4 AM cartwheels & No power in the tower

My goodness, I can't believe I actually survived finals. Looking back at what I was assigned to do and accomplish, it really doesn't look like I was given too much. On paper, my finals requirements looked easy-breezy. But, when you start peeling away the layers of what has to be understood in theory in order to execute practically or at least explain critically in essay, the comprehensive work cut out was extremely taxing and exhausting.

For example, a simple 10 pager where we had the luxury of creating our own child-aged patient and develop a treatment plan for his/her disorder became one of the most complex tasks I have ever completed in my history as a student. Conceiving a "case" from onset, through screening, diagnosis, prognosis, treatment and outcome proved to be a hair pulling, excruciating brain busting assignment for this first-quarter/first-year grad student. A fellow procrastinator and I spent the better parts of Tuesday and Wednesday stuck in a treatment room at the UW Speech and Hearing Clinic researching and laboring over our prelinguistic patients with autism, and found ourselves being driven to near insanity as we gave each other tangible rewards such as "work hard for an hour, and then we'll go out at 2 AM and get gyros at the Pita Pit on the Ave", or "finish our validity/reliability discussion on a certain study by 4 AM, and then we can do cartwheels down the halls of the clinic". And of course there was the ubiquitous influence of caffeine that goes hand in hand with finals and stress. But, apparently procrastinating paid off, because I ended up getting a perfect score on it.

And my reward for surviving finals? 80 mph gale-force winds, with rain that seriously was coming in upside down. Welcome to winter in the pacific northwest. My friend Kevin E. was in town for work and crashed at my pad and helped me celebrate the end of my first quarter. What takes me a good 10 minutes to walk from my apartment to Gas Works Park to enjoy this view...



Took a solid 35 minutes in the wind and rain where we were able to enjoy this view...



Lovely.

But that really didn't get me down, since I was to return to my blessed home in the mountains the next day for Christmas Break. I managed to get my apartment clean after a week and a half of absolute neglect, packed my suitcase and hopped on the King Country Metro to the airport, where I got to wait an extra five hours for my flight because someone forgot to plug in the Air Control Tower (hee hee...just a reference to "Airplane" the movie). SeaTac was once again thrown into the national spotlight, but this time not because of differences in opinion regarding holiday decor, nope...this time due to electrical problems from the previous night's storm.

I managed to take off and land in Salt Lake, which welcomed me with blankets of snow drapped beautifully over the valley and Wasatch. It was a great homecoming.