X'mas fun

It's hard to believe after a giant snow storm the weekend before Christmas that left the streets covered with more than one foot of snow, there's going to be another 6 inches piled on this new year's eve. The weather sure knows how to dampen the spirits of new year firework-watchers (such as us). Nonetheless, dc and I have never seen so much snow throughout our three years in Hopkins. The non-stop 50+ hours of snowing kept us at home to write our autopsy reports, which we handed in right on time on Xmas eve. We are also proud that we took an hour in the last moments of the storm to trudge through the white and slippery streets of Cambridge. Check out my large snowball that I accumulated during our walk!

Meanwhile, we monitored the weather and the road conditions closely after the snowstorm, and on Xmas eve, made the decision to undertake our winter holiday to Newport, Rhode Island! It's a snap-finger-and-go trip, we knew little about what to expect or do, but New England amazes us in fascinating ways.

First up was our favourite hotel Marriott Residence Inn. It's affordable, spacious and we love the fully-equipped kitchen in the suite together with all the amenities. We enjoyed the room so much that we prepared and had our dinners in the hotel the two nights we were there.

I have never heard about Newport being a major town in Rhode Island - it is really a very scenic coastal town where the tycoons in the Guilded Age build their summer homes. Here's the gate of one of the 'cottages':

Impressive? A street along the coast of Newport are dotted with mansions that are built by wealthy families like the Vanderbilts, JP Morgan, and interiors are decorated in an extravagant and opulent way beyond our imaginations. The way in which these people spend to keep up with appearances in the past just blew dc and I away.





It's a pity that photography was not allowed indoors in order to preserve the paintings and fabric, but here's a photo I took off the internet, just to give a feel of the majesty of the mansions. (Photo: John Corbett, Courtesy of The Preservation Society of Newport County) Marble pillars, chandeliers, gold foils lining the skirtings, one-of-a-kind wall fabric. An interesting nugget of information we learnt - Anderson Cooper of CNN is a son of the great-granddaughter of the man who built the mansion in this photo. It's almost like having a royal lineage.



Not forgetting the beautiful cliffs near which the mansions are built, the wharfs of Newport, and the vineyards dotting New England.. The cobblerstone streets and colonial architecture speaks much about the history of Newport as a colony before the revolution, and for a moment, we felt like we were back in Edinburgh.

More photos of our Newport trip on Google photos here!

And so it concludes our little Christmas getaway. The photos do not do justice to the fun we had over this much-needed break. The semester has been tough - I had problems finding a lab, and several times dc and I questioned our ability to do well enough in our classes to fulfill the department's requirements. By the grace of God, everything turned out very well! A prof took me in, though I do not have the skills for what he wanted me to do. His students all speak very highly of him (I was told he makes the best chocolate and ice-cream!) and my exchanges with him have been very comfortable. I'm so excited to start some lab work! Amazingly, dc and I both received As for the extremely difficult class! We were literally screaming and jumping and hugging each other in our little apartment. :) Praise the Lord!

End of first semester

It has been a rather event-filled semester.

Other than the usual mugging we kindda expect, it was definitely good to have people coming over now and then ever since we arrived here in Boston. Zhen Xing, Bryce and Yichung, then our parents, sister and the whole gang of ka, pi, pao, chuan etc etc. Not to mention this was the first time I went to outlet mall so often.

All-in-all, I would say this is a semester of hard choices (Yup, just like a class entitled "Principles and Practice of Hard Choices" taught by God.) Our being in Boston was already the start of this series of hard choices. As we transversed the wet and windy streets of New England and joking about "wouldn't we be enjoying better weather if we had made our decision to go somewhere more sunny and less cloudy", we were almost instantly reminded that we made this decision ourselves. This is not to imply that this has been a bad decision. Many aspects of Boston still leave us grateful for being here. But I guess the notorious gloomy skies are always a good scapegoat to represent the collaterals of choosing to come to MIT or perhaps choosing our Phd program. Anyway, we have come to realize how hard the choice we made have become. Academic requirements, outcompeting the incredibly smart classmates for a few select nationalities, cost-benefit-risk-interest-everything under the sun analysis in choosing our labs are all on a fine thread under high tension. Again, not that it's bad since level of difficulty does not equate the level of goodness but it still intrigues you when you look back at your own decisions.

