MPH

I was officially hooded as a Master of Public Health on Friday morning, and spent a long weekend having a blast with my mom and celebrating with various groups of friends. I feel incredibly blessed, totally satiated, and a little overwhelmed by all the celebrating and the long lead-up to graduation. After a day or two of recovering from it all, I'll be back to regularly scheduled programming. There will be blogging about food and gardening, enjoying having a social life, doing summer-y things, and job searching as I work on beginning my new career. I am so excited to be joining this field and all the amazing people who work in it. A million thankyous to everyone, far and near, in person and virtual (hey-o, blog readers!), who has supported me in this endeavor and put up with any whining I engaged in along the way! I couldn't have done it alone.

Another Bend in the Road

Late last week I passed my comprehensive exam, and yesterday I officially completed my Master's degree. Two years of student life behind me, a new phase of my life begins.

Sometimes the most momentous occasions in our lives are best appreciated without major fanfare (there will be enough of that come graduation). So after I turned in my final reports yesterday, I met a friend for coffee, and later walked through my beautiful neighborhood with rock and roll pumping on my iPod and my camera in hand, soaking up the glory of Portland on a late May day, warm and humid between rainstorms, and overflowing with green. Celebrating. Unsure as I am of where my life will go from here, between the music in my ears, the beauty all around me, and a supreme sense of accomplishment, I felt satisfaction beyond compare.

Home.

Handmades for Baby (and Brother)

I got in a nice dose of crafting this last week, to counteract the effects of studying for my comprehensive exam. One of my favorite families is expecting a second baby boy in just a couple weeks, and we had a really lovely backyard barbecue in the warm almost-summer rain yesterday to celebrate his upcoming arrival.
Here's what I made for gifts:

After knitting off and on for the past several months, last week I finished my first moderately complex knitting project, which was a great experience for me- I learned new stitches and tricks, how to sew buttons onto handknits, and how to block! Also here's a shout-out to Heather for some technical assistance along the way. I am in love with the feeling of complete satisfaction that comes from actually creating fabric out of this beautiful wool, and I have to say I'm pretty pleased with myself since as far as I can tell, I managed to complete the whole thing with only one stitch out of place.

My Ravelry notes are here. 

Last summer, when I first found out that my friend R was pregnant, I was inspired to make name bunting for both the new baby and his older brother. I finished the bunting for big brother last August, and set it aside, and cut out the flags and prepared everything for the second bunting, not knowing whether it would be for a boy or girl, or what the name would be. There are so many great bunting projects on so many different blogs that inspired me, and as a combination of several of those, this method worked really well for me:

I cut the flags out with pinking shears- saves SO much work of hemming. The ribbon was just made from scraps of fabric rolled on itself and sewn and ironed flat. Using ric-rac for the letters worked perfectly (thanks to Laurel for fueling my new addiction to all things ric-rac). I sealed/melted the cut ends of the ric-rac with a lighter so it wouldn't fray, and pinned the letters in place before sewing down the center of the ric-rac. Once all the letters were done, all the flags were sewn onto the ribbon. 

For Big Bro (2 years old)

 For Little Brother. You might notice that these are leftover pieces from the table set I made last summer. Relatively gender neutral...

 Done! I'm so pleased with how these turned out. Such a simple, fun project with a colorful and hopefully long-lasting end product. 

__________

With that- I'm off into the last two weeks of my graduate school career! I doubt I'll be back here until I've finished everything up. So send positive energy towards me as I take my comps next week, and in the meantime I'll be doing a lot of this:

Fueled by a lot of this: 

My default quickdraw dinner of late- a grain, a protein and some greens all piled into a bowl together with some salt. Brain food. 

Spring Runnings-Around

It's that time of year when suddenly everything is bursting into busy-ness and also the contents of my garden are growing like crazy! It makes for a busy life trying to keep up with work, school, impending graduation and exams, and also launching my garden into the summer! I've been feeling a bit scattered, wishing I was able to blog in a bit more comprehensible and frequent fashion, but you'll just have to deal with my tangential meanderings for a little while longer. Thanks for sticking with me :)

Here are some things that have been happening lately:

I had to get rid of my worm bin, and release the poor worms into nature. They were having a hard time for quite awhile, and I tried and tried to change the environment in their bin, without success. Last week it was getting to the point where six or eight of them would escape every day, and I felt bad for them and also got tired of cleaning dried-up worms off my kitchen floor--ewwww. So I am now making peace with having to put all of my food scraps in the trash, with no other means to compost where I currently live. I just have to remember that I am being conscientious about it, and I won't always live here. 

