What Have You Been Up To?

"So, what have you been up to lately?"

I've been asked that question a lot lately, and usually I answer something along the lines of, "working and sleeping. That's about it," which typically gets me a response along the lines of "welcome to life, kid". However, if I really thought about it, I still get to do a lot of cool stuff.

Do I have as much free time as I did in high school or college? No way. 10 hour shifts take a good part of your day, and on the days that I do have a little bit more time I come home from work absolutely exhausted.

Yet, the ability to rest often comes through occupation. People do things to unwind. It's strange how after a 70 hour work week a doctor will choose to spend his weekend cycling 50 miles. That sounds like work. But, that's what we do.

As for myself, I am no exception to the rule. I spend all day on my feet training clients, demonstrating exercises, and occasionally picking somebody off of the floor (moving treadmills don't stop when you like sometimes), yet I still find time to get out there and do things.

To start with, I've still been doing a great deal of hiking, leading me to some pretty cool, little-known vantage points of my city.

 I found this cool goat and his little buddy while meandering about an absolutely stunning cemetery during one of my recent lunch breaks. He's there to clear out the brush.

A buddy went hunting for quail, and brought me a few to try. 

Tastes like chicken. Looks like frog. 

We recently got a double hammock, which I have thoroughly enjoyed. Retreat from society, find awesome spot, sleep in a tree. It's hard to find a better spot to take a nap. 

 I've been hiding some of my own geocaches lately. I'm pretty proud of this one. That's a camouflaged PVC pipe zip tied to a tree. You fill it up with a gallon of water, cover the hole at the bottom, and the cache floats to the top!

The floating cache!

This one just required solving a pretty tricky puzzle. A little plastic ammo case I got for $3 at Rural King, one of the greatest stores on the planet.

And, I've been working on my knife making skills. I cut the rough outline of the knife out of a piece of steel I got from Lowe's using an angle grinder. A bench grinder has allowed me to smooth down some of the edges, but it still needs a lot of work. Hopefully, it will look like the plastic version at the right when it's all said and done.  

I Thought That Was the Way to a Man's Heart?

One of the things that I really appreciate about where I work is how awesome my patients are. To prove just how awesome they are, every Christmas I get buried under a plethora of incredibly thoughtful and creative gifts.

Let's just say that my wife is fond of some gifts more than others.


Me: "Today was a good day for Christmas presents. I got all sorts of stuff!"

Yellowhed: "What'd you get?"

Me: "Well, here's a rum cake."

Yellowhed: "Cool."

Me: "Here's an orange with those smell-goody things stuck all in it."

Yellowhed: "Cool."

Me: "Here's a book on blacksmithing someone gave me. I'm pretty excited about it."

Yellowhed: "Cool."

Me: "And here's a giftcard to Olive Garden."

Yellowhed: [while fist pumping] "SUHHWEEET!"

On the Tip of My Tongue

80 something year old woman: "And that's why I left Chicago."

Me: "Why did...crud, I just forgot what I was gonna say."

80 something year old woman: "Welcome to the club, kid."

Geocaching Adventures

As I mentioned earlier, now that the underbrush and ticks have died off, I've been able to do a heinie-load of geocaching lately. 

Here's a few of the places it's taken me the past few weeks.

I found this little orange bat stuck to a tree in broad daylight. Initially, I thought he was the cache because he was right at ground zero, and I couldn't see his head. So, I poked him with a stick just to make sure. He didn't appreciate it very much. He flew a few feet away and chirped at me for the next 20 minutes. 

I'm not a huge fan of tupperware caches, as they tend to be trashed. 

This one more than made up for it though. It was hidden in the local library, and you could only find it by finding a tiny little magnetic pill container that told you the call number of the book that you were looking for. 

Fake rocks are always cool. 

I ended up pretty deep into bear country attempting to find this one, and didn't come to that realization until I was already deep into the woods. "Hey. This is a bad idea!" Next time I'm making sure that I have more than just a little pocket knife and a dead stick to defend myself. 

This one was absolutely fantastic. It took me to a magnificent view of a field on top of a mountain on a trail I didn't even know existed.

The girls really enjoyed finding this one hidden behind a reflector. They had to use a pair of pliers to get it out, it was so deep into the post. 

The girls really enjoyed having the local donkey follow them around the cemetery as we searched for clues as well. He was separated by a fence, but he followed them everywhere. 

"Feed me."

Winter Hiking

Writing is a funny thing.

It's something that I absolutely love, something that I find cathartic, yet it's hard to sit down and write what you WANT after you've been drained throughout the day. You can't just sit down and let the pen flow after you've been dealing with emails and presentations all day - at least I can't.

