Making a Difference: My Reflection on El Salvador & Kiva.org

Meet Jorge Raul. Jorge has never met me, nor have I ever met him, but I have met and seen many faces of Jorge in my recent trip down to El Salvador on a medical mission with Mayo Clinic and Operation Blessing. When you realize that much of the world has it much worse off than you, suddenly life takes on a new perspective. Take for example my experience working with our doctors examining the many old ladies who came into our free rural clinic in El Salvador complaining of muscle fatigue and bone pain. Muscle fatigue was simple: despite their old age, they were still working hard in the fields in the scorching sun to scratch out a living. The bone pain? Easier to diagnose than to treat. These ladies, despite their best nutrition, were calcium deficient and are developing osteoporosis. "Increase your calcium intake" we advised them, advised them until we realize that their nutrition consisted of only rice and beans, day in and day out.
"milk is too expensive," they told us. Cheese was a fantasy.

Such societal disparity was shocking to me as I worked in the mountain villages of El Salvador where just a short 40 minutes away was the commercialized hub of San Salvador where I had just dined on sushi at Benihana's the night before and was comfortably lodged in our air-conditioned hotel with wifi, a flat screen TV, bottled water, and a daily hot breakfast. Suddenly a knot of guilt tightened across my belly as I tried to swallow the fried chicken, biscuit, and slaw that was being served to me during our lunch break at the rural clinic. "These starving people are so graciously watching me stuff my face with chicken," I thought to myself, "I wonder if these children have even tasted chicken before?"

While we took no measures to provide ourselves with any extravagance on this trip, in contrast we were basking in luxury compared to the lifestyles of these people whom we were serving. Our $26 a night hotels and "U.S. comparatively half-priced" Benihana's dinners suddenly carried a lot more superfluous cost when we learned that these people living in the hills had to buy their bottled water on the few weekly dollars that somehow they generated through their agriculture or industry.

I could go on complaining about the deprave social condition that we as humanity have let ourselves stoop to, that such circumstances that I've described actually exist, but in continuing to do so, I lend my voice to nothing more than the numerous politicians, the bureaucrats, and the institutions that talk the talk of change and do little in effect to make a difference.

So let us talk about making a difference. In 2006 Muhammed Yunus, a Bangladesh economist was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in microloan banking. Gambling against human self interest, Yunus took a chance at the novel notion that poor people nonetheless being poor were still good people. These were people who didn't want to remain poor, Yunus thought. They were products of social circumstance and were suspended because of no means of upward economic mobility. So, Yunus thus started the Grameen Bank in which he started loaning outmoney to the indigent that had a need for money - a plan for industry, or an idea to help themselves out, and what he discovered was a phenomenon that is growing globally today.

There are people like Jorge out there who have an idea, who have an industry, who have a means to get themselves out of the poverty that is tethering them down -- but they lack the equity, the first chance, and the gamble of trust that most financial intuitions operate by when they calculate the odds of their institution ever seeing the money they loan again. Here's were you and I and Kiva.org come in.

Kiva, a non-profit organization which works with other global NPO's and NGO's find people like Jorge who have a plan and have a need. In fact Jorge even had a bio:

Jorge is 42 years old and he lives with his wife and children. He has three children that are the ages of 15, 9, and 4 years old. They are all in public school. Jorge sells chicken and his wife sells food, and they used to always have leftovers. They always used to have to pay people to take away the leftovers until Jorge got the idea to raise pigs and to feed the leftovers to the pigs. He now has 180 pigs. Jorge needs $525 to buy live pigs and food for them. Since Jorge has been in the group Finca, he has progressed economically. Also, he has learned to be punctual in making his payments on loans for his business. Jorge’s dream is to buy a truck for his business.

