My wrist is still bothering me a bit from the mugging last week. Two Philly detectives came by my apartment last night and formally took my statement and my boyfriend’s. I think they may have caught one of the four guys, which is a step in the right direction. A nice lady found my keys in the weeds, and my Moo cards with my lab phone number were still on the keychain, so she called my lab and I was able to meet her and get my keys back. I walked along the block where she found my keys and found my hand lotion, one of my tubes of lip balm, and some trash I knew had been in my bag.

I’ve started replacing most of my things that were stolen, which is more frustrating than anything else. I’m back in lab, at work, for the first time in months. I’m in limbo though. I’m appealing to the executive committee of my department to let me stay in the PhD department, and not only get my masters (and then have to apply to another school if I want to continue my education). I’m writing an appeal letter that is due tomorrow, and hopefully they will meet sometime next week. No one has ever done this, so it’s new territory for me and the University. We’ll see what happens.

So I’m plugging away at labwork, more than happy to be back at work and not at home all day. Kinda in limbo at the moment though until we find out if I’m going to remain a PhD student or be downgraded to a masters student.

Wednesday I retook my oral PhD qualifying exam. I thought I had done much better than my first attempt, and was pretty confident. However, I could unfortunately hear my committee deliberating through the door after I was asked to leave the room; it didn’t sound good. When they finally called me back in, they told me while I did do better than my last exam, I was borderline pass/fail and they need to deliberate further.

Yesterday, my program director emailed me and told me she wanted to talk to me about the outcome of my exam. So I went into the city, to her office, to meet with her. I already had a pretty good feeling that I had failed. The regulations of the program say that means I’m kicked out of the program, so I was understandably stressed and a bit depressed. I had failed my exam, but I had 4 options: voluntary withdrawal from the program/school, take a leave of absence and take classes elsewhere, do a master thesis and take a terminal masters degree, or appeal to the executive committee of my department to stay a PhD student. I’m only willing to even consider the last two options. I’ve already taken 3 months off to study for this retake, and I’ve put too much into the past two years to just leave. So I’ve pretty much decided I want to appeal. I have the rest of the graduate students in my department behind me; my boyfriend, parents, and my sister are all supporting me on this decision as well. I have a meeting with my program director again on Monday afternoon - she wanted me to take a few days to make my decision.

After my meeting with my program director, my department had a social thing that my boyfriend came with me to, and we had a great time. We usually take the train home from Center City, but we got done with the social in between trains, and the bus takes us by our apartment just as well, so we took the bus home instead. We were walking home from the busstop when my boyfriend noticed some kinda creepy teenage guys in hooded sweatshirts following us. So we crossed the street and picked up the pace home. When we got to the parking lot of our building, the guys crossed the street as well, and approached us. The one guy tried to take my totebag, to which I resisted and kept yelling NO. The other guy claimed to have a gun and threatened to shoot my boyfriend. My boyfriend just kept telling them to calm down and leave me alone. The guy trying to take my bag threw me to the ground, which made it possible for him to yank my bag off my shoulder, and they ran. My boyfriend ran after them for a few blocks to see if he could catch up to them or see where they were going. I called 911; by the time he got back to me, my boyfriend was calling 911 as well. We rode around with the cops for a good hour, but didn’t find any leads. We made a report and I’m waiting for a detective to call so I can make a statement.

We’re getting the locks to our apartment changed, since my keys and ID were in my bag. I’ve also already called my bank and credit card company to cancel all my cards and get new ones. I’ve ordered new health insurance cards, and will be going to get a new state photo ID (I don’t have a driver’s license) and a new school ID today or Monday. Physically I’m alright, I’ve just got a sprained wrist from being thrown on the pavement. I’m more mad and frustrated at having to replace what was in my bag - my wallet was from Etsy, it was one-of-a-kind, my headphones and microphone adapter for my iPhone were in there (luckily my iPhone was in my pocket so I still have that), my school notebooks, including a notebook with all my notes from PodCamp Philly were in there. All because a stupid bunch of teenagers wanted some cash or something. I only had maybe $50 in there. And I was only a couple hundred feet from my front door.

My poor mom is worried sick about me, which is even more awful since today is her birthday I’m fine, but she’s worried about her little girl. For now, we’re waiting for maintenance to get here to change the locks, and then I’ll see what sort of time I have to get new IDs in the city. Not what I planned to do today, but life happens.

Two of the chronic conditions I have are viral arthritis and fibromyalgia, both of which are arthritic conditions. The Arthritis Foundation has walks every year to raise money for awareness and research for cures for the over 100 arthritis diseases that affect 1 in 5 Americans. Please help me out and donate towards my walking in the 2009 Philadelphia Arthritis walk on May 17, 2009. You can find my donation page here.

I live with the pain and the meds from these conditions everyday. My mom also has fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis. My grandparents all have osteoarthritis. Please help me raise money so maybe we can someday find better treatments and hopefully even cures for these painful disease.

Thanks!

Photo taken by Mark Blevis

September 6 and 7 I attended PodCamp Philadelphia and met some fantastic podcasters and bloggers from Philadelphia and around the world. One of the wonderful sessions was given by Canadian Mark Blevis, where he talked about how to enhance your podcast by acting like the band the Police. Mark also talked about his podcast about children’s books called Just One More Book. Being the bibliophile that I am, I recommended he attend the Rosenbach Museum while he was in Philadelphia, as I knew there was a Maurice Sendak exhibit there at the moment. The Rosenbach is a little known Philadelphia treasure, two rowhouses in Center City once owned by two brothers who had a love of books and is converted to a wonderful library and museum. I’d been there once before and fell in love with the place. On Sunday of PodCamp, Mark, myself, and two other great Philly PodCampers rushed over to the Rosenbach during the lunch break, and saw the Sendak exhibit and recorded a podcast in the car. The result is posted on the latest Just One More Book, please listen and enjoy: The Art and Books of Maurice Sendak