As a result, I've not been able to muster the energy to add an extra blog post for every exciting thing that's happened recently. I get to it when I do.

What I DID do lately though is go camping. And considering the fact that it's winter time here, I think that's a pretty big accomplishment.

I was feeling stressed out from work after a rough week, and asked Yellowhed if we could take a mini weekend vacation somewhere. I was thinking something like spending a few nights in one of her favorite cities, watching some movies, and eating at some nice restaurants.

She recommended camping.

I was stunned.

Of course I wanted to go camping. I always do. But to here those words come out of City Girl's mouth - the girl who once attempted to chase a baby bear through the woods because she wanted to hold it - blew me away. And so, we went.

*PLOP* Our little tent!

It's been a while since I've spent the night outside, and so I guess I'm a little rusty. I completely forgot that there's a difference between winter and summer tents. A summer tent tends to have mosquito netting in the top so it doesn't get so stuffy during the mid-July heat. However, it also allows wind to rip through your little lean-to like a Taco Bell fart through swimming trunks. 

Guess which one we had. 

It was absolutely frigid. 

I knew that it was going to be cold on top of the mountain. It always is there for some reason. Even in the middle of summer, you can get hypothermia up there. Back in high school a friend and I went up there and he decided to bring nothing but a sheet to sleep in at night. A sheet. He no longer does that. 

As a result, I brought every blanket with us that we had in the house (literally), as well as every packet of HotHands that I'd been hoarding over the years. As soon as I got out of the car to register I knew it was going to be a loooong night. It was easily 20 degrees below the already low temperature back at home. We ended up going to bed at around 6pm simply because it was too cold to not be inside of a sleeping bag anymore. 

I spent most of the night curled into a little ball in the bottom of my sleeping bag wondering how I could be so cold with so many blankets. Eventually, I gained the courage to peep my head out to see how Yellowhed was doing. 

There she was, sound asleep, with every blanket on her wrapped up like a little cocoon. I further mustered the courage to wake her up, and when she saw how cold I was she offered to share.

She's so nice. 

It was at this point that I decided to break out the HotHands packets. I'd been awake for well over 3 hours in the middle of the night trying to stay warm, and by golly I was gonna fall asleep. 

I ripped open a couple of the packets, lining the inside of my sleeping bag with them, and finally got some rest. 

We woke up with the mutual understanding that we were going to be much better prepared next time. 

What's Been Happening

I've had a bit more free time now that grad school is over, and it's allowed me to do a whole lot of the things that I've had to put off for a while. 

I was able to spend a good bit more time in the garden, and though everything is pretty much dead now, I did manage to pick these pretty nifty colored carrots.

I picked some chestnuts out of my Papa's garden in an attempt to make a type of peanut butter out of them. It took HOURS. The end result was an oatmeal-y paste that tasted like baby food. 

Yellowhed wanted to pick apples again, so we checked out one of our favorite orchards. Unfortunately, the rest of the state had the same idea, because there was easily 500 people there that evening (literally). It took us 45 minutes just to battle traffic up the driveway.

Found my Dad a Halloween costume. 

It didn't turn out as pretty as I was hoping, but I finally finished the river rock travel chess board that I've been working on. I got the rocks from a local stream, used a dremel to etch out the shapes I wanted, filled the shapes with acrylic paint, and then glossed over the stones to give them a wet look. 

Now my little sister and I can play at the beach without the pieces blowing all over the place again. 

Yellowhed had to work Halloween, so I spent the day hiking one of the most beautiful peaks I know. 

We made pumpkins. 

Annnnd, with the fall weather killing off all the underbrush and ticks, I've started going out geocaching again. Here's the one I found yesterday. 

Is A Degree In Exercise Science Worth It?

After going through the post-graduation job safari myself, counseling a number of students currently going through the job safari, and really getting a good look at what's out there, you eventually come to the question:

Was a degree in exercise science really worth it?

Not all college majors are created equal. TIME and Think Advisor have already proved that, and you can readily see the statistics on a number of other websites.

Like it or not, there are some majors that simply aren't useful. Philosophy and gender studies immediately spring to mind. You can't find a job with them. So automatically, we know that some college majors are duds.

However, some show more promise, such as is the case with exercise science. I was told again and again all through my undergrad just how expansive our field was going to grow, and how we would never have to worry about job security.

Maybe that's the case, and maybe it isn't (I'd argue more of the "isn't" line), but what my professors failed to mention was the pitiful pay you are likely to earn with a degree in exercise science.

