July! July! July!

This month has been a busy one. All complete with a wedding in Alabama, trip to Zion's National Park (apparently it's a Utah thing to add the 's' to the end of Zion when talking about the physical canyon place and not the metaphoric in your heart location), and finishing up a phlebotomy class. Also, I just like saying the word phlebotomy. It sounds like phlegm.

Also, I'm gearing up to head out to Boston for Zoe Metger's wedding in a week and then flying to Israel to spend 3 weeks with a good friend from Stanford.

Another Stanford Year Down

This past year out in Palo Alto was another great one. It was both fun and stressful, but all in all very rewarding. Here's a summary of the year.

Highlights:

• Making great new friends (esp. ME & GG)
• Getting to know old friends better
• Learning more about myself
• Finishing (and Passing) the HumBio Core!
• Teaching a class on 'Disability and Sports'
• Sleeping outside on Roble field (w/ME) and not getting any sleep because I was terrified of sprinklers and rapists...in that order
• Having great conversations outside my window with BE late at night
• Studying in the library (this was the first year I actually studied in the library and it's awesome!)
• Having the goal to visit every library on Stanford Campus (8ish down, 16 more to go) http://www-sul.stanford.edu/libraries_collections/maps_directions/SULAIRmap10-11.pdf
• "Study" sessions in Braun with LS and BE
• Partying at Xanadu with JP, LS, ML, etc. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m1UWSD-FaA)
• Seeing Lake Lagunita (slash Lagunita Puddle)
• Improving my GPA...just by a wee bit
• Seeing Andrew Luck...'s Legs (haha, that's a joke...kinda)
• But really I saw Andrew Luck
• Finishing my pre-req's for the classes that I actually want to take for next year
• Taking 2 classses that were at the same time and passing both

Lowlights:

• Taking 2 classes at the same time and wishing to be like Hermione
• Having 2 Finals at the same time on the same day
• Living on the opposite side of campus than the majority of my friends
• Lagunita Dining....might as well add Stern to that too
• Having the year end
• Realizing I only have one more year of college and trying to figure out where to go after I graduate
• Knowing that a lot of friends will be leaving next year because they graduated or are going on missions or changing wards

Swim swim swim

Hello Friends,

This Saturday I am participating in a swim-a-thon for an organization called 'Swim with Mike' which gives scholarship money to disabled athletes. I was a fortunate recipient this past year and will be swimming to help fund raise and raise awareness about this program.

If you would be willing to sponsor me I would be very grateful. No donation is too small. You can sponsor me by lap or just an overall sum. If I drown, I'm pretty sure you can get a refund.

Here's how you can sponsor me:

Donations can be made online at this link http://www.swimwithmike.org/giving.html If you do choose to sponsor me online, simply hit the button "sponsor a participant or recipient," and then select my name from the pull down menu where it says "select a swimmer." The rest of the steps allow you to provide the requisite billing and payment information. If you prefer, checks can be made out to the "Physically Challenged Athletes Scholarship Fund” and sent directly to me at: PO Box.

Thanks!

~Lena

Love that Dirty Water...even in the Bay Area.

Last week the Red Sox came in to town to play the A's. Luckily someone in the ward had tickets but couldn't make it and therefore offered them to me and a nameless Yankees fan. It was fun going to another ball park, especially since I'm so close to two right now. The student life is hard.

Some highlights:

• Buying $5 hot dogs
• Having the usher who took the above picture say I look 13-years old
• Watching JB lead the "Boston Sucks" chants on the bleachers...(and then expecting a ride back to PA with me....boy was she wrong)
• JB photo-bombing the person in front of us by giving them bunny ears
• Having the 8th inning last longer than the rest of the game up to that point
• Arriving at the entrance with 2 printouts of the same ticket (I guess only one of us gets to go to the game...and that person is the one in the wheelchair)
• Freezing and having JB be stubborn enough not to share her blanket with a Red Sox fan
• JB wearing her Yankees shirt, but hiding it under that pink sweater (I'd be embarrassed if I was a Yankees fan too)
• Watching the Red Sox win!!!! (the day after)

Late night Laundry night

So after going to office hours for an hour and a half, and going to a meeting for an ASB (alternative spring break) trip, and working the rest of the night on a Computer Science project that's due tomorrow, I realized I haven't done my laundry. And I need to do my laundry if I am to take a shower tomorrow morning because I'm pretty sure it defeats to point of showering if I dry myself off with a dirty towel and dirty bathrobe.

