Fishing

I am on GI consults for the next two weeks. We are the ones you call when your patient is in the hospital and for whatever reason, needs a colonoscopy. Or, as was the case for the poor man we consulted on on Monday, you swallow your dentures and need emergent upper endoscopy. We (by we I mean our fellow and attending, I stood in the corner and watched) spent 90 minutes trying to fish the dentures out of this man's esophagus. I'm not sure how he got them down in the first place, because they were very poorly designed for passage through the GI tract. It was a partial, so there were two teeth on one side, with an acrylic bridge on the other side. There were two opposite facing metal hooks on either end to secure the thing in place. Unfortunately, the hooks were also perfectly positioned to snag on the mucosa as we tried to pull it up. We ended up pushing it down into the stomach and leaving it there for the surgeons to work their magic.

It's actually really cool stuff. If I didn't hate all of the body fluids involved in this specialty, and hadn't already committed myself to a life without overnight call or any emergencies, I'd be all about GI. It's like playing video games involving people's colons. Luckily for you all, there will be no pictures accompanying this post. But if you are really curious, try looking up "endoscopy foreign body removal" on google images. It's amazing what people will swallow.

Freedom!

For the first time in awhile, I had an entire weekend off. So I cleaned the house, and now can finally show off where Adam and I are living. After a few attempts at various furniture configurations, I give you the living room:

It's a nice living room, very bright and sunny. And yes, we finally bought a television. I've become a big fan of PBS in HDTV. This week I've learned about the building of the St. Louis arch, Mark Twain and traveling in Amsterdam. Gotta love public television.

Upstairs we have two rooms--the bedroom and Adam's office/my yarn and book storage room. And an interesting consequence of building a house on a hill, our garage. Enjoy a slide show of our lovely house:

In addition to cleaning, we visited the Birch Aquarium in La Jolla and attempted to attend a free concert downtown. The Flaming Lips were playing. The show was sponsored by Southern Comfort, and there was no charge for admission. We failed to predict that a free concert = lots and lots of people and ended up watching the early part of the show from the parking lot. Eventually though, enough people left that we were able to get in. Although a large part of the portion was the lead singer professing his distaste for the Bush administration, the music was good and certainly can't complain about free concert!

Today was more mellow. Laundry, grocery shopping and more PBS (today we are learning about Typhoid Mary). And next weekend? Adam wants to go flying.

Getting hitched!

After 3 years (and approximately 25 days), Adam proposed! He tried so hard to surprise me, and I tried so hard to let myself be surprised, but given my inherently suspicious nature, I made it very difficult for both of us.

He had been in Seattle the weekend before, so we hadn't seen each other for a few days. Monday morning was my day off, and before Adam left for work, he asked if I wanted to meet him for dinner. My suspicions were immeditately aroused, as Adam never asks me to go to dinner. I usually have to drag him kicking and screaming on anything resembling a date. To his credit, he always claims my cooking is so much better than anything we could get in a restaurant, so why should we go out? As the day progressed, I went about my errands. I was taking our recycling to the appropriate drop off site (can you believe we don't have curbside recycling? And given that it was ingrained upon us in Seattle to recycle anything and everything, we collect our recyclables in the garage for periodic trips to the recyling drop-off sites). I went to put something int he back seat, and found a bag with some of Adam's clothes in in. Since I had picked him up at the airport the night before, I initially thought he had just left it in my car last night. But that didn't make sense, why would he be carrying a change of clothes in an Ann Taylor bag? When I got home later that afternoon, I IM'd him, asking why his clothes were in my car. His reply: "I don't know what you are talking about." Now I knew he was up to something, but still didn't know what. But I decided to let him have his surprise, and I stopped asking questions.

That evening I met him at work, and we walked to a very nice seafood restaurant down the street: The Fishery. It was a very nice dinner, and afterwards we went for a walk along the beach taking in the sunset:

We continued onto a pier, where there is a hotel out over the water. As we were walking, Adam was telling me of his new plan: to be more romantic. As he told it, he had realized that he would never be able to do anything romantic without arousing my suspicions that he will be proposing. He had decided to be more romantic in order to catch me off gaurd when he did finally propose. It seemed reasonable to me, and at that point I decided whatever he was up to, he wasn't planning on proposing that night. We were walking back up the pier towards the car, when Adam turned towards one of the hotel cottages. "Where are you going?" I asked, "you can't in there!" as he walked through the gate marked "PRIVATE." "Yes we can," he said. "We are staying here tonight." I reacted in a way that I'm sure Adam was not expecting (or was expecting I guess, given my dislike of surprises): "What are you talking about? I can't stay here! I need to be at work at 7am!" Eventually however, he was able to convince me to stay.

As I looked around our cottage I saw a small box sitting on the bed. I opened it, and found the perfect ring:

Adam asked, I said yes, and there you have it. We're getting married!