gotta love PY

i was at the dermatologist's office this morning. he started off this conversation:

      "where are you from again?"

      "i grew up in montana."

       *silence* "hmm... well then what in the world did you do there that gave you so much sun damage?"

       "oh. well, that was for sure from serving a mission in paraguay. the sun is extra hot there."

this is where he started going off on a rant about the church missionary system and how they don't encourage missionaries to use sunscreen and about how he needs to personally do something about it. he continues by saying...

      "well, your neck's sun damage looks like mine. the only difference is that i'm 71 and so i have about 50 years on you and i spent every summer of those extra 50 years in the alaskan outdoors."

why thank you doctor, for telling me that my neck looks like a 70 year old's! it's not my fault that i served a mission in the hottest place ever, where i swear the sun was closer to the earth than normal. also, why did i ever think it was cool to tan in high school? curse you, peer pressure!

think twice about not wearing sunscreen, my friends. since i've been home, it is my best friend. even if it's not hot outside. you don't want your old man dermatologist telling you that you're all sun damaged and shriveled. (okay, he didn't say shriveled...) but still!

feliz cumple, daddio!

Fifty-six years ago, on October 30, 1956, one of the most important people to me was born. 

[He-ro]: 

1. a man of distinguished courage or ability, admired for his brave deeds and noble qualities

2. a person who, in the opinion of others, has heroic qualities 

3. my dad

In every way, my dad is my hero.

i know you think that your dad might be the best, but i'm sorry. mine is!

he's the kind of dad that will drive next to you for your entire ten mile run because he wants to make sure you have water and that you make it home alright.

he's the kind of pep-talker that will convince you that you're the smartest person on campus even after having bombed a test. 

he's the kind of goof that wears a band-aid tie to his son's college graduation, just because (see the last picture).

he's the kind of nerd that loves watching the history channel, nat-geo, and shark week.

he's the kind of friend that will call just to ask how you did on a test and then to tell you what he learned on the o'reilly factor that day.

he's the kind of rebel that will steal fruit off of all of the fruit trees that he sees while vacationing in spain.

he's the kind of hard worker that will always tell you, "persistence, persistence, persistence".

he's the kind of party animal that will fall asleep during the avengers, be ready for bed by 10 pm, and mow the lawn for fun.

he's the kind of hero that works hard to be the best at what he does and has a lot of experience loving people unconditionally. i wish i could say the same about myself.

daddio, 

you are turning one year older today. last year was a big year for you. you welcomed me back to the united states after 18 months away, you moved back to your native idaho, started work at a new hospital, headed up a new stroke center. you welcomed new grandbabies and said goodbye to your last baby and became an empty-nester. you worked hard to get where you are and you've never stopped encouraging me to be who i can become. i love you! here's to one more year, and the years after that, and the eternities after that.

happy birthday, daddio.

con amor,

tu hijita KALBANDO

whooooops...

remember how i haven't posted in like 50 kabillion years?? yeah, that was not intentional. what can i say? life is busy! but i'm back with a motivational monday post.

so, a not well known fact about me is that i love NPR. seriously, national public radio is the best ever. one of my favorite weekly programs is the 'wait wait don't tell me' news quiz. one of the quizzes from a few weeks ago talked about an actual study performed in japan about workers and internet cat videos.

yeah, you read right. cat videos.

the study showed a positive correlation between watching cat videos and work-place productivity.

my first question why in the world would someone watch cat videos, was quickly followed by why in the world would somebody run a study about cat videos.

but enough with the questions. here's to greater workplace productivity and a happy monday! enjoy!

if that's not motivational, then i don't know what is...

the one that's black and blue

hoooooooooooooly cow, have i got a story for you. and even better, i have a picture to supplement my brain ramblings.

so as some of you might know, i'm training for a marathon (see here). it should be epic. as such, i was running the other night. it's about 10 pm and i'm almost done with my little five mile run. i'm running on canyon road in provo, heading home. at night, canyon road is pretty quiet. there's no cars or other people, except for this one rogue car that comes speeeeeeding down the road.

i'm assuming the people in the car thought it would be funny to throw something at the two runners just trying to get their run in. so they (those punks, whoever they were) roll down their window and throw a paper mcdonald's cup at us (i'm running with a friend, if that wasn't clear). they threw a CUP FULL OF WATER AT US!!!

i, being the one closer to the street, took the bullet and got hit by the cup on the back of my leg. okay, so you're probably thinking to yourself, wow... you got hit by a paper cup. how tragic. (that's dripping in sarcasm, btw)

but hey, don't forget that the car was going way fast and a cup full of water thrown out of a car at high speeds hits you LIKE A FREAKING BRICK.

all i remember thinking right after it hit me was:

1. wow, that hurt.
2. wow, that's going to bruise.
3. who in the world does that?
4. HOW OLD ARE THESE PEOPLE???!
5. seriously?

anyway, before i go to bed that night, it's definitely got a good lump the shape of the bottom of a cup and a tiny hint of a blue bruise showing up. the next morning... we'll just say it got exponentially worse overnight. one day later, it's still getting worse. 

so i bet you're dying now to see what happens to your leg when it gets hit by a flying fast-food paper object at high speeds. 

it might be the worst bruise i've ever had. and the picture doesn't quite do it justice. it's bad.

this is the medial side of my left leg. if you couldn't tell.

so once again i ask, who in the world does that? seriously??!!

the one where i'm astounded

so today i was studying outside of the wilk before i had to go to my open anatomy lab. i had my study book open to something that looked like this:

a girl passes by and stops to rearrange her backpack, looks down at my page, and asks me,

 "oh, are you studying art history?"