The average student loan rate is currently around $30,000 after graduation, as you can see here. The average starting salary for somebody with a degree in exercise science is approximately $36,000, according to that Think Advisor link above.

How long do you think it's going to take you to pay off that $30,000 only making $36,000/year?

The answer? Forever.

What jobs do you qualify for with a degree in exercise science though?

Really, the only jobs are as a personal trainer, or as an exercise physiologist.

Unfortunately, you don't need a college degree to become a personal trainer. In fact, you really don't need anything to jump into personal training. You can get a job training at just about any gym out there after spending $100 on a certification test. Voila. You're a personal trainer, making an average of $37,000/year, according to Glassdoor.

The $100 test guy isn't going to know anywhere near as much as you are going to, but he's also not going to be $30,000 in the hole, in addition to the cost of not working full-time for 4 years while you were at college. To start off as a personal trainer, all you really need is a working knowledge of the gym, charisma, and to be in shape. Obviously that's a broad generalization, but seriously. I see a lot of trainers that know squat, yet they're good marketers of themselves. As a result, they sell.

So to work personal training as a career, I honestly can't say that a degree in exercise science is your best bet.

What about exercise physiology?

Depending on where you work, you may or may not need a master's in exercise science to land a job here. Unfortunately, those with a master's rarely make anything more than one with a bachelor's in exercise science. So a master's isn't worth it in my book.

What you are going to need no matter what, is some form of certification with diseased populations. Most 4-year programs have these put into their degree completion plans already. The ACSM CEP test is the best known.

A job as an exercise physiologist is certainly a lot more stable than as a personal trainer. With exercise physiology, you typically work for a hospital, and have set hours. Come in at 7am, leave at 6pm. Personal training is really just up to you. How many clients can you get?

Exercise physiology is certainly a lot more in-depth as well. You'll be working with cancer patients, guys who just finished having their chest sawed open, people with strange diseases, and incredibly brittle old ladies. You have to know what you can do, and what you can't. You have to know how that medication is going to affect Mrs. Jones' blood pressure. You have to know which exercises will flare up Bob's sciatica. It's on you. You mess up, and somebody can die, or get seriously hurt.

It's a lot more responsibility, As a result, you'll probably get benefits, and a median pay of $50,000 according to Glassdoor.

Now I'm not sure where Glassdoor gets their numbers from, but I can tell you that I've yet to meet an exercise physiologist (and I know a lot of them), who's making $50,000/year. Think more like $30,000. That $50,000 number may come from a big city like New York or San Diego where everybody makes more anyway (and everything costs more too).

I can remember my very last semester at college, when one of my professor's finally said something about our job opportunities. "Yeah, ya'll are probably going to have to go to grad school. You can't really support a family off of exercise physiology."

Shoot. That would have been nice to know.

If you absolutely have your heart set on exercise physiology though, you're going to need a degree in it.

As ya'll know, I am an exercise physiologist. I was a personal trainer. I absolutely love both of them. There is nothing like helping somebody to overcome a painful shoulder that nobody else could fix. To help a morbidly obese man lose 200 pounds. To help somebody with COPD not only now be able to walk across the room, but to get off of oxygen, and be able to do HIIT training. Exercise physiology rocks, and I love it.

However, I keep coming across students who are absolutely lost after they graduate. Ultimately, is it up to them to research their college major before taking classes? Absolutely. Is it wrong for exercise science professors to paint a pie-in-the-sky picture of exercise physiology for students though? Absolutely. Not a single one of my professors has ever worked as an exercise physiologist, and only one of them was a personal trainer. They have no clue. They're straight academics.

Am I complaining? No. If I knew what I knew now, would I still choose exercise physiology as a career? Yes. This is a passion of mine. I feel like I belong here. Paramedics make peanuts. They average $30,000/year, and yet there are still plenty of people out there who make that their full time job. Why? Because they love it.

So that's what it all boils down to with exercise science, I believe. Do you want to be a personal trainer? Skip college. You don't need it. Do you want to be an exercise physiologist, and have a full understanding of what that requires? Then do it. Are you planning on going to grad school afterwards in public health, physical therapy, biomechanics, MBA, med school, or something like that? Then by all means, take the exercise classes. You'll gain a different perspective from a lot of others out there, and be set financially.

However, if you think for a minute that you're going to make a large amount of money as an exercise physiologist, think again.

Just something to think about for all you upcoming potential exercise science students.

(And for the record, I went on to get my MPH. I absolutely love exercise science, and hopefully will be able to come back to it/somehow stay attached to it, but I want to be able to financially support my family, and I don't see that happening otherwise.)

