civil War) and has a very prominent accent, so after spending a little time with him, it's very easy to imitate - lol!
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Created on 7 January 2004
