Sorry for the late post, I had kind of a weird schedule with working the weekend then being off Thursday and Tuesday. This week, I got my second MMR vaccine, had a fever dream about bread, interacted a bit more with Stuart the bathroom spider, and drove across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge with some ladies from church to visit a cute little town called Saint Michaels.

Stuart’s latest adventure

I discovered that Stuart the bathroom spider is, in fact, alive. I saw him moving about the ceiling after my shower in pursuit of a small fly that had made its way into the bathroom. He kinda came out a bit but funnily enough it’s like he saw me and was too scared to move out further from his corner and he retreated. I ended up killing the fly the next morning for violating my space.

Anyway, that at least answers the question of if Stuart is alive. The answer is yes! And he tries his best, but isn’t very good at catching other bugs yet.

Boosted

I went to a travel health clinic to get the second dose of the MMR vaccine (measles/mumps/rubella) because my pre-employment medical screening discovered that my titer was really low. The clinic actually is where I went to get my shots before going to volunteer with Mercy Ships! The nurse there had a really keen interest on learning more about it and it was a really cool opportunity to share about my experience and also encourage her to look into it. She has a family and kids and didn’t know about families serving together and the ship’s academy. She said I should be a recruiter, haha. Anyway it was really neat to see how opportunities to speak about my time there still pop up today.

Smoke alarm saga

The day I got my second MMR shot, I started feeling a bit of a reaction near the end of my shift. Needless to say, by the time I got home I was ready for bed. I felt like someone upstairs had some weird alarm going off because I heard a beep when coming into my apartment.

I didn’t think too much of it, put my bag down and went into my bedroom to get my pajamas and change of clothes for shower.

Beep.

I went back into the kitchen. I waited. Silence.

Thinking nothing of it, I went into the bathroom and started brushing my teeth.

Beep.

Okay, I definitely heard it this time. I stood outside of the bathroom. Waited. Surely it would happen again.

Beep.

It’s definitely in the kitchen! I still couldn’t isolate it. I eventually took out my phone and set a timer to determine the frequency of beeps. Only once every 60 seconds.

Beep.

It sounds like a smoke detector? But when you look up in the ceiling… There isn’t one?

Maybe it’s my air conditioner. I stood by the air conditioner for a long time.

Beep.

It sounds close, but it doesn’t quite seem to be the air conditioner. Wait, there’s a smoke detector in the bedroom. I go to the bedroom. I wait. And wait.

Beep.

It’s not this smoke detector. It’s definitely coming from the kitchen/living room.

Wait.

And wait.

And wait…

Beep.

WHERE IS IT????

I go back and forth playing this excruciatingly long game of hot-cold trying to find the source of the beep. I probably spent 15-20 minutes trying to figure it out before I gave up and resigned myself to a defeat. I continued getting ready for bed and tried to sleep with a random beep interrupting the silence every minute. Luckily the beeping was in the kitchen so being in the bedroom it wasn’t so bad.

The next morning:
Beep.

It’s still going, oh my goodness.

Unbelievably, I managed to locate the source of the beep within the next beep. My host had removed the smoke detector and PUT IT IN THE CABINET UNDER THE KITCHEN SINK. Which sorta makes sense, the original place was right above the stove so I imagine it went off all the time. I think the battery was dying, or something, maybe? So it started beeping.

Okay so you see how it says “press to hush” so I pressed the button and the alarm immediately starts going off. I panickedly press the button many times. It goes through its entire cycle of screaming my ear off before I figure out how to open the battery case and remove the battery, which took kind of an embarrassing amount of time to figure out. It happens when I’m not in my right mind.

Bread-related fever nightmare

On my day off I had all these plans to go downtown, but then it rained all day and I got a fever from the continued MMR reaction, so I mostly spent time taking it easy. I also happened to have this really strange fever dream surrounding bread. I was in a super-Target/Walmart/store that sold home goods but also groceries, and I was really panicked because I really needed to buy a loaf of butterbread. But everywhere I looked, there was tons and tons of bread in all these different aisles, but none of them were the breads I wanted, whether it was the wrong shape, or the wrong flavors, I couldn’t find it. I got really anxious because I was just on this mission to find and buy butterbread because MY GOODNESS I NEED BUTTERBREAD WHERE IS IT. I did have this bread loaf I considered buying which was a walnut-hazelnut swirl bread which was sweet and sounded really tasty. But then I didn’t buy it in the dream, because it’s sweet bread! You couldn’t make like a deli sandwich with it, it wouldn’t go well. Then I got more stressed out.

