It's a Wrap!

My blog fluency is equivalent to child swimmer level: arm floaties. I thought I had this, but I seemed to have "saved" this post from June 7th instead of publishing it... now I am pushing the big orange "Publish" button for sure!

I have officially survived my first/junior year at UC Davis! Finals are over and now I just have to sit and anxiously await the posting of grades! (June 13th edit: Still waiting, but I got a B in Genetics and that is all a girl can hope for with a class average in the 60s!). Two weeks before the end of the quarter, our beloved Smartsite online portal went down, so even if professors have already graded exams, they can't upload them to Smartsite so we have to wait for our official transcripts to post to view our grades, which may take a while ("June 24th" officially). In the meantime...

After my last final, Andrew took me out for steak and whiskey, so I'm really feeling in Summer mode now (even though I'm taking more classes starting next week). I'm wearing flip flops and tank tops like they're going out of style. I also finally started reading the book Cutting for Stone that was recommended to me last year by an older woman volunteering at the library who used to work as a pathologist in the 1950's, "back when things were less elegant and more gorey." The book retraces the  history of twins born in Ethiopia to a surgeon father, and mother (a nun!) who passes at their birth. When I started reading it, I thought that the universe had conspired for me to read this book at this time in my life. I highly recommend it. Also, so does the New York Times (where it reached #2 on the bestseller list) and Amazon (where it is in the "100 Books to Read in a Lifetime"). Cutting for Stone reminds me of how I used reading as a kid to travel and learn about histories and cultures from different perspectives. I had this series of books wherein young historical figures would write about major world events in a journal format. For a long time I kept a journal, always thinking that my words would be worth something one day. As it turns out, writing is more about the reflection process than the actual end result. Oh well, I am learning a lot about Ethiopian and Arabian peninsula history reading my current book, which has only taught me how little it is that I actually know.

This post is getting a little long in the tooth; I'll bow out here, I've got some Summer to Summer!