Update: May Fitness Challenge (05/16-05/22)

I am officially done (again) with my med school courses! The “again” is due to the fact that ACLS apparently did count toward our grade, so we’ve had that all week. It was somewhat frustrating in the sense that I have my giant test to take tomorrow, and ACLS effectively sapped all my boards study time away this week. On the plus side, it wasn’t all for naught! I did my megacode yesterday and after I finished and signed off on what I’d done, they had me sit elsewhere while they deliberated on whether or not I passed/failed.

When they brought me back over, here’s the conversation that followed:
L: How do you think you did?
F: I think(?) I did okay and I hope I passed. I don’t think I left out anything glaring…
S: Do you think you left anything out?
F: I feel like there was one point where I should have addressed the patient’s oxygen levels first but I was tending to something else.
S: But you corrected it, didn’t you?
F: Yes indeed.
H: Who was your instructor this week? Dr. Cookie?
F: Yep, but I’d go to Dr. M’s reviews at night since I heard that all the instructors emphasized different things. (This was an understatement. I went to him specifically because he held us to a higher standard and included a great amount of detail. I figured it’d be safer to err on the side of way-too-much-information.)
S: We wanted to know who taught you because we think you did very well. In fact, we recommended you for IP (instructor potential).
F: …:O! Really!?
L: You interacted with the patient, made sure they were comfortable, explained and clarified all the procedures in great detail and went through your reasoning behind everything that you did. We were very, very impressed.

I aced today’s exam too (not bad for never having owned the book, right? :D ), so it looks like I won’t have to retake it! :P I sincerely hope this trend continues!

My mom sent me a giant container of mixed nuts (brazil nuts, hazelnuts, cashews, almonds, walnuts, etc.), another ginormous Costco bag of walnuts (she said they’d be good for my brain), a bottle of pineapple aloe juice, 2 cans of lychee (I requested em’), a bag of dried longan, allergy meds, a giant bag of Krave Lemon Garlic turkey jerky(!), a mystery package that I can’t read the calligraphy for (I’ll figure it out eventually) and 4 bags of dried mangoes.

I’ve concluded that my mom would be amazing at Tetris (maybe that’s where my Tetris-ing skills came from). I guess she figured that if she was going to pack up a box, she might as well fill every last bit of space up. :P

I also got a package from Becca a couple days later and it completely made my day. :D! I think both of them realize how much I miss having an accessible (aka not a 2-hour drive away to get to the closest one) Asian market, so said packages reflected that. :P They definitely provided me with the pick-me-up I needed. <3! But of course, before I could check it out, it had to pass inspection first.

“There’s nothing for me in here? I guess you can have it then.” :[

Becca sent me 2 boxes of curry, furikake seasoning, ingredients (minus the eggs, obviously :x ) to make tea leaf eggs, a reminder of home + a super cute card. <3

May 16

• 1 hour + 1 min. on ellipticals @ 7% resistance while studying (214 questions completed)

May 17

• 30-min. At-Home Abs/HIIT

May 18

• 25 min. Tahitian practice
• 5×2-min. Supermans

May 19

• 1×200 bridges @ 24 lb
• 3×25 BW squats
• 1 hour + 5 min. ellipticals @ 6% resistance while studying (250 questions completed!)

For the record (you may have already noticed this), I’m not much for taking gym selfies or anything of the sort, but I recently remembered that I could take screenshots on my phone, so I’ve just been including my fitocracy points in pictures, haha. :D

We started off the week with another lovely stab to check for TB (yet again). I’m proud to say that Mike is still alive, and so am I.

May 20

• School is killin’ me. :[ The entirety of me walking to and from different buildings + all over the farm probably added up to 20 minutes.

