Since We Last Talked – Part 3

Oh, hi. It’s me! I’ve emerged from two kinda crazy weeks – one with a few evening events and one of feeling kinda crappy combined with some getting home later than usual – to find that there are only two weeks of my internship left. Crazy. So, let’s catch up. Since we last talked…

…I escaped a room.

Sort of. One of our bonding activities for the interns was going to Room Escape Adventures and being stuck in a relatively small, dark room and finding DaVinci’s lost meatball (apparently it was the perfect meatball… and yes, there were a lot of jokes made about this task). It was an incredibly strange hour or so. The location felt kind of creepy and the workers all put on horrible fake accents to get into character, and it ended with a little speech from the director about how we struggled for the first 10 minutes because we didn’t communicate and communicating is the key to everything, duh. We still got out with 20 minutes left on the clock, though, so we didn’t do too terribly.

…My leg issues got better – sorta.

And the leg saga continues. At my last PT appointment, I saw someone on my physical therapist’s team, but not her. It was a fine appointment and one of the other PT’s gave me some modified arch supports in my shoes to see if that helped. I think it has, largely, and I don’t experience pain in my calf anymore. Yay! However, I have some ankle pain now, probably from walking a little funny for the last 6 weeks.

When I tried to explain this to my physical therapist, she just told me to keep doing the exercises she gave me, which are:

• Not challenging
• Things I have been doing for years to keep my hips and core strong
• Not at all targeted toward my ankle/lower leg

Yes, I’m a touch annoyed.

I have a follow-up with my orthopedist today, though, so I’ll see what his advice is. I just want to be able to run a little sometimes, guys. That shouldn’t be too much to ask.

…I ate at the nicest restaurant in Columbus.

Two weeks ago was Restaurant Week, which always conveniently falls around my mom’s birthday. On her actual birthday (July 19 – mark your calendars), we went to Refectory. This is the kind of restaurant where the waiters put the napkins in your laps and refold them if you get up to go to the bathroom. I was, of course, 20 minutes late to dinner because of traffic, but everyone was very nice about it. And, yeah, the food was pretty freaking delicious. I’m not going to say it was leaps and bounds better than any other restaurant I’ve eaten at, but it was really good.

I started with gazpacho with shrimp and avocado and followed it up with bourbon-glazed pork tenderloin that was so, so tender.

The winner of the night was the flourless chocolate dome with vanilla anglaise (which I don’t usually love) and Godiva liqueur on the inside.

OMG. Let me eat that forever. If it weren’t such a nice restaurant, I would’ve licked the plate clean. Instead, I scooped it all up with my spoon. #compromise

…I taught my first yoga class in a studio.

I’ve been practicing for free with friends and stuff, but I hadn’t taught a real yoga class in a studio until last Saturday. I subbed for my favorite yoga teacher at the studio I took classes at in high school. Granted, only one person showed up because the regulars were mostly on vacation, but it was still fun and I’m doing it again in a few weeks!

…I got a new phone.

I am a hopeless Apple product junkie. I love them and swear by them. However, I’m not the person who has to upgrade all the time. I had my last iPhone for several years, and I’ve been noticing its battery getting weaker and its AirDrop and ability to sync with my computer weren’t working, which was all kinds of annoying, so I decided to get a new one. Update while writing this post: AirDrop is still giving me issues. Lame. But at least it syncs with my Mac now. I was just going to go for the iPhone 7 because I didn’t think I could stand the size of the 7 Plus… but then I got to the Apple store and the very nice salesperson said she was the same way until she realized it could still fit in her back pocket. So, I slipped it into my back pocket to make sure it fit. Aaand I was sold. It’s beautiful and I’m super excited about the camera, especially with all my upcoming travel.

…My usual half-hour commute took two hours.

I actually left work at 5:00 on Thursday, but the combination of rain and two bad accidents made me get home later than on any of the nights I worked later last week. After a relatively full day of sitting, the two hours made me very annoyed. 

…I got some perspective.

First, some context. One of my favorite experiences at school was being an Orientation Aide, especially before my second year. Once you’ve been in college for a bit, you encounter a lot of cynical, stressed people who just want to get college over with already (and you might even become one of them), so I love meeting excited new students. Before my second year, I got to get to know all the first years in my house and hang out with them pretty much all the time that week.

A few days ago, one of them was diagnosed with aggressive stage 3/4 acute lymphoblastic leukemia while interning on an island in Hawaii and needed a medical flight to the mainland (California) as soon as possible to begin treatment. His sister started a GoFundMe for the $60,000 flight and within a day and a half had raised it all and then some (which will go toward the expected three years of treatments).

Basically, everything changed really quickly, and I became a whole lot less annoyed about traffic and occasional intern boredom and slow drivers and all that.

…I went to the lamest Harry Potter festival in the world.

I obviously have not been to every Harry Potter festival, or even any other Harry Potter festivals, but let me tell you, this was bad. 

Potterfest in Kent, Ohio, is advertised as a little town transforming into Harry Potter world. NO. It actually is way too many people dressing up in too-hot wizard costumes in the middle of summer and squeezing themselves into a college town that’s barely trying and totally failing to be Harry Potter world.

There was a cat statue (I think) wearing a Gryffindor scarf. There was a line around the block to go into “Diagon Alley” that wasn’t even decorated with Harry Potter storefronts (no, I didn’t wait in line for this). There was a single store selling butterbeer floats that people waited an hour and a half to get (no, I didn’t do that). They held a “Defense Against the Dark Arts class” where a Sunday school teacher sang several odd songs, including one to produce “good vibes” to create a patronus. My sincere apologies if you actually watched my painful Instagram story of that. Also, there were a ton of vendors selling things not remotely related to Harry Potter… and not very many actually selling Harry Potter stuff.

We drove two hours each way for that nonsense. The upside was seeing my aunt and cousin and their friends, and mostly seeing how excited and happy my cousin was with her best friend just gushing over Harry Potter (not because of how great the festival was, but because they’re both totally obsessed with the series right now). So sweet.

P.S. Today is Harry Potter’s birthday, so everyone should celebrate with birthday dessert. Just an FYI.

Your turn:

What have you been up to lately? I wanna know!

Have you ever been to a totally disappointing fair?

What’s changing your perspective lately?