For fear of this section closing I figure I ought to go ahead and do this now. It’ll be easy actually.

Since I can’t really remember where I left off last year I might as well start somewhere around last fall. The only major thing to happen really was that I did in fact take the entrance exam and fill out applications for dental school. I was slowly but surely rejected from all of my school choices, and in the case of UW apparently forgotten about entirely until the day before my birthday at which point they finally remembered to send me the rejection notice. I think this was equal parts not having stellar grades and also not spending a huge amount of time observing a dentist.

It’s not that I found the rejection discouraging, I just really wanted to take time again to prepare and also do something fun. So I decided not to try and apply again this year. Instead I’ve been getting ready to do some real mountain climbing. In June my dad and I took a week long class in the north cascades that taught us proper packing, good gear lists, crevasse rescue and general glacier and mountain skills. Out of this I thought I learned how to hike, backpack and camp better in general. And now when I look at mountains I feel like I could actually go out and climb about any one safely. The pinnacle of all this work was climbing Mt Rainier two weekends ago, the pictures are linked somewhere else on idkfa. 14,412 feet of mountain with my dad, though only about 9000 feet that I personally had to walk. Dad was a little worried he wouldn’t be able to make it, and a couple of times it was hard to get him up and walking towards the summit again, but we did it in good time and aren’t much worse for the wear of it. Now I’m looking to do some more summits and maybe even take on Rainier again with another climbing partner.

Job wise I’m doing the same thing. Earlier this year my old boss quit right about the same time as I had been discussing moving to another scientists group, which was a little awkward. My old boss caught wind of my move to a different group and was a little unhappy about it, since I initiated the move before I knew she was leaving. Anyway I work on leprosy vaccines now though I still moonlight with TB and generally am an all around kind of guy. I did finally learn how to do flow cytometry and intracellular cytokine staining. Kinda still slow on it and I get confused by the intricacies of the flow machine program, but basically not much has changed for me at work.

I just finished captaining my second season of corporate ultimate Frisbee league with a perfect record for our team. And by perfect record I mean 0-10 all losses. Still we had the most fun of any team out there and were awarded for most team spirit… tied with REI corporate actually. In a few weeks I’ll be starting a fall league and also riding 160 miles in a MS fundraiser.

At home things are pretty much the same. John is going into the second grade at a new school. We really couldn’t handle the Christian school anymore, with any and all of John behavior problems there being blamed on Katy having a job that did not include popping out babies like the Dugger family. That and the final straw for me was when John told me that only god/jesus can cure leprosy, and did not believe me when I said that there were pretty good antibiotics out there… I really don’t need John telling his teacher even in a misguided way that I’m trying to cure people like jesus.

That is pretty much it, more than that really. It’s not like much has happened in a year, I just have a slow afternoon at work today.