She makes my studying more bearable. :]

May 21

• 1 hour + 7 min. on ellipticals (intervals) while studying (250 questions completed)

I’ve taken to buying a tub of mixed greens for $1.59 (manager’s specials! <3) and loading it with stuff so that I at least won’t be eating like crap during exam week. :O

May 22

• 2 hours on ellipticals (intervals and then even harder intervals) while studying (342 practice questions completed ._. only 98 left until I’m caught up, but I think I have another 250 tomorrow…)

Total: 342 minutes
Running Total: 1537 minutes!
(Start, Week 1, Week 2)

The #20×31 fitness challenge is hosted by Jen, Samantha, Carley and Anna. It’s not too late to join if you’re interested! (We still have a whole ‘nother week!) Just 20 minutes per day for the month of May! :]

Advertisement

Nike Women’s Marathon (2010)

In the rare instances where I write about doing any form of cardio, I think I invariably mention how much I hate it. This was not always the case. While I’ve never loved it, I really did give it a fighting chance and…tolerated it for a time. Back in the day, when I was dating an avid runner, he’d convince me to come with him on his crazy treks throughout town. The very first time, I obliged, but on my bike. That was actually kinda fun (and I didn’t feel like I was slowing him down, so there was that), but I was dragged on several more of these crazy adventures throughout the year, and it was pretty much a testament to how much I liked spending time with this guy. After he introduced me to/I fell in love with weightlifting, running was but a distant thing of the past (other than uh, some more 6-7 mile runs that I managed to live through only because it meant that we’d get to eat the world afterward).

Anyway, if you fastforwarded (really rewinded, since we are now in 2014) to May of 2010, a Nike college ambassador came into my exercise psychology class to pitch to us the awesome-ness that was the Nike Women’s Marathon. Her exact wording may have been something along the lines of how “finishers [would] get a Tiffany’s necklace presented to [them] on a silver platter by a hunky SF fireman in a tuxedo.”

I’m usually not into this whole expensive jewelry thing, since I’d much rather spend my money on food (they don’t call me a black hole for nothin’!). But if I were to run a half marathon and they’d give it to me? Why would I ever say no? Especially when there was a fat discount offered to college students? (My mom was appalled by the idea of having to pay to run. I think once upon a time, I thought the same way about this, but anyway.)

I coerced two of my friends from junior high to come along and run it with me. At the time, I’d started running somewhat regularly, but was forced to take a break in the fall due to a super-fun back injury. The idea of this half-marathon entered my head when I’d just gone through ~1.5 quarters of cardio kickboxing. I figured that signing up for this would do me a whole lot of good, including:
1) Motivating me to actually run regularly
2) Giving me an excuse to hang out with Whitney/Becca once we were all back home (this was the year we all graduated from undergrad, in case you were wondering)
3) Brag rights if I finished running it without dying

#2 slightly backfired because Whitney ended up not being able to do the run with us. #1’s “regularly” was relative, but considering my running as of that year before and how grumpy I got after mile 3 or so, I’d have to say this was a vast improvement.

The Friday before, I got together with Becca so we could make shirts for the occasion. My fabric paint backfired on us (or at least, the colors I wanted to use did), so we ended up using pink. I think they turned out fairly well though. As somewhat of an explanation, two years ago, we were trying to come up with a term that could collectively incorporate all three of us, and we somehow came up with this:
Whitney
Becca
Farrah

_{“We Be Friends,” because we’re hella ghetto.}

We went off to SF at noon to pick up our race packets and check out the expotique. We’d gone on an epic run up Mill Creek on Monday (bright and early at 6 a.m., because my physics class had gotten cancelled and covered about 10-11 miles, which, at that point in time, was the longest distance I’d ever run. I figured 2-3 more miles should definitely be do-able.

_{My name on the wall! It made me feel super-special awesome, but alas, I’m too short, and could only point to ‘Frank.'”}

My main concern was to be able to finish the race without dying (such an ambitious goal, I know), mostly because I hadn’t really have a lot of time to train for speed. (Although to be honest, I doubt I ran anywhere near as much as I should have to prepare for it.) For the better part of my high school/college years,my favorite forms of physical activity have been [and still are] gymnastics, horseback riding and dance, none of which were a regular occurrence. (I have since added on weightlifting, MMA, pole-dancing, occasional yoga/pilates, and for that short period of time, running.)

We had a pasta dinner the night before and went back to Becca’s mom’s friend’s hotel room. On the way back, I was stopped by a guy who asked me what I used to style my hair.
F: (recalls how she stayed up til 4 a.m. the night morning before watching Make It or Break It, and blearily woke up this morning to pick up Becca) Um, nothing?
Guy: You don’t use anything to get it so perfectly straight like that?
F: I didn’t even comb it this morning. :[
How’s that for honesty? It’s nice to know some things don’t ever change.