Merging Yunus's microloans ideas with the global reaches of the internet, Kiva has harnessed the individual's capacity to make a difference. Philantropy now crosses all boundaries as individuals can help individuals directly for as little as extending a $25 loan to someone in need. The beauty of this social experiment is that Yunus's gamble paid off. To date, over 98% of his loans are repaid, and Kiva through their affiliate partners boasts similar returns.

Though this is but a small step in the marathon humanity runs against poverty, it's one small step that I've taken to make a difference directly in someone's life. You can choose to donate separately to Kiva if you wish, but Kiva, unlike many other institutions that will skim your donation, assures you that 100% your money is going where you intend it to go.

Foregoing a meal at Benihana's today may be a small sacrifice that I make, but with Kiva.org I hope that that sacrifice can make a bigger difference in Jorge's life. I invite you to learn more and make a difference at:

http://www.kiva.org

Greenwich: Straddling the Hemispheres

Greenwich is famous for its standard time (GMT) that bisects the world into eastern and western hemispheres at 0 degrees longitude, and also known as the prime meridian (the international dateline is its analog on the otherside, but that zig zags around certain islands). Anyways, Greenwich was a great 20 minute boat detour down the Thames. Picking up a high speed ferry from the Tower of London we headed to this smaller city and its observatory in the park and university that is central to the town. As dusk set, you are able to visualize the prime meridian as a powerful green laser beams its path above the point that I'm bouncing around and over in the picture here. You can see our Greenwich pictures in Europe Gallery allery 6, starting from our ferry ride. It's not everyday that you have a picture that spans two hemispheres, let along having the opportunity of bouncing back and forth between them.

I See London, I See France...

And we might also have seen some underpants (or lack thereof) in one of these galleries documenting our dinner excursion through the Montmarte district of Paris. Rest assured the facade of these buildings including the historic Moulin Rouge was as far as we got as we settled for a nice little Italian bistro over the cabaret that evening. In a whirlwind 8 day trip, our journey spanned over 11,000 miles with over 60 hours of travel and as we straddled Greenwich--even crossing over two hemispheres. I brought along the Canon XSi to break in - so pardon some duplicate series of pictures as I was trying to play with the settings and didn't prune these 3000+ (40GB+) worth of photos yet, everything here was taken as is, minus the videos, and scaled down to smaller size. Just as a reference itinerary, this is what David and I covered in the 8 days that we were gone on our version of The Amazing Race:

1. Sunday November 16, 2008: Travel 350 miles by car from Rochester, MN to Chicago O'Hare, hop on a connector flight to Dulles, Washington D.C., enjoy a three hour layover, jump aboard another plane for an 8-hour flight to London Heathrow, figure out how to use the London Underground system and buy an Oyster card, jump on Monday morning's 7am commute to St. Pancras station.
   
   
2. Monday November 17, 2008: Realizing that we arrived too early for our 1 pm Eurostar train to Paris, we meandered the British Library near St. Pancras, enjoying the Magna Carta and various original texts such as Leonardo Da Vinci's notes, Isaac Newton's letters, and Galileo's sketches. The Eurostar was a lost memory due to sleep deprivation, but after pit-stopping in Paris, we walked the Champ de Mars, and ascended the Eiffel Tower
   
   
3. Tuesday November 18, 2008: Visited the Palace of Versailles, the Hospital Museum (Musée de l'Assistance publique - Hôpitaux de Paris) and walked by Notre Dame Cathedral by night. Ascended the Arc de Triomphe, and ended up in Montmarte for dinner and shopping.
   
   
4. Wednesday November 19, 2008: Revisted and ascended Notre Dame Cathedral (Notre Dame de Paris) proper, saw the museum and crypts of Notre Dame, walked through Hotel Dieu and then saw 2-million skeletons in the Catacombs of Paris. We finished the day blitzing through the Orsay Museum, blistering our feet through the Louvre and finished the day at Place Monge, which ironically enough was not happening at all at 10:30 pm at night, though we managed to sup on escargot outdoors at a cafe that spoke not a speck of English.
   
