nws = national weather service

10/28/2009 0906 PM
Boulder, Boulder County.
Heavy snow m17.3 inch, reported by NWS employee.
On roof at NWS office.

But...I'm off to class.

things i've learned in grad school: part 1

1. Don't hit your kid for stuttering.
2. Don't hit your kid for faking hearing loss.
3. You could buy a 32-gallon bag of pot for $1 in Vietnam during the war.

knowing the theme music to the young & the restless came in handy

Here's a little internet documentation of some recent fun (really, it was fun...despite my face in the picture!).

done come.

Sometimes the reminders of home are just...baffling. Again from The Kansan.

first snow

It kind of sleeted/snowed a couple of weeks ago, but last weekend it snowed quite a bit and it was cold enough that some of it stayed around for about a day or so. It did leave a lasting impression because the snow was all it took to completely strip some trees of their leaves. So there are still some green trees, some trees with dead leaves, and some with no leaves at all. We didn't really have the "pretty leaves" fall. I am thankful that the last half of this week has been beautiful weather! I definitely am not ready for cold and snow for a long period of time (I don't know that I ever will be). I like to see the snow-covered high peaks, though.

Here you can see the level of the snow and also a lot of leaves taken down by it.

whirlwind weekend

The first weekend in October, we went home! People are always telling us how great it is that we moved into mountain country, but I love Kansas! I was excited for the flat, open spaces and familiar sites...home.

Our time was unfortunately very limited, but it was good to be there even for the short amount of time that it was. We felt like we were constantly telling people sorry that we didn't have more time to spend with them. Thanksgiving will be good. Due to schedules, we couldn't leave for KS until about 5pm, which put us in Moundridge at about 2am.

We packed a lot in -- breakfast in Moundridge, a haircut, one hour at Fall Fest, lunch with my family, a visit to Dave, Shelley, and Rhett's where we admired their newly finished basement, and then it was off to the main event. :) The reason we chose that weekend to go home was so I could attend my 10-year high school reunion. We had dinner, drinks, a slide show, some prizes, and a lot of time for chatting. I saw a lot of people I wanted to see. It was a good time. The only picture of people I have from the weekend is below. All other pictures are of my cat, who I got to see for the first time in two months!

We got to chat a bit more with my parents after the reunion and have breakfast with everyone Sunday. Then it was back to Moundridge for lunch and we had to take off. The drive back was ok, but unfortunately we ran into some bad fog, which slowed us down some.


























Alison, me, and Hai

school hearing screenings

This week I got to have my first real world experience in my new field. For the class Audiological Evaluation, we all signed up to volunteer with school hearing screenings in the public schools. I know I am not going to be an audiologist, but since speech/language is so connected to hearing, they are good skills to have, and an SLP has to rule out hearing loss as the cause of speech/language impairments or know if it is a contributing factor. Anyway. I was both excited and nervous because I did not want to make any mistakes. I was glad it worked in my schedule to sign up for an elementary school because the kids are so cute and they care about wanting to do a good job. It was fun, and I performed my task well. It was interesting to go over audiograms with the audiologist and ask her questions. I identified one hearing loss that was not previously know to the school district. It may not have been a new loss (and I hope, for the kid's sake, that it is not) because he was new to the district and was previously at a private school that apparently didn't do hearing screenings because they didn't have a case history for him. When I screened him, I wasn't positive my results were correct because it really was just one frequency in the middle of others where he did not respond. When a kid doesn't pass, he eventually is given a diagnostic test by the audiologist to find thresholds. I got to see his audiogram, and he truly has a notch of hearing loss only at one frequency. Exciting for me that I found something, but sad for the kid.

Another fun part of the day is that we got to eat school lunch. It's funny that I was so excited about it because I stopped eating regular school lunch somewhere around 4th or 5th grade because I didn't really like it. I guess it is novel again. This school lunch was incredibly "Boulder": offerings included tofu hot dogs on whole wheat, an amazing salad bar (how many elementary-aged kids do you know who eat salad bar?) with all kinds of toppings including chicken breast and vegetables grown at the school by the kids (so awesome), and individual soy milks. Loved it.