Masters International, Kitchen Calamity and Bug Fighting

Hello again!

I have three stories today that were the highlights of my week when I wasn’t reading/studying or exercising. School is in full swing now (so there’s a LOT to do) and while I am starting to procrastinate a bit (old habits die hard,) once I start working, it’s so interesting it doesn’t feel like work and time flies. I’m truly lucky to be here!

The first: I’m now an official member of Tulane’s Masters International program – a group of students who all intend to do the Peace Corps (as well as students who’ve already done the Peace Corps) as their practicum (an experience requirement to graduate.) Tulane’s commitment to global health and this Masters International program were a couple of the main reasons I chose this school and it’s really great to meet and work with others who are as crazy as I am about service and public health. This weekend we helped with a Habitat for Humanity build. I improved my hammering skills (which isn’t saying much, they were rough to begin with) and really enjoyed the day!

Did I mention it was REALLY muddy?!

Our pre-mud group!

Like I mentioned, my hammering skills weren’t the best to begin with…I managed to bend all these!

Next up: Kitchen Calamity! I should start off by mentioning that I’m usually really careful with things. After working in a lab for so long (and being a team leader where I was responsible for everyone’s safety,) I have an appreciation for doing things the safe way. So what happened was quite surprising to me! I was proudly at the final stage of making a cheesy-vegetable soup (I was proud because it was the first time I’d made soup from scratch) when I noticed a bug crawling up the wall. Bug infestations can be really problematic down here (more about this in the next story below) so I put down what I was doing and grabbed a paper towel to kill the bug before it had a chance to reproduce and all that. So I reached over the electric stove with the paper towel and …. the paper towel caught on fire! And, apparently my first instinct when holding something on fire is to wave it in the air, which as I’m sure everyone is guessing, only worsened the fire. Thankfully, reason finally kicked in and I threw the paper towel in the sink and turned on the water. Crisis stopped, no harm done and lesson learned: just because those electric stove tops don’t look hot, they definitely are and can easily catch paper towel on fire!  

Despite the incident, the soup turned out fantastic!

And finally: bug fighting. One of the trades offs for this beautiful weather in the South (it’s in the 60s here while the poor northeast is facing a snow emergency) is that bugs like it too so there are more of them and they tend to be larger than up north. And I remembered that we had cockroach problems in Vicksgurg, MS last year about this time so it being “winter” doesn’t mean I can forget about bugs at this time of year like I usually do at home. So, with this in mind, I thoroughly cleaned the kitchen floor this weekend. I’m fairly certain nobody’s bothered with it in at least 6 months because it was ridiculous. I’ll have to go back and do it again soon because I wasn’t able to get everything and the walls even needed wiping down...Anyways, either because I made their kitchen home less habitable with my cleaning, or because of crumbs I’ve dropped while eating in my room (my new rule is no eating in my room,) I’ve caught 2 roaches in my room – NOT cool! The first was easily killed with a shoe. I didn’t like it, but you do what you have to do. What wasn’t so easy was roach #2. He’d discovered that the warm space beneath my laptop on my desk was a great place to hang out. I unknowingly surprised him by picking up my laptop to go print something which is when he made a run for it. I wasn’t quick enough to get a shoe before he’d squeezed himself in a spot where I couldn’t get to him. So I stepped out of the room to retrieve the Raid but when I returned, he’d disappeared! As there wasn’t much I could do about him, I put the Raid next to me and hesitantly began working at my laptop again. It feels like that roach was playing with me because not much afterwards, I saw a dark blob dash across my desk! That time, since I had the Raid next to me, I sprayed him directly and thankfully he stopped moving. When I went to pick him up with paper towel, however, he’d mysteriously disappeared again! I’d thought he was dead or at least paralyzed with the neurotoxin I’d sprayed all over him! I understand why people say roaches will survive an apocalypse… So after some fruitful searching, I gave up on him again and got back to work. A few minutes later, the roach made a third appearance by crawling up my laptop! I think he was feeling the Raid’s paralyzing effects though because he wasn’t skittering quite as quickly as before. I was finally able to crush him with paper towel and rid him of my room. I’ve since cleaned my desk and laptop and I’m currently praying that word on the bug street is about the importance of staying out of my room.

