Keep on Keeping on

I've been enjoying the free weekends I've had these last 6 weeks.
You can read about our most recent adventures--flying and camping--on our other blog.

Life is more normal these days. I go to work in the morning, I come home in the evening, Adam takes Wylie to the park, I make dinner, Adam cleans the kitchen, and we enjoy our evenings. It has been nice. But not very interesting, thus not much to write about today.

This weekend I'm off for a girls weekend in Seattle. It will be nice to see some rain for a few days. And great to see my family and friends.

Counting Down the Weeks

I have had a fairly easy schedule the last few months. In reality, I only have one hard month left, and two different 2 week rotations that will actually require any amount of work. It's kind of amazing to think that after all this schooling I've subjected myself to, I can see the end coming. In only 13 weeks (I think) I will be done, and heading back to Seattle. I'm so happy to be going back to Seattle, for many reasons. I will definitely miss the predictably wonderful weather we have here, but this has never felt like home. Part of that was probably my doing. I always knew this would be temporary, so I never tried to set down roots. I'm looking forward to finally feeling settled. I want to have a home. I want a yard that is mine. I want to finally unpack all our wedding gifts. And I want to stop moving. Dear Lord, do I want to stop moving. I was fairly stable through high school, only moving a few times. But since then? I lived in one dorm my freshman year, three different places my sophomore year, two places junior year and one apartment senior year. Not counting all the off-terms spent at home in Seattle. After college? I lived at home for about a year, sub-let a room in a house with Kate for a month or two, lived with Emily for about a year, moved into a house with a bunch of random people for about a year, then moved out with one of those roommates for about a year. She got married, and moved out, so I moved in with a friend of hers who needed a roommate for another year. Then, during my 3rd year of medical school I lived in Anchorage, AK for three months, back in Seattle living at home for 6 weeks, spent 6 weeks in Sheridan, WY, six weeks in Buffalo, WY, six weeks in Great Falls, MT and then back to Seattle. I think I moved in with Kate at this point, with another 6 weeks stint in Great Falls, MT. After Kate went back to law school, I moved into another room found on Craigslist. But the passive aggressive notes of my roommate got to be too much, so I moved in with Adam until I came to San Diego. Here I had my little studio for 9 months, we house sat for 2 months, and finally have been in our current place for almost two years. I think. So in 15 years, I have had 24 different homes.

So I am ready to go back to Seattle and hopefully stay put for awhile. Currently, Adam and I are trying to figure out the best approach to take with moving back. We have his house in Ballard, which is a fine house in a great neighborhood. It is not our dream house. The kitchen is small, and I suspect will frustrate me when it comes to cooking. The yard is small, and doesn't lend itself well to exercising Vizslas or growing tomatoes. There's only one shower. But it has 4 bedrooms, it has a big basement. It is close to the Burke-Gilman trail, making bike commuting easy. Do we move back into his house, perhaps invest in a kitchen remodel? Build a fence? Do some landscaping? Or do we keep renting out the house and find a new place for us? If we go that route, do we buy another place (assuming someone will loan us money after looking and my income to debt ratio)? Or rent a place that has what we are looking for, with the knowledge that after I finish fellowship, we might not stay in Seattle? My mind is overwhelmed trying to figure out the right approach here. I keep going back and forth. But it always come back to my need to feel settled. I can't keep moving like this. I seriously have boxes that I haven't unpacked in 2 or 3 moves, because I know I'm only going to have to pack them up again.

But regardless, we will be back in Seattle. And that will be good.