This will be our 2nd Christmas away from home. A white christmas perhaps, if it snows enough and the temperature remains cold enough to stop the snow from melting. We are all ready for it, with a nice Christmas wreath, littl' O Cypress tree, pink carnations, Xmas Tree lights from CVS. We even prepped ourselves by listening to Christmas Carols all day during our mugging. (Now we can guess the song with just 2.546 seconds into the song.) Now, we will just enjoy our well-deserved break (once we finish writing our autopsy report) and chill.

Happy 25th!

Hope this year will be better than the last! (Though the last was already excellent with me officially entering your life :))

Yours always,
cy

Thank you for the wonderful Thanksgiving holiday

Thank you for travelling half-way round the globe to bring everything we miss about Singapore to us - chicken rice mix, Indocafe coffee mix, kuei lapis, durian cake, etc, and THE family! We are truly blessed to have you stay with us for the past three weeks, and we certainly hoped you enjoyed your holiday as much as we enjoyed your company (despite CW's classmates teasing her about coming to Boston to 'play computer games').

I love you.

Following the US Presidential Elections, here's dc's favourite SNL clip

Nerd Pride

nerd n (plural nerds)

1. (slang, derogatory) A person who, although having good technical or scientific skills, is introspective and generally introverted

(Source: Wikitionary)

When I was in high school, "nerd", although not an extremely positive term, was something I secretly wished people will use to describe me, because that will mean that I am mugging as hard as my peers. On retrospect, it is interesting that many years later, I will marry a "nerd" and pursue graduate education in an institute that celebrates "Nerd Pride" (yes they sell merchandises - keychains, shirts and the like - in the MIT bookshop that spells N-E-R-D-P-R-I-D-E). One particularly popular product among students which I found really interested was a T-shirt that simply has this on its front:

So this nerdy couple (my husband insists that I have to be a nerd in order to marry one), like all inquisitive scientists and conscientious students, prints articles and notes at a vorocious rate. This week, with the graduate student lounges in both MIT and HMS being unavailable, we decided to explore the printing labs in MIT computer labs (the free printing attracts poor students like us).

Even for someone like me who has experience programming with Java and Matlab, printing at MIT still proved somewhat intimidating for me. For starters, the whole network operates in Unix (non-Graphic User Interface!) and we have to remotely access Unix just to get the combo to unlock the doors to the computer lab.

Here's what we need to do to command the program to read the thumbdrive:

Athena% attach-usb

attach-usb: Command not found.

Athena% add consult

athena% attach-usb

Alert: attach-usb needs to run as root. Either "su" to root

before running attach-usb, or type the root password now:

Password:

Success: the usb drive is attached to /mnt/usb

WARNING: run "detach-usb" before you remove your usb drive.

Removal without running detach-usb might not save all your data.

Athena% nautilus / mnt/usb&

[1] 4059

athena%[1] Done nautilus /mnt/usb

athena%

athena% []

Phew!

Plug in USB, enter commands to detect USB, enter password to access USB, open files, enter command to print, close files, enter command to remove USB. What a lot of trouble! Granted this makes the network an extremely secure and stable system, I suppose only seasoned MIT nerds can operate the computers effortlessly without constantly checking back with the MIT computing cheatsheet. Oh did I mention dc and I spent something like ten minutes figuring out how to remote access Unix and login to start with?

*~*~*~*

It's perfectly normal if you do not understand what is on the MIT T-shirt, I paused for 5 min myself.

