NaBloPoMo Day 30--Done

Sunday on-call at the VA is usually a pretty quiet day. They don't have a real ER there, so not a lot of sick people show up. There are no clinics on the weekends, so docs can't send their patients to the hospital, and there are no weekend procedures, so the orthopedic surgeons can't dump their patients on our service ("yeah, I know he's got a broken hip, but I think he'd be better served on medicine." "what are his medical problems?" "he's 85, i'm sure he's got something").


Today was no exception. I actually got to leave work at 6 pm, since we don't stay overnight when we're on call at the VA. It was nice to have time to catch up on the boring but necessary aspects of life. Like laundry. But I also had time to catch up on my food blogs, bookmarking all the recipes I want to make in the coming weeks. And we finished our Christmas shopping last night (thank you Amazon!) so I pulled out all the wrapping paper and gift tags so I can start putting together the packages to send off to our various relatives.


I feel like it has been a ridiculously long time since I had a day off (it was Tuesday...). And you my dear readers have had a ridiculously long time without an interesting post about anything. We're both in luck. Wednesday, I get the day off. Finally. And today is the last day of nablopomo. I'll probably disappear for awhile, it's hard to post regularly when I'm on the wards, mostly because not a lot happens in my non-hospital life. So you all have a little break to look forward to. Thanks for putting up with this. I think I will not do it next year.

NaBloPoMo Day 29--Almost there!

It is a good thing this whole post everyday thing is almost over, because I am completely out of anything to say. So I give you another photo from the Tracy 1970's collection (except this might be Kate, I'm not sure...):
Nice hair Dad!

NaBloPoMo Day 28--Post-Thanksgiving Turkey Coma

I have nothing to say, but as there are only 2 days of this nablopononsense left, I must eke out something for your reading pleasure. So I leave you with this:

I had some crazy hair back in the day!

NaBloPoMo Day 27--Thanksgiving

After washing what seems like every dish in our house, twice, my hands feel like prunes. But for our first go at Thanksgiving, I think Adam and I did ok. Nothing turned out spectacularly but neither of us have any special family recipes to start from, so this was a Thanksgiving from scratch (except for the Silberfein apple pie, Adam is always very successful with that one). I tried to document the day through photos, but the lighting in our place is lousy, I hate using the flash on my camera, and without image stabilization... well, you end up with a lot of blurry food photos.

Adam was in charge of the turkey. Using his mom's patented self-basting technique, we ended up with this: Yes, it looks like it landed flat on it's back after falling from a great height, or perhaps someone who spent too long tanning on one side (which effectively it did, since we cooked it most of the time breast side down), but since we carved it all up in the kitchen, no one ever saw the unattractive turkey. The meat was tasty and moist though, and isn't that the point of a turkey? Who cares what it looks like?

Afterwards, I got to hack up the carcass with a cleaver (what does it say about me that my favorite part of thanksgiving day was the hacking up of the turkey carcass?) and it is now simmering away on the stove to provide me with large volumes of turkey broth.

We had a lovely evening with one of Adam's co-workers and his family. They have 3 kids under the age of 3, and were the most wonderfully well-behaved, polite children. It almost made me want to have kids. Almost. Dog first. Kids later.

NaBloPoMo Day 26--Traditions

Now don't get me wrong, with my last, oh woe is me post. I'm still excited about Thanksgiving. Adam's making the turkey and apple pie. I'm making a whole collection of other things, including the pumpkin bread that is baking right now. The fact that I have to work in the morning sucks, but it could suck worse. I could be one of the patients in the hospital and have to eat the VA's version of turkey. And as Adam has pointed out to me, as we get older, our memories of what holidays were in the past get harder and harder to recreate. And that is ok, we just need to start creating our own holiday traditions. We'll figure those out. For instance, Adam needs soup on Thanksgiving because that is something his family always had. I need cranberries made from scratch because one year long ago I realized those were ridiculously easy to make, and I decided to make them every year. At Christmas, Adam needs his blue sweatshirt and Christmas socks for Christmas morning. I need corn souffle for dinner (pronounced soo-full for those not familar with the traditional Tylee family dish) and cranberry nut bread with coffee for opening presents on Christmas morning. I need molasses sugar cookies and Russian tea cakes and oatmeal coconut crisps. I need mom to teach me how to make fudge (hi mom!). I'm sure we'll figure things out as we go along and come up with our own blend of the Tylee-Silberfein holiday traditions. As long as those traditions don't involve me regularly working on the holidays, it will be great.

NaBloPoMo Day 25--Holidays

I have fond memories of the holidays from my childhood. I love the days where you get out of bed, stay in your PJ's for the entire morning, cooking and baking, with the smells of turkey and pumpkin pie filling the house. The last three years I've missed that. I think I've worked every holiday since I've been here. And even last year's Christmas, when my family was here and we had a big dinner with friends, which great, wasn't the same since I was at the hospital until noon. I didn't get to spend the morning in my PJ's, opening presents, eating cranberry bread, and drinking coffee. We're doing Thanksgiving on our own this year, and Christmas with Adam's brother (I think). I'm sure we'll have a great time but I miss the days of having the whole family gathered around the table. Being an adult is hard.

I'm going to watch Charlie Brown's Thanksgiving Special now. And put together my Thanksgiving Day Spreadsheet. How's that for holiday tradition?

NaBloPoMo Day 24--Progress

A few months ago I decided I needed to do something to get back into shape. So I started running. Very slowly. In fact, 2 months ago when I started, I was walking more than I was running. My route looked like this (you may have to move it around to get the full route to show up, I can't figure out how to make google maps look the way I want them to in my blog):


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Today I ran 5 miles. Still, interspersed with occasional walking, but I've made progress. In fact, I'm now having to double back and loop around in order to make my route long enough to get my entire run in. Here's what I did today:


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The best part of all of this is that I can actually tell a difference. I have muscles again, my clothes fit better. It's amazing. Excericse and eating less (and honestly, I'm not eating that much less--just no snacks and no seconds) really do lead to weight loss!