Check out Eric Cressey's two awesome posts on the subject HERE and HERE. They may get you to thinking as well.

The $15 Car Break Down Kit

So I decided to make some car break down kits for my brother and sister for this Christmas. Student loans currently have me broke, so I needed to do it on a budget, and was very happy with what I was able to find.

Here it all is.

Inside is:

• 2 emergency blankets - $1.86
• 2 disposable rain ponchos - $2.49
• a serrated kitchen knife - $0.88
• 2 emergency glo-sticks - $2.00
• a roll of duct tape -$0.97
• 2 pieces of notebook paper - free
• 3 pack of tissues - $0.97
• 2 Walmart bags - free
• an LED flashlight - $1.50
• 1 water bottle - free
• a pencil - free
• 3 rubberbands - free
• a pair of non-slip work gloves - $1.99
• a tupperware container - $0.87

TOTAL = $12.99

 I think it all fits pretty nicely.

The lid doesn't stay on very well, so I tied it all together with some jute string I had lying around that I use for my tomatoes. That way the whole kit can bump around in the trunk without spilling everything all over the place.

The catch is that had I just made one car break down kit, it probably would have cost me a little bit more (around $20). I bought my material with the intent of making 4 of them, and so things ended up being a lot cheaper. The duct tape, Kleenex, kitchen knife, and tupperware container I all got from Walmart. The gloves and flashlight I got from Harbor Freight Tools, with the flashlight being part of a 2 pack. The emergency blankets, rain ponchos, and glo-sticks I all bought off of ebay in 6-10 packs.

I only bought items with free shipping, and a lot of the stuff I found was on sale.

Everything that you see that's listed as free I was able to just find around the house.

If I had decided to spend $5-10 more, I probably would have added a Powerbar, some matches, a screwdriver, pliers, bandaids, Neosporin, some bungee cords, and a mini plybar.

If I REALLY wanted to spend more money on them, I would have added jumper cables and a small tarp.

It's really not that expensive to make one of these things. Walmart, the Dollar Store, and ebay all seemed to have some of the best prices as far as I could tell.

I don't hope that their cars break down, but I do hope that these things will come in handy should that happen!

A Master's Degree

And just like that, after one final momentous push...grad school is over.

It's hard to think about.

I'm done. I've finished. I just finished two years of some of the most difficult schooling of my life while simultaneously working full-time. Holy smokes.

I'm glad it's over.

The amount of free time that I've had lately has been a fantastic breath of fresh air. I can DO things again. I spent this past weekend just chilling at my parents'. No papers to write, no deadlines, no presentations to prepare. Just a weekend.

It was awesome.

Thanks to the sheer amount of writing that grad school requires, I haven't been able to keep up to date on here as much as I would have liked. Writing is a finite resource. You can only spill so much at a time. I have managed to keep pictures of the past year or so on hand though.

This has been life:

I discovered a pretty sweet waterfall way in the backwoods...

There's a park nearby where I managed to capture this awesome sunset while attempting to dodge mud and baby ticks (yeesh)...

My brother got married...

This cool, little, philosophical frog was chilling by the pool of the beach house I got the opportunity to stay at for a while with some awesome people...

"So. What are you going to do with your life?"

I discovered that Yellowhed makes medium-rare boiled eggs...

This almost made a colleague throw-up.

We adopted a little puppy dog from the shelter who was terrified of men, raised her for 6+ months, and then had to give her away. With school and work going on, she was spending the majority of her day locked away in a cage. Not fair to her. She's now running and playing with a family of 11. 

Meet the puppy who knew she was going to get in trouble for pooping on my carpet, and covered it up with my sandal to hide it from me.

This hermit crab at the pet store made me laugh...

And, I've done a little kayaking...

Petsitting No More

Person: "Well, the dog is house trained, but only for my house."

Me: "Ok."

Person: "And she doesn't come anywhere near to being as good as your old one. She's pretty much Satan."

Me: "Oh."

Person: "Oh, and she's also in between flea medications. Sorry. If you see one, just give her a bath with this special lotion."

Me: "Alright."

Person: "Welp, gotta go. See ya."

Anybody Else?

When you disagree with just about every comment that your professor leaves on your paper...

"It's a research paper! The heading IS the transition!"

Everybody in Prison's Innocent

That moment when you have to peer-edit your fellow students' papers.

I absolutely detest peer-editing.

Professor: "Well, I'm too lazy to edit the paper myself, so I'll just have my students do it for me! And make it a grade! That'll work!"

