The Long Lost Blogger

Here I am making my 2010 blog debut. Rachel has carried us for sure on the blog this year, and has done a fantastic job. I enjoy reading them even though it is about our life. This next week is spring break for me, and everything at school has leveled off for a while. We only have a few practicals remaining and no tests until finals start the last week of April. Rachel and I are both excited about the time off! This weekend we are traveling to Fayetteville to spend the day with John and Sarah. Ben gets back from Milan Saturday, so we are thinking a dinner at Venetian Inn may be in order. We are also headed home for Easter the weekend after next. We wish that our spring breaks aligned better, but still glad for the rest.

During the first week of March, I got the chance to go to Washington DC with some guys from school. This past summer we participated in a program at UMKC that allowed us to research a specific area in the dental field. My project dealt with the bond strengths of different "dentin adhesives." In other words, we tested the strengths of different composite fillings. This trip was the culmination of the project. Although we were only in DC for 1 day, we had a great time. We ate a steak at the District Chophouse, went to see the capitol and toured the new visitor's center. I was interested in seeing the visitor's center because it was under construction when I was in DC last. At the conference we attended, we presented the poster that summarized our project, while people perused all the hundreds of posters that were in the room with us. Some people were actually interested in my project and wanted to talk about it. I really enjoyed the whole experience. Here are some pictures from the trip.

We got to DC around 7 pm Wednesday night and found the District Chophouse for a big steak that UMKC paid for!

Here I am in the exhibition hall standing by my poster. There were hundreds of different posters lined up in this room, and people just walked around reading the ones they were interested in.

A picture in front of the capitol.

One of the guys is from Hawaii, and really wanted us to stand in front of this statue and do this Hawaiian hand motion. This guy is one of Hawaii's two statues in the capitol.

Check out the awesome IADR meeting bags we were toting.