   
5. Thursday November 20, 2008: 5 am Eurostar trip back to London was equally not the most exciting though we arrived plenty early in London to beat the opening of most places at 10 am. We hit up the British Museum, ate out of the supermarkets where food was actually affordable, and visited the Hunterian Museum of John Hunter (1728–1793) as we came in part to study history of medicine by also reading the biography of John Hunter: The Knife Man. We went by Westminster and Parliament but by 3 pm apparently the sun sets in London so we decided to go crash and recoup from sleep deprivation early.
   
   
6. Friday November 21, 2008: London Bridge (Tower Bridge), and the Tower of London started off our day, and effectively ended the daylight too since there was only about five hour's worth. We took a boat to Greenwich and straddled the Prime Meridian with a foot in each hemisphere. A walk through Leicester Square and Trafalgar Square ended our evening.
   
   
7. Saturday November 22, 2008: More walking. More blisters and bursitis. Buckingham Palace probably had a changing of the guard, but we were too pooped to wait and find out, so we walked onwards and across the Thames from Parliament and Big Ben and Westmister Abbey, in fact we walked all the way to the Imperial War Museum where we stayed longer than we expected, and ended up skipping St. Paul's Cathedral, though we walked in and looked around without paying its hefty entrance fee. Finishing the night in Oxford Circus we supped on fish and chips in an English Pub, and nearly died on the late-night tube back to London Heathrow Airport (but that's a story you'll have to ask either David or me)
   
   
8. Sunday November 23, 2008: After a night slouched in the Heathrow airport, reverse Sunday November 16, 2008th itinerary from Heathrow, add 1 hour of lost luggage in Chicago, and we've made it back home from our week of too much fun which was catalyzed by the two of us discovering $48 round trip tickets to London from Chicago.
   

So in the end David and I left our families behind for a week, squandered their wealth, studied some history of medicine, had a great time, came home bearing gifts, and now our trip is yours to enjoy vicariously in these many galleries! (Click the links below to enter each respective gallery which are arranged by 500 images each in chronological order)

Europe 1	Europe 2
Europe 3	Europe 4
Europe 5	Europe 6
Europe 7

Trick-or-Treating for the First Time in 10 Years!

So I had a Remy the Rat & Our Pea in a Pod for our first year as a family to go trick-or-treating with some friends and Mikey absolutely loved it! Carolyn got us some chef hats from the local restaurant supply store, so we took them around and Mikey went door to door with his "trick-or-treat" [then helps himself to handfuls of candy] "teet-you" ('thank you'), and then "next one!" Mikey has watched Ratatouille probably 20 times now, so this was a fitting costume and continues the animal trend from last year's dog costume. Someone did say "what a cute elephant you are!" though. For this person's reference:

This is a rat:

and this is an elephant:

Compare as you dare.

Davey At 2 Months

Davey as of 10/26 hit his 2 month mark, and boy has he filled out. To celebrate we subjected him to the camera and brought Mikey out to fly a kite. Here's an overblown picture for you, think of it as one of those internet speed test downloads, hit the link - and to think this is one fifth of the original file's size.

Every Olympian's Dream

If you watched the Olympics this year, you saw it, I saw it, everyone worldwide saw it: Every Olympian's Dream - One world, one place: A Chicken sandwich for breakfast: The Southern McChicken Sandwich only at McDonald's. For the multiple millions of dollars that McDonald's burned to promote the sandwich, one would think this would be on the magnitude of say the hot dog meeting the bun, new world tomatoes finding old world cheesy bread, or the ice cream getting its cone. Well, in the three sleepless weeks of surgery rotation I just finished I succumbed to marketing hype and picked up one of these in the middle of the night. What a waste of $3. This thing was just about the sickest thing I've ever seen. McD's should be ashamed to market this crap as should we be for eating this garbage! A picture speaks a thousand words, so let these speak to you:

In case you missed the propaganda, I dug it up on Youtube:

Announcing David Michael Chan!

