A little bit of everything, figuring it out as I go along. Inspired by my scrappy little rescue cat and scrappy quilts. Making stuff, especially from reclaimed or recycled or inexpensive materials; philosophizing; research. Whatever is passing through my busy little mind.
The 12:30 physical exam didn’t bother to show up.
The 12:50 appointment just got here at ten after 1. At the same time as the 1:00 physical exam appointment.
So if people start showing up now, I’ll be running late all afternoon. On the other hand, I finished all the morning’s paperwork while I was waiting. Which is why I’m posting again…
So apparently the Friday before Christmas starts slowly. It’s 8:20 and my 8 AM patient hasn’t arrived. Either she forgot she’d made the appointment, or remembered but then decided she had better things to do with a day off. I can guarantee it wasn’t traffic because I just drove in myself and the roads were lovely and clear.
On call last night, got the usual people who call in the middle of the night because their kid is congested. I gave sympathy and a promise that if they call before 8:30 this AM I would guarantee to see them in clinic today. I notice that no new appointments have appeared on my schedule, though, which suggests that the problem was not important enough to actually come to the doctor for – which makes me a little irritated that they felt it was important enough to wake me in the middle of the night for…
I went to 5 or 6 different stores looking for a particular goofy gift for K – didn’t find it anywhere. Eventually gave up and stopped at the grocery store to pick up a few things and saw the perfect item – at Fiesta! And was only 8 bucks so if he hates it, no harm done… we’re not doing a lot with gifts this year, since we’ve been putting our creative energy into this wedding thing instead. Still need to come up with some vows, though.
My future mother-in-law sent me her list of people to invite to a rehearsal dinner – which was way short of the actual number; she’d left off one of her own sons and his family and their kid is actually in the wedding. I suspect she’ll be embarrassed at this…
OK, one of my patients has finally showed up – actually, 3 showed up at once so I go from being bored to being behind in the blink of an eye. TO work!
The stereotype, of course, is that all non-Xian people go out for Chinese food on Christmas. Because nothing else is open.
K and I will be on our own for the holiday, and hadn’t really planned anything. I just can’t see cooking up turkey and all the fixins for just the two of us. Last year, we ended up going out for … Chinese food.
This year, we were talking about it and wondering what our other options might be, if we weren’t in the mood for pork dumplings and sesame chicken.
Anyone know of any good restaurants open on Christmas in Houston?
We all have some sort of food that we just love, even though it’s the furthest thing from high cuisine. K, for example, willingly consumes strawberry-flavored Quik…
For me, that guilty pleasure is Taco Bell. Their particular variety of not-really-Mexican-food is one of my favorite comfort foods. When I was a kid living in Kentucky, with no idea what real Mexican food (or even Tex-Mex) tasted like, Mom would buy those hard taco shells and pre-mixed seasoning kits and we’d brown up some ground beef, cook up pinto beans and mash ’em up in a pan with a little bacon fat, chop lettuce, onion, and tomato, grate cheese, and put the carton of sour cream on the table, and that’d be good eatin’. Somehow, it all came out remarkably similar to Taco Bell’s offerings, actually.
Later, when I was in medical school, there was a Taco Bell just a few blocks from my home. I’d be driving home post-call, having not slept or eaten for a couple of days, and didn’t dare stop at any of the drive-throughs near the hospital, because only the gnawing hunger was keeping me awake… Pulling into the Taco Bell meant relief from that hunger and also that I was almost home and could crash for a few hours. So now, when I’m stretched too thin, I crave Taco Bell – my hind-brain says that will make the pain go away.
The point of all this rambling is that I was driving home and listening to the radio DJs talk about whether the recent e. coli outbreak at Taco Bell was caused by the onions or the lettuce, and all I could think was “Mmmmmm. Tacos……”
And I decided that was kind of funny in a twisted sort of way.
I have released several dozen books “to the wild” at this point, registering them all at bookcrossing.com and hoping to learn where they went. Today for the first time, someone actually posted the fate of one of the books! She dropped it off at a school today…
I’m so excited.
has been doing a great job of dutifully documenting his workouts to inspire the rest of us. So has
. I have been falling rather flat on the same charge – on the reporting bit, I mean, I’ve actually been quite good on the exercising end.
I have improved since I started doing this, although the metrics suggest I’ve gone to utterly pathetic to just kind of pathetic. I’ve never been good at running, so that’s my usual self-test. At the outset, be utterly shot within 2 minutes. So I was alternating 2 minutes run, 3 or 4 recovery, another minute or two running, and so on. By now, though, I can steadily run 5 minutes (a half-mile) – still kind of sad, but at least it’s getting better. So far, no obvious change in my weight or clothing size, but that’s fine… not really my goal anyway, I just want to be stronger and more fit. I’m in no danger of looking anorexic if I do lose a few pounds – in fact there’s a few outfits I’d love to be able to wear again – but not unhealthy now either so can’t make myself get that worked up about it. Not when it’s December so Blue Bell is marketing peppermint ice cream, anyway.
That’s all!
Got reviews back on an article I’d submitted along with a friend/colleague to an asthma journal.
The reviews shredded the article. They questioned the value of the work in the first place, the methods we’d used to approach the work, and the conclusions we drew from our results.
The editor sent it back with a “revise and resubmit”.
