Kiersten Anderson, R.D.

Kiersten just walked in from taking her "Registration Examination for Registered Dietitians". For the past two months (since her year-long internship ended), she has been studying at least nine hours a day in preparation. And she passed! My wife is now the world's newest dietitian!

Needless to say, I am one proud husband. Super, super congratulations Kiersten!

In case you're not impressed, take a look at her website to see some of what she's done. I'm impressed!

(fyi: all of the interns passed!)

Camping in Cuyamaca

It's the last day of summer break, and it's about time I did a post. To celebrate the past year of EVERYTHING, Kiersten and I took a much needed vacation away from internet connections and cell phone reception. We hopped in our car and drove the whole 60 minutes to Cuyamaca Rancho State Park for three days of camping and hiking. Here are some pictures of our fun times. (We discovered the collage feature in Picasa and probably had a bit too much fun...Sorry.)

At the campsite. It had been WAY too long since we've had tin foil dinners.

On top of Mount Cuyamaca, the second highest peak in southern California. On clear days, you can see the coastline from the peak, but knowing San Diego mornings, we were expecting to be seeing nothing but clouds. We were pleasantly surprised to find that we were a few hundred feet above all of those clouds.

Just because it's hard not to get lots of jumping pictures when you're so high up.

And, just because we took far too many pictures to pick which ones we like best.

Cuyamaca was beautiful. This was our first time doing real camping since we've been married. (We don't count staying in a cabin camping, even if it was our honeymoon.) Needless to say, we won't be letting another two years go by without another trip.

Our little adventure

As you may or may not have heard, San Diego experienced a major power outage yesterday/today. I was at home studying when suddenly my internet connection dropped and my computer told me the battery was almost dead (my battery lasts about a minute without a plug).  I was about to call our management to tell them to come fix it when Eric called and informed me that it was not just me.  In fact, at the peak, about 5 million people were without power.  For us it lasted about 12 hours.

Eric and I quickly found out how unprepared we were for this.  Both of our phones were about dead with no way of charging them.  And with that, reception for phones that were working was spotty at best.  The next few hours were quite stressful with me worrying about Eric getting home.  He was at work with horrible traffic between him and home.  He rides a carpool to the university campus and then a shuttle home.  Which, for some reason, decided that no electricity was enough of a reason to cancel all the buses.  So he was stranded a half hour drive away at campus.  Our phones somehow held out long enough, and for about a minute reception came back, so he could tell me he was stuck and I could tell him I was coming.  About 9pm, we were home.

How small a thing, yet so depended on, is the ability to connect and communicate with each other.  Obviously this was just a power outage, not a huge disaster.  But I was so worried about the fact that I couldn't talk to Eric, couldn't know where he was.  Had he been in an accident?  Why wasn't he home by now?  Where is he now?  I was a mess.  I couldn't concentrate on trying to study, so I cleaned the apartment to distract myself until it was too dark to see.  I can only imagine how it would be in a real disaster like an earthquake.  If I wasn't able to talk to Eric, to know he was okay, that would be horrible.  We were told in an emergency preparedness class recently that cell phones would still be able to work in a disaster situation and that you would at least be able to send texts or call out of state.  We found that wasn't the case.  Our texts weren't sending, no calls going out. The reception just died.

So Eric and I learned a few things:
1. Charge our phones every day
2. Get a radio (apparantly some places were put on a boil water advisory and we would have had no idea)
3. Sign our phones up for the reverse 911 message system that the city has (of course, this would only be useful if our phones weren't dead)
4. Get more/better flashlights
5. Get more candles (we had enough and made do but they wouldn't have lasted us too long)
6. When we have more space, store more ice/cold packs in the freezer (to keep refrigerated food good. We had just a couple ice packs that we put in a large cooler with our milk etc, which was fine for overnight but would not have lasted much longer)

One of our goals for the last year since we moved here is to finally get moving on our own family emergency preparedness.  Things like lack of time and resources have continued to put that on hold.  But I think this was a nice little shake to tell us we need to get moving.  It never hurts to be prepared, it can only help.

Besides the wake-up call, at least one other good thing came of all this - our apartment is really clean.

Practically locals

Eric and I hit our one year mark in San Diego this past weekend. Time has really flown by!  We have had some amazing experiences during this year, as well as some more difficult ones for our little family. But overall, it has been a wonderful year and we absolutely love San Diego.

We celebrated by going and getting some fish tacos, which San Diego is famous for. Seeing that we have been in San Diego for a whole year, we figured it was high time we finally had some. Yes it took us a year.  We went to Blue Water Seafood, a place close by to us and known for their fish tacos. We were greeted by this:

which turned out to be a 40 minute line. Apparantly they are also known for their long lines.  Thankfully, the food was well worth it!