And then I found a loaf of butterbread, but it was cut long-ways. Like instead of cutting the bread into square slices, it was like a loooooong rectangle of bread instead. It was also labeled “George Washington cut” as if there’s some reason George Washington wanted his bread cut long ways. I have been listening to a lot of the Hamilton Soundtrack so this is probably where that came from?

I somehow found an image of this cursed existence so you can suffer with me knowing that somebody out there ACTUALLY cuts their bread loaves like this.

According to dream brain, the idea of the George Washington cut was that you could make a sandwich on one piece of bread and then just fold the bread over to make a sandwich (instead of just using two pieces of bread???). When I recounted this extremely stressful dream to my parents, my dad really bought into the idea of long bread. (“You could make this a business. Label it like a party size sandwich, then people can just cut off the portion they want to eat instead of being subjected to specific portion sizes created by standard bread size.”)

Ramen Thursday: brothless ramen

I still managed to get out of the house for lunch and tried out the brothless ramen (mazemen ramen) at RamenYa that the chef had recommended last week. The chef himself came out to serve it. He was so happy someone remembered to come back and order it. Behold! Here it is:

As always, it was very good. The noodles were served with a kind of spicy peanut sauce with no soup. It was spicy but I was able to handle it! It was so delicious. The little bit of spicy added to the flavor, I think. And I ate all the veggies because they were a bit cooler. I cleaned the whole bowl out. The chef came to ask how it went and I told him it was delicious. Then he said that there’s another type of ramen he’s offering, which is a kind of clear broth ramen served with a citrus peel. He said the flavor is a lot lighter, so to him he feels like it might be a little bland. I told him I would give it a try next time. Stay tuned!

Worship to polka

I found the video upload of the polka style “Our God is an Awesome God” from last week’s service. It’s quite a treat (unexpected, but delightful). Please enjoy.

The pastor came back this week, and he spoke on wanting the members of the church to be active, to serve and to be involved in the family. Then he preached on Psalm 1, about meditating on the Word day and night so you can be like a tree planted by springs of water, and how we ought to avoid the way of sinners and scoffers.

After church, I had to go since I was working that afternoon, but not before a nice lady named Pam from last week struck me up in conversation. She asked me if I had crossed the Bay Bridge yet, to which I answered I had not. I told her I needed to find a destination across the Bay Bridge in order to get a reason to go there, and she suggested a cute little town named Saint Michaels. I said I would have to make that my plan for my day off on Tuesday and thanked her for the suggestion. She then pulled an entire wall calendar out of her purse, the kind that you hang on the wall with the one page that’s a large photo and the opposing page is a grid showing the month. She flipped open the calendar to June, and said she was free and asked if I wanted some company. Sure! The more the merrier, things are more fun with company. And I also thought it would be a great time to connect with some of the people in the congregation. She then flagged down Erin, who was passing by on her way out, and asked if she might be interested in coming. So the plan was hatched.

Saint Michaels

Operation “get Jasmin to drive across the Bay Bridge” consisted of a spontaneous trip to Saint Michael, a small town on the Bay. It’s about an hour and a half drive from where I live, so it’s a place that’s more like a day trip type thing. Washington DC is closer than Saint Michaels.

The Bay Bridge is a large bridge that connects the mainland to a section of Maryland called “The Eastern Shore”. It’s long and high up over a large body of water, so a lot of people really don’t like driving over it because it kinda freaks them out. I found it to be really cool! But I can see why people don’t like it.

But I did it! Pam took a photo of me driving as proof so I can show all my friends.