Well it's due time that I blogged about the latest addition to our family, David Michael Chan born August 26, 2008. In the fanfare of the early wee morning hours, Carolyn's labor and delivery was more than uneventful, in fact in retrospect it was quite bizarre!

As the typical labor goes the night cramps started early on the 25th and our trip to the hospital was sometime in the early morning of the 26th. After checking for a false alarm because Carolyn had had her membranes stripped the day before, they admitted her when in fact she was dilated. Fast forward to 8:00 am and conveniently on the shift change. Now post-epidural and into some regular contractions our nurse was pretty confident that Baby David was ready to come out. To the contrary opinion however, the chief resident felt that there was still some time left and left with the attending to round on other patients. No sooner than this occurred and with a subsequent push, sure enough David's head came popping out. Quite about the same time, a fellow Mayo third year medical student (Cara Alexander -- she'll make a great family/OB doc!) came and quite literally caught David as he came popping out! Of course the nurse at this point was off to call the team back and I was standing bedside quite dumbfounded that the whole ordeal unraveled into utter randomness. All's well that ends well, though I can hardly justify the $2700 billed for David's delivery (in addition to the other $14,000 bill that came with the $1500 a night rooms - oh my! Next child or new car? is the eventual discussion that we'll have for Number 3).

Incidentally David has become quite the palindromic baby. We couldn't come up with middle names that we agreed with, so we decided to systematically eliminate the need for formulating one by daisy chaining the boys names together, hence: Michael Daniel, then David Michael - so not only do they have that level of reciprocity, but their birthdates ended up palindromic too: Mikey 6/28/2006, and then Davey with 8/26/2008. I thought that was kind of neat.

It obviously has been over 4 weeks since Davey's delivery and aside from a bug that's come down on the entire family (that I probably dragged in from clinic), everyone's doing well. In fact, we were insane enough to take some time to appreciate the fall colors in a family campout and snagged some pictures for you to enjoy, check them out of facebook as blogger is giving too much grief uploading more here.

Weeks 47-51: Summer Vacation and China Trip

Well I'm hopelessly behind in my blog, and out of time to do much updating as my 5 weeks of summer has wound down. But needless to say I had a great summer, 2 weeks of which I spent with a classmate David, and his wife Meghan in China all over the place. I'll fill in the details as I revise this post eventually, but in the mean time I wanted to include the pictures (note I'm still filling in captions so eventually they'll be all updated) that I took for everyone to get an early look at prior to my eventual detail filling. Enjoy!

A Tale of Three Wii's

Finishing another block pushes me another six weeks behind on the blog, but it suffices me to say that all's well that ends well, and so it was with microbiology and pharmacology. Actually microbiology was really interesting and hopefully on my week by week recap I'll be able to highlight some of my favorite microbes for your entertainment.

Pharmacology on the other hand was not one of the most organized classes we've had here (thankfully microbiology was one of the best), so sometimes lectures went long and tangential. One day in the middle of the block I was slouched over, daydreaming, and more or less catatonic when all of a sudden in a cacophony of forgotten-to-be-muted rings and chimes I was startled back into reality as my phone started ringing, notifying me of a new text message, a new voicemail, an email, and an instant message--it was a wiialert! I didn't have a moment's time to lose as I knew that I had to act fast. Faster than an orderly running for a crash cart on a coding patient I was at Amazon.com within seconds checking out with 3 Nintendo Wii's for a pricey $750. They sold out again within a minute's notice but my order which I had attempted many times prior had finally gone through.

So the story ensues with 42 of my classmates + 1 world renown lecturer looking in my direction as I pursued the three elusive Wii's. I had postings up on Craigslist and the Mayo Classifieds within minutes, and within minutes I had two calls from people who were already interested in buying them. There was just one problem: I didn't have any of them in hand yet. One of the callers however decided to stick with me and he became Wii #1 starting my story of the three Wii's.

