Randomness

I'm 3 days into my new role as "resident" and I'm exhausted. We have 14 in-patients that our team is responsible for (a team consistes of two interns, one resident and one attending, plus a couple 3rd year medical students and one 4th year medical student). The patients are divided up between the interns who are responsible for the day to day care of the patients--making sure the right tests are ordered, following up on results, calling all the consult teams to help us out. I supervise the interns, make sure that everything we have discussed gets done, and I help come up with management plans. The attending basically makes sure we don't kill anyone. But my interns had the weekend off, so I had to do everything for the last two days. Plus I was sick yesterday so was not really functioning at 100% (more like 25%). But today is my day off, and so far I'm enjoying it. Coffee, knitting, KEXP.

Interesting (perhaps) things occuring in my life currently, which you may hear more about at later dates:
1. getting my medical license. I passed all 3 steps of the licensing exam! Now I get to fill out a 22 page application and pay $900 and will soon have the ability to write prescriptions.
2. applying for fellowships. I want to be an endocrinologist when I grow up. And I want to go back to Seattle.
3. vacation! I'm off to Austria in about 6 weeks for a 10 jaunt through East Tyrol and Vienna.
4. Yosemite. Potentially--I have 4 days off before I leave for Austria, so Adam and I might take a little road trip.
5. knitting. I have about 6 works in progress. I keep hoping to get all my knitting crap organized, but it's just not happening.
6. Books. I need recommendations for what to read now that I have finished Harry Potter.

That's my life. I like it.

La-La Land

Saturday morning Adam and I headed off to LA for a day of history and music. After several hours touring the Nixon Libaray in Yorba Linda (interestingly enough the Watergate exhibit was "closed for renovations"), we then headed off to the Hollywood Bowl for a concert with the Decemberists. The Hollywood Bowl is a beautiful outdoor amphitheater up in the Hollywood Hills. They let you bring in your own food and bevs (including alcohol!) so we had a lovely picnic up there prior to the show.

The show itself was fabulous. The Decemberists are doing a series of shows on this tour with orchestras, and last night they played with the LA Philharmonic. While there were a few times when the orchestra overpowered the band a bit, it was a great show. I got some pretty bad pictures of the event, but I'll post them anyway:

The amphitheater. If you had the ability to magnify the picture, you'd see the HOLLYWOOD sign up there in the right middle, on that distant hill.

This is a picture of the audience after the band asked everyone to pull out their cell phones and wave them around as if they were waving around lighters. The effect was pretty cool (or silly as Adam put it) but the picture doesn't really capture it. I think the band was having as much, if not more, fun as everyone at the show.

UPDATE: someone got video of the cell phone thing. It's actually the entire encore, when they seemed to be having a great deal of fun. Cell phone thing is about 4 minutes in.

A few You Tube links to songs from the show (I did take some video but it's not worth trying to figure out how to get it online because it's just not that good):




Plus more at You Tube

Words

100 words high school students should know.
I know 70%:

abjure abrogate abstemious acumen antebellum auspicious belie bellicose bowdlerize chicanery chromosome churlish circumlocution circumnavigate deciduous deleterious diffident enervate enfranchise epiphany equinox euro evanescent expurgate facetious

fatuous feckless fiduciary filibuster gamete gauche gerrymander hegemony hemoglobin homogeneous hubris hypotenuse impeach incognito incontrovertible inculcate infrastructure interpolate irony jejune kinetic kowtow laissez faire lexicon loquacious

lugubrious metamorphosis mitosis moiety nanotechnology nihilism nomenclature nonsectarian notarize obsequious oligarchy omnipotent orthography oxidize parabola paradigm parameter pecuniary photosynthesis plagiarize plasma polymer precipitous quasar quotidian

recapitulate reciprocal reparation respiration sanguine soliloquy subjugate suffragist supercilious tautology taxonomy tectonic tempestuous thermodynamics totalitarian unctuous usurp vacuous vehement vortex winnow wrought xenophobe yeoman ziggurat

I knew the words in white; I did not know the words in red. In total, I knew 70 of 100.

How many do you know?

Urban Hiking

My last weekend of vacation so we tried to pack it all in.
Saturday night, a return trip to the fair for some fair food:

and a Pearl Jam cover band. We tried to win me a goldfish (we were going to call him Finn) but $1 later, we still hadn't sunk any balls and figured we could buy one at a pet store for another dollar, so we called it a night.

This morning we tried to get up early to get a hike in at the Mission Trails Regional Park. Given that temps inland can hit 90 by noon we wanted to get an early start. We did manage to get on the trail by 8:30 am. We climbed Cowles Mountain, the San Diego equivilant of Mt. Si. Hiking here is very different than in the northwest: no trees, no water, smaller mountains and very urban.

