Tuesday, August 30, 2011

august in a nutshell

I think one of the greatest things I've ever discovered is Google Calendar. It is seriously God's gift to the organization/planning freakazoid like myself. It's extremely useful especially when I'm trying to describe the entire month of August in a single post.... Here it goes!

The first week of August pretty much flew by with me working 40 hours since I had taken those 3 weeks off to study for the NAPLEX and CPJE. I also wanted to work more since I was going on the cruise to Mexico the following week which meant I was taking another week off.

8 oz lazy ox burger with cantal cheese & green peppercorn mustard - lazy ox canteen
That Saturday, August 6th, Tony took the train up to Union Station since I didn't want him to leave his car at my house for the entire week especially since it'd be such a hassle with street cleaning and such. I happened to buy a Bloomspot coupon for the Lazy Ox Canteen so since we were in the area, we decided to try it out. Burgers and beers were pretty good and we even got a free taster! The place is right near Little Tokyo and there's a bunch of apartments there that look really nice so we were going to check them out until we realized that some of them were senior living places lol.

ricotta pancakes with meyer marmalade - lazy ox canteen
For dinner, I had a get-together with my elementary school/middle school friends. There's 6 of us total and well, we've been friends since forever. It was definitely a nice reunion since it's so difficult for us to all get-together these days. Some of us went to different high schools and some of us went to different colleges but we've remained close friends. We went to Ichima Sushi in Pasadena. Pretty good prices, good selection and sushi was pretty good. Pretty great service too! We pretended that it was Amy's birthday so we got a free cake :)

ichima sushi - pasadena; l to r: helen, me, amy, christina, annie, anna
**oooo... please bear with me as I adjust to the newest changes to google calendar. The lightened past events is making my eyes all weird**

August 7th thru August 14th was our adventure to Cabo San Lucas and Puerto Vallarta. That vacation deserves its own post so I'll do another post for that later.

adele - the greek theatre, los angeles


Monday, August 15th was long awaited bestie time with Judy at the Adele concert at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. Such a great concert! Apparently there were a bunch of celebrities at the show but me and Judy were too enthralled by the presence of Gordon Ramsey to notice (we were pretty much watching him the whole time before the concert started!).

enjoying the sunset at the greek theatre

loving the stage set-up. p.s. me and judy can totally be adele's back up singers. we've got those moves down!
fantasia at the hollywood bowl


Ended up finishing up some training I had to do for the rest of the week. On Thursday, August 18th, I went in to do my QA training and the pharmacist (who happened to go to my high school! such a small world!) was telling me to check to see if I was officially licensed yet. I had checked the Board of Pharmacy website the night before and my license still wasn't posted yet so I wasn't expecting it to be posted. Plus, they hadn't cashed my check for the license fee either so I was thinking it wasn't going to be posted. But there it was! Posted in all its glory! Didn't really celebrate much that day besides vegging out when I got home lol.

BUT... took the next day off and went to see Disney's Fantasia (not the American Idol person! lol) at the Hollywood Bowl. The fireworks at the end were amazing! Wine, food, and great company. Could not have asked for more! If you look at the picture below, you can spot the fire trucks on the left hand side. Apparently some trees caught on fire from the fireworks.






Ended up working on the Saturday and Sunday after that doing some more practice QA sessions.

Went to my grandmother's (Dad's side) birthday dinner on Sunday and then drove down to San Diego to spend some time with Tony. I got there pretty late on Sunday and he had work early the following morning but when I woke up, I went downstairs and found flowers and breakfast waiting for me. I didn't have my phone with me at the time so I took this picture after I got home on Tuesday. Seriously, I have no idea why and it seems almost illogical but flowers are the way to a girl's heart lol. Maybe it's because it shows forethought and that the guy actually took the time to go get them but seriously as much as they're practically dying when you buy them, they are worth the monies! You can even save some money and pick them from your garden for all I care lol.

On Monday night, we decided to go to this Brazilian BBQ place in Downtown SD called Rei do Gado since he had a gift certificate and it was super delish!! Their selection was huge! They had so many side dishes for the buffet and the meats were sooooo good!! At the end I only asked for all the meats that had garlic 'cause I was sooo full but I couldn't resist garlic marinated meats! lol.

Drove back to LA on Tuesday and then went to happy hour at BJ's with one of my old rotation-mates from the Long Beach VA to celebrate her engagement! So exciting! We went to Forever 21 and did some shopping afterwards but that was a fail.

Just vegged out on Wednesday and cleaned my room a little before my first official day as an RPh on Thursday (that horrid day... mentioned in my previous post). I guess we're all caught up! Hope everyone is having a great week!!