I always end up with the paper that is in dire need of help, or the grader who thinks that peer-editing means you have to be a writing Nazi and mark up the paper as much as possible because THAT must be what the professor is looking for.

I fail to see how either scenario is helpful.

My latest encounter with peer-editing involved my grading a paper for a girl who clearly did not put in the appropriate amount of energy.

The paper was atrocious. To be in grad school, you should have some level of writing already mastered and this paper did not demonstrate it at all. We're talking fragments and nonsense all over the place. And I'm not one of the grammar Nazis either. Many times, if the paper looks fine, I'll send it back with maybe a few comments, but I try not to overdo it.

This paper was different though. It was terrible.

On top of all that, I found that the writer had inserted an extra space at the beginning of every sentence. For a paper with an assigned length to it, that looks veeeeeery suggestive of cheating to me.

And so, I put in a comment.

"I first thought this was isolated incidences here and there, but I've now noticed that you've put an extra space between the beginning of every sentence. Is this to increase the paper length?"

I'm not stupid. I know just about every trick in the book when it comes to increasing the length of a paper. Increasing every period's size one point, an extra "Enter" at the end of every page, yada yada yada.

And so, that's what this looked like.

The writer emailed me back saying that I was unprofessional and that she "didn't appreciate my snarky comments".

Well, shoot.

I don't think I'm going to reply to that email, but I think I now have further ammunition against why I hate peer-editing.

Time to go for a hike.

Why Do Physical Therapy Assistants Get Paid More Than Exercise Physiologists?

Why do physical therapy assistants get paid more than exercise physiologists?

It doesn't make much sense, does it?

To become an exercise physiologist typically involves at least a bachelor's in exercise science, and in many cases grad school as well. Then, at the very end you have to take an incredibly difficult certification exam.

The end result is a job with a great amount of autonomy, where your time is spent helping people who have had heart attacks/open heart surgery/lung transplants/etc. get back on their feet via exercise.

You have to understand EKGs, how medicines affect heart rate, exercise recommendations for a variety of conditions, biomechanics, how to know when your patient is hypoglycemic, gym structure, sales, and often a lot of business-keeping work as well.

The end result? An average salary of $47,000, according to indeed.com, and I've yet to meet an EP that makes that much.

A physical therapist's assistant however, goes to school for two years, typically at a community college setting, before taking a licensure exam. They have very little autonomy whatsoever, basically being at the mercy of the local physical therapist. They too understand some biomechanics, as well as exercise recommendations for a variety of conditions, but not to the extent that an EP is going to.

However, they're average salary is $59,000.

What gives?

How does more schooling, and more knowledge not equal more money?

My theory? Physical therapy leads to more tangible results, and provides a more exclusive service.

If a 44 year old mailman ends up with a frozen shoulder, he's going to be referred to physical therapy. He knows that he's not going to get better without it, and he desperately wants to be able to put his arm above his head again. He goes to PT, they work on the issue, the shoulder's fixed, and he never has another problem with it.

The mailman can vividly see the changes that PT worked for him, and nobody else would have been able to provide him that service.

Contrast that to the 44 year old mailman who has a heart attack. The doctor will refer him to cardiac rehab, but he may not even decide to show up. He knows that he needs to do cardio, so he decides to start riding the bike he's had stored in his basement the past 15 years. He may not know the correct target heart rate, the correct seat height, and how to progress, but he knows how to ride a bike by himself, and that's what he's gonna do.

Why waste money for an EP to tell him the same thing? That tends to be the mindset, anyway, even if it's not the case.

An exercise physiologist's services tend to be viewed as common knowledge, even though that's not the case.

"Oh, exercise more, and eat less. That's all they're gonna tell me."

Somebody with severe joint pain or post-orthopedic surgery is going to do what it takes to get themselves back to being pain-free with a full ROM. Pain is a powerful motivator.

Somebody with a cardiac or pulmonary condition is not necessarily living with pain, however, and they may see their event as a one time thing. You can see the differences in level of pain when PT is helping you out with your low back pain. You can't see the differences in decreasing your risk of future MI via working with an EP. Sure, you may feel healthier, and lose a bit of weight working with an EP, but you may still have a cardiac event anyway, and so what's the use, right?

So it all comes down to the type of patients that a PTA is going to work with compared with the patients that an EP is going to work with.

A PTA is going to work with people in severe amounts of pain, who will do anything to get back to where they were. Nobody else is legally licensed to work with these same customers over these same issues, and so they have an exclusive customer base. (=more money)

An EP is not always working with people in severe pain (CABG being the exception), and a lot of times work with weight loss clients, diabetic clients, and other clients who have similar issues. There's a lot of competition for these people. Local gyms, personal trainers, Weight Watchers, Nutrisystem - all of these people are competing for an EP's customer base.

