Marc is home after a week in Dhaka. On his way home, he transited in Dubai and met up with my brother & sister-in-law. It's great to have family all over the world!

It is indeed nice to have him home... we have been enjoying the temporary but abnormally cool weather (for here) by going on walks together. It'll be my turn to do some work-related travel in a few weeks when I head to China. I will be in Beijing, Luoyang (Henan) and Yichang (Hubei) for about 5 days a piece to work with some of the China CDC folks and present (in Mandarin... yikes!) some of the work me & other colleagues here have done using the China data they help collect.

Talking about diet & nutrition data, I recently signed up to be a research subject on a study on eating disorders. No, I do not have an eating disorder (although if you've ever seen me eat, you might suspect I do), which is precisely why they needed folks like me to be the control /comparison group. This involved me having to wear an accelerometer and keep a detailed log of what I ate for 4 days (3 weekdays, 1 weekend day), which was an interesting exercise. I do keep a log of my exercise, but have never really tracked what I ate over the course of a day. This snapshot told me that I average ~2100 kcals/day.... interesting... I guess that's what I need since my weight hasn't changed the past few years. It also made me far more aware of those empty calories out there (like Pop Tarts, which I ate one day for lunch because I left the sandwich I had made at home).

Otherwise, looks like my appointment in the Dept of Nutrition got approved (despite some initial uncertainty). I'll get to lead a 1-credit course on US Nutrition policy this year, which will involve bringing a group of graduate students to Washington DC to meet with legislative staff, executive branch personnel, directors of govt, agencies, public interest & industry groups on policy information for food, nutrition & health issues (e.g., WIC, school lunch programs, Farm Bill, etc.). I'll also pop in to teach a few courses in a methods /data crunching course in Fall. I'm looking forward to learning from these experiences!

~ Shuwen