Bright and early at 4:30 a.m. (I’ve only ever gotten up this early to run one other time in my life >_> ), we got up to eat and get everything ready, then walked our way over to the starting point. Auntie Judy handed us bottles of water, but since we’d overestimated how much time it would take by…a lot, Becca and I ended up leaving to give our water away to two homeless people we’d passed by on our way there.

_{Somewhere around 6 a.m. in the morning…}

_{Waiting for the race to start…}

The first three miles or so felt pretty surreal. I couldn’t really believe it was actually happening, and before I knew it, we’d already gotten to Mile 6, which was the start of the horrible hills. Oh, what fun. But they weren’t actually that terrible, most likely because the Mill Creek run did us a lot of good.

We were handed all sorts of things throughout the different miles (water and Gatorade every other mile, orange slices, POM, Luna bars & Clif Shot Blocks at Mile 9, Ghirardelli chocolate squares at Mile 12… I ran with Becca for 13 miles and sprinted the last 0.1-ish. Finishing it felt pretty much like…it hadn’t really happened. I thought it’d be a hell of a lot harder.

So. I forgot to get a picture with my fireman. :[ But we did do a video testimonial together that they probably shouldn’t use. I believe I said something about how you get a pretty necklace from a super-sexy fireman and how Don’t Stop Believin’ is an awesome song in a semi-fob accent. And then we couldn’t figure out how to turn the thing off because we’re hella awesome. Yeah.

_{The fruits of our labor!}

_{NWM 2010 Necklace! :D}

_{I didn’t die! :D}

I seriously cannot fathom running even 3 miles now without gasping for breath, which is pretty depressing. When I look back on this, I usually feel a sense of complete disbelief that it ever even happened. So why am I talking about running to begin with?

I’m thinking of actually starting that up again. Linda took me on a mini-tour through the town I’ve been living in for the past 1.5 years and I discovered that there’s a beautiful park with an amphitheater, a track, what used to be the pool that is now a community garden, pull up bars, parallel bars, playgrounds, picnic benches the river…and it’s literally less than half a mile away, just down the hill from where I live. How did I not know that this existed!?

winter break recap

Well then. That was definitely not the best way to start off the new semester. Since my neighbor is about 10 lectures ahead of me, I spent yesterday in somewhat of a mad rush trying to catch up to him and ended up sleeping at around 2:30 a.m. As luck would have it, none of my 5 alarms went off this morning (either that or I just seriously did not hear any of it) and we had mandatory class at 8 a.m. I woke up to the sound of somewhat frantic honking outside my bedroom window at 7:48 a.m., freaked the hell out, and rushed to school (I made it on time). Since I usually leave a couple minutes before he does, he figured that the fact that my car was still there meant that I was out cold. (Thanks a billion! ;_; )

This is basically why I’m completely okay with him doing stuff like this to me:

I came home one night a week or two ago to find this on my doorknob (it was actually better coiled so that the snake was actually facing me). Keep in mind that I live kinda in the boonies, so it was pitch black. I was talking to my mom at the time, and our conversation went something like this:
F: (starts laughing)
MF: What’s so funny?
F: There’s a snake on my doorknob.
MF: WHAT?! What are you going to do!? Are you going to call someone?!? (She has ophidiophobia.)
F: Don’t worry, it’s not real.
MF: (still panicking) What’s a fake snake doing on your door?!
F: It’s probably Adam.
MF: Why would he do something like that!?
F: Just to be a dick.
He finally admitted to it yesterday, and confessed that it took a good 5 minutes to position it so perfectly on my door. Tis a shame that I had to actually open the door to turn on the light so I could take a picture. :O

Much to my chagrin, classes have started again, but I suspect that if break had been any longer, I would just fall off the whole study-hard wagon. Here’s a super quick recap!

I watched the Nutcracker ballet (for the first time! :O ) in Oakland with my family because we somehow managed to score free tickets that the mayor was giving out (…? I have no idea why or how this happened, but I will take it). We also went to see Les Miserables, which is one of my two absolute favorite musicals (the other would be Wicked). We went to a family friend’s place for Christmas lunch and played White Elephant. It is probably only at an Asian White Elephant gift exchange that you’ll ever see durian as one of the gifts. My entire family hates durian, so I actually haven’t eaten any since 2006. Back in the day, my grandma and I used to eat it together and we’d be mutually shunned by the rest of our family.