Nobody says that a personal trainer can't workout with his client that had an MI and stent a month ago. 

He can't provide "cardiac rehab", but who's to say that he can't put his client on a progressive cardio plan starting off slow working on the bike, treadmill, and rower? Nobody.

Does this mean that an EP is going to be less knowledgeable about these issues than all of the other options? By no means. It's typically the opposite. But that's where marketing comes into play, and an EP has to be a good salesman if he wants to keep clients coming his way. A PTA doesn't have to worry about this. The PT takes care of it for them.

And that is why physical therapist's assistants make a significant amount of more money than an exercise physiologist. If you want patients to come specifically to you, you have to figure out a way to provide an exclusive service, and then market it as such.

A New Party Trick to Try

So, we're studying tapeworms in that Infectious Disease class I keep mentioning, and I've just now come to terms with how absolutely terrifying they are.

My professor used to be a physician in Latin America, where tapeworms are prevalent. He tells the story about how one day he had a 30ish year old women come into his clinic. She presented signs of abdominal swelling and pain.

After placing his hand on her abdomen, he felt movement under the skin. His initial thoughts were that the lady was pregnant, but upon further investigation, he found that this wasn't the case.

A stool sample confirmed his suspicions. The woman had tapeworms.

And she was infested.

The type of eggs that were found present in the stool sample were of the Ascaris species. These worms are about the diameter of an earthworm, with the males growing to about 8" long. Females can grow up to 14". (Google image search if you dare)

Fortunately, tapeworms are relatively easy to treat. He gave her the required medicine, and kept her around the clinic.

About half an hour later, she started to vomit, and within the vomit was a worm or two. Then she had diarrhea, and sure enough, a worm or two ended up in the toilet.

Then she vomited again, and about a dozen worms came out. A trip back to the bathroom soon followed with about the same number.

By the end of the half hour the woman was vomiting up worms by the handful. They were trying to escape her system, and were literally crawling up her esophagus to get out, with some exiting through the nose.

When it was all said and done, the lady had expelled over 300 tapeworms. She showed up just in time too. If she had waited any longer the worms could have formed a blockage within her small intestine that would have caused it to rupture, poisoning her system and killing her.

She was cured after that, but I guarantee you she did a much better job with personal and food hygiene from that day on.

Uh, No Thank You

Annnnnnd after spending the past week studying STDs in my "Infectious Diseases" class I now have a better understanding of why God commands monogamy.

Asides from the inability to pee for days yet still manufacturing urine (read "ow"), the development of fibrous growths all over your nether regions, sterility, and some very painful sores, there's also aneurysms, blindness, cardiovascular disease, links to Alzheimer's, and more.

Don't be stupid. God doesn't want his children playing in the street.

Me Punch HARD!!!

That feeling you get after you've spent days collecting research for a paper on anthrax, and have finally come up with enough information for a well-rounded paper, only to find that your professor decided to get creative with the instructions and is making you compare and critique articles instead.

And as a result, most of your research was for nothing.

ZOMBIES!

What I imagine my new class "Prevention and Control of Infectious Disease" is going to be like.

Time To Pick Up Something Heavy

First, the good news.

I passed my CSCS!

After 3 hours of staring at a computer screen, attempting to figure out how those three multiple choices even apply to the question that was asked, I managed to pass!

Sure, maybe I only passed by 5 questions, but it still counts! I'm now a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist!

Now, the annoying news.

A few months ago, a buddy of mine informed me that the MPH program had an "exit exam". What did that mean? What did it cover? Why didn't they tell us about this sooner?

These were all some of the questions that instantly spewed out of my mouth.

Apparently, the exit exam is a gigantic essay exam covering everything that I've learned since my first biostatistics night class that if I fail, forces me to retake my entire 16 week practicum (essentially an internship for married people that are already in the workforce and are now forced to juggle multiple jobs. Thanks grad school.).

Oh joy.

Why my school's administration didn't tell anybody about this sooner, I have no idea. I was just officially told about it last month, and told that it was strongly suggested that I take the exam within the next two weeks.

Aside from two week's notice being a bit short for such an exam, especially when I had scheduled a beach vacation one of those weeks a year in advance and had just paid $500 to take my CSCS - which, if I failed, was around a $200 retake fee - I need to have all of my old textbooks to take the exit exam.

THE ONES I SOLD TWO YEARS AGO.