Wii #1 went to a man who's wife went in for surgery at Mayo and needed something to keep her entertained while she would be recovering for the next few weeks. He showed up in leathers looking like he was ready to kill, I thought he might be with Hell's Angels as he unrolled a wad of cash and gave me a cool $300. I was waiting for the ATF and FBI to jump me at any moment and I think I still am.

Wii #2 "Hi this is so and so from Luther Midelfort Northland am I speaking to Dan?" is what I heard when I picked up the phone. Confused and swearing that I heard that so and so was from Dunder Mifflen I was bracing to retaliate against this unsolicited sales call on my donotcall.gov phone number. I was pleasantly surprised however when the individual on the line inquired about the Nintendo Wii and I was even more impressed that they turned out to be a Mayo department. "Umm sure I can take a corporate check, and send it through the Mayo intraclinic courier system... or I could drop it off to you..., wait, you're in North Wisconsin!?" Wii #2 is pending a Mayo Clinic billing department corporate check. I sold a Nintendo Wii to the Mayo Clinic!

Wii #3 Went out the door this morning. I had just come in from playing with Mikey outside in the 1/16th of a inch of snow we received last night when I got a call from a desperate women on the other end of the line. "Are you Dan? Do you still have your Wii available?" I told her I did and was immediately barraged with "Thank you thank you thank you thank you - you are my hero - thank you! Can I buy it from you right now and can we meet half way?" Considering the notion that I would need to get ready and go somewhere I was caught off gaurd on this lazy Saturday morning and mustered up little better than a prolonged "Ummmm..." "Well you see, my best friend is having a wedding and it is right now, and I'm the bridesmaid, and I didn't know these damn Wii's were so damn hard to find in the whole city (try the whole country I thought to myself), and now I'm late and I need one to give to them because that's what they wanted and I've been looking all morning." *Sigh* fine, I can get ready I thought to myself, heck I can even dig up a gift bag for it, but what frightened me was what she asked next: "So how much does a Wii usually cost? Is there anything wrong with the one that you are selling? Can you promise me that it will work?" This is an example of a very bad buying situation for the buyer, had I been a malicious salesperson I could've probably exploited this situation pretty badly and left the buyer out of money and out of luck. But being the nice guy that I think I am I only scooped her for the $50 commission and now in turn have christened a wedding with a Wii.

So there really wasn't much of a point to this post. Sure pharmacology was probably the worst of times, and this wii alert in class that day probably was the best of times, but the real enjoyment that I had from the sale of these three Wii's wasn't the fact that I could pay our utilities for three more weeks, but rather the three little crazy vignettes that I otherwise never would have acquired. So the moral of the story is: if you ever stumble upon a stash of Wii's one day, maybe try picking one up and if not to play, list it for sale and see what comes your way.

Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

View the PDF version here

Dear friends and family, a cold and snowy greeting we’re sending your way from Rochester, Minnesota—a place we now call home. We moved here this past July and purchased a nice little townhouse close to the Mayo Clinic where Dan is now attending medical school.

Dan is busy studying through his first year of medical school and has finished his first blocks which included histology, genetics and genomics, gross anatomy, radiology, and embryology. Dan’s chronicles of his medical school career have begun on his blog viewable (here of course!) Needless to say, he’s glad he made the choice to come to Mayo and loves the opportunity studying here.

Carolyn is also very busy as a full-time mom and also as a part time dance instructor as well as a teacher at a local daycare. She’s also starting up private piano lessons beginning in January. She enjoys digital scrapbooking and takes care of our little bundle of joy: Mikey. Her adventures of our family are written at http://danandcarolyn.blogspot.com

Mikey is now 18 months old and he is loving life here. He’s got 12 teeth now, is fully bipedal and navigating stairs standing up, and has a repertoire of words that include: “wadder, bahbul, bawl, mmm, uh-oh, woof-woof” along with “ma-ma” and “deeyeh.” Mikey currently writes no blog, but he is going to go bonkers over his wooden train table, Tonka truck, radio flyer tricycle, musical bongo drums kit, and the other thousand items under the tree that he will discover tomorrow morning.

