Hi!
I'm tired.
IN OTHER NEWS, I mailed my hair off to Locks of Love on Wednesday.
I hope it gets there okay! The address is all the way in Florida, so hopefully it doesn't get lost on the way or something...
Also, apparently there's been an outbreak of mumps at UC Berkeley! Normally, that wouldn't concern me at all... But this weekend also happens to be the weekend where all of the students at USC go to Berkeley for the USC vs Berkeley American Football match!!! They're all going to come back with the mumps! You can read about the outbreak here, and if you just Google search "UC Berkeley mumps", you'll get a ton of results from various news sources where you can read about the recent outbreak.
Thus, as a precautionary measure, today I went to the USC Health Center and got an influenza (flu) vaccination, as well as an MMR booster shot. Immunity from a vaccination can weaken over time, so I thought it would be good to make sure my body is up to par with antibody production against measles, mumps, and rubella pathogens. The last MMR booster I got was in 1994; it's been seventeen years since then, so I figure my body could use a reminder of what those three diseases look like! And the flu vaccination, well, that's just common sense.
The MMR vaccination costs $65 and the flu vaccination costs $25, but with student health insurance, apparently I only have to pay 10% of that cost; so for the two vaccinations, it only cost me 9 U$D! Best nine dollars I've ever spent in my life.
The lady who gave me the shots, well, she was pretty old and her hands were kind of shaky, so they hurt a LOT. The flu shot was intramuscular, so she just stabbed it into my arm and wobbled around a bit while depressing the plunger. Ouch. The MMR shot, though, is subcutaneous, which means it's injected right under the skin, above the muscle. That one hurt waaay more with her shaky hands, and I cringed pretty hard for that one. Usually I'm totally okay with shots, but that one was pretty bad.
Anyway, it's done now, and that's why I have those two little round band-aids on my arm in the photo at the top of this entry. Woohoo!
Now, it's finally the weekend, which means I get to sleep and eat a lot and study, yay! Off I go to do that now, I'm feeling pretty tired after the two vaccinations I had today.
But before I do, let me briefly share this coolness with you guys! It's an interactive scale of relative sizes of things in the Universe... Just drag the bar at the bottom of the screen from left to right and vice versa, and it presents a fascinating study of the size of everything compared to other stuff... I'm pretty terrible at explaining, so you're just going to have to go check it out for yourself. I promise it's pretty amazing! ...Or maybe I only think it's amazing because I'm a science nerd. ^^
And secondly, have a look at this, it's also interactive, but it's a view of the inside of the Sistine Chapel... Wonderful stuff! Really beautiful. Have a look!
Okay that's all for today...
Stay happy, world! (:
michelle. xx