So after being irritated that it's 11:15 PM and I want to go to bed (which by the way is pretty early for Stanford students, scandal I know)...and after wheeling down the large hallway with the faint aroma of pot to the elevator and down to the laundry room with a big bag of laundry and detergent on my lap...I was trying to figure out what I would do with the next hour and half that I have until my laundry is done. Because you can't just leave your laundry in the free shared dorm room washers and dryers. If you do, you risk theft and even worse, the chance that someone with handle your intimates and put them on a dirty table so that someone else can use your washer that you were just using. Yes, this really happens. Ironically, sometimes I have to be the sketchy one to handle someone else's intimates in order to use a dryer I can reach. So, I must watch my clothes hour by hour and arrive to retrieve my clean clothes right when the meter hits 0 mins. But, yes, I was trying to figure out what I would do whilst I waited. I could do homework and study, but who does that the week before finals? I could watch TV shows on Hulu (a very good backup option). Or I could blog.

So here we are. I'm trying something a bit new. I have recently been inspired by a friend who is very good and funny at blogging and I'm taking a page of advice from her style format. (Oh snaps, I totally just edited the html in this blog to add a link to my friends blog. Yeah CS 105!) She's much better at rambling on about the thoughts in her head than I am, but I'm trying.

This week as been an interesting one. I went to a meeting about a student initiated course I'm teaching in the spring called 'Sport and Disability'. I'm very excited about it. I'm co-teaching it with someone and we are talking about adaptive sports and some of the dilemmas that arise with disabled sports. At the end of the course, students get to learn and play wheelchair basketball. Did I mention this is open to everyone? Yes, very exciting.

The other fun thing that happened this week was that I sheared a screw on my wheelchair. Again. Originally I sheared one that was on my backrest but I got it fixed a week ago thanks to my Mechanical Engineering friend, but this time I sheared a screw on my front caster wheels. Did you know that you actually need those? Luckily the screw didn't fall out when I was wheeling, but it was close. I had to sit on a bench to figure out what the problem was. Yes that is my wheel in my hand with the broken screw in the other. Luckily a nice stranger offered to take my picture. Haha. Just kidding, I was with a friend when this happened. Holding on to her backpack while she biked probably wasn't the best idea at the time....

Something Different

Somehow, I can't relate to the weather patterns of the rest of the country. Especially New England.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=palo+alto+weather

2010!

Oh yeah....that blog thing....

So I finished my first year at Stanford about a month ago. It was a fantastic finish to a wonderful school year. I will admit that it didn't start out amazing. I took Geology classes and hated it, but now after doing some more searching for classes and majors, I finally landed on one that I'm confident will stick and will also give me better options for my future. This new major is called Human Biology. It is a pretty unique major and I had never heard of it until I went out to Stanford. It is a BA as opposed to a BS, and it looks at humans both from a biological and social science perspective. It is also a very flexible major where you can choose a lot of your own classes within the major and choose what your concentration within the major is. There are just a few core classes that you take, which I started last quarter. One was The Human Organism which was basically an intro to physiology and anatomy. The other core class was Health and Environmental Policy Analysis. I absolutely loved all the classes I tool this past quarter and am excited to start the other classes that I need to take next year. I'm still planning on concentrating in Health Policy but after looking in to the Public Policy and Human Biology major I thought that Human Biology would be a better fit for what I want to do. Since it is interdisciplinary, it will be better for me when going to PA school.

This past quarter, I also took a required writing class where the topic was 'Women in Sports' which was awesome. But as part of the requirement I had to write a research paper and then present it in front of the class. I did my research on Title IX and how is represents disabled athletes...or doesn't in this case. My teacher was really motivated by my research and I made a lot of cool contacts and connections; long story short, I'm going to try and start some type of adaptive program next year. Stanford has student initiated courses where students can design and teach classes to other Stanford students and they can get university credit for it. I'm thinking of creating one of those classes, like an 'Intro to Adaptive Sports' class where other students can come play adaptive sports with me. It may be my own selfishness of not wanting to leave campus for hours at a time to play sports with other people in Berkeley or San Jose because balancing school work and recreation time is very hard at Stanford. So hopefully my plan will work out next year.

This Summer I haven't been doing too much. I had a nice TV series marathon of "Bones" and now I kind of want to be a forensic anthropologist. Not really, but maybe it can be my secret identity/profession at night. I'm also planning on going to Finland this summer with some friends. One of my good friends that I met at the Rehab hospital is from Finland and is going back there this Summer to visit and she invited me to come as well. She'll be there for a month but I will be there for a couple of weeks starting at the end of July. I figured that there will be no other time that I will have my own personal tour guide of Finland as well as a place to stay. It should be fun. It will be my first time in Europe with a wheelchair which will be an adventure in itself. But I'm very very excited.

That's it for now!

Hope you enjoy your Summer!!!!