who commands the sun, and it does not rise;

who seals up the stars;

who alone stretched out the heavens

and trampled the waves of the sea

Job 9:7-8

This week I poked fun of how much money Duke has, ate lots of food, visited the gardens during pollen Harmattan, saw donuts getting made, and did some good music release during our church’s praise night. It’s the second week back now, and I’m starting to understand “transition” a bit more.

On the prowl

My job search continues. I’ve found a couple of positions I’m interested in, and I submitted my first application this week! (Hooray.) Haven’t heard back yet, but we’ll see how it goes. My Microsoft Office license expired because I’m no longer working at Duke, so then I had to re-download all the Mac versions of the Office Suite and re-make my resume and cover letters in them because when I imported the documents all the formatting was messed up and can’t have ugly documents, REEEEEEE~~~~ Though my friend Sisi who goes to school there says I can get a copy of Office through her. “Gotta milk them clean” as they say.

Speaking of

My friend Enze works in the admissions department and he was giving some sort of information session to some prospective applicants so JasminE and I went to go heckle him. He also adheres to the “they have too much money” mantra and gave us these really fancy brochures to take.

“Here, take these.”
“Why..?”
“Because they look expensive.”

The brochure is really flashy but I think otherwise extremely poorly designed. It’s hard to read and doesn’t actually make you read any of the information in it. I guess its purpose is just to literally be something that looks expensive? And not actually disseminate any information…? Lots of weird page flips and everything that don’t really serve a purpose.

I’m no print editor but I’m pretty sure this could have been much better executed.

Enze says this is the most commonly re-stocked thing. Probably because it looks expensive so people want to take them.

Earlier that day

Jasmine and I went to a nearby Krispy Kreme after my doctor’s appointment to kill time and work on stuff before lunch and Enze’s information session. The HOT sign was on so they were actively making donuts! And you can see the whole process from start to finish which is pretty cool.

We ate some. It was delicious. We had a debate about how many we should get. They sell them in packs of 3 and 12, but also there’s an option for 6 that isn’t on the menu. My guess is that the half-dozen is only like a dollar or two less than the whole dozen, so people just are like “ah screw it, a dozen is better value” so then the half-dozen never got purchased. It was either 3 for us two to share, or a half-dozen or dozen to share with some church fellowship (PSALT) peeps at lunch. We ended up going for the half dozen. I ONLY ATE ONE. Because Jasmine said I had to finish my yogurt before I could eat a donut. :(

Then at lunch time we met up with Enze, Felicia, and Sisi from PSALT since they all go to Duke or are around Duke for work. We ate at one of my favorite classic places, Pho and Poke House. I used to eat there almost every other week after work before pottery class with work-Eileen, so it was a good nostalgic meal.

“The chairs at UNC were more comfortable.”

Was pretty lolz. Enze is a good speaker and is quite eloquent with his talk. Though you would think that for a school as rich as Duke, they would be able to afford cushier chairs for their information session (ouch). Even the girl who was actually visiting for the visit agreed. When her family sat down in front of Jasmine and me, the dad whispered, “the chairs at UNC were more comfortable.” YEAH THAT’S RIGHT. Anyway, flashy video similar to flashy brochure above was shown and some stuff about community and program opportunities and whatever but I’m not planning on attending Duke for a repeat of undergrad it was mostly entertaining to watch someone working. I think that’s actually one of my favorite pastimes. Is people watching friends when they either don’t know you’re there (like watching Esther work in the café when you’re up in midships) or they know you’re there but they can’t do anything about it because they’re doing some sort of public speaking or presentation.

Harmattan of Pollen

Spring is upon us in full force and the Harmattan of pollen has descended on North Carolina. Outside for more than a few minutes? COATED IN YELLOW DUST.

Disregarding all this, we decided to visit the Duke Gardens afterwards to see all the tulips in bloom! And other flowers but the main flower right now in the gardens are tulips. They always have such an amazing variety of colors and strains each time. Usually they arrange the gardens by color, but this time they were mixed in a bit more, which I actually found to be more visually appealing than having a whole section of reds and a whole section of yellows.

My university (UNC) had a bunch of azalea bushes around its signature campus symbol, the old well. I always love how richly blooming azalea bushes get. My mom also likes to plant them and we have a few outside our house. I need to remember to show her these. Look at how many flowers there are!

The cherry blossoms were in bloom too, quite beautiful. There’s a cherry blossom festival in Washington, DC each spring, and I really want to go see it sometime! The peak bloom is right about now, I think. But I always think about going a bit too late.

This last flower is the North Carolina state flower, the Eastern Dogwood. Its flower always has four petals, whereas the Pacific Dogwood has six. Usually they’re white, but I guess sometimes they can be pink! I hadn’t seen a pink one before and I thought it was really neat how vibrant they can be.

I always thought their petals were a cool shape, the way they pinch on the outsides like that. The Dogwood is also one of three families of trees that have opposite tree branching in North Carolina, the other two being maple and ash trees.

Anyway, there’s this nice koi pond that’s in the gardens, but because of pollen harmattan their water looks like absolute garbo and it looks even grosser than the port water in Guinea sometimes. Poor fishies. I wonder if they get allergies.

The air is still cleaner here, even with all the pollen. Though not if you have seasonal allergies, everyone who does goes through like a box of tissues a day when pollenstorm is here.

Super overpriced hipster food trends

So Enze is from Hawaii and introduced us to the next big overpriced hipster food trend since avocado toast: açaí bowls. One tiny bowl from the hipster place that sells them in Durham is $11 (!!).