Huh?
Usually revise and resubmit means “we want to publish it but have to give lip service to our reviewers.” I conclude that either the editor didn’t agree with the reviewers, or they’re really hard up for material these days.
As you can tell, I didn’t have a lot emotionally invested in this article – I sent it in expecting a reject. So even a shredding followed by an invitation to resubmit has exceeded my expectations.
More relieving, when I screwed up the courage to look at my advisors comments for the paper I actually DO care about, they’re… manageable. I was terrified he’d say he really didn’t think the underlying idea had value, but in fact he seems to have enthusiasm for the basic precept and simply made (generally worthwhile) comments about wording and presentation. Whew.
You know, this academic stuff is a pain, but it sure beats working for a living.
I’m not passionate enough about my shopping to have a strong opinion, but it sort of seems like Wal-Mart just can’t win. The mass media seems to be full of people grasping for any possible reason to criticize them, and every move they make is grounds for new criticism.
My reaction was “Cool! A huge market player is going to be shopping for organic foodstuffs on the global market – that’ll increase the pressure for more farmers to adopt healthy, sustainable practices! And their tradition of competitive pricing will make organic food available to shoppers who simply can’t afford places like Whole Foods Market!”
But what do I see written about this move? Well, the US organic farmers are pissed because Walmart might buy some of their organic produce from somewhere other than the US. And the general WalMart bashers are certain WalMart is doing this as part of an insidious plan to lower the standards for what is “organic”. Oh, and the monopoly alarmists are concerned that once WalMart supplies organic food, well, there’ll be no further reason for any other stores to exist so they’ll all go belly-up – at which point I suppose WalMart will cackle gleefully, jack their prices through the roof, and start sacrificing virgin babies? (or is that Microsoft?)
To me, this just seems like people who can’t stand to admit that their favorite enemy has done something right. Or am I missing something here?
On other fronts…
At work we all got set back by a major system crash – long story involving a major software vendor who pushed an upgrade on us without bothering to mention the upgrade was known to be unstable for groups with more than 200 users. In all, about 3 days of information (about 4000 patient encounters) were lost and will have to be manually reloaded; there was also a lot of lost productivity because people were fighting with the system instead of seeing patients most of those three days.
At home we proceed forward with our off-beat wedding planning; it turns out that the makers of tungsten carbide rings generally assume that females won’t want their product. At least, I assume that’s why all the designs have names like “Thor” and only come in size 7 or above. But we found some pretty rings that seem to be available in smaller sizes, and so that’s another problem solved. I’ve let the house get messy again; need to get back on top of the clutter race even though NaDeCluMo seems to be over now.
School… well, my advisor just returned my paper draft with an email explaining that there’s no fewer than 30 comments on it and “you might find that some of them are rather contradictory depending on when I added them”… OK, guess I can try to sort it out if he doesn’t want to go back and clear up his contradictions. I’m trying to screw up the courage to look at the actual document – probably after a good night’s sleep. I tend to get really depressed and discouraged at perfectly reasonable feedback, then have to crawl into my cave, lick my wounds, remind myself that concrit is good for me, and whimper a while before regaining my self-confidence. Committed to meet with him to review on Tuesday, so that keeps me from going into total shut-down avoidance mode (I hope).
Social – enjoyed the Lights in the Heights on Saturday night. For those who are not from here, this is a local event based in a part of town where most of the homes are classically Victorian in style – big porches, gingerbread detailing, peaked roofs… the neighborhood residents block off their streets for the evening that they first turn on all their Christmas lights. People walk the streets checking out all the lights; local musical groups perform from the big old porches, residents invite all their friends for parties… it becomes a big spontaneous street festival in true Houston style. It’s one of my favorite events of the year – I hang out at the house of a good friend who’s a very talented hostess; I get to go watch
and
entertain the crowd with their singing, I get to drink spiked eggnog…
Health – was worried I was getting sick Fri/Sat because was exhausted and coughing, but slept 11 hours last night and have been more productive today. Also remembered that I tend to really need to seek out sunlight this time of year. When it gets grey and cloudy and the days are so short anyway, I fall into the doldrums and don’t get anything done. Give me some sunlight and I can get back on my feet again.
Life is good.
Things I intend to do this weekend:
can take note if it pleases her)
Also hoping to spend some time with friends tomorrow afternoon.. should keep me busy!
I lost a bunch of productivity a few weeks back with a bad cold.
Now my laptop isn’t working right and I’m suspecting a virus. Though my virus scanner doesn’t seem to be finding anything.
Those who are smarter about this stuff than me: I have an XP computer, which starts up OK but doesn’t seem willing to connect to my wireless even though it apparently sees it just fine. Asked to repair the connection, it hangs up on the “disabling wireless adaptor” phase forever, or until I stop the process using task manager. Asked to shut down, it hangs up on the “Windows is shutting down” message forever. If I cut power it will restart normally.
Ordinary programs (word processor, etc) seem to be working correctly but a few days back (before any of this started happening) I noticed that the license manager was being wonky.
Tried restoring the system to an earlier date; it didn’t fix the problem. Although, given that it’s not shutting down properly, maybe the restore isn’t actually working.
Have run a couple of malware programs without finding anything more lethal than a tracking cookie.
Any thoughts?
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