This is California?

If I didn't know any better, I'd think I was in Seattle right now.
Looking out the window, we have typical Seattle November weather.
Cloudy. Cool. Damp. It might even be raining, I can't tell from this
angle. The only difference is I know this is temporary. San Diego will
be sunny again. Seattle however, will continue to exist in its gloomy
winter dampness. But you know what? I really miss that gloomy winter
dampness. I miss the snow in the mountains. I miss dark rainy
afternoons, curled up on the couch with a good book (or my knitting).
I miss Christmas shopping downtown. I miss rainy days running between
stores at University Village. I miss Wallingford and Fremont and
Ballard and their neighborhood shops. I miss good yarn stores. I miss
my friends. I've been working on my fellowship applications all day,
trying to figure out what I need to say to convince the people at
University of Washington to take me. I'm so homesick, I don't even
really like being a doctor right now. I'm sure I will survive the next
20 months, but it would be much easier to make it through if I knew I
got to go back to Seattle after all of this. I miss home.

Pictures of Death Valley

As promised, here are the pictures. Sand dunes are very photogenic. The pictures do not do justice to the vastness of the park. It is so hard to convey how much barren space there was here. It was incredible. You should all go someday. Especially if you are old and drive an RV. You will have lots of company.

HIghs and Lows

The destination of this weekend's mystery road trip... Death Valley. I didn't really know what to expect, but it was beautiful. Vast swaths of nothingness between two mountain ranges, salt flats, sand dunes and some amazing sunsets. Saturday we drove up along the east side of the Sierras and hit the high point of the journey: Mt. Whitney, highest point in the lower 48:We camped in Death Valley that night and then next morning explored sand dunes:

Played on the salt flats:
And hit the journey's low point: Badwater Basin, lowest point in North America and 282 feet below sea level:

Road trips are exhausting, so I'm off to bed. I'll post the rest of the pictures tomorrow after I've had time to look at them all and make sure no one is doing anything obscene in them.

Road Trip

Free weekend and we are going exploring. I don't know where, we are getting in the car and heading northeast. I have been promised coffee before we leave town, so I am up for the adventure.

I'm Hooked

I worked a half day today (it being Friday and the post-doc I work with needing to go drink beer and all), and while at home I was searching Netflix for something to watch while I sorted through my mail and yes, knitted (I'm down to one project at a time, I think that is progress). Netflix has a nice feature akin to on demand movies on cable. They have a selection of movies dubbed "watch instantly." For every dollar you spend on your monthly membership, you get one hour of online movie watching. Searching through the listings, I saw they had the season one DVD of Heroes. Little did I know...

Seven hours later, after using up all my allotted hours, and hacking into Adam's Netflix account to steal some of his hours, I'm two episodes away from the end. I had no idea what I was missing out on, not having a TV for the last year and a half. This is where Adam accuses me of being a couch potato and threatens to take the TV away. I'll have you know, I multi-tasked. While watching TV and knitting, I sorted through my mail, read medical journals and wrote my personal statement for my fellowship applications. All while sitting on the *floor* which I think disqualifies me from couch potato-dom. I also took a break to go running. Couch potatoes most definitely do not go running.

Using Technology to My Advantage

I'm a bit slow to jump on the technology bandwagon. I don't do text messaging. It takes me too long to type with my thumbs. If I have something to say, it's much faster to just dial the darn phone. Over the weekend however, I discovered some of the wonderful things google is doing with cell phones. I'm already a loyal user of goog-411, google's free version of 411. You can get addresses, phone numbers, look up entire catagories of businesses if you don't remember the name of the place you are looking for. So when Adam and I were trying to go to a movie on Sunday (I pulled a typical Dr. Jones maneuver and got my times and theaters mixed up so we ended up at the wrong place at the wrong time). Being without the internet, I didn't know how to figure out where we were supposed to be. Adam (or rather Adam's brother) saved the day... text "google" with the name of the movie you want to see, and the city or zip code where you want to see it and voila! You get a return text with the theaters and times where the movie is playing. I love it!

And this is my first attempt to blog via email. Success?

They're back!!

Damn egg nog lattes. Guess it's time to finally schedule those trainer sessions at the gym...

In other news, it is NaBloPoMo (aka national blog posting month). While I'm fairly certain I will fail to post every day in November (largely due to the fact that I will be out of town next weekend), I'm always up for a challenge. Especially if there are prizes involved!