Halloween/Thanksgiving/Fall Semester

We've been pretty busy the past few months. The semester has been easier for me than it has for Dimitri. I am only taking 3 classes and they are all on Monday and Wednesday so I am free the rest of the week. I spend Friday mornings volunteering at an elementary school helping out in three Adapted P.E. classes and on Thursdays I am often doing data collections or in the lab working on data reduction. The rest of the semester will be pretty easy for me, I just have a couple of papers to write and one exam and then I'm done! Next semester I'm going to take 4 classes and so far they are all on Tuesday/Thursday so I will have long weekends again which is really nice, and it is really convenient for data collection since they are in the mornings and are at least a few hours.

One of the babies on a treadmill (they are usually naked).

The research project I am working on is called Myelomeningocele Intervention or MMC study. MMC is one type of spina bifida. For the study we have families do treadmill training 5 days a week for 10 minutes a day with their baby with MMC. The parents hold their baby on the treadmill and try to get them to take weight on their legs.  Every 6 months they do a bone scan to see if their bones are becoming more dense (which is a good thing) among other tests we run. Babies with MMC generally have very low bone density in their legs making them more likely to break their bones and depending on the level in the spinal cord where the lesion is people with MMC may only walk for a few years. We're hoping to increase their bone density and possibly help them to walk longer and avoid assistive devices. So far things are looking promising, but many of the babies haven't graduated from the study yet so we will see!

Dimitri is taking 6 classes this semester and can't wait to be on Christmas break. He spends at least 40 hours a week doing homework. He is currently waiting on the Master in Applied Economics program to see if they will let him do a dual masters (right now he is in Master in Financial Engineering). It's university policy that they have to see one semesters worth of grades before they can grant you a dual masters so he won't find out until December some time.

Ann Arbor by our apartment.

For Halloween this year we were really excited because there are a lot of kids in our apartment complex which meant that there would be lots of trick or treaters, BUT then we realized we're both in class until 8 pm on Halloween which meant we wouldn't be home until almost 9 pm. By the time we got home no one was out so we got stuck with all the candy. Oh well! : ) We carved pumpkins the weekend before Halloween. My pumpkin said 'Trick or Treat' and Dimitri's pumpkin was of Jack Skellington from A Nightmare Before Christmas. They turned out pretty good I think!

Our 2012 pumpkins.

For Thanksgiving my advisor invited us to her house with the other grad students, but we decided to do our own Thanksgiving since it was our first chance to do one with just us. We ended up finding a 10 pound turkey and ate around 3 pm. We made cheesy potatoes, stuffing, rolls, cranberries, gravey, and pumpkin pie to go along with the turkey and we have A LOT of left over. Everything ended up being done around the same time which worked out really good. (Dimitri's Note: Arielle hasn't liked stuffing but this year said it has grown on her lol.)

Dimitri wearing his chef jacket from Natalya.

The finished meal before we ate.

We went on a walk after we ate dinner and heard a scratching coming from the dumpsters. We walked over and looked in the recycling bin because raccoons often get themselves stuck in them when the trash isn't full enough. He wasn't in the recycling so I lifted the lid of the garbage and couldn't see it until I looked down and he was looking right at me and hissed. After a few attempts Dimitri was able to get the lid to open all the way and we put a vacuum cleaner (someone left it by the dumpster) in the corner of the dumpster so the raccoon could climb out. We thought the vacuum fell over so we went to go get a big stick from the other dumpster, but when we were walking back we saw the raccoon go down the sewer drain in the parking lot.

Today we decorated our apartment for Christmas. Our tree is up and we put lights around our back slider door. We listened to Christmas music for a good 6 hours and watched Frosty the Snowman. We also got most of our Christmas shopping done online today so we won't have to travel with everything when we go back to Spokane for Christmas.

Pizza Party

Last week we ended up having some of Dimitri's classmates over for dinner. Giovanni is one of Dimitri's friends from class. He is Chinese, but was raised in Italy. Giovanni's friend Mattia cane over to visit from Italy and is staying until Sept 1 so we decided to have an Italian dinner. We also invited Rob (Dimitri's friend from Slovakia), Susan (his friend from China), and Lisa (Giovanni's GF who is from Michigan).