With that we bid you a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays with all our love,

The Chan Family
Christmas 2007

Buy Uranium-238 from Amazon.com!

So, if you haven't caught on yet, I've been trying to catch up on the blogging from a few weeks back, but I stumbled on the oddest product listing on amazon.com tonight I couldn't pass up expressing my "?!" moment, enjoy:

Uranium Ore
Price: $22.95
Availability: In stock. Processing takes an additional 4 to 5 days for orders from this seller. Ships from and sold by Images SI Inc..

Product Description
Radioactive sample of uranium ore. Useful for testing Geiger Counters. License exempt. Uranium ore sample sizes vary. Shipped in labeled metal container as shown. Shipping Information: We are always in compliance with Section 13 from part 40 of the NRC Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules and regulations and Postal Service regulations specified in 49 CFR 173.421 for activity limits of low level radioactive materials. Item will be shipped in accordance with Postal Service activity limits specified in Publication 52. Radioactive minerals are for educational and scientific use only.

We are always in compliance with Section 13 from part 40 of the NRC Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules and regulations and Postal Service regulations specified in 49 CFR 173.421 for activity limits of low level radioactive materials. Item will be shipped in accordance with Postal Service activity limits specified in Publication 52.

But in the words of Levar Burton on Reading Rainbow: Don't take my word for it

Mean Time Between Failture? 6 Months

Halo 3 the biggest most anticipated game of the century is coming out September 25, 2007 and I for one will not be able to play it - why? No not because I didn't preorder the game, no not because I'll be too busy studying in medical school as I am now (as we'll be in our selective block then), but because my second Xbox 360 has up and died on Carolyn tonight on of all games: Viva Pinata!! Arrrgh!! This makes for the second system failure from a brand new console a year ago, spaced out 6 months apart. At this rate my now extended 3 year warranty is going to see 6 console repairs and at 4-5 weeks a piece, that means out of 3 years of owning an Xbox 360, for half a year it will be off somewhere being "repaired."

Frankly this isn't as dramatic as I make it out to be. Do I really have Halo 3 preordered? Sure I do, I mean, it is the most anticipated game of the universe -- but do I really care about it? Well let's just say I've never played Halo 1, or Halo 2, so Halo 3 doesn't seem to be such a dramatic thing to me. But not having a console that I could play Halo 3 on or any other game for that matter irks me major. I guess there are always people worse off, but for now, it's time to look into getting a Wii.

Floating Down the Street in Flood Water

Well it rained and it poured all night long last night and by morning it showed. There were some of the loudest thunderclaps that we've ever heard and in the middle of our midnight movie we heard our own sump pump turn on multiple times pumping water from out from under our foundation. Luckily the neighborhood didn't seem to suffer any water damage despite the fact that these pictures were taken only a few yards down the road.

Apparently this park which doesn't even have a name to my knowledge, was designed by the Army Corps of Engineers recently to be a flood plain for the Zumbro river that winds its way along the bike trails around our house. Needless to say, as seen below, most of these bike trails are unaccessible in the present condition and our road in front of our house is closed until these waters recede.

From these pictures that we took you can see the depth of the flooding by gaging it against the park bench picnic table in the picture with the park sign in it to the right. According to one of the people that was looking puddle side with us this has been the worst flooding even to exceed the 1970's flood that was the last benchmark. Apparently according to the news this same storm system has already claimed 4 people east of us in Winona.

Well as far as we go it seems that we aren't in any danger for any flooding so long as the drainage systems keep up and we don't get another deluge of this 17" rain in a 24 hour period. Thanks for the concern that some of you have extended to us. If anything we've come to realize that we aren't in Utah anymore.