I saw several of my closest friends again and definitely Asian-fooded it up (Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Indian…). :O When I described the sushi buffet I went to to my anatomy professor today, he was overwhelmed with all sorts of jealousy and said that he would forgive me if I left a bento box at his office door. I am highly considering getting a bento box and filling it with pictures of the sushi I had to leave in front of his office door, but am wondering if that would make him hate me forever. :x

I met up with Becca & Whitney, who are the only two people from the group I hung out with in high school that I still keep in contact with. We have a reunion every break we have and usually do some kind of crafting (e.g. I learned to knit last winter and made a billion scarves). This winter was somewhat truncated because my break was so short, so I made a pompom out of yarn for my beloved cat, Ninja.

She definitely enjoyed batting the crap out of it. :O

Before I left for Napa, I went to visit one of my favorite people in the world, aka my second mom: Bel! :D We talked for a couple hours and I was hella sad that I had to leave, so she said to come by to her SWEAT class at ClubSport on Monday so I could hang out some more. :D This is us showing off my month in the Twirly Girls calendar! (Somehow, I always end up with January, haha.) I’m hella sad that I couldn’t really take any classes this break, but mark my words, I will be living there again this summer, if all goes well. *-*

I also have a reunion every winter break with several of my Davis friends. Usually, we go to Walnut Creek, but we deviated from it this year to head over to Napa to stay with one of her friends. This is us at the Napa River Trail. Since it’s such a small picture, you hopefully can’t tell that we’re all squinting and/or crying because the sun is so bright. Sun, how I miss you [already].

They set up beds for us (I love the monkey-bear pillow, haha) and let us know where the spare key was so we wouldn’t have to worry about waking them up, or having to come home while they were still awake.
Us: Thanks, Mom and Dad! :D
Emily/Aaron: We’re like the cool parents!

Indeed they are! They even made us dinner! :O We had three different kinds of pizza (taco pizza, pizza with goat cheese/caramelized onions/pears, Hawaiian pizza [not pictured]), salad, and apple pie + ice cream. :D (We brought the apple pie back for them since they wouldn’t let us treat them to dinner.) I’m definitely going to try to recreate the pizzas sometime because they were glorious. (I usually don’t even like goat cheese, but it takes on a much more mild flavor when it’s baked. :O ) If I’m successful, the recipes will, of course, be shared here. :O

I actually snuck up to Davis for a couple hours too since I couldn’t be there for the actual music reunion this year (it’s tomorrow and class started today :'( ). I figured seeing a couple of them would be better than nothing! :O Curse my brother for saying that it only took 15 minutes to get from Napa to Davis though. It’s a good 50-60 miles away. In what universe would that take 15 minutes by car? >:O We chilled at Burgers & Brew for a couple hours and then I finally made it home. I miss Davis and being able to get everywhere without having to drive. ;_;

The next morning, I went for a hike with my family and several family friends over in Coyote Hills. :]

Our plans to make steak fell through because the friend who found the awesome butcher was no longer free. Without her, we were rather lost and thus decided to wander around Trader Joe’s and pick up whatever looked good for dinner. When Sam saw the stuff we came back with (cereal, mozzarella, coconut milk, cheese, baby carrots, cucumbers), he was rather mystified as to what we would be making. :x

On my last day, I met up with Bel at 12 and took her boot camp class, which left my legs super sore all through my plane rides the next day. I’ve never actually been in ClubSport because it’s for rich people and we are not rich (nor can I even convince my parents to go work out even when there are 2 free gym memberships waiting there for them :[ ). I legitimately got lost in the locker room (sad, I know). I’ve gotten kinda used to paying next to nothing (<$7/month) for a bare-bones type of gym ever since I lost my ARC membership (oh, how I miss you :[ ), and now, I basically pay nothing because it’s been included into my monstrous tuition.