Before we had the dinner, we took Giovanni, Mattia, and Rob with us to Costco to get some supplies. Both of the Costco's we've been to in Michigan are about twice as big as the one in Spokane.

(Mattia, Giovanni and the giant bear)

The day of our dinner Mattia ended up getting sick, so he didn't come :( Giovanni said they were planning on making some pasta dish, but only Mattia knew how to make it so we didn't have it.

(Giovanni, Susan, and Rob. Lisa hadn't arrived yet)

 

We didn't have enough chairs for everyone so Rob sat in our pink chair and Dimitri sat on our step ladder.

Susan brought some food too. She made shrimp with corn and beef with onion and tomatoes. The dish on the top Giovanni made, it is fresh mozarella, roma tomatoes, and oregano.

Dimitri also made two pizza's.

In other news, Dimitri is FINALLY done with his summer boot camp!!!!! This week we are just relaxing and finding our classes and going to orientations. Starting on Wed UM's welcome week starts and they have free events for the students.

The Critter

     So as many of you know I have 40 hours of class a week including Saturdays. Well this last friday as I was walking through our parking lot to class I saw the University Operations parked by our dumpster. As I got closer I heard some scratching coming from the dumpster and decided to stop and watch the school workers and see what was in the dumpster. One of the workers grabbed a large branch and put it into the dumpster and out climbed a raccoon.

     Saturday morning as I was walking to class I heard the sratching again so I looked into the dumpster to see if it was the raccoon again. It was so I searched for the large branch and helped him out again. This time though he didn't run off into the forest but ran down a water drain. The picture above is a picture I took of him on Saturday. I have a feeling that this will occur again. I am thinking about naming him or her if it continues.

Ann Arbor

     So Ann Arbor is a really nice place from what we have seen so far. There are literally trees everywhere! There are parts of Ann Arbor that don't have dense tree coverage but these areas are highly populated and are mostly paved with asphalt and concrete such as campus, the city and other shopping areas.



The main road that is close to our apartment.

     The University of Michigan's campus is really big compared to WSU's campus and much flatter. West of campus there are a lot of ethnic restaurants around campus including a Mongolian BBQ which we might try out soon. The campus is surrounded by a few large buildings and small shops that give it a college town feel. The campus is smoke-free, has three recreation buildings, a library that looks like it is from Harry Potter, and is so large that there are three sections which are North Campus, Central Campus, and South Campus.

     We live by North Campus which has the Motts Children's hospital (which is top rated), the engineering and computer science buildings and the old Pfizer research compound which UM just bought for research purposes. Not surprising we have an automotive engineering program.

     Central Campus has the majority of class buildings and libraries. The photo below has the Rackham graduate school in the background which Arielle and I are apart of. We have only walked on central campus once to get our ID cards and went through a few buildings.

    We have not been to South Campus yet but it is mainly the football stadium which seats 109,901 people but usual holds 110,000. The record attendance for the stadium is 113,090 people at the 2010 season opener. There are also other sporting areas on South Campus such as tennis courts, a golf course, and one of the three recreation buildings.

   This weekend we went to the Henry Ford Museum which was very interesting and had a lot of stuff including trains, cars, planes, machines, and much more.

A Wright brothers replica plane with some of the original fabric.

    After the ford museum we went to Detroit and went through the GM building and saw Canada across the water. After seeing the city center we drove through some of the city which was in terrible condition including buildings that were graffitied, burned, and/or windows broken out.

The GM Building

    Overall Ann Arbor is very different from Spokane including the shopping (Ikea, Whole Foods, and many others), weather which is like Spokane in temperature but is more humid and has more storms including tornadoes, and the animals. We have seen a wild turkey, road killed foxes, larger squirrels (that are grey on top and reddish orange on the bottom), a mom raccoon with two babies in a dumpster, cardinals, fireflies, marmots, and I am sure many more to come.

Road Trip to Michigan!

The Saturday before me moved to Michigan we had a going away party at my parents house with family/friends and I made some cupcakes for dessert : )

On June 13th (wed) we picked up our truck and trailer and loaded everything up. Luckily we did it early because it started to rain right after we finished.