Rainy Weekend

Several storms moved through over the weekend, bringing lots and lots of rain. What is one to do on a rainy weekend in San Diego? Well, I baked, and cooked, and drank beer. All in all, a nice way to pass some time. First, the baking. My mom has a recipe for Dilly Bread, which I haven't had since I was little. She had posted about the bread on her blog recently (yes, my mom has a blog) and I decided I wanted to make it. So I got the recipe, and set to work. I had been making bread with my kitchen aid and the dough hook, but the motor is somewhat wimpy, and can really only handle making pizza dough. Any significant kneading sends the mixer shuddering across the counter. I also have a significant lack of counter space in my kitchen, so kneading by hand is challenging. Thus, I put the bread maker to work. I let it knead and rise the bread for me, then baked it normally. I think it turned out lovely. And delicious.

The trouble with baking bread is that I'm always faced with leftovers. I could sit and eat the entire loaf in one setting, but that kind of goes against this whole eat less exercise more thing I'm working on. So bread always goes stale before I can make it through the loaf. Sunday morning it was still raining, so I deicded to make breakfast. Utilizing the Dilly Bread (and a lot of cheese) I made a strata. It was tasty, although certainly not part of a low fat/low cal diet. I only ate two meals Sunday to make up for it:

After breakfast, we drove up to Escondido to visit the Stone Brewery. As far as breweries go, it was your typical brewery tour. They mainly brew bitter beers--IPAs, pale ales and their signiture Arrogant Bastard Ale. Strong, but tasty beers. Adam had the cask ale, which was the smoked porter with chipotle pepper. Very unusual, but I liked it. We also ate lunch at their beautiful restaurant. Then drove home in the rain. Now the sun is back, but the rain is supposed to return this weekend. We will be in Connecticut though, so we'll miss the rain. And I'm ok with that.

Religion

I have not been a religious person for most of my life. I did go to Catholic school until I was 7, and we did go to church for the first 7 years of my life, but all that was before I really understood what was going on. My memories from church consist of sitting on the floor near the kneelers with coloring books and being afraid of Father Gould. As I've grown up, I've come to realize I'm really not meant to be Catholic. It's hard for me to be a part of a religion that has so many fundamental beliefs that are contrary to my own. Lately, I've been thinking that I would like to start going to church again. I don't think I feel the need to add religion to my life so much as I would like to have a community that I feel part of. But what religion? How do I find a community that fits with my beliefs? Of course, the internet. After a google search for "how to choose a religion" I found a 20 question quiz, which identified the religion that most closely fits my values/beliefs. And the answer? I'm guessing those who know me won't be surprised...

Unitarian Universalist: basically, you believe whatever you want regarding the existance of God, they tend to believe that the Bible is a symbolic story; the origin of the universe is based in nature; they don't believe in original sin and overall, God (or whatever you believe in) is good; tend to be liberal when it comes to contemporary issues.

They actually gave me a list of 26 religions that match my answers anywhere from 100% (unitarian) to 10% (jehovah's witness). Interestingly, I'm a better match with LDS than Catholicism.

The remainder of the top 5, for the curious:
Liberal Quakers: generally believe in individual spiritual truths, God is love, love is eternal, and our actions in life should reflect love for all of humanity rather than the idea of heaven/hell; all will be saved because God is good and forgiving; pretty liberal when it comes to contemporary issues
Neo-Pagan: Wicca, Shamanism, etc falls into this category; God is all and within all; The Great Mother Earth, or Mother Nature, is highly worshipped; many believe in reincarnation; evil occurs when we "forget" that we are one with the great spirit--an imbalance in nature; probably a little too out there for me.
Secular Humanist: most are atheists or agnostic; evil can be explained through psychology, etc.; working for the betterment of humanity through ethical consciousness and social works are considered paramount, but from a naturalistic rather than supernatural standpoint; I think I need a bit more spirituality than this one would offer.
Liberal Protestant: view the Bible as a witness to God rather than the word of God; includes include some churches within Anglican/Episcopalian, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, and United Church of Christ; God controls the processes (e.g. evolution) that created life; no original sin and God is good and made people inherently good

Anyway, maybe once we move back to Seattle I'll start searching for my religion. I think I'll steer clear of Neo-Paganism, but Unitarian, Episcopalian, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian and UCC are all possibilities. We'll see. It's all about feeling like you are somewhere you belong. I'd love to hear other people's experiences with any of these (or other) religions.