Did anybody ever tell me I should keep those textbooks, just in case I happen to have a gigantic comprehensive exam near graduation? Nope.

"So, what's the big deal? Just go to the library, man."

Yeah, I thought the same thing. Except the library recently decided that it's going to be closed all Saturdays this entire summer, and only be open for five hours on Sundays.

"Well, just go on a different day, man."

That'd be fine, but I've already gotten a phone call from my professor, and multiple emails complaining about how I said I was going to take the exit exam and that I didn't. Did I ever say any of that? Nope, but that doesn't matter, I'm now the lazy, apathetic Southerner in the eyes of my professor.

USE. BETTER. COMMUNICASHUUUUUUUN!!!

Here's To Tomorrow

After six months of saving money/studying, I finally decided to register for my Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS) exam earlier last month. I'm scheduled to take it tomorrow.

I've been doing a good bit of freelance writing lately, and I wanted CSCS after my name to add a little more oomph to what it is I have to say. That, and if I ever want to teach classes at the university level someday, having the CSCS will help.

It's widely regarded as an extremely difficult test, while simultaneously being the gold-standard test to determine whether or not you know what you're talking about when it comes to training. That typically means you devote hours every evening attempting to absorb too much material.

310 questions in 4 hours.

Let's do this.

Time to Invest in Some Purell

So, I just finished my food safety class. Yeah, I didn't really know what that meant either, but it turns out that it's a whole lot of microbiology, something that I've never been very good at but still find fascinating.

I most definitely learned more about norovirus and salmonella than I ever thought possible, but one of the most interesting facts to learn was in regards to E.coli, a bacteria that grows in your intestines, but that can kill you if it gets out into other parts of your body.

To be hospitalized for a case of E. coli has an average cost of $6,922.

Holy smokes.

To be hospitalized for a case of E. coli where the patient suffers from hemolytic uremic syndrome and dies, the average cost is $6,963,826.

That's quite a legacy to leave behind for your family.

Sooooo, the moral of the story?

Wash your hands before you eat, cook your food well (particularly beef), and make sure your water is clean. Your family will thank you.

What Registering for Class in Grad School is Like

"Woohoo! Time to register for new classes!"

"That's odd. It's not letting me register online. Looks like another trip to the registrar."

*later at registrar*

Registrar: "Just fill out this paper, get your professor to sign this paper, bring it back, and you'll be set!"

*later at professor's office*

Professor: "That's the wrong paper. The correct one is online."

*later at home*

"Sweet. The paper is printed. I'll just fill this out real quick, annnnnnd....I need a preceptor to sign this form."

*later at preceptor's*

Preceptor: "It's signed! Here ya go!"

*later at grad school office*

"Here's my paperwork. Am I considered registered now?"

Office: "Nope. You didn't complete the online form. Thanks for the physical copy though."

*later at home*

"Great. I need a copy of the form I just turned in. Oh, and my preceptor's resume as well."

"I'll see if I can get that and then I'll be done."

Grad School: "Nope. You need to do a criminal history check to apply for that class. It's $40."

Personal Training Hiatus

Ever since I was a little kid, I've always known that I wanted to be a personal trainer.

I've always been on the go, I love science, I love the fitness scene, and I can remember being absolutely captivated by peoples' stories of weight loss and what it took for them to get there.

It was in high school that I recognized just how much physical activity caused even the most shy guy in the class to finally open up and be themselves, even if just for an hour.

And so, I went to college, getting my degree in exercise science, and taking a job as a personal trainer right afterwards.

I absolutely love it.

And so, it was kind of hard to put in my two weeks notice today at the gym I've worked at the past year and a half.

I ended up taking a full time job as an exercise physiologist for my hospital (a job I absolutely adore), and grad school has really begun to ramp up as I prepare for the final stretch. When you add those two things on top of personal training, I was consistently working 10-12 hour days, which I quickly discovered you can't do forever.

Am I glad to be able to clear a little room off of my plate so that I can finally breathe again? Absolutely. It was getting to the point where I had little time other than just to sleep and work. My own workouts went down the tube, my studying suffered, I found myself irritable, and it was making it so I barely had anytime to spend with Yellowhed.

I had to make a choice, but I sure do hope I'll be able to get back to it someday.

I've been talking about that with a guy at work lately. Both of us want to someday open our own gyms, and personally, I'd love to open a personal training studio as well. But if you want that to happen, you have to have a leeeeetle bit of working capital.

And so, I save.

I don't know. We'll see what happens.