Summer Contest Wrap Up

Well it's official, another summer, another summer of contests over, and as their 6-8 week delivery times wrap up I'm getting in the haul. This year, the top of my winnings was probably the Toshiba HD-A2 Drive and Matrix Trilogy HD-DVD set I won from Expo TV for making a video on a HD-DVD product for their summer contest. You can see my over the top review video at Expo TV. Last year's Expert Gamer contest at ExpoTV was a little better (32" Sony Bravia HDTV & 5.1 surround sound system) but I can't complain this year either. If you or anyone you know is in the market for an HD-DVD player, contact me as I don't intend on keeping this one as I have a hard time watching DVD's as it is.

A couple more wins include an iPod Nano, some Xbox 360 games, an Xbox 360 faceplate, and possibly a GPS system and and Xbox 360 bundle which are yet to arrive. If you're reading this and thinking - how can I win this stuff too? There's a great forum at slickdeals that has a whole kaboodle of contests and instant win games popping up. Enter as many of them as you can and as often as you can and you're bound to be a winner too!

The Last Days of Summer

We've been enjoying the last days of summer for me as school officially starts this upcoming Monday July 23, 2007 - but more on that as it begins. We just most recently came back from camping at Whitewater State park this past Monday.

Whitewater State park is the closest park for camping from Rochester, it is about 40 minutes away by car on a paved road that passes farms, farms, and nothing but farms (corn and soybeans), and seems to exist only to get to Whitewater.

Whitewater is a conservation project that started in the early 20th century that was mediation from erosion caused by local slash and burn farming, as such everything was re-vegetated. For less than a hundred years it's done a good job becoming dense and green again and features 12 miles of hiking and even a man made beach (although nothing to compare to our California adventures - I mean it's on a river).


We picked a bad night to go camping though as it was muggy, rained, and our campsite wasy, raided by raccoons (two families of 3 each I think) every hour on the hour from 12-4 am. Needless to say I didn't get much sleep. We enjoyed a hike though, and Mikey seemed to like the beach, and drinking the river water to our chagrin. We'll have to redo the camp in the winter and I think it'll be a lot more fun!

Mikey's First Birthday

We celebrated Michael's first birthday on June 28, 2007. He didn't have too much pomp or circumstance as he has hmm about zero friends his age currently here and I think the birthday concept still eludes him. He nevertheless got a fair share of presents and a cake all for himself. After a little crying during "Happy Birthday" he dug in face first to his personal cake and has never forgotten it since. Everytime we pass one at the grocery store he still points and motions towards them. Of white or chocolate Michael picked out his chocolate cake.

Hectic But Happy

Well we finally arrived in Rochester, MN on Friday June 15 and it's been a week of unpacking, moving stuff, setting stuff up (namely garbage, water, gas, cable, telephone, sewer, recycling, internet, etc.), and buying stuff that we've found ourselves deficient of: ie a dinner table and chairs.

The move itself was rather uneventful - except to the 6000 or so bugs that ended up dying against 5 tons of steel smashing them to smitherines - I thought I even got some small birds against the windshield although upon closer inspection they were bugs the size of small birds!

We stopped in North Platte (yeah if you don't know where that is I don't blame ya), Nebraska for a night on the way out - and for some reason the entire city was booked. It turned out Nebraskaland Days was going on - whatever that is. Other than that Nebraska really is a terribly boring state to drive through.

The drive was scenic, but not very interesting. When we arrived in Rochester it didn't really feel like that long of a drive despite it being about 18 hours total. I attribute the monotony of the scenery to lending that illusion. What did feel like a long trip was paying the credit card gasoline bills of our truck that did sub-10 mpg, and at about $3 a gallon and 1400 miles that added up to a pretty penny of ~$500 worth of gas. Ouch.

