This morning was a special day at work. We had a potluck feast to welcome Terri (the new branch chief for MCH), another lady who is downstairs (I'm sorry I forgot her name!) and me. I got a cantaloupe and small watermelon last evening at the farmer's market and cut those into bite size pieces and took that. Here is a picture of the whole group (it is big enough it took 2 pictures!). My very first day at my internship they had a potluck because they were shuffling people into different offices. I remember sitting in this conference room with these people and being introduced - so many names, so many people. Today I look around and most of them I not only know their name but have talked with them, eaten with them or had a chance to "Talk Story" with them. Everyone is laughing in this top picture because as I held up my phone to take the picture it MEOWED really loud (my notification sound). I couldn't have done that if I tried! It did get everyone laughing and smiling though!!!
This is the feast. Leonard (Family Planning) is sitting in the middle in the first picture above. He brought a bunch of items that are often served at Lebanese meals and were delicious. Of special note was the za'atar that he brought (he pre-mixed with olive oil so we could put it on the rosemary bread he brought with it). It is utterly delicious and can be used on about anything. It is a mixture of thyme or savory, oregano, marjoram (somerecipes use it and others don't), sumac (found online or in Indian grocery stores), sesame seeds (he used black but can be either), and salt. You use VERY little salt because the other components make the salt taste pop out. You mix this with olive oil and can use it on bread, meats, fish, poultry, veggies, etc. This can be very salty but in moderation it is DELICIOUS. I will definitely make this at home.
There was also the rosemary bread, tortillas, fresh mozzarella in olive oil, spinach hummus, grape tomatoes, artichoke dip that was a lot like labneh, big black and green olives, chunks of cucumber, pickled okra (okra from the community garden), pretzel sticks (great for the hummus and dip), a cubed cheese plate, char siu boh pork (the red sweet pork found in chinese dishes) and vegetarian manapua (LOVE these), inari sushi, slices of custard pie, dumplings, pancit (Filipino noodle dish with rice noodles, shredded -cabbage, carrots, pork), and my watermelon and cantaloupe. I LOVED the pancit. Lori made a delicious cake, it was white and green swirls with a light fluffy frosting (maybe cool-whip). SO YUMMY.
We ate at around 8:30 then all settled in to work for a bit. Ann had to leave early at 11 for a meeting for the rest of the day. At around noon Lisa came and got me and most of us ended up in the conference room with all the food back out, eating a feast again! I didn't take a picture of that, it is embarrassing how much I ate today.
Susan brought me a Chinatown magazine to read. Here is the cover, it looked pretty neat. It had an article about an artist trained in acrylics and oils that switched to spray paint and is now famous for it. Made me think of you Susan (Hopkins)!
As for work, I spent a while helping Susan with some organization for the Child Death Review. I helped with some Excel technical stuff. We discussed the review process and I helped with some ideas of how to break out data sets from the master report for certain steps int he process. Coding each variable and pulling only the needed data to seperate worksheets, rather than having completely different files, will help in several ways. First, it protects the PMI of the child and family from those who don't actually need to know it. Second, by having the data entered once, rather than multiple times on multiple files/spreadsheets/databases it reduces the chance of data entry error from multiple entries. Third, it builds quality assurance and quality control into the process from beginning to end by ensuring that the variables remain consistent throughout the entire process (thus definitions for terms/variables remain constant). There is a data entry quality check built in to the process already. It was very interesting! This is the Child Death Review booklet that is filled out, which we were using to verify which variables needed including.
I also spent a lot of the day working on the Hawaii State Domestic Violence Fatality Review (HSDVFR). WOW, I just realized I spent the entire day dealing with death data. I created a chart to distinguish who was killed (Male/Female, Victim/Abuser, Friend/Family, Child, etc.), whom they were killed by, and numbers. I also started building charts, tables, graphs and pie charts for some of the other data that was particularly useful. Basically getting some of the data into easy to see and understand visual formats for the report we will be doing next.
At the end of the day I felt like going out to do something so Jeff helped me find my evening's entertainment. That will be on the next post.
To be continued...
Aloha!
~Melissa
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