I finally took down the lights under my kitchen table, so foot room has been restored. On Sunday I took my tall teenage tomatoes to the garden and got them in the ground- the first ones in the entire community garden! I always jump the gun on tomatoes, but I'm doing better than last year, when I was planting them out in mid-March. As it is, we're past the last frost date and this whole week is forecast to be sunny and 75 degrees, so I think they'll acclimate just fine. 

I finally did some of my community service time (all garden members have to do a certain number of hours of work on communal spaces like paths) and weeded and re-mulched the path on the north side of my plot, which was a veritable quack grass patch. It all looks so much nicer now. 

 The remaining starts from under the lights have moved into my east-facing window. These are all basil- two kinds, standard sweet basil and Siam Queen Thai basil.

My peppers did not germinate well- I planted six but only two actually came up, and the jalapeno (on the left) is pretty stunted. The other is an Aci Sivri, the gorgeous red chilis that I loved so much last year. I'll just have to buy starts for the rest. I'm guessing the seed has gotten too old at this point, and I'll have to get new seeds next year. 

I now have four pots of flowers and herbs outside my front door. I planted chives, sage, parsley, dill and mint, plus some pansies from the garden center and zinnias and nasturtiums from seed. I can't just pop out to the garden for fresh herbs, so this is my solution. There's just no substitute for fresh herbs when cooking, and if these can manage to grow on the north side of a building then I'll be content. 

Elsewhere, I've been trying out my new camera, which seems so small compared to the lovely big Pentax I've been using for the last three years but which is not actually mine. Simplify, simplify. One of my goals for the summer is to take a real photography class, but in the meantime, it's fun to experiment with my new toy:

 Massive artichokes a couple plots over from mine.

 Spring garden so full of potential.

 I love living so close to the river now. Another version of the greens and blues of spring.

Spring sky! 

I am now less than 5 weeks from completing my Masters. It is all closing in on me at an alarming rate, but it is also very exciting. I think this means I have to be a grown-up now or something. Somewhere in the busyness of everything else, I need to find time to start looking for the first job of my public health career. My two years of graduate school have absolutely flown by, and I can hardly believe it's almost over. This year is full of new beginnings for me, and this transition will just be another one, and it will be good.

At the Garden

After work on Monday, I biked over to the garden and did my first planting of the season. It was the day after St. Patrick's Day, so I planted potatoes! Really just two of them, because my space is so limited- but I have to have at least a few new potatoes to dig up. I am trying a new-to-me variety this year, Red La Sodas.
I also planted turnips and radishes and beets, and did a bunch of cleaning up of my plot. It felt so good to get out and till things up, and pull (numerous) weeds, and tidy up all the chunks of cardboard that started out as mulch and then disintegrated and blew around everywhere and made it look a mess. It was a lovely evening, warm until the sun went down, then freezing. It was the first time I'd been able to go to the garden after work, thanks to Daylight Savings- now it stays light past 7 PM!

I officially finished the term last night with my last exam, and tomorrow night I'm off to visit my family for several days, do some hiking, and revel in not having to think about school for the next two and a half weeks.  Happy spring!
 

Spring Has Sprung!

I've just spent the last 5 hours in a computer lab, finishing up a big term paper and presentation. So close to the end of the quarter. Another week and a half and I'm done. As soon as I've written this, I'll be back out in the sunshine. It is gorgeous out today, and being stuck in here doing homework was pure torture. I rode my bike to campus today though, on the trail along the river in the bright sunshine. Having finished the paper (ok, just a solid draft. Still lots of work to do), my reward is the beautiful ride home.

Yesterday was just as lovely as today, and when I got home in the afternoon I went for a walk around the neighborhood with my camera, on a treasure hunt for springtime. And I found it!

Look at the fuzzy buds! Look at that sky! 

Leaves! Leavesleavesleavesleavesleaves! 

I've been walking past this tree every few days, waiting for those buds to burst open. Yesterday was the day! So much beauty. Nature does it best.  

 Spring projects getting underway down the street.

An early tulip- the only one I saw. 

After many months of waiting, it's here. Spring is here! Bright happy daffodils everywhere, and tomorrow is daylight savings! I'm SO glad (can you tell? I might not have used enough exclamation points).