We're finally getting setup to some degree, although most of it will be temporary as we have a construction crew set to finish our basement for the next few weeks, so hooray to more clutter. At least when the gauntlet medical school schedule begins we'll have some more habitable space to live in... more on the gauntlet Mayo schedule in another post, let's just say - since when were schools allowed to schedule overnight stays, Sunday instruction, and 3 weeks of your life in 15-minute increments including bathroom breaks?!

We've Bought a Home in Rochester!

We've just returned from a trip to Rochester, MN looking for a place by the Mayo Clinic and after searching for two days and seeing countless properties we found one that we like and are closing the place this week!

It's a short 6 minute drive to downtown Rochester (Mayo Clinic), and is situated on a nice bike trail along the Zumbro River that will allow me even to bike to school (if there isn't two feet of snow). Otherwise a bus line runs in the back of the house too!

Enough of the chit chat, I know the family's eager to see some of the pictures of the place so here you are for your viewing pleasure!

So Where's it Gonna Be? It's Mayo not UCSD!

Well today's the big decision day for all medical applicants everywhere as post May 15th if you are holding onto multiple acceptances you can get threatened by each individual medical school that you are holding to make your mind up -- and fast. As such to people like me who were struggling between decisions like UCSD and Chicago, the May 15th release of acceptances also magically finds new opportunities and new offers like: The Mayo Clinic

We were actually out hiking yesterday up Provo Canyon again and this time saw a 3' diamondback rattlesnake that was out sunning. It was about 5 feet away before I noticed the bushes rustling and caught eye of the snake (we were both listening to The Wild Trees on audiobook on our iPods so we didn't hear it earlier). It wasn't too big and it only spanned about 1.5" across at its thickest portion, but 2 hours up the canyon was hardly the place where we wanted to get bitten by a rattlesnake. It had a nice 3" long rattle but didn't seem to notice us nor need to use it.

So by the time we returned home we were hardly thinking about medical school decisions when Jane, the friendly admissions correspondent at Mayo popped up in the answering machine messages. Both excitement and despair hit me at the same time; excitement that I now had the Mayo Clinic as an offer, despair in that just as we had finally acclimated in our minds for San Diego would see a drastic change in the next hours.

Sure enough after relatively short consideration the table was turned in favor of Mayo and now my summer's been cut short to a start date of July 23, 2007. Not to worry though, we're headed out next week to find a condo, and hopefully will be moved out of Utah by the end of June! This summer may see some excitement yet beyond summer hiking not that I mind either.

I won again this week and also $120,000†

†So I won another $20 in Bajio, $15 in iTunes, and another t-shirt from playing Tetrix again this week. At this rate I think I'll win this prize 5 times before summer's out. What about the cash I'm mentioning? No I wasn't on Deal or No Deal, I'm probably dumber than a Fifth Grader, I haven't made it to Jeopardy--yet, and I don't think any other gameshow awards that much money these days after their ratings drop. So where'd the $120,000 come from? University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine.

So someone between the Financial Aid office and my mailbox goofed as I was apparently supposed to get notification about this scholarship months ago and just got a message this morning after inquiring about financial aid that I had a three-quarter tuition scholarship there all along! The catch is I have until Tuesday May 15, 2007 to decide what one and only one school to keep. It is now a battle between University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine (Shown to the bottom right) or University of California San Diego School of Medicine (Shown in the top left). Both are great schools and San Diego has already offered me a great financial incentive for going there, but with Chicago's new ante this drop tuition at Chicago to about half of San Diego's. Housing is financially comparable in both places and academics are par between the two with perhaps a little more respect from residency directors for Chicago over UCSD. The key thing here is can we forgo the amenities of a city like San Diego to save a bit in Chicago with a marginal benefit to my education -- or is keeping the wife and kid happy with prospects of the San Diego Zoo, Sea World, and the beach worth the marginal cost of "name brand" recognition? I think it's a very tough call and sometimes wished I didn't even have this choice to make between the two - let alone only two days to make it.
I determine the fate of my future, my education, my career within these next 48 hours.