Flatting is Fun!

One year ago, I had my bags packed and I started my journey to New Zealand - what a year it has been!  Thankfully, my life has become way more predictable and I am in my own groove.  In fact, last week was my best week since I arrived (productivity-wise, but by far not the most fun).

 I've been working hard on an abstract for the Association of Contextual Behavioral Science annual world conference in Sydney, Australia.  I've been looking at how middle-age New Zealand women's baseline Acceptance and Action Questionnaire-II score is associated with changes in body mass index over 3 years.  The analysis has been a wee bit shaky because I'm not a whiz with the Stata software nor linear regressions.

Yet.

At the end of the day, I get to retreat to a flat that I share with five other postgraduate students.  It's been a great experience to live with these friends.  I especially enjoy our Sunday dinners.

On Sundays we eat dinner together.  Usually, someone comes up with an idea and then everyone pitches in ingredients to contribute.

We've done lentil curry, pizza, stir fry and, my personal favorite, breakfast!

Sometimes it's just a few flatties working together, sometimes it's the whole gang.  

 We had talked about doing sushi for dinner this week, but Alia had a great idea to make dumplings.  This seemed much simpler!

It's too bad that I didn't take a picture of the whole crew enjoying our hard work.  We had guests over and so it was quite a site seeing our living room area crammed with bodies eating malformed dumplings.

Since it's been a year since I've done a video update, I hope to do that soon.  Otherwise, I'm going to have to dig around for interesting things to write about.  See, I'm taking a class this semester and it's supposed to be an intense course in biostatistics and epidemiology.  I'm a little nervous, but wicked excited about it!  Since the manuscript on incentives with mailed surveys is nearly done, I'll be more thrilled about going into the office to do work.  Hopefully, it'll be a piece of cake keeping my head above water until the course exam on June 11th!