Hiking in the Heat

I had an entire weekend off and so Adam and I decided to do our first hike here in Southern California. Important lesson learned: when hiking in the desert, must start by 7 am or I will die of heat stroke. Needless to say, hiking between the hours of 1pm and 4pm, I was suffering in the heat. But it was a lovely hike nonetheless. We drove out to Julien, and small town about 90 minutes from San Diego. It's your typical quaint touristy town, famous for their apple pie. Then we drove about 20 minutes into the hills. I was surprised at how green it was for most of the drive. There was a huge fire in this area in 2003; 30,000 acres burned, 15 people died, 3000 homes were destroyed, many of them in Scripps Ranch which is a neighborhood just a few miles from where we live now. You wouldn't know there had been a fire here if you didn't know what it looked like before. Everything is growing back now and there is green everywhere.

We eventually got to the trailhead at a deep valley, very desert-like in appearance. Our destination was a waterfall along one of the upper tributaries of the San Diego River. You would never suspect there was water out here, until you notice the greenery at the bottom of the valley:

From there we made our way down to the creek where we suddenly found ourselves at the top of a 90 ft waterfall, with a swimming hole at the bottom. It looked very inviting, given it was in the 80's and I was hot. But we couldn't fiugre out how the get down, so we just enjoyed the view, then made our way back to the car.

We then drove back to San Diego, and decided to try to go to the Padres game, despite its being sold-out. That was an adventure in itself, which Adam will be telling you about. Here's a link to the rest of the hiking pictures, as well as a few from the game:

Joey and Sugar

I realize I have not yet introduced you to the lovely dogs we are sharing our home with. So allow me to do so,meet Sugar (the brindle who poses so nicely for the camera) and Joey (going to town on the Nylabone):

They really are sweet pups. Sugar likes to sit on your lap if you are down on her level. If you are sitting in a chair, she will come put her head in your lap and just gaze at you until you pet her. Joey has really bad breath and sheds like no dog I have ever me, but he is also a very sweet dog. He enjoys leaning and eating sticks, but we are trying to distract him from eating sticks by providing him with Nylabones. So far so good. Joey loves Adam and food. Sugar loves everything and everyone. We will definitely miss them when our house-sitting gig is over, but I can honestly say I will not miss the shedding. How can they lose so much hair and still not be bald??

Adventures in Felting

I know I haven't had much to say about work lately. That's because I've pretty much had it with being an intern. I just finished a couple of blocks (month-long rotations) of in-patient, which entails admitting patients to the hospital every other day, figuring out what is (or more often is not) wrong with them and sending them home (unless it is the VA Hospital in which case we send them to a nursing home or to a homeless shelter because anyone who has a home usually has health insurance and does not come to the VA hospital for healthcare). Next month I'm on ICU, which is basically the same except the patients are sicker and we never send them home. We just send them out of the ICU and the the in-patient teams send them to their home/nursing home/shelter. And as of June 22nd, I will be done with this year, and I will get to be a resident and (hopefully) life will be good.

Meanwhile, I knit. My latest adventure: felting. You take a nice non-washable wool. Make something about three times larger than you want it to be, then throw it in the wash and wash it in hot water until it shrinks. I recently made a felted hand-bag:

All it needs is the handles and voila! So much more fun than being a doctor.

Welcome.

Welcome to my new location. Same boring information about my day to day life (and knitting!) but new stealth web address. Enjoy your visit.

Only two more months of internship! I think I'm going to make it!