Saint Michaels is known as “the town that fooled the British.” According to history, the town of Saint Michaels was able to fool the incoming British Navy during the War of 1812 during an attack on the town. The town was a strategic military location at the time, because it was at the entrance of the Chesapeake Bay and was a major stop along important trade routes to Baltimore and Washington, DC. They were also a major shipbuilding town, even though they’re not super big, they were an important target for the British. The story has it that the locals hung lanterns up high in the trees, fooling the British to fire into the trees over town rather than the town itself.

They are very proud of it.

It was actually such a beautiful day outside! It was sunny and mid 70s, which is unusually cool for the summertime in Maryland. Pam kept saying how God really orchestrated our outing to be a wonderful day of fellowship and nature. :) Which is true, I had a day off, Pam didn’t have anything to do, and Erin (who is a pharmacist) also happened to have the day off and her son was hanging out with her parents out of town so there wasn’t any obligations she had at home.

Our time was mainly spent walking the town and going through the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum. It’s actually this huge 18-acre harbor/shipyard area and they repurposed a lot of the buildings to showcase the shipbuilding and maritime history. The entrance is like a remade tugboat!

They even have a shipbuilding area where they still are using some traditional techniques to rebuild one of the historic ships that was lost, a new Maryland Dove. Lucky for us, it is actually almost finished! They’ve been rebuilding it for a while, it seems. It was lost without a lot of documentation or models, so they’ve been combing through different records to try and rebuild it as accurately as possible. It will be a gift to a historic city of St. Mary’s.

As expected, the water has some really great views and of course, lots of boats!

The first place we went was a model boat guild building. They have a lot of history about different boats, their purposes (like fishing, transport, etc.) and they have a lot of cool scale models of the boats themselves. I learned that a lot of the shipbuilding technology came out of necessity when needing to do things like outrun British warships while pulling cargo.

There was also a large exhibit on hunting waterfowl, hunting guns, and the like. It was really interesting! There was an entire building dedicated to decoys. There’s some really interesting things like they had this boat thing that was really a flat panel with a dug out hole so you could hide at water level then they lined the surrounding area with decoys to lure in the ducks. Then they also had these kind of comically large swan boats they hunted from also.

Also, these huge guns! They’re so heavy and cumbersome that you could only shoot once then you had to paddle your gun back to shore to reload. They were called punt guns, and they eventually got outlawed because they were so loud they’d scare away most of the waterfowl anyway. As they became outlawed, people would do weird things like weld together a ton of guns to make “battery guns” which was like a ton of guns on a rack instead. O_o;

They also have a bit on the Chesapeake Bay Retriever, which is a hunting dog that was bred in the Chesapeake area. It is the state dog of Maryland.

Then we visited the Hooper Strait Lighthouse. It is more like a cabin with a light on top rather than the lighthouse towers that we’re accustomed to seeing in NC.

Also unlike the lighthouses in NC, you can go inside! Well, mostly because it’s been moved and preserved on land, but these lighthouses used to be out at sea. The only way to get to and from it was by a boat, which hung kind of like a life raft over the edge of the railing. There’s two curved black posts that straddle the two big windows on the main floor that you can see in the above picture; those held the boat.

I should’ve taken a bunch of photos of the inside, but it was really just like a cabin. They did a really good job with keeping the “look” of the inside and having these really unobtrusive notes that if you looked around you could get narration and commentary from people who were lighthouse keepers or their families. It was really interesting! It was a fairly dangerous job, out there all by yourself, without really any easy access to shore.

You can even go to the top. It was a bit cramped, but I managed to get a selfie with the lamp.

The shape of the bulb is spiked like that to project the beam of light to the maximum possible distance. Science! Or something. I’m not very good at optics, so you’ll just have to believe me on this one. The lighthouse also has a shutter that pulls down over the windows over the lightbulb so the sunshining through the big magnifying parts doesn’t catch the house on fire.

The lighthouse is also equipped with a fog bell, a loud bell that the keeper rings to warn boats of the shore when visibility drops below 5 miles and the light becomes less effective at warning ships. The bell, as loud as it needs to be, is very heavy, so the keeper has to wind up a large weighted mechanism to ring the bell. The bell will ring for 2 hours before the keeper has to wind it up again. Not too bad, right? But what if it’s foggy when you’re trying to sleep? Or if the fog is there for days? I can’t imagine having to worry about that.

