Desert Magnolia

This was a weekend of visiting. We hosted a dinner for visiting family from California, then attended a dinner at which a visiting Mama from Germany was the guest of honor. The weekend was mellow and the weather was lovely, and the the entire thing passed far too quickly, as they tend to do. One conversation with a friend revolved around why we do what we do, and what seems to be our tipping point from contemplating a change to actually acting on it. (This woman is remarkable, and has ascended in corporate ranks within the health care community with astonishing speed and great success, and she is familiar with striving well beyond expected levels to pursue goals.) She looked pointedly at me when this came up, and she said, 'Well, what did it for you? What process did you undergo that catalyzed a life changing series of decisions about going to grad school and reinventing yourself midlife?' I thought about it for a moment, before I responded. 'My decision to study med...

This week is the second week of finals, and I have two more to go. Thursday's is my Herbs II final, and I expect it to be a bear. Friday is Public Health and Epidemiology, and I expect it to be full of facts but manageable. The PH and Epi final has one thing over the Herbs II final in that it's all English, or mostly even though public health jargon is replete with acronyms, as one would expect from an area that deals with many government departments. But this Herbs final is going to take some finessing to manage. See we learn herbs with both their Pin Yin name (ie Chen Xiang) and their Latin name (Aquilariae Lignum resinatum). And then we learn about 20 details about each, and then we learn to distinguish between herbs in categories, ie which one is best for which condition but still good for other conditions, and so on. This semester we've learned 121 herbs in 17 categories. So far I've completed the study guide/take home quiz that our prof provided us. I feel ...