(Einstein's mass-energy equivalence)

(Ohm's law relating voltage, current, resistance)

(Ideal gas law in thermodynamics)

Good Eats

So is the title of a show on Food Channel, which CY and I crazed over in our undergraduate years, because it is so scientific in all the cooking. Explaining steps in chemistry, measuring temperature with infra-red thermometer, you name it all.

One month ago, we chanced upon this book called "Molecular Gastronomy". Sounds yummy, yet nerdy huh. It turned out that it was exactly the book we would like. It discusses many cooking processes in scientific terms, summarizes important experiments and data to support hypotheses (e.g. when preparing broth, should you boil the water with the meat or add the meat only after the water start boiling?) and even has references to literature. Wow!

There are many molecular gastronomical phenomena happening around us everyday as we are preparing food. One of which has been on our mind for long is why do bones make good broth? Here're the candidates in bone which can potentially be the trick: collagen (type I), mesenchymal or hematopoietic stem cells, precursors to all the white and red blood cells or simply the adipose (fat) tissue in the bone. Personally, I would go with the precursor cells. Here's why: Collagen Type I is a huge protein which can potentially give rise to all the yummy amino acids to give a MSG-like flavor but it's questionable if thermal degradation breaks it down so efficiently. It may be so if we have heat-tolerant collagenase akin to heat-tolerant DNA polymerase for PCR. Fat is always good but well, it adds richness but in terms of giving tastiness, hmmm nah. Stem cells are cool and funky (and elixir-ish) but considering that they are relatively undifferentiated, they probably do not have so much proteins hanging around in their cytoplasm anyway. Does DNA taste good.... probably not. So we are left with precursor cells, cells which are happily differentiating, chunking out tons and tons of proteins for gene regulation, surface markers and enzymatic activities. Did I mention that they form quite a big proportion of the cells in the bone marrow space?

The third and last installment of the Presidential Debate was finally over. Each time there's a deabte, all major news network run lots of analysis including who looks more presidential. To me, Obama looks more presidential, not because he looks calm and composed but because he engages questions and answers them as though he has known you for long.

By the way, everyone knows who Joe the Plumber is after the debate. It turns out that he is not really a plumber but what is more interesting to me is an associated piece of news that comes with it. Average annualized pay of a plumber in USA = $47 000. Isn't something impressive to many graduates in Singapore even before we talk about currency exchange? It's time for plumbin-opolis.

cydc's First Honeymoon (implying more to come)

Today being the first anniversary of our engagement, it seems apt to (finally) put up some photos of our honeymoon which I have been sitting on for a while now.

Perth, being desertous and laidback, is not many people's idea of a fun or romantic honeymoon destination. Yet after a whirlwind wedding preparation, cydc are only too ready to go for a relaxing, nature-filled trip before we uproot ourselves to settle in metropolitan Boston. The holiday exceeded expectations, even if we drove 2000km at speeds up to 130km/h to little known, yet interested places in Western Australia. With a total photo collection of 1800 (a staggering 7GB!), it is of coz not easy to shortlist pictures without cluttering the blog. So here are our tour guides for the trip:

and also our little passengers:

Western Australia was definitely a good juxtaposition of city and nature, history and geography. We visited countless national parks and never got tired of taking in the chilling winds from the Indian Ocean, the gorgeous gorges along the coasts, or even the mysterious limestone pillars at Pinnacles Desert. We had the opportunity to picnic by the rocky Muchison River at Kalbarri (yummy fish burgers!) in a world of our own! July was also the beginning of the wildflowers season and there were just vast fields of golden yellow flowers along the highways, which together with the random wind turbine park en route, looks just like Teletubby land :) Pelican feeding, dolphin sightings, emus at a random highway stopover, kangaroos along the highway (dead and live), rabbits scurrying across the road oblivious to traffic - don't we enjoy the freedom of animals in the wild?

Little did we expect Western Australia to also have a rich maritime, gold mining and shipwreak history. The HMAS Sydney Memorial at Geraldton is a dome made in the image of 645 seagulls representing the lives lost when the ship sunk in war. Stories of shipwreak mutinies also made for great collections at the maritime museum.

