I’ve been really busy the past two weeks preparing for dental school and haven’t been able to update the website.  I also haven’t had time to touch my camera, how disappointing!  After the first week and a half of dental school classes most of my fears and hopes have been realized.  I really enjoy the material and find it interesting, and it’s going to be a lot of work!  Really looking forward to learning more and getting more experience, especially in the lab.

Some of my books for dental school this quarter, oh my!

Our first week was a really slow introduction to the school, classes, and teachers.  This past week, however, things started to get real.  Our first anatomy lecture was a 4 hour marathon that ended with 105 powerpoint slides and over 10 pages of notes.  Our second time in with our clinic partners had us applying fluoride varnishes on each other, and our second day in lab we were drilling on extracted teeth, and placing composite fillings.  It was a whirlwind week of 6-8 hours of class a day.  I felt like had I studied for 3 hours a day at the library after class, not only would I be extremely bored and frustrated, I’d still feel like I had more to cover!

So… I decided not to do that.  Instead everyday I’ve been to the gym directly after classes for 1-2 hours playing racquetball, running, or lifting weights with Max.  It really helps to detach from school for a couple hours and think about something else, and not feel guilty.  Had I sat at home for 2 hours surfing the internet or watching TV I would feel guilty for not doing anything constructive.  But going to the gym is fun, constructive, and not school-related.  Plus, getting in shape is never a bad thing.

We have yet to get really into the thick of things (our first exam isn’t until the 16th of October), but I hope I can continue this routine.  The main library is close to the gym, so stopping by there for a couple hours on my way back home is convient, and then I can relax when I do finally return.  I’m trying to take a page out of my friend Max’s playbook and focus on studying the main themes and important points rather than getting bogged down in the hundreds of pages of details.  You would do nothing but eat, sleep, and study if you tried to learn everything we’re “expected” to know for a test.

We’ll see how the first quarter goes before I put my foot in my mouth.  Needless to say, this is going to be a great challenge, and a challenge I’m really looking foward to.  And I always make sure I have time for Buckeye football, go bucks!

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During my last week in Australia Jill and I traveled to the famed Whitsunday Islands, a group of 74 islands off the northeast coast of Australia along the Great Barrier Reef, absolutely beautiful.  We arrived on a Sunday afternoon and stayed until Friday, a very relaxing 5-day getaway.  Our apartment that we rented was on top of the tallest hill in Airlie Beach – the resort area that we stayed in.  We got a good workout just walking back to our place each night, I was puffed after climbing back up the top.  A couple of times we even took a $5 taxi ride, haha, we had some tiring days!

We flew up to the whitsundays along the coast, and I couldn’t help but take photos out of the plane window.  Not the best quality, but I think the majority of the coastline was beaches.  Around Moreton Island I saw this strange water pattern – I would guess it has something to do with the water temperature, or maybe some wierd cloud cover casting crazy shadows.

After we landed we were met by a limousine to take us to our resort about 30min from the airport.  When we topped the hill in front of the beach the view was breathtaking.  I wasn’t taking photos from the car, but check out the view we had from our pool.

Jill and I took a day ‘off’ to hang around Airlie Beach and explore the small town, buy groceries, and relax before embarking on our Great Barrier Reef trip.  We took a taxi to the harbor and board a catamaran for a two hour boat ride out to the reef.  Once there we docked at a floating platform where we could go scuba diving, snorkeling, swimming, eat, and relax.  It was a blast, much more fun than the first time I went snorkeling on the reef because this time Jill was with me.  (More of these photos on on Flickr)

During our off day we decided to try one of the trails nearby for some scenic overlooks.  We ended up doing a 7.4 km loop and getting some great views of the surrounding islands.  The end of the loop took us by a coral beach.  The entire beach was made of coral, no sand to speak of.  Not easy to walk on unless you were wearing sandals, but the water was warm.

On Thursday went on our island-hopping tour.  We went to Daydream, Hamilton, and Whitehaven Islands.  Whitehaven is an uninhabited island with one of the world’s top 10 beaches.  It was Amazing!  Daydream and Hamilton are both resort islands.  Daydream is really small, and the whole island is basically the resort, while Hamilton is much larger and hosts several resorts and a nice beach.  We didn’t get to see much of Hamilton because of the boat schedules, but we were there long enough to snag an ice cream after the beach. Click to enlarge the panoramic to a much bigger size.

The vacation was fantastic, then it was back to Brisbane for a couple of days before heading back to the States.  More on the firework show “Riverfire” some other time.  Check out more photos from my trip on Flickr!

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Jill started her 2nd attempt at a herb garden.  This time she’s moved them to a place with a bit more sunlight and less access to the dog, haha.  Her plants are so far small, but progress is being made.  After a few weeks her capsicum (bell pepper) plant produced it’s first harvest:

Jill claims this is a ‘baby capsicum plant’, but I’m not entirely convinced.  If the plant would have somehow grown a full-sized capsicum it would have been twice as big as the plant that yielded it, so I think this might just be a proportional capsicum, giving the size of the plant.  We’ve been spending the last couple of days joking about what to do with the harvest.  Best idea so far is to have stuffed capsicum for dinner one night, haha.

This past weekend was Lauren’s birthday.  I’ve been here for a lot of them, late August seems to be free for me often enough that I’ve made 3 of her last 4 birthdays.  One of those was when I accidentally missed my international flight home and got to stay for another day (that’s a whole other story!).  Jill baked Lauren an orange cake, it tasted exactly like those orange cream girl scout cookies, amazing!  Happy 22nd bday Lauren!

We went out Friday night for Lauren’s birthday and also had morning tea (they’re more like hobbits here than you can imagine ), lunch, and dinner on Saturday with her and Tom.  All in all a great weekend!

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After my first attempt at editing with Photoshop, I’ve decided to take on something a bit more challenging.  As you well know I stayed in San Francisco for two days with Ben and explored the city a bit.  We visited the Golden Gate Bridge and did the photo thing.  Here is the photo I took of Ben:

Decent photo, no?  We switchd places and I gave Ben a go at the camera:

To be fair, I did not bother to touch up this second photo at all before resizing and posting it, but a lot of the bridge is missing and its too zoomed in.  So I started Googling, as you do whenever you have a question, and it turns out its actually not that hard to pluck someone or something from a photo and paste it into another.  I cut out myself from this photo, and made a new memory!

It’s not perfect, but for a first try I was pretty happy with it.  If you look closely you can see around me is a bit of a blur, and I had to slightly resize the initial photo so that Ben wasn’t 1.5x bigger than me.  I mean, he has a big head, but it’s not THAT big.  I might not be completely finished touching this one up.  In the photo I look a little brigher than Ben, so I might go in and mask just myself and darken it a little bit, maybe put a fancy border around it and a big copyright stamp that reads BEST FRIENDS across the middle.  Just an idea.  Nice of Photoshop to hold the camera so we could both get in the shot though!

Oh – and don’t believe all the photos you see on the internet, because if I can do this, imagine what an expert can do, like this:

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