Well, that’s all folks! Best wishes until later! 

-Holly

Welcome!

Greetings readers of the cyberworld!

I’m Holly, a new graduate student at Tulane University’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans, LA. My concentration is Global Environmental Health Sciences (what in the environment is affecting human health?) and I’m so incredibly excited about being here. Helping others is what motivates me to get up every morning and with my science background (I was a biochemistry major in undergrad) and belief that health is a fundamental right, not a privilege, I’m in the right place. I’m writing this to keep in touch with my friends and family that live very far away and show anyone interested in pursuing a MPH what one person’s perspective is. I’m also writing because what better way to remember how lucky one is than by reflecting on all the adventures one has experienced?

The ol Mississippi River 

The famous Jackson Square and I

"The union must and shall be preserved" - Jackson

View from the sculpture garden of the New Orleans City Park Museum

Spanish moss

Now, I’ll explain a bit about my reasoning for this blog’s eccentric titling.

The Hg:
• My initials are HG. Pretty self-explanatory.
• My initials happen to be the chemical symbol for mercury! Being a science nerd I am, this is awesome!
• Mercury poisoning: I’m getting a degree in public health – mercury poisoning is the kind of thing I’d like to help everyone avoid. Biomagnification (the tendency of pollutants to concentrate as they move up the food chain – ie big fish eats lots of small fish which all have mercury so big fish ends up with lots of mercury) and the long half-life of mercury (the time in which it takes one half of a substance to be removed from the body) are important themes in my studies.

Acronyms can be fun and after memorizing so many anonyms throughout my science classes and during my two years working for the government with FEMA Corps (perhaps more about that another time,) I’ve decided I was cool enough to make one about my graduate (grad) school life:
• Green – This is one of Tulane’s school colors, my favorite color and my AmeriCorps NCCC – FEMA Corps Member year unit (who are we? green machine!) I also like to practice a green lifestyle and green is a predominant color in nature, which I love!
• Rewarding – I’m a very grateful person in general. I believe life is better with a glass that’s half full and one of the things I like about myself is that when all is said and done, I can just about always find a positive result, no matter how invisible that liquid in the glass may seem. Therefore, to me, just about everything is rewarding; one of my favorite mottos is “La vie est belle” or “Life is good.” (I should probably mention I also majored in French in undergrad (double major); in fact, my very first blog is about when I studied abroad in Paris, France - Mes Adventures en France.)
• Adventurous – I’m always down for an adventure! I love traveling and learning new things. And when I don’t have the resources to physically adventure, I love to read about adventures :)
• Daily – Don’t be fooled into thinking I’ll have the time to update this daily! I mean daily as in what happens on a day to day basis. I’m aiming to post about once a week, but this will depend on my levels of homework, tests, motivation and procrastination.

Life: I believe that life is grey and oh so interconnected and complex. This adventure will be really tough but I’ll get to learn so much that no matter how hard it gets, it’ll be rewarding. With the bad comes the good. To quote one of my favorite French poems from Apollinaire, “la joie vient toujours apres la peine.” (Joy always comes after pain.)

And finally, here are a couple of fun-loving, Holly Golightly, parting thoughts:
• The light in my bathroom is automatic so every time I walk in, just for a second, I think I turned it on with my mind. However, it wasn’t so awesome that while in the midst of a relaxing bath, the motion sensor decided nobody was in the bathroom anymore and the lights went out on me!
• Before stricter standards were imposed on death certificates and medical records in the early 1900s, phrases like “Died suddenly, nothing serious,” “Patient was alert and unresponsive” and “By the time he was admitted, his rapid heart had stopped, and he was feeling better” were recorded… (Gordis, 2014.)

Best,
Holly