Not forgetting the great food that we had Down Under..

We had seafood almost every meal - fish, scallops, prawns, calamari, mussels, oysters and lobsters, otherwise there was steak, ribs, and our new food craze: grilled chicken with avocado sandwich! Though food was not exactly cheap (contrary to what I was told), the portion size was definitely huge - cydc definitely added an inch or two around our midriffs at the end of our honeymoon. There are of course, times when we had to resort to KFC or Nong Shim Kim Chi instant noodles, when prices or availability got out of hand haha. Did you know that dc introduces instant noodles as his favourite food? He definitely had no complaints about the cup noodles.

A special mention about the cake in the last row - many thanks to Daniel who very warmly served us champagne and chocolate cake on our flight home! The cake was really yummy!

And of course, you can't be at west coast and not enjoy the beautiful romantic sunsets..

We ended our honeymoon with our Toyota Camry Sportivo smacked full of insects from the wilderness on every surface at the front. It looks quite disgusting (especially when you have to clean the bugs off your windscreen), but I guess it's just a nice report card on how much and how far we have travelled :)

We were unable to take any photos at our last stop at Perth - The Perth Mint, but we did bring home from the mint the best momento of our first honeymoon of many to come.

Happy anniversary, Dear. :)

Tired but still thoughtful

Our crazy two weeks ended with a finale (just two hours ago) that left cydc brutally deflated. The midterm was unexpectedly incomprehensible and both of us concede defeat to the prowess of MIT's renowned (notorious?) Department of Chemical Engineering.

Nevertheless, the roller-coaster two weeks have seen more downs that ups. Starting with the ascending portion: we were finally called for our long awaited autopsy! Halfway through our ChemEng class, the beeper went off and everybody turned back to a very embarrassed cy while dc hunched over to retrieve the beeper. If anyone is getting cold feet at the thought of autopsy, I have to say it is really less scary than we make it to be. It helped that the body was already opened by the time we arrived, and the deceased's face was respectfully covered, so it felt like we were only viewing a demonstration. (btw, that's a photo of dc in scrubs!) While this class is about the causes and mechanisms of diseases, dc and I came to a realization that when a patient reaches the need for medical intervention, things usually go downhill from there. Medicine, while at times being able to solve a problem, often introduces other issues to a patient's already broken body. I'm not good at philosophical stuff, but just feel that we can't do enough in medical care.

On the other hand, my new laptop has arrived! (finally!) It is a series of unfortunate events that resulted in four failed deliveries and one return to sender, almost killing all the excitement in getting the new toy. Events of the last two weeks have forced us to marvel at the idiocracy of US systems. Example 1: UPS will only deliver my package before 10.30am on weekdays because the package is delivered from overseas. Obviously working people will not be able to sign for it, and UPS cannot make the exception, so the only way out is to allow them to send it back to the sender based in US, then redeliver by ground, this time they will make the home delivery before 5.30pm. This caused a two and a half week delay. Example 2: We cannot make a Massachusetts state ID (all-purpose document) because we have foreign driver's licences. The only way to get an 'all-purpose document' is to take the local driving test to get the state driver's licence. "When in Rome, do what the Romans do" - we can only swallow our frustrations.

In any case, there are only great times ahead. Our next round of midterms are in mid-November, and between now and then, we have in mind to go outlet mall shopping, watch the fall foilage, host three friends coming up from Baltimore and prepare for our Thanksgiving trip in end November. My family is coming over to Boston! Excited excited.. If anybody wants anything from the US (e.g. scrapbooking materials *wink*, sorry no SunBeam raisins here!), drop us a note!