..........i think i might have stared at her for a second before i consciously took control of my brain and said,

"no. this is human anatomy. this is a body." 

oooooh, the things that you hear on-campus at byu. astounding.

the one about sperm

first of all, let me start out with a *big huge disclaimer*: sometimes when i completely immersed in a class, i morph into the world's biggest nerd. i think the things i'm learning are so cool. like so cool that i just have to tell everyone about them and blog about them. and then i tuck away my little factoids for later nerd opportunities.

okay, now that my disclaimer is out there, i learned the coolest thing in anatomy today! 

it's about how RARE and UNIQUE each of us really are!

it all starts when mommy and daddy are trying to have a little baby.

daddy lets loose 100,000,000 - 200,000,000 little spermies at a time. now, in order for you to get made, said spermie has to find mommy's big old egg (literally, the eggs are as old as the female is. we are born with them!). let's outline all of the ways this miraculous fertilization process gets difficult.

• upon contact, half of the little swimmers DIE. just because it's so dang acidic and they can't handle it. talk about sperm genocide - about 100,000,000 deaths in the first few moments of their little adventure.
• next obstacle: getting past the vagina. unfortunately, the vagina has these microscopic ridge-y things called rugae that make it so that the little sperms get LOST. seriously though, to a tiny little sperm, those rugae are probably like mount everest. i'd get lost, too.
• sperm's other problem: they try to fertilize whatever the heck they come in contact with. yeah. so, it turns out that a lot of sperm will be misguided and run into mommy's white blood cells (you know, the ones trying to kill "foreign cells"). they try to fertilize the WBCs, only to fail miserably. poor little guys.
• yet another physical obstacle! the end of uterine tube (where actual fertilization takes place) has all these finger-like extensions called fimbriae. think like the fringe end of a rug, except tiny. a large amount of our sperm friends get STUCK in the fimbriae. whoops.
• okay, so now we're left with the chosen ones. they braved the elements, proving themselves worthy to approach the egg. only problem - there's only ONE egg. and only ONE sperm can get there first. so even if one sperm gets there .000001 seconds earlier, all subsequent sperms WILL DIE. it's like magic.

so just think about it: if another sperm beat the lucky sperm that made you who you are by even .00001 seconds, you would be a completely different person!!

isn't that sooooo cool?!!? 

oh man, this class might bring out the nerd in me.

also, please enjoy this overly cheesy cartoon i found. :)

the one where i didn't get an A

well folks, spring term is officially over. i have now officially experienced BYU's attempts at squishing a 14-week class into 8-weeks. it was hard and it was a lot of work. i may or may not have studied for 15 hours straight in attempt to cram all of that information into my little tiny brain nugget of mine.

was that effective? no, not especially.

i knew that i needed at least an 88.5% on the final to get an a- in the class. there's nothing worse than a b+ as a final grade. it's like the b+ just sits there and taunts you and tells you just how close you were to a status, but no, you failed. 

anyway, point of the story is that i did NOT get an 88.5. in fact, i got a little bit lower than that. it was not my finest hour in the testing center. i mean, not terrible, but definitely not wonderful. will i be getting an a or a- in the class? nope. but you know what, for once in my life, i am okay with that. because what i got out of this class was so much more than a stupid grade on a stupid college transcript that i won't even remember in 5 years. heck, i won't care about them in 2 years.

nutrient metabolism. 

this is what byu's academic catalog says the class is:

     
        chemical structures of nutrients, their food sources, requirements, digestion, absorption, transport, metabolism, functions, storage and excretion; metabolic consequences of nutrient deficiencies, interactions, imbalances, and toxicities.

this is one of the most amazing classes i've ever taken at byu. (#1 being, hands down, human physiology from dr. rhees.) i know this might sound silly, but this class kind of changed my life a little. 

not only did i learn every single detail about vitamins, digestion, metabolism and the likes, but my perspective on nutrition has completely changed. the foods that you eat, the foods that you don't eat, really do matter. 

some really cool random things that i learned this semester:

• salad dressing and salad - what is the healthier choice: regular dressing or low-fat/non-fat dressing? people eat salads to be "healthy". salads are generally a great source of the fat-soluble vitamins: A, D, E, and K. BUT because they are fat-soluble vitamins, it means that unless you eat fat with the meal, you don't absorb any of the nutrients. so does that mean that a salad without any fat is pointless? YES. it does. eat good fats with your salads, otherwise you're just munching on calorie-less greens.
• increasing your calcium can decrease fat stores. yeah, buddy! it's kind of counter-intuitive, because increased intracellular calcium actually promotes storage of adipocytes. vitamin d is needed to sort of shuttle the calcium into the cell so it can start fatty synthesis. but it turns out that increased dietary calcium decreases blood vitamin d. so more calcium = less vitamin d = less calcium uptake by cells = less adipose synthesis = less body fat = increased weight loss! (*note... this is not a scientifically proven way to lose weight, just a few fat cells*)

i was just going to also describe joseph goldberger's "filth" parties in detail, but then decided that describing how a man willingly injected himself with blood from pellagrous patients and swallowed nose droppings from the sickies who had pellagra was a little gross. yeah... but kudos to the man who was willing to die for science, though. (he did not get pellagra though, thus proving, to himself at least, that pellagra was not infectious) (**also kudos to you if you know what i'm talking about!)

anyway, all nastiness aside, nutrient metabolism has been one of my favorite classes ever. the fact that i didn't get an a+ in the class will not matter in 5 years. it probably won't even matter in 2 years. all i will remember is how amazing the class was and how it completely changed how i eat. and that my friends, is worth more than an a any day.