And this is what you get:

It’s like a parfait but instead of yogurt it’s like açaí berry sorbet. Then topped with honey, granola, banana, some healthy seed thing, blueberries, and (?)coconut shavings. It was super delicious, but not $11 worth of delicious. Definitely would eat all of it when someone buys (like Enze buying this time) but would not buy it on my own. Eh. A good experience though, nonetheless.

[fingers crossed]

I ate with my ex-labmates for dinner at Juju, a fusion tapas place. It’s quite expensive, but tasty as. I got to meet work-Eileen’s new bf Jason who is an actuary, that’s now two people who I know who are actuaries! The other one is Roy, who is from our church.

An actuary is someone who does lots of maths and statistics that deals with a lot of risk management. Quite big in the insurance industry. They have to take exams and things to work as one (like an accountant has to take the CPA thing). I don’t actually know a whole lot more and I’m not sure if anyone reading would really care to know more, but if you want to know more about actuaries and what they do, here is a Wikipedia link for your convenience.

In any case. It was really nice to see my work mommas (Lisa, who’s next to me, and Peg, in the back right)—they’re the senior techs on my weekend group so we spent a lot of time together and they were very glad to see me and hear about my experiences. I was really happy to see some people from work and share some of the things that I saw in the ship lab and also the culture of being in a more… team-friendly healthcare setting. Our full lab staff I want to say is something like 60 people? So this is not everyone for sure, but I’m glad to see who I did get to see. :)

When I told my mom I was meeting up with the lab people, she told me to “not give them false hopes that I’m going to be immediately returning.” Ahahahaha. Though my manager did say I was welcome to come back if I want. 🤞 I told her I appreciated the offer and it was definitely an option but I think God is calling me to explore some other areas for work.

Dumpling night

Jasmine accidentally arranged dumping night at her house when I was at lab dinner but I went by when we finished anyway to see how things turned out. Between Jasmine, Sisi, and Enze, they made like three huge trays of dumplings and then ate a ton. Enze eats way too fast and way too much. He also isn’t the best at folding dumplings. Most of his turned out unpleated which made picking them up with chopsticks really hard.

Jasmine has two cats, Lulu and Meowmi. You met Lulu when I got picked up from the airport, and Meowmi is a beautiful but old and kinda grouchy Siamese cat. He likes sitting on jeans so he chose me to act as his warm throne for the duration of (second) dinner.

At the end of the night they didn’t end up eating everything, and then Enze misjudged how many would fit in this one container so we were left with a singular dumpling left out in the cold. Poor thing.

Mom’s cooking

I happened to take this photo when someone asked me what was for dinner but it was three of my favorite dishes my mom makes! Pork shoulder, Chinese broccoli, and tomato fried egg.

Sorry for potato photo. It wasn’t really taken with the blog in mind, but it made the blog anyway.

In gaming world

I’ve been playing a lot of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. The AI in the game can be kinda dumb sometimes. ALSO SORRY for the potato here (especially committing the “phone photo of screen” sin)—but Ultimate doesn’t allow you to take video captures from the native capture function so what else could I do?

Also, it was apparently Bagon day in Pokémon GO today so I caught all these bad boys. I played only for maybe ten minutes and caught this rather rare and strong Pokémon (many of them). Apparently Justin caught over 100. Lawd.

Prayse night

Friday night our church’s English congregation had a “prayse” night (pray + praise). Just a night of prayer and worship and the like. I got to get back on the cajon which was really awesome to do—something I missed a lot while I was on the ship. I had expressed interest in helping with the praise worship there, but I was kind of brushed aside when I said my main thing wasn’t singing. I wasn’t asked to join until the Thursday before I left the ship (by someone else), sad face.

I’m glad I got to finally get back on the cajon for some real good box smacking. I was feeling kinda meh about going that night, but I was compelled to tough it out and go anyway. For a long time it felt like I lost my mojo and couldn’t really let loose but after hearing “Is He Worthy” during practice it really helped to unstopper some clog about something I was trying to process for a while. I grabbed a pen and paper and just scribbled a ton of thoughts down about the idea of worth and the meaning and weight of worth of people. I was supposed to be giving a presentation to my high school about my time on the ship (the Medical BioScience Academy there is what got me first exposed to medical lab sciences), but I was having trouble really figuring out what was the real underlying message I wanted to use to tie it all together to explain a big piece of what I learned during my time there. More to come on that, for sure.

In any case, after processing the worth stuff and getting that bit unclogged, I felt like I just had so much more freedom. I cajoned so hard I bruised my hand. Ouch. But it was a really awesome time!

This just in

Green Skittles are no longer lime flavored, they’re apple flavored and they are ruined forever

I also got that steak I’ve been wanting on the ship. My parents took me to the nicest steak place in the Triangle area to give me my official “welcome back” dinner since I was a bit sick for the first week being back. CHECK OUT THIS STEAK things like this are the reason my hemoglobin is through the roooooof.

Australasians

TFW Trancy asks if it’s possible to three-way call and you call the group chat just to check and then you end up chatting a little bit anyway. Trancy took a screenshot during our Korean hand-heart kiss-blowing while winking.

Oh it was already like 8am. I thought it was like 7am, now I feel less bad (she was in bed when we called whoops).

Ehh this update is kinda all over the place. I feel like my blogging abilities are on the decline.

—Jasmin