Lord of the Rings - Nothing rings a bell

Ever since Frodo of Shire, we have

Space of Disse
Fat cell of Ito
Pore of Kohn
Cord of Billroth
Column of Bertin
Islet of Langerhans
Loop of Henle

Not forgetting,

Hassal's corpuscle
Bowman's capsule
Nissl substance
Wharton's jelly
Peyer's patches
Schwann cell
Meissner's and Auerbach's plexi

That's what we have been doing the whole weekend

The golden silence

After the pager went off like crazy on Thursday, beeping almost every half an hour, it stopped once it landed into our hands. It's nice not to spend the weekend looking at the creations of God up close and personal but well, CY is not going to be happy if it goes off tomorrow. That would only mean that she will miss the second attempt for her laptop delivery.

We had our first fire alarm this week though. I was cooking halfway, frying bean curd to be exact and smoking the entire apartment in the process when the strobe lights suddenly started to flicker. I almost thought that CY was taking a picture with flash but when I saw her sleeping on the sofa, the only natural reaction was "crap, I didn't trigger off the alarm, did I?" Well, it turned out that I wasn't the culprit and it was someone 15 floors above us. The fire alarm was cute in the sense that it was not an announcement to ask residents to evacuate the building. The exact instructions were something like the alarm had been triggered, someone would verify the trigger and we were to evacuate only if we hear a signal for our floor after the announcement. Nice huh. Isn't it great to know that they would verify the alarm before ordering an evacuation and the evacuation is floor-specific? Well, after hearing the announcement repeating itself in 3 other languages and hearing a signal so faint that our neighbors and us thought that it was from another building, maybe an immediate order for evacuation was better.

Our days without TV were given a break on Friday when the presidential debate was on and every laptop could become a TV given internet access to CNN website to watch it live. The debate was just ok and nothing unexpected came out from it. Obama was surprisingly very patient, I think, as he tried to straighten the logic that McCain posed. I would have been driven to insanity if I were him.

We're next in line to view an autopsy!

Stay tuned for updates, likely this weekend :)

(See also: Sept 6 entry)

1 thought, 2 woks, 3 something

It has been a routine week and to give an exact definition to a routine week, I guess it will be "a week" during when our expected schedule is mixed with random events. Nevertheless, it seems possible to string all into a certain "1...2...3..." Lame and cliche, huh? But as we are told multiple times in our pathology class that "cliche tends to be true to some extent", it may be true that we can all summarize our week in 123.

First about the 1 thought. We have been talking to Professors, visiting some labs (and hopefully attending some lab meetings soon) so as to identify a good place and project to work on in our next 5-6 years here. Like all things in life, it's really difficult to choose. In forcing ourselves to come to a decision, we think about all sorts of things, like whether the PI is a good mentor or a slave-driver, whether the lab looks nice, whether the project is interesting to us (I just type it subconsciously and try to convince myself these are considerations are not in order of importance). These are existing parameters. Many, including myself, project what the consequences of a decision may be in the far future. Those are projected parameters. Logically speaking, one should make the decision mostly based on optimized existing parameters due to the very nature that our projections of our own future are mostly wrong. Yet, it is somehow counter-intuitive to do so, as though God has created a sense of time so strong that we cannot be satisfied with looking solely at present circumstances.

This week also marks the demise of our second (2) frying wok. This is where we have to stand on the side of anti-technology folks. Manufacturers nowadays add all sorts of coatings, from Teflon to nano-particles, onto the woks and pans and once the integrity of coating is compromised, the wok is essentially pronounced unusable (unless you want to coat your GI tract with Teflon before eating greasy food). Our first wok got burnt when we just heated it up on the stove with nothing in it. The second one survived for a bit longer but the nanoparticles were obviously trapping burnt stuff on it and necessitated the use of scrubs to remove them, resulting in scratches and a broken layer of coating. Why cant they just leave the nanoparticles for something better, like lining the exhaust pipes of cars or something?

Next, a bunch of interesting facts with the number 3. This is our 3rd week at MIT. The homework this past week was so hard that I had to drink 3 cups of coffee to keep myself awake while finishing it. Of course, we finished the homework only at 3am the day before submission.

