It's been awhile again since my last post, but a lot has been going on!

First of all, we have been getting ready for school. Jihad, my stepson, is now living with us, and he starts 4th grade on Monday. We are all excited at the start of the new year and hope to get a lot from it.

On August 1st, I officially became a student again! I am now a National Library of Medicine-funded Informatics Training Fellow within the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University. My supervisor was kind & thoughtful enough to guide me through the application process so that I could do this. Ultimately, it will work out for the best for both the library and myself and while it will be a challenge, I am definitely looking forward to it. In my fellowship, I will be getting a Masters of Public Health degree with a focus in informatics. I have been an NLM fellow before, that is what brought me to Vanderbilt in the first place, so I am VERY grateful to have another opportunity for training at this point in my career.

Then, yesterday, I had the joy of experiencing my first ever tooth extraction. Turns out I had a partially erupted wisdom tooth that was causing me toothaches this week, so it had to come out. My extraction was yesterday afternoon, but the pain was so bad Wed night that I spent from 2am-6am in the Vanderbilt ER where they gave me some Loretab, and then some bupivacaine to alleviate the pain. It was great! And, the tooth extraction itself was hardly a problem at all. The dentist was very funny - he kept me laughing the whole time and I didn't even realize when he took the tooth out. Pain last night was kind of bad and even though he prescribed more Loretab, it didn't work very well. But, this morning I started taking ibuprofen and it has been perfectly fine all day. I even ate a real meal at lunch today.

So, I am now getting back into some normal routine. I'm parked in front of the television right now watchign the opening ceremonies of the Olympics - I'm so excited!