Adam and the chaparral:
Lovely Santee:
Some distant mountains:
Where the Pacific Ocean would be if the fog weren't there:
Then spent the remainder of the afternoon cleaning, potting plants and finally feeling settled. Tomorrow, it is back to work.

Cleaning House

I returned from a short trip to Seattle/Portland last night, and spent the day trying to get my life in order before year two of residency begins on Monday. Annoyingly (is that a word?), I could not do half the tasks I set out to complete since I do not know my employee ID number. Apparently my social security number is not sufficient for identification, so now I have to track down my employee ID number before I can get a new ID or a parking pass.

But frustrations aside, I also spent the day unpacking, doing laundry and finally downloading the pictures from my camera. Today we have something of a hodge-podge post.

First, why I love California:

Produce! Isn't it lovely? Strawberries are nearing the end of their season, and I bought some gorgeous ones at the farmers' market last week:

They made for some tasty shortcake.

On the knitting front, I finally finished what is affectionately known as "the ugly sweater." It was a gift for Michelle's 30th b-day. The green turned out to be, well, a lot more green than I had thought. But I still think it turned out quite nice as far as hand-knitted sweaters go. For my next one (Kate has asked for one, but not in green) I think I'll take in the waist a bit more and make the body a tad longer. Michelle says she will actually wear it, which is why I made it for her. Of all the people I know, she is most likely to wear a hand-knitted sweater (that's a compliment, really!).

And finally, doctoring. For those of you keeping track, I have now finished my internship. I am officially a resident. I will be a resident for two years. Then I will be done. The main difference between internship and residency is the type of responsibility. As an intern, you deal with the day to day details of patient care. You order the medications, you deal with nurses and patients and families, you deal with the logistics of patient care. As a resident, you are in charge of the interns. You do more of the decision making and management. Most importantly, you get more out-patient months which do not have over night call and have weekends off! I start with out-patient allergy, so I will not yet have the full resident experience until August, my first in-patient month. I'll let you know how it goes.

The Magic Ingredient

One of the wonderful things about Seattle, one that I miss very much, is the plentiful supply of delicious Thai restaurants. Here, not so much with the Thai food. I have yet to find a place with decent noodles. Over the years I've been on a quest to find a recipe for Pad Thai, because really, how hard could it be to make it myself? Save the $8 a week I was spending on Thai food. Now that I have no access to the delicious wonderfulness that is Pad Thai, it had become more of a necessity. The problem is, the available Pad Thai recipes suck. Seriously, ketchup? Blech. Brown sugar and fish sauce? With vinegar? Certainly doesn't smell like anything I'd want to eat. And the boxes of Pad Thai, or the frozen stuff from Trader Joes? Not horrible, but it just doesn't taste like the stuff in the restaurant.Then I stumbled upon this. I'm not sure how I found it, followed a link from one of the blogs I read, to another, then another, before I know it I'm reading the intimate details of some stranger's life. But more importantly, I discovered the secret ingredient to making Pad Thai that actually tastes like Pad Thai.

Tamarind paste. Available in your local Asian market.

Tonight, I made Pad Thai. The real stuff, that tastes like what you would get in a good Thai restaurant. Even Adam thought it was good. He was very complimentary. He doesn't give out compliments easily. He didn't even complain about the number of dishes I left for him to clean. That means it was really really good.

Yes, I'm Back.

It was a rough last month--I was on an ICU rotation, on call every 3rd night. Which didn't leave much time for eating or sleeping, much less blogging. But I'm on outpatient now, and my schedule is far from full. The move to the new place is almost complete, just waiting for the couch and chair which are scheduled for delivery this weekend. It's nice having something resembling a normal life. In fact this month, I've worked fewer hours than Adam.

It's been beautiful here the last few days, no more June Gloom. The sun is out every day, I have views of palm trees from my window, and it smells like California. There's some sort of tree here that smells like my grandparents house, and it always makes me think of California. It's amazing the power of smells to invoke memories.

So now with more free time, I hope to have more interesting tales to tell. And I'll try to take pictures too. Everything is more interesting with pictures. Plan this weekend is for a trip to the San Diego County Fair. Pig racing! Deep fried avocados! Then I'm headed back to Seattle/Portland for a short visit, before officially starting residency. Luckily I start off residency with an outpatient month, which allows for trips to LA to see the Decemberists with the LA Philharmonic Orchestra, and we're going to see Avenue Q here in San Diego. And of course, lots of time for knitting.