Boston tour - downtown and Cape Cod

It has been a wet, relaxing and dirty weekend, and now cydc are tired from all the activities of the past few days, yet saddled with three washing machine loads of laundry in the dryer and tons of undone reading and homework for the coming week. Thus we start our third week at MIT, already feeling jaded with the routine of graduate life (though we have not even started lab work yet!)

Nonetheless, cydc finally took time to do tourisy stuff around Boston since we came. I think I must have gotten into the groove of school so much that I actually felt guilty about spending a large part of the day out! Still, no birthday in the Lim household (yep, that's cydc's alias) begins without the mandatory longevity noodles that is really instant noodles in disguise. I do have to lament that US boasts of far better selection of instant noodles than Singapore has. Think pork bone soup, or braised beef noodles..

We had a chance to get away from the bad landscaping in MIT (what are the smart engineers in MIT thinking? geez..) to Boston Commons and Public Park. They're nowhere as big as Central Park, but I love the flowers and the gardening, especially the willow trees by the pond that leans into the water. For the more-than-one-year that cydc were in Singapore, we kept talking about going to the zoo, botanical gardens, South Ridge trail for 'nature dates', but interestingly those never materialized with all the graduate school, wedding stuff going on. It's a pity, but I'm glad we made it up over my birthday! Nothing more I love than to spend quiet time with my hubby!

Clockwise from top left: Parkman Bandstand; Make Way For Ducklings, a sculpture erected as a tribute to an illustrated story of the same name that made Boston Public Garden familiar to the world; one of my favourite landscapes - love the contrasting colours between the flowers and the white Christmasy plants; swan boats that cruise the pond at the Public Garden - the operator in the swan has to paddle!

As much as dc doesnt mind splurging on a expensive meal at a classy restaurant on his wife's birthday, I found going to Quincy Market for 'cha-pa-lan' dinner from many different food stores a much more exciting gastronomic exploit. It's mandatory when you're in Boston to go to Quincy Market, and you haven't been to Quincy Market until you have had clam chowder soup from Boston Chowda. It's way better than any Campbell soup (ok maybe that isn't a very flattering comparison, but it's a must-have!). Our seafood platter with fried oysters satisfied our crustacean craves. Somehow we just cannot bring ourselves to pay so much more to buy fish and prawns compared to poutry and pork to cook at home. Lastly, my birthday cake this year is special because it's not really a cake. There wasn't any birthday song for me, but.. I really don't need one since I'm already a ripe old 23 :)

This last birthday photo deserves a frame of its own. A week before my birthday while we were cooking dinner, a mysterious parcel arrived at our door. dc denied that he is involved, though his refusal to open it gave himself away (totally). Heehee. My hubby sure knows my heart, because he bought me a beautiful rustic candlelabra, knowing that I have this fascination about candles because they have such a peaceful and sensual aura about them. In line with his usual corny gift tags ("Enjoy your Valentines' Day before we become more than valentines!" before our wedding), his gift tag this time reads, "Happy birthday Darling! Wishing you a fruitful year ahead (with me)!" dc has this brand of humor that is unique to him, and that has certainly attracted me to him!

It's unfortunate that our departmental retreat only received a cursory mention in our blog, but that's really because it has only been a short trip, and since it rained most of the time, there really wasn't much activity going on. cydc certainly did manage to accomplish another of our unfulfilled goals in Singapore - that is to go kayaking. dc never believed that I love kayaking, and this time at least he was convinced that I'm as good a rower as he is :D. Other parts of the retreat were much like OBS, with all the team building games and such. As much as I hoped to get to know people in my department better, somehow its difficult to step out of our comfort zone to talk about random things like Americans do (like why today is a good day to wear a yellow top). It's not all unaccomplished, I'm sure we'll be having many other (and hopefully more comfortable) opportunities like this.

CSI: Boston

Not another series to look forward on TV but what we have experienced so far this week has been nothing short of CSI. Indeed a week peppered with mysteries, twists and . as CY insisted, "Horatio Caine coolness".

