Stuff I did

These things are sort of cheesy, but also fun. This one makes me feel pretty accomplished.

1. Started your own blog (obviously)
2. Slept under the stars
3. Played in a band
4. Visited Hawaii
5. Watched a meteor shower
6. Given more than you can afford to charity
7. Been to Disneyland
8. Climbed a mountain
9. Held a praying mantis
10. Sang a solo
11. Bungee jumped (but I have gone cliff diving)
12. Visited Paris
13. Watched a lightning storm at sea
14. Taught yourself an art from scratch
15. Adopted a child
16. Had food poisoning
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty
18. Grown your own vegetables
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France
20. Slept on an overnight train
21. Had a pillow fight
22. Hitch hiked
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill
24. Built a snow fort
25. Held a lamb
26. Gone skinny dipping
27. Run a Marathon
28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice
29. Seen an eclipse
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset
31. Hit a home run
32. Been on a cruise
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person
34. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors
35. Seen an Amish community
36. Taught yourself a new language
37. Had enough money to be satisfied
38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person
39. Gone rock climbing
40. Seen Michelangelo’s David
41. Sung karaoke
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt
43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant
44. Visited Africa
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight
46. Been transported in an ambulance
47. Had your portrait painted
48. Gone deep sea fishing
49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling
52. Kissed in the rain
53. Played in the mud
54. Gone to a drive-in theater
55. Been in a movie
56. Visited the Great Wall of China
57. Started a business
58. Taken a martial arts class
59. Visited Russia
60. Served at a soup kitchen
61. Sold Girl Scout Cookies
62. Gone whale watching
63. Got flowers for no reason
64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma
65. Gone sky diving
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp
67. Bounced a check
68. Flown in a helicopter
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial
71. Eaten Caviar
72. Pieced a quilt
73. Stood in Times Square
74. Toured the Everglades
75. Been fired from a job
76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London
77. Broken a bone
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
80. Published a book
81. Visited the Vatican
82. Bought a brand new car
83. Walked in Jerusalem
84. Had your picture in the newspaper
85. Read the entire Bible
86. Visited the White House
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
88. Had chickenpox
89. Saved someone’s life
90. Sat on a jury
91. Met someone famous
92. Joined a book club
93. Lost a loved one
94. Had a baby
95. Seen the Alamo in person
96. Swam in the Great Salt Lake
97. Been involved in a law suit
98. Owned a cell phone
99. Been stung by a bee

Tying up loose ends

Looking back at the last post I wrote, I mysteriously referred to a position at Bank of America I was going to recruit for. Well, long story short they're laying off 35,000 people in the next three years, Charlotte was pretty but not for me, and I didn't get an offer anyway. I'll be staying in New York where I belong, thank you very much.

The semester ended yesterday for me and now I'm free as a bird until late January! I'm very excited about about the whole thing, especially because this next one will be my last semester! I'm having a hell of a time deciding what class to take for the one required out-of-program course built into my degree. I thought this would be easy, but really when the whole school's course catalog is available to you, it gets harder and harder to choose! Right now I'm registered for 16 credits (I need to and will only take 7 in the end) because I still can't decide and I don't want to risk being shut out from these courses in case I end up picking one of them. My problem is that I can't get the professors to actually respond to my requests for syllabi so I can make an informed judgment. Come on people, is it so hard to respond to an email?!

Thursday night I'm having a little holiday party. More accurately, I am having my friends over to frost the cookies I am bringing to the office holiday party the next day. There will be way to many for me to frost myself, so I'm enlisting help. Seemed like a good idea to me! I'm sure we'll have lots of fun and all go home crashing from a ridiculous sugar high.

Ok, so that's it for now!

Just call me Fishbone

Damn it's been a minute since I updated this thing! Grad school is such a time sucker, I'm telling you.

Recently I had a harrowing experience with a fishbone that I'd like to tell you all about. Over Thanksgiving I was in London with about 40 MBA students attending an event called London Banking Days. This is the second year that I've gone for this event and honestly, it's a great trip because I really don't have to do much besides schmooze with recruiters and students and have lots of cocktails and canapes at receptions and dinners. All was going swimmingly until my last cocktail reception on Friday evening. It was at a posh bar/restaurant called Le Coq d'Argent right in the heart of London's financial district. I had consumed one to many tequila shots the night before at the behest of the Latin MBA contingent so I wasn't actually drinking anything at this particular event. Just as I was about to leave I decided to grab a little cake (what I thought would be crab) from a passing plate of hors d'oeurves. During the last bite of that little sucker my troubles began. Turns out it was a fish cake and had a BONE in it. A bone that got stuck in my throat. And chilled there for SEVEN WHOLE DAYS.

I knew something was wrong as soon as I swallowed that last bite of course. The bone poked me every time I swallowed. Did you know that we swallow saliva every 20 seconds or so? Yeah. So for the next week, I got stabbed every time I swallowed anything unless I held my head at a certain angle and pressed on my throat in a certain way. The whole experience was rather unpleasant to say the least.

On Sunday night I called my mom to ask her advice. WedMD had said something about eating doughy bread and then going to the hospital, both of which sounded rather useless so I thought I would try a different source. She corroborated the doughy bread story, so later that evening I made sure to swallow the stuffing at Thanksgiving dinner while turning my head in every possible direction in the hopes that it would pick up the bone that had been in there for 48 hours by that point. While it didn't pick up the whole bone, it did manage to snap off a chunk of it, or at least that's what it felt like. There was a hot flash of pain and then suddenly the stabbing during swallowing was less frequent, although not completely gone. I lived with that until I got back to New York and could call a doctor on Thursday.

Friday morning I went to the doctor to get this thing removed! The doctor was really squirrely and quirky, but he was pleasant and quick. First he shot lidocane and some other thing in my nose so it would drip down the back of my throat and numb it. Then he put on his little miner's head lamp and looked down my throat. Next he took a long tweezer/scissor like thing and stuck it down my throat and came back out with the damn bone! It was 3/4" long and at least as big around as a pencil lead. The one side was rather jagged and I suppose that's where it broke off the previous Sunday night. The doctor offered it to me as a souvenier, but I decided that I didn't need to keep it. :) Man, was I glad to have that thing out of there! The doctor then checked the wound for an infection and told me if I didn't develop a fever over the next three days I would be a-ok.

And I was! The end.