We got up early on Thursday and were on the road by 6:40 or so.

Our first day of driving was pretty uneventful, we spent most of the day driving through Montana which SUCKED. There was a ton of road construction so we had to go 35 instead of 70. We were following mapquest direction and they sent us on a back highway instead of I-90 so we thought we were lost. In the end it took us about 15 hours to get from Spokane to Sturgis, SD, but it should have been only 13.

On Friday we were back on the road by 5:40 Spokane time. Driving across South Dakota was pretty uneventful, we were debating stopping by Mt Rushmore but it would have been an hour out of the way just driving, so we decided to skip it. As soon as we crossed the Minnesota border I swear there was life. Everything was green and there were people. We also crossed the headwaters (?) of the Mississippi River which is on the border between Minnesota and Wisconsin.

When we got into Illinois we used the GPS on Dimitri's phone to get us to our hotel because there was road construction on the freeway and we couldn't see our hotel. Day two was another 15 hour drive day, but it went by faster I think because we had scenecry to look at.

On Saturday we slept in a little bit and had breakfast with Dimitri's friend Alex King who works for Boeing in Chicago. After breakfast we hit the road and drove 4.5ish hours to Ann Arbor!! We checked into our apartment around 5 and started to unload the truck. Luckily one of our neighbors, Dan, helped us to unload the truck so it went A LOT faster.

We unpacked all day sunday and then made a Costco run so we had some food to eat. I'll post pictures of the apartment later and pictures of what the roads look like, there are trees everywhere.

Update

I had my last day of work at the Card Shop last week so the countdown to moving to Michigan has really begun. We will both be attending the University of Michigan for our Master's. Dimitri is getting his Master in Financial Engineering and I will be getting my Master in Kinesiology with a specialization in Motor Control and Development. We pick up our truck on June 13th and we're heading out early on June 14th. We're planning on driving to Sturgis, SD the first day, Chicago the second, and arriving in Ann Arbor on June 16th.

Dimitri is beginning boot camp (basically a summer school class for everyone in his program to make sure they start on the same page) on July 2 so we will have plenty of time to unpack and explore before then. I will probably be doing a whole lot of nothing during July unless my advisor wants me to work in a lab or something since I will be there so early.

Boot camp for Dimitri ends at the beginning of August so we will both have that time off before school starts on Sept. 4. Dimitri already has his fall schedule set up and he is taking 12.75 credits this fall. I will be signing up for classes this week and will probably be taking 9 credits unless I work in a lab in which case I will probably get more credits. We're hoping to finish school in a year and a half, it just depends on how the classes work out. Dimitri needs 39 credits to graduate and I only need 30.

We are really excited to move to Michigan and start a new chapter!

Arielle's 23rd Birthday

Arielle’s birthday was May 2^nd. I made her small chocolate cakes with a chocolate cylinder to hold the cake together. Inside the cylinder were four layers of cake with caramel layers between them. They were then topped with chocolate ganache and strawberry compote with fresh cut on top.

As many of you know we are moving to Michigan to go to the University of Michigan. I got her a UM Sherpa lined zip hoodie and some t-shirts. My parents got her a UM t-shirt and a UM sock monkey. Her parents got her a gift card to Pottery Barn which is really nice since we have been saving up for a nice bed from Pottery Barn. Overall I think her birthday went pretty well.

Happenings!!

So I know I haven't updated for months, but we have exciting news! Dimitri was accepted to the Master of Financial Engineering program at the University of Michigan!!!! He applied to seven different programs last fall and was accepted by UM and Claremont Graduate University. He chose UM because they are a better program overall than Claremont, have a summer bootcamp so everyone starts off on the same page (the bootcamp isn't graded, but it's required for all MFE students), and it is closer to where we want to end up (NYC). UM also has a Master in Kinesiology program that we learned about right after Dimitri was accepted, so I applied to that program (the due date was March 1) and I take the GRE's on March 9, so hopefully we'll both be in school this fall.

Dimitri's program starts July 2 so we'll be moving over to Michigan at the beginning of June. His bootcamp schedule is 6 days a week for 8 hours a day, so I'll be pretty bored during days when he is in class because my program (if I get in) doesn't start until September.