1) We had Registration Day at MIT the past Tuesday and here's Mystery #1 - MIT doesn't use an online system for registering, adding or dropping classes (at least not for incoming students). Coincidentally, we also had a mysterious hold (essentially meaning the school admin blocked us from registering). As a result, we had to trod down the infinite corridor of MIT to the student service center, where our hold had already mysteriously disappeared and our registration forms were on a desk ready to be handed out. We headed back to our advisor, had her signed our forms and left with Mystery #1 unsolved.

2) We got to learn of this prior to this week already but since the theme for this week is CSI, it wouldn't hurt to throw in another mystery which is perhaps just a week too old. Mystery #2 - Harvard has a fall semester which breaks before Christmas, after which students return for a 2-week reading period and then take their finals. A corollary to that is Harvard apparently runs a very different academic calender compared to MIT. A secondary corollary (if you will, corollary of a corollary) is that we, as HST students, have to absorb two different academic calenders with occasional differences in holidays like Fall break and Spring Break. To identify our holidays, it is now necessary to use the logical operator AND. Only when both MIT and Harvard have holidays at the same time will we have ours. Somehow the arrival of my PDA phone (with wonderful Outlook Calendar functions) makes me slightly more comforted.

3) Human Pathology class has already convened twice this week. The first lab was eye-opening, especially when we saw organs (preserved and fixed in formalin) of all diseases state laid out in front of us. The second class was the appetizer to the "Horatio Kane coolness". We had a lecture on autopsy, how to do an autopsy and finally had a medical examiner who used to work in NYC to talk to us on the various cases he had worked on before. Interestingly, one of his cases, involving an undercover cop cross-firing with a cop in a subway station, bears remarkable resemblance to an episode in CSI: New York. Now here's the deal of coolness. We are now in a team of four and charged with a beeper. Once the beeper goes off, we will rush to Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in 15 min, suit up and join a resident in doing an actual autopsy. Mystery #3, however, is that although the hospital will know 1 hour in advanced of a deceased on whom an autopsy can be done, we can only be informed 15 min prior to the start of the autopsy.

Autopsy = Educational but gory
Beeper = exciting but intrinsically meaningless
Beeper + Autopsy = Horatio Kane coolness

4) Yet another appetizer, we had a taste of clinical medicine today at Brigham and Women's Hospital. The key highlight had to be our trip to the phlebotomy department (aka blood drawing department). We had our hands on drawing blood from our classmates (even CY drew) and in turn, had ours drawn. We then took the blood to run tests in machines which analyzed the cellular content in 30 seconds. Cool huh, but the limelight still had to be stolen by the new blood drawing needle we saw prior. Manufactured by BD Biosciences, it is a retractable needle which, at the end of the blood drawing, retracts out of the skin and flesh into a hidden compartment in a split of the second. No more of the unbearable pulling out of needle. Engineering rules.

TC

First week in Boston!

Today marks almost the end of the 1st week in Boston. Many changes along the way and many tasks to settle, many meetings to attend and many adaptations to be made. None of these beats the saddening revelation that we have definitely become older, or at least less robust to take the long-haul flight from Singapore to US. Despite the shorter transit (layover in US colloquial terms) time in New York JFK Airport, we couldn't help but succumb to the inevitable "stoning"...

Anyway, back to our arrival in Boston or by this time in more exact geographical terms, MIT Eastgate (E55) Apt 4B. A nice cozy apartment, clean by all standards, just a little bit run-down due to its age I guess. MIT did keep her promise of not giving us any furniture and lighting and so there wasn't any surprises there. Something a bit disappointing could be the dirty glass windows, which make you feel like you are in the LRT with the transition glass windows blurred permanently, but other than that, we must say the view is not too bad for a 4th floor. The famous Charles River is in sight and the pretty Boston cityline (of course not the whole of it) as well. A good consolation is that if you ever want to take the whole city with the river in one go, the penthouse lounge is open to all residents. The first night was spent getting to know our apartment well, literally, as we scrubbed the floors and hugged them to sleep after about 30 hours of traveling.