I also tried to get in one last Bikram yoga class but somehow didn’t remember the time correctly (thought it was 4:30 p.m. instead of 4 p.m.). There was a woman sitting there who’d gotten there 10 minutes late, so I started talking to her and managed to do some completely unintentional networking. She apparently works at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation and said that when I was out, I should definitely look them up because they were always looking for people, especially those who wanted to go into primary care. ( :D! ) She also said my personality was bubbly and friendly enough that patients would definitely love me  in primary care. Hells yes. <3 Her name is actually really familiar-sounding, so I’m half-wondering if she was the physician I was going to have, had it not been for the fact that I had to switch over to Kaiser. :x

Yep, that’s all I have. I also managed to catch the plague for a bit because I wasn’t sleeping very much (or at all) due to my want/need of seeing all my friends/family as much as humanly possible before running off to the mountains again, but I’m alive and well again. Ready or not, here comes the second semester of med school! I’m missing a fat chunk of change because I just paid off half the year’s rent as well as half the year’s auto insurance. Hooray hooray?

explain them tags

It occurred to me the other today that some of the tags in my posts don’t make too much sense if you’re not me or the people encompassed within that particular group, and while it may not matter to most, I feel like explaining em’ today because I miss the contents of said tags. I think the whole concept of having a name for a group of people came out of sheer laziness/convenience (because who wants to have to name every single person in the group every time they mention it?). In any case, they are invariably tagged in many of my recipe posts because we wholeheartedly believe that food is an event. I swear we do other things than eat, but generally speaking, the only pictoral evidence I ever have of our gatherings is for the food, because hell knows I never seem to take pictures of anything else.

If there’s one thing I have good taste in (I say this only because my first couple picks in dudes were pretty effing questionable), it’s in my friends. <3 You’ll probably notice there are several people who overlap consistently in these groups because we’ve basically been friends for what seems like forever and logic concludes that if you find a good one, you hold onto them. I’m gonna attempt to go somewhat chronologically. This is, in short, the main cast of characters in my life. <3

.CCL4.

Everyone except me, because I’m taking the picture. :P

This consists of my closest elementary school friends (me, Joanne, Jun, Amy). I’ve known Amy and Joanne since fourth grade–Joanne is the first friend I made when I moved to the other side of my hometown. We have been through a shit ton together, and I’m super glad that we’re still awesome friends. :] Her mom has at one point mistaken me for her girlfriend (nope nope). I like to refer to Amy as my “favorite neighbor.” She lives across the street (times two) from me and for the majority of elementary school throughout high school, we’d walk to school together. We don’t really talk all that much anymore, but back in the day, we’d have annual sleepovers with the four of us and where we’d watch stupid movies, play games and be awesome. Amy coined the term for our group name, which is short for “ChenChanLiFongtastic Four,” a conglomeration of our last names. I shortened it to CCL4 because that’s carbon tetrachloride, although technically, it should be CCLF4. CCl4 had a better ring to it though. :O

.whibefariends.

Evidence of our hang-out-itude in high school. This was us at Keat’s house before senior ball. :O

The only two high school friends I consistently hung out with throughout high school (e.g. during lunch, etc.) that I remained in contact with. (I’ve known most of my closest friends since elementary school, but we didn’t necessarily hang out in the same groups in high school. We used to write in notebooks and pass em’ back and forth throughout the week to keep each other updated on our lives and such. Then we split to 3 different UC’s and then to different parts of the state (country, in my case) for a while, so now we keep in touch through facebook and try to make it a pact to hang out at least 1-2 times per year through gathering together to garner new hobbies and make stuff (e.g. last year, I learned to knit and we started making all kinds of stuff). whibefariends is a combination of the first couple letters of each of our first names. Yes, we were trying to be ghetto.

Here’s us with our creations (scarves). :O

.9F.

This is the kind of stupid shit we do together. Yep. The idea arose because we owned matching underwear. We’re awesome, I swear.

Our lonely (hah, “lonely” group of two, so named 9F because that was the apartment we lived in together for two years. This consists of none other than Jun, my college roommate/facebook husband. We lived together for all four years of college and have been married on facebook since July 8th of 2006 (which I believe trumps many actual relationships in length and quality), coupled with a 2-year long engagement. We go out every year for steak or whatever we’re craving for our anniversary lunch or dinner and usually drag along friends to celebrate the joyous occasion. We’ve been friends since we were 11-12. <3

.6F.