Now we have had our fish tacos (which we will definitely have more of!). One more thing down, so many more things to still do and try here.  But we aren't going anywhere soon, which is a good thing!  San Diego has really come to feel like home for us. Since Eric just got his California residency last week,we are both officially Californians.  And now we are also San Diegans.

A time to relax

It was a Thursday and I was headed to the beach at 9am!  Felt a little strange, but oh so good!  

My family stayed for the day after my graduation and we hit the sights early in the morning. I took them to some of our favorite places (Eric had to work). We went to Cabrillo National Monument...

To Coronado Beach (where the sand sparkles like gold!)...

My poor mom was just burning up!

And then it was off to beautiful Balboa Park and the gardens there...

So much fun!  It was great pretending like I had no responsibilities in the world!  Today was a little like that too.  I went for a 12 mile run in the middle of a Friday morning.  Oh how nice that was! But I also spent time today organizing and now have my study schedule all laid out for the next four weeks.  Monday morning I will buckle down to work. But I think I deserved a little vacation, right?!

Almost an RD

50 weeks, 1800+ hours, an ever-changing schedule, and five worn-out interns..  But as of Wednesday, we are now all officially done!

The UCSD Medical Center Dietetic Intern Class of 2010-2011!

Edna, Natasha, Mei, Samantha, me

We had our small graduation ceremony Wednesday evening.  My parents,my sister Celestia and my brother Edward were able to make the trip down.  It was great to have some family there! I think my mom was even more excited than I was when I got into this internship (she is an RD herself) and has been a great support and listening ear throughout this entire time. She never did an internship herself (there were different routes to becoming an RD back then) and so has been living this internship through me.  

A dietetic event would not be complete without great food and our Chef Adam really did an amazing job. There was a 'risotto action station', hummus and flat bread, so many different cheeses (I couldn't tell you the names of any of them, except that one was some sort of special goat cheese) and fresh bread, fruit with white chocolate fondue... Sound good?  And that was just some of it! Yum!

Adam making my risotto

The family

My good friend and visiting teacher, Cori

 Alia was one of my most favorite preceptors.  She is so incredibly smart and the sweetest person. And she makes some killer baba ganoush!

It feels so good to be done.  This is something I have been working towards since starting college oh so many years ago.  I really didn't know if I would make it this far!  I didn't blog too much about my internship, but it was one challenging, intense year. Now it is time to buckle down and study for that RD exam, because as much work as we have put in so far, we aren't dietitians yet!

How many calories?!

Has everyone noticed lately how all the major restaurant and fast food chains have started are labeling their menus with calorie information?  The rule is part of the health care reform legislation that President Obama signed in 2010, but the regulations and who it applies to actually just came out April of this year (and there are more details to the regulations that haven't been decided yet).  A lot of restaurants have already stepped up and are providing the information, and the rest should have them out by 2012.  So with this already going for a few months, the big question is, will it work?

The whole purpose of course, is to help people made educated decisions about what they are putting in their mouths. I first saw it in action when Eric and I went with our parents to eat at Islands.  I was completely blown away to see that the burger I was going to order was around 1500 calories.  That is practically a whole days worth right there! Eric and I shared.

At first I thought, "Hmm...I don't know if I like this!"  Eric and I very very rarely eat out - maybe once every couple of months. Maybe. Did I really want to know how many calories were in those few and far between treats?  Would it ruin the experience?  But I have definitely decided its a good thing.  It has affected what I order when we do go out, and I look for the information now. And I know Eric and I are not the norm - the general population eats out a lot more than Eric and I do. So for them how much more important is it to be able to know what exactly it is they are eating! No one out there should be eating 1500 calories at any meal.

The other day I came across this article talking about NYC and the results they are finding there. NYC passed their own law in 2008, requiring restaurant chains to post calorie information. It appears it hasn't been as successful as was hoped, with only about 1 in 6 people changing what they order when they see the calories. This goes right along with what I have heard from most people I have talked to about this.  People just don't seem to be paying attention or they don't really care.  What is good though, it that some restaurants are taking this opportunity to make modifications in their menus, to make the choices themselves healthier (anyone see the changes to the Happy Meals this week?).

This does underline the fact that policy changes and new laws are extremely important, but they must go hand in hand with education.  Unless people understand why that amount of calories is too much and why it is so important to eat healthy, what the health consequences can be, who is to expect they will change?

Do you find that having the calories posted changes what you order? Do you like these new regulations?