Do I absolutely love being an exercise physiologist? Yes. Did I absolutely love being a personal trainer? Yes. However, I've also come to terms with the fact that I have limits, and so, personal training has been put on the backburner.

Maybe I'll get back into it after grad school?

Parents Are Weird

Parents are weird.

At least new parents are.

I guess I'm at the age where a lot of my friends begin to have kids of their own, and I get the opportunity to observe how that little diaper head changes their lives forever.

Just this past Christmas break, I walk past one of my friends at a party who's changing his kid's nasty diaper down in the basement.

I didn't realize he was down there, and so I wasn't sure if diaper changing was a public endeavor or not. I was just about to leave when he said,

"Parenthood is great, man. I can't even begin to describe it to ya."

Yeah, you can start once you finish wiping feces off of that little guy's butt.

The same deal just happened the other day at a dinner we had with some friends from church.

They're telling me all about how they wake up at least 5x/night, how their baby cries all the time, and how high maintenance kids are, all while their smallest continued to throw applesauce all over the floor.

Yet despite all of this, they still were able to say that parenthood was easily one of the best experiences of their lives so far.

I don't know, maybe I'll understand it someday, but for now, new parents are weird.

Grad School Internships

Grad School: "Hey! Come to our school! You can work around your busy work schedule with our classes, learn a lot about what you're interested in, and meet people from all walks of life!"

Me: "Well, gollygee! That sounds swell! Sign me up!"

*2 years later*

Grad School: "Oh, btw. You have to quit your job that you worked forever to get and absolutely adore to do an unpaid internship for 3 months for us."

Me: "What?"

Grad School: "For no pay."

Me: "Huh?"

Grad School: "AND you have to pay us $2000 to get credit for that internship."

Me: *uncontrollable sobbing*

What Ticks Me Off

I whole-heartedly believe that personal training is a noble field. We study the tools and techniques to help people live healthier, better, and hopefully longer lives. 

Incredible back pain? 

There's personal trainers out there that can help.

Need to lose 50 pounds to get your blood sugars back under control?

Personal trainers can help.

Knee pain that's keeping you from living life?

We can help with that too.

Though we're certainly not physical therapists, we can still help to strengthen parts of peoples' bodies to get them to where they want to be. Though we're not counselors, we're always there to help people blow off a little steam after work. 

I take my job seriously.

And that's why when I hear of other "trainers" abusing my field, it disgusts me.

Pushing your clients to only eat 1300 calories the rest of your life, giving your clients injectable steroids, working at another studio for 3 days just to take pictures of their set up before you quit and set up your facility the exact same way, treating clients like crap and ditching them last second when more "important" clients come in, and only letting your clients eat one meal a day are not the characteristics of a true trainer.

Ugg.

People deserve better than that. 

Praying for a Friend

I just found out that a very good friend's dad just passed away from a massive heart attack.

I mourn with him.

THAT is exactly why I work in cardiac rehab. To keep people from having to experience pain like this.

I love ya, Goose.

SHE'S LYING!!

*Sitting at the lunch table when one of the cardiologists brings his 1 year old daughter inside to have eat with his wife and him*

Doc: "Where's your noooose?"

[kid points at nose]

Doc: "Where's you beeelly button?"

[kid lifts up shirt]

Doc: "Where's your moooommy?"

[kid points at mom]

Doc: "And where's your daaaaady?"

[kid points at me]

Does the 3 Second Rule Still Apply?

Thought I'd give ya'll an idea as to how my morning went.

Well, Thanks for Checking

Yellowhed: "Ooo, there's a zit on your back. Let me get it."

*squeezes so hard I start to bleed and my right leg goes numb*

Yellohed: "Nope. It's not ready yet."

Back to Math Class

As of tomorrow, my extended break is officially over.

Back to grad school, and back to papers till 2am. Despite the workload, I'm actually looking forward to this semester's classes though. I start up with yet another statistics class tomorrow (making this my 6th stats class), but I've slowly grown to appreciate it.

Nothing like good ol' multiple linear regression analysis to help you appreciate the finer things in life.

Aside from being a fake math nerd though, here's a little bit of what else has been going on lately:

I've still been doing a lot of hiking, and found this bird's nest made out of snake skin the other day.

I'm sure there's a Bible lesson here, somewhere.

 I'm attempting to do a little bit of leather work...

I'm secretly making a Russian hat and shoes. Don't tell Yellowhed. I wanna wear it next time I see her folks.

 I just bought a tin whistle...

Titanic theme song. Done.

I've become addicted to Ticket to Ride...

And...I just got back from the Mid-West, where dogs are dressed in sweaters.