Category: Volunteerism

Getting to back to basics

One sentence that can be used to describe my life right now: following my heart these days. Seriously. I may not be making the most money right now, but I will not trade a high flying job for the wonderful man I married, the wonderful family I married into and the incredible support & love I’m getting from my family & relatives. In other words, I have my own personal slice of heaven right here in Georgia. I’ve made unbelievable personal strides in my life and personal struggles & I’m frankly amazed at myself because I almost didn’t think I had it in me.

As a matter of fact, 2009 is shaping up to be a life-changing year for Matt & I. Let’s count our blessings, shall me:

  1. I’ve quit biting my nails and I’ve been “sober” since the 8th of June, 2009. My nails are growing out beautifully and Matt’s amazed at how ‘quickly’ they seem to have recovered. It’s a huge confidence booster for me because I’m always hiding my fingers when in public and it’s a new & fascinating feeling to be able to simply stretch my hand and not worry if I’m displaying my “good” side or not. 🙂
  2. Matt is kicking butt in his GIS classes. Since he started taking classes in the summer of 2008, he has had solid As in all the courses he has taken! I can’t say how proud I am of him especially considering the grueling nature of his schedule (working at Wally world and on his free days, he’s at school or doing homework). He’s quite the trooper and I draw inspiration from him daily.
  3. I’ve become mentally stronger about myself and I have to say that leaving grad. school was the best decision I ever made, despite the heartwrenching sadness I felt at the time i.e. I felt like a quitter. However, like I tell Matt, sometimes you have to do things that hurt to protect yourself and nurture yourself. I’m not 100% out of the woods, but it’s the little things that indicate to me that I’ve come a long way. I’m learning to not be afraid to let things go, especially things that do not contribute positively to your life.
  4. My family and I are much closer now that they have internet access at home and just the past Saturday, I spent over 1.5 hrs chatting via Yahoo messenger (webcam and talking via the PC-to-PC connection) with them!
  5. I’m actively pursuing other avenues of interest to me i.e. photography, computer science, social service/activism, etc. For instance, I purchased a Nikon D90 early this year and as God would have it, I attended the Flagpole Music Awards and introduced myself to a man who would turn out to be a key figure in my quest to learn more about photography. As it turned out, I kept in touch with this man and he has introduced me to several important people in the community and has taken me under his wing (informally) in teaching me the ropes of photography! On the social service front, I’m a new volunteer for an organization that advocates for children and it is a very humbling task that renews my faith in social service workers and those who serve communities.
  6. My 2 new websites went up this year and are  going strong. They are: (i) Jane Ullah Photography (ii) Jane Talks Tech! so please support me and check out my sites! 🙂

I could go on, but you get the point. I am just incredibly thankful to God for bringing me this far on my journey and the people He has brought into my life. As LG slogan says, Life’s Good(tm). 😀

TGIF, people!!

Well, after a long week, the week’s end is here. I’m going to be doing a volunteer gig tomorrow and I’ve got to get up even earlier than I would for work to attend this function. I’ll try to make this a staple of my weekends. Not the morning thing, but some sort of volunteering activity. I figure it will increase my physical activity as well as allow me to meet more people. Matt gets all the ‘fun’ at his workplace. lol. Anyhow, next week will be packed and I may not even have space to breathe. I bought a calling card that I haven’t even used yet and I apologize. The calls will be forthcoming.

 Several hours after I wrote the first paragraph, I’m at work and it’s a painfully slow day. I wish I had the gall to ask if I could leave early, but I don’t want to make a bad impression. I’ve got a simple SDS PAGE experiment running, but that’s about it. I’ve got a schedule or run-down of how next week will go and I’m looking forward to the actual procedure of growing and classically purifying a protein. I’m working on an ortholog of said protein and will eventually be doing a large scale growth and purification of said ortholog. Further down the road, we (I) shall be making mutants of original protein and doing another large scale growth & purification. The eventual goal is perform surface plasmon resonance (SPR) with these proteins. Now, SPR is a nifty little trick that I’m reading up on. You can detect binding of one protein to the other in real time and determine how strong their interactions are. Or even use it to find novel interactions. I’ll talk more about this in a later post. This is just to tell you all that I’m alive and breathing. And loving my job.

Some volunteerism in my life

I’ve found a worthy cause to volunteer my time to. The location is anywhere with the only caveat being high speed internet. I’ve got that and now, I just hope that I pass their rather rigorous screening process. The website belongs to Sage Leadership and the position is that of a Global Economy Associate and has several themes an associate can work under. They believe in a lot of things and Open Source, which is music to my ears, is one of those things. The ‘job’ requirements include knowledge of audio editing software (such as Audacity which I’ve tinkered with before, but now, I have Nero‘s WaveEditor) as well as becoming skilled in using a voice recorder. Score for me on both counts! 🙂 Now, I just need to find a way to channel all the goodness I have to give into an astounding cover letter. They also require knowledge of things such as blogging software and they use Vox as their example. Well, I’ve been a WordPress user for the longest while and just switched to Drupal as my content management system so I guess I’ll have to sign up with Vox and see how it stacks up. Interesting thing about Vox is its owners: the company (Six Apart) that owns LiveJournal, Moveable Type and Typepad, but Vox is being billed as “social networking” site (1). They ask that individuals be familiar with things like wikis and I’m up for the adventure. Now, let me get back to writing that cover letter.

  1. Vox Lifts Off and You’ll Love It Techcrunch.com 10/26/2006