The Bay (understandably) has several lighthouses and there’s a cool poster that showed a lot of them and their designs. You can see that the house ones in the water are held up by some stilts. The bottom of the stilts have these huge screws to help them stay planted into the sea floor.

There’s also an entire section on my favorite Maryland thing: crabs. It goes a bit into the history of crabs in the local economy as well as the industry of “crab picking,” or peeling crab and removing the meat from the shell.

It was historically a low paying job that required workers to be very dextrous to pick crab well—fraught with inequality, crab picking jobs were mostly women who were paid by the pound of crab they picked rather than by hour like most of everyone else working in the factories and processing plants. It was difficult to automate as a job because machines could not pick cleanly enough, and/or left a lot of shell in the meat.

Nowadays, it’s evolved into something of a speed sport also. Maryland is home to the NATIONAL HARD CRAB DERBY which includes the crab picking contest, along other interesting events, like a pageant for “Miss, Little Miss, and Little Mr. Crustacean” (lol) and a cook off. But hey I found this short video of a master crab picker “Hurricane Hazel” picking at the 2013 Crab Derby crab picking contest. Look at her go!

“Why is it called a crab derby?” you say, “The only derby I know is the Kentucky Derby, and that’s a horse race.”

Well, I’ll have you know it’s exactly what you think. (Wait, really?) Yes. Everything you could have wanted, and more. I even found an example for you to enjoy. It’s as riveting as they get.

Anyway, after exploring the museum, we went to find a place to eat lunch. There was a crab restaurant right outside the museum but it was closed on Tuesdays! In fact, almost every single restaurant we found was closed on Tuesdays. Oh well. We ended up eating at an Italian restaurant named Limoncello. It was actually really good!! I had the lobster ravioli.

The seating place was also pretty cute. We got seated in an outdoor patio.

Afterwards, we went to a small ice cream stand that was locally owned and operated by a local farm! They had a sign out front that said their ice cream goes “from cow to cone in 2 days!” Anyway, I forgot to take a photo of the ice cream because I was too busy eating it. It was good! I will say though, I still think that Howling Cow has better texture. FOOD SCIENCE!!!

We then went into various shops, and I got myself a little compass souvenir. I don’t know, it was just something that really spoke to me when I saw it. It works, too! It has a really nice weighty feel in my hand I just like opening it and looking at the little arrow move. There’s something kinda meditative about it. And something about it being for navigation and just pointing you a way. I think there’s something really nice about that.

Then we went back to the gift shop at the maritime museum so I could buy my mom a little magnet that I saw. She collects fridge magnets like I collect postcards, so I’m always on the lookout for one when I travel. I saw a cute pewter crab and I really liked it! So I got that for the fridge. :)

When we got back, Pam gifted Erin and I each a pewter crab claw keychain she got from the gift store! It’s definitely cast from a real crab claw; it’s very sharp, hahahaha. She bought one for each of us to remember the trip by. It’s on my bag now. :)

Napkin dispensers

The only update about the work that I have for now is to note that I noticed this weird trend that this hospital doesn’t have paper towel dispensers, only napkin dispensers. It is really weird. In fact, the only paper towel dispenser I have seen is specifically in our lab. Not even in the other labs. Everyone only has napkin dispensers that only dispense those really terrible non-absorbent brown paper napkins.

Then last week, my coworker dropped and spilled a large jug of orange juice in the breakroom. Do you know how many napkins it took to clean that up?? So many. It was really frustrating trying to absorb like a quart of orange juice with those thin, one-ply brown recycled paper napkins. Eventually, I had to get the spill kit from the lab just so we could absorb enough of the liquid on the floor.

Anyway, wow what a long update! Hopefully it’s enjoyable. Next week some peeps from CCMC are coming up to visit, so that’ll be super fun! I had to go out to get some paper plates and bowls and plasticware because my apartment only has 3 bowls, 3 plates, and 3 of each silverware and we’ll have 5 people. :) Until then!

Jasmin