At my junior recital! <3

This consisted of the merging of 9F with Nadia and Rey, who lived in 6F. To this day, we still blame Kayleen for wanting to sit with the sushi boats on her birthday back in freshmen year of undergrad because if not for that, it is highly likely that we would have met each other sooner and started living together/making even more awesome memories sooner. But better late than never! We had about a year’s worth of awesome times together and they are the reason why I am hesitant to ever live with anyone else again because the only way to go from there is down. I’ve technically known Nadia since freshmen year of Davis, but didn’t get to know her until around junior year. I officially met Rey in my junior year as well (she is my “dirty mistress” and collectively, we’re known as “Reyrah,” and the four of us hit it off immediately, so we replaced their former roommates the following year. <3 I miss them lots, and basically became Nadia’s weekend roommate from 2010-2011.

.supah speshal awsum.

Us as the Alice in Wonderland cast!

This the blanket term for everyone in Fremont/Davis that we hang out with, and it’s the name we used for mogwee (a group chat application that we all downloaded one day because Florence was working for the company that made it and we were being their free beta testers). It’s butchered English for “super special awesome” [just in case you can’t tell] because we tend to regress (that’s not even the correct term because only one of us is actually a fob) into fob speech when we’re around each other. Right now, it mostly consists of Diana, me, Florence, Joanne, Jun, Kayleen, Steph and Nadia, but can stretch to encompass others (anyone we hang out with back home, basically). The pictures I have don’t have Florence or Steph because I apparently stopped taking pictures of anything other than food/pole dancing after I moved back to Fremont.

I think this picture most aptly describes our friendship.

.coterie.

We’re missing Sylvia because she’s taking the picture! :[ This was on our SF trip.

Although I’ve known Mekala since the 4th grade, we actually didn’t become friends until around freshmen/sophomore year of college (weird how that works, huh? it only took 9 years, haha). I had treble ensemble with Sylvia, but again, we didn’t become friends until sophomore year, and I met Kaitlin at Davis too. We had physiology and/or our creation of Dames & Fellas A Capella together and bonded over that, and after we all graduated and moved back to Fremont (other than Kaitlin :[ ), Mekala and Sylvia became my running/recipe experimentation buddies. We try to all meet up somewhere in the middle of where we all live once a year because we miss each other, and are all freakishly busy/not in the same time zone otherwise, since I’m generally in the eastern time zone, Mekala’s in the middle, and Sylvia/Kaitlin are in CA. This group name is taken from the name of our group texting app (yep, that’s how we keep in touch. that and the ecards Sylvia sends us). :O

Yay! Here we are. :O They came to see my senior recital! <3

.MH gang.

Here’s us with our landlord at our white coat ceremony! :] It’s blurry because this is a picture taken of the picture my landlord gave me (it’s the only one that has all of us!).

MH is short for the road/hill we live on, but this is basically me and my neighbors in WV. Both of them are full of all sorts of awesome and I am beyond lucky to have them as my neighbors, although I’ll have to admit that I’m pretty biased towards Adam in terms of bonus points of awesome because we never see Dustin anymore and because Adam cooks me meals (my parents are likely hanging their heads in shame over this because I seem like a total eternal freeloader, but I swear I try to reciprocate ;_; ), picks up random stuff at the store that he knows I’ll like, functions as my alarm clock/cold-weather-living advisor, as well as my study buddy. We spend inordinate amounts of time together studying, so it’s a really good thing that we get along so well, or shit would go down. All in all, I couldn’t ask for better neighbors. :O I’ve become severely spoiled and am not really sure what I’m gonna do without them after these two years pass by. :[ :[

We have yet to figure out a name for the group I hang out with at med school other than my neighbor (this doesn’t happen so often anymore because I started studying at home/med school happened, but we do still see each other! :O). We keep each other sane and often make food to share with each other. For the ones who can’t cook (e.g. Kosina, despite the fact that her name means “kitchen”), they buy stuff and bring it in so we’re usually all in good moods. I’ll retag when we get hit by a couple bouts of inspiration and figure out something to collectively call ourselves. :O