Monday, August 29, 2011

entering the working world & figuring out finances

Thursday, August 25th marked the first day of my life as a working pharmacist. It was all around pretty horrible but in the words of Judy, at least I survived. I've been working the last 4 days and it's been a great first week at work besides that first day. I strongly believe that the staff you work with really determines whether you'll have a good or bad day. There was this one technician on my first day of work that was seriously typing random jibberish. Every single prescription I was checking literally had 3 mistakes: drug strength, date written, doctor. There was a prescription for Neurontin that CLEARLY stated 300 and this technician typed it for 600. AND he was off in his corner talking to the other technician while the phone just continued to ring. I had to pick up the phone and then delegate him to answer the call. Honestly, hearing "one pharmacy call" over and over again is not the most pleasant thing on earth. To top it off, I seriously had 5 or more instances where during my final quality assurance, I was checking the drug against the drug image and they did not match AT ALL. The ones I remember from that day were the rx's for Bactrim but the technician put Bactrim DS in the bottle... another one was filled with Vicodin when the prescription was for Vicodin ES. Then I caught a prescription that was written for a completely different patient! The date of birth didn't even match! *le sigh* Makes me appreciate those really good technicians so much more.

I haven't gotten my first paycheck as a pharmacist yet but I've been thinking a lot about the amount that I owe and how I'll be paying it off. I've been using Mint.com to track my finances ever since Judy and Sophie introduced me to it. It's quite useful especially since I don't have that many accounts (well... technically I have around 28 accounts according to my last credit report but I don't use all of them). I know the initial setting up of all your accounts is long and tedious but it is worth it!
My loan totals for grad school and undergrad are posted to the left. I also owe $6,000 for my Federal Perkins Loan from UCLA. I've been trying to figure out how much of the interest of my student loans could be used as a tax deduction since this might be the only year I can use the tax deduction. Anyways, I was talking to Sophie and she sent me a link to a site that was pretty helpful.

So if you're trying to figure out what tax bracket you're in here's the link:
http://www.bargaineering.com/articles/federal-income-irs-tax-brackets.html

From the looks of it, I'll either be in the 15% or the 25%, which is a pretty large difference so I'm counting on my deductions to put me in the 15% tax bracket. 

So I looked into it a little more and found the IRS Page regarding Student Loan Interest Deductions. It's actually quite useful. Here's the jist of it which I updated from this article because the numbers have changed. Basically, if you make less than $75,000 (single filer, post-tax and other adjustments), then you can get a deduction of $2500. If you make between $75,000 and $120,000, then you get a partial deduction which can be calculated by going to the IRS page up to $2500. If you make more than $120,000 then you don't get any deductions for the interest you pay on your student loans. Once again, this is for single filers since most of my friends are not married.

Hopefully this answers some questions you may be having regarding repaying all our debt and how to attempt to not get taxed a crap load.

In an attempt to streamline my expenses vs. income, I came up with a spreadsheet of my bi-weekly income, how much is used to pay each one of my bills and/or loans, how much I will transfer to my savings account, and what is left over. I guess we'll have to see how well this system will work.


Anywhos, I'm working on some catch-up posts for the past month so you'll hear from me soon! Hope this post helps!


Saturday, August 06, 2011

last friday night...

Is it just me or is every single Katy Perry single friggin catchy?! Got that stupid T.G.I.F. song stuck in my head. Anywhos, I was about to update about what happened last weekend... hence, last Friday night is somewhat appropriate.

Last weekend I went down to San Diego for one of Tony's cousin's graduation party. Can I just say that these people know how to celebrate every friggin occasion?! It's just crazy how much money people spend on these things. They're almost like mini-weddings! If by now you have not sensed the jealousy in my tone then maybe it's time for me to make it explicit. When I graduated from high school, I didn't get any type of party because according to the parentals, this wasn't a big deal. We'll make a party when you graduate from college. Ok. So I graduate from college and I believe we celebrated afterwards by going to get dim sum. Not bad. I think maybe 3 family members excluding my parents came. For my graduation from grad school, we celebrated afterwards by going to eat pho. I think people are now celebrating their kid's graduations from like kindergarten and I'm like are you kidding me?! I think these kid's celebrations are wayyyy more extravagant than any celebration I've ever had. Anyway, enough with me ranting away. Here's some pictures!








Have a great weekend everyone!!

Wednesday, August 03, 2011

finally time to blog!

Howdies ya'lls!

I'm finally back!! I'm so happy to be done with studying at least for now. I took NAPLEX on July 22nd and then CPJE on July 29th. After getting home on the 29th and washing my car and packing all my stuff to go down to San Diego, I got my NAPLEX results and I passed! It was seriously the best surprise because I had been so worried since taking that exam that I failed. Every day after taking NAPLEX I would be studying for CPJE and I would look over material that was on the exam and then realize I made a horrible mistake on the exam. But fortunately, I didn't do as horribly as I thought.

As my graduation present, Tony bought me the little penguin pendant I had posted on Facebook and he said that he'd take me on a cruise since I was always talking about how great they are. So we're leaving this Sunday for a 7 night cruise to Cabo San Lucas & Puerto Vallarta! I'm so excited to just go on vacay. Everyone and their mom's have been going on vacations since pharmacy school is over and I really didn't have the money or the time to go so I figure I better go now while I can still work anytime I want. So this last weekend I went crazy shopping all over San Diego. I also brought out some of my older summery items that I'll be taking on the cruise so I'll be posting those on here as well.

Anywhos, I'll hopefully be able to update before I go. I've been working full-time lately and my goodness it's tiring on my old ragged body lol.

Hope everyone is having an awesome hump day!!
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