The next day was extremely fun because since when was spending money not so? We got a mini-van, went to Target, Ikea and Star market, justifying how would we need all sorts of stuff and dumping them into our shopping carts. Little did we know that we really shopped for the entire day. 10.30am - 1pm at Target, 4 - 9pm at Ikea and 9 - 10pm at Star market. Maybe for once, even cy can be tired of shopping...

In case anyone wonders, yup, this was still orientation week. It had been difficult to leave the apartment in a mess and go out for the orientation events, but well, we did so for some of the events. Had a nice walking tour around Harvard, did both our MIT and Harvard IDs and attended the full-fledged HST orientation at the posh Sloan building (which boasts of Fullerton-style bathrooms with black marble tiles). And it's back to assembling furniture, assembling and more assembling, as much as I would like to make it more interesting, driving screws into wood is just driving screws into wood and I would rather fast forward to introduce the finished product of our new home...



And some nice, cozy, romantic pictures of our lovely home...





So that almost marks the end of the first week in Boston, only to be made better with going to Church with Dominique, having good old chinese-cooked rice in Chinatown and lots of Chinese grocery shopping at C-mart near South Station (only 3 stations from our apartment, thank God for that!)

First month!

Many months back, my hubby was inspired to set up a blog because he realized we needed an avenue to store our common memories. After a few months of negligence, I have the honor of cataloging our new beginnings!

Our first month of marriage has been nothing short of bliss and affirmation of our decision made ten months back when he proposed on the cable car (a lost memory here - we neglected to take photos of the life-changing moment, but the confidence and courage with which he asked will always remain vivid in my heart). To those who asked us about the past month with a mischievous wink in their eyes, I'll only say it's been fun being husband and wife ;) It's wonderful to wake up in the mornings next to the one you love so dearly, knowing now you're legally stuck to him (and do not have to travel an hour to meet him!). I was a pretty possessive girlfriend, so it's comforting to see him 24/7.

By the grace of God, our journey towards this marriage has been one that was blessed by many people whom gave us countless prayers, advice and help. No doubt our parents gave us confidence in love and marriage, but being one of the firsts among our peers to wed, I am really amazed that this year in Singapore we gained so many married friends (our church cell!) whom we can talk to and turn to for help. God's timing is impeccable. Not to forget old friends who are ever so excited for us and enthusiastic to help - I term them, the Corned Sardines! (corny, I know, but that's the whole point of the Corns right? ;))

So after a whole month of procrastination, I present to you, a slideshow to our special day on July 19, with a special tribute to all who have rendered us so much help in organizing it.
Also, you will find more photos of the event as well as many group photos (all of downloadable quality - max resolution!) here.

cydc will be travelling to Boston to jumpstart our married life on August 24, 2008. Until then, I'll try to clear my backlog of updating on our honeymoon to Western Aussie and our post-wedding dates!

Something for the 1st Post

Finally, we have our own blog!

It is an incredible feat, especially for someone (the DC) who is still grasping the rationale behind blogging and who is, for some reasons, very challenged to gain and maintain momentum in getting involved in online stuff. (DC doesn't have the online photo gallery, doesn't habitually browse other people's blogs and has to be reminded to change his facebook's display photo. What DC lacks, CY has it all though.) Yet amazingly, it's DC who sets up this blog.

My thoughts about blogging deserves another post by itself but most importantly, this blog cannot be set up at a better time. CYDC are going through transitions on so many levels and are waiting, working or praying to be propelled to new beginnings on so many areas of our life.

One thing for sure, we would love a time capsule to chronicle our walk into unity. That's why Internet, being physically formless and therefore infinitely enduring, serves as the best medium. That's why blogging, being so personal and expressive, serves as an ideal channel to chronicle this. That's also why this URL is cydc2008 - to mark the holy and life-transforming event in 2008. (www. cydc.blogspot.com is just coincidentally not available)

DC