Relaxing

There are times when doctoring isn't the horrible time consuming adventure it can be. Like this month. Right now I'm on rheumatology consults, which is actually very interesting. We have clinic 3 half days per week, and the rest of the time is spent seeing in-patient consults. However, there aren't many in-patient consults right now, so I've been hanging out at home in the mornings, working on presentations, doing reading, and playing with the puppy. I only live 5 minutes from the hospital, so the fellow pages me if I need to see someone and I can go in. It's definitely a nice change of pace.

So I'm trying to take advantage of this down-time to get my life in order. It seems like I'm always trying to get something in order. I don't know what I would do if I had nothing to organize. I think a part of me thrives on disorder. It gives me a purpose. In addition to organizing my life, we have some travel coming up. We're going to Connecticut in a few weeks for our east coast wedding reception, then I'm going to Seattle in March for a girls' weekend with Kate and Emily. After that I'm back in the ICU for a month, but then the home stretch... I can't wait to head back home again.

I leave you with random pictures and links:

My most recent socks, comepleted.

Wylie's online photo album on PicasaWeb:

Puppies

Adam's birthday, documented on the other website
My favorite recipe of the week: "fried" chicken
Enjoy!

Time to Spare

For those of you keeping track, I have approximately 4 1/2 months of residency left. I am now in the midst of a fairly easy stretch. For the last two weeks, I was on a dermatology rotation. Of the 10 possible days there could be clinics, I worked 5 of those days and I don't think I worked a full 8 hours on any of those days. Now I am on rheumatology consults for the next two weeks. Again, I was home by 2 pm today which was lovely. The rest of the year is hit and miss, with a week of the ED, and week of nights at the VA, a month of ICU, but interspersed with those rotations are more dermatology! More consults! And lots more weekends!

So today when I got home at 2 pm I thought I would take advantage of that spare time and make something exciting for dinner. But I was not very inspired. I went through my files of "recipes to try" and found some turkey burgers from Cooking Light (after the weekend of eating with Kate and Ben we will be on a Cooking Light kick for awhile). But they were going to take all of 20 minutes to make. I needed something more exciting! More involved! That's when I remembered the cookbook Kat got me for Christmas: Montana Cooking, and its recipe for homemade hamburger buns. Yes, I spent 20 minutes making turkey burgers and rather than just picking up some hamburger buns while at the grocery store, I spent 4 hours making my own. They were ok. I still have problems with my bread (it just isn't light and fluffy) but it was fun. When we move back to Seattle however, we're going to need to get a chest freezer because I have filled up our little freezer here with rolls, pizza dough, chili, chicken stock, turkey stock, waffles and now hamburger buns.

Which brings me to the main point of this long-winded post about cooking. I like to find recipes all over the place. My cookbook collection. Cooks Illustrated. Cooking Light. Bon Appetite. Food blogs. Tastespotting. More food blogs. And I save them, until I try them. If they are good, they go into my permanent collection. When I got married, Kate requested a copy of my recipes as a bridesmaid gift. So I searched and searched for a good way to put them all together in cookbook format and I found this. I love it. I made cookbooks for all the bridesmaids and sisters-in-law. I still add new recipes and figured out that I can share my recipe collection on-line. If they want the new recipes to add to their cookbooks, they can order them. And if they have recipes of their own they want to share, they can set up a Tastebook of their own. I'm working on getting my recipes updated, then I'll be sending the link to all the original recipients. If you are interested in seeing what makes the cut with me, let me know and I'll send along the link. Just a warning, I enjoy using cream, butter and cheese. Things taste better that way. If you're worried about calories, just eat less.

Time for bed. We've finally tired Wylie out. Here's hoping he sleeps past 6 am!

Updates

New posts up on the other blog.
Wylie!
Tylees!