Juno

It’s 10pm and I should be dead as I’m going on 40 hours awake.  In another time, I probably would have been, but something happens when you get responsibility and spend the first 30 hours seeing patients and supervising medical students then spend the next 10 taking care of your family.  I’m ready to collapse and will feel like crap when I wake up. 

Summer is waking up and the days are full of energy.

And yet I can’t keep my eyes open to type or finish this movie. 

Night.

Lifestream Feeds

I’ve been able to add my Digg and Amazon Wish List to my tumblr feeds.  In all, the following feeds are automatically imported in my Lifestream powered by Tumblr:

1. Flickr
2. WordPress
3. Youtube
4. Twitter
5. Digg
6. Amazon Wish List

I gotta say…

Last Saturday was a very good day.  It started with waking up early to drive Ikuko to work.  On the way home I stopped by Walmart to get a couple birthday cards for her and look for some cheap necklaces that she likes so much.  Nothing they had was tolerable even with the dirt cheap prices so other than the cards I just got her a few pairs of comfortably boring panties.  As I left the store a few flakes were falling gently from formerly spring sky.  Since Target wasn’t going to open for another half hour, I headed home to grab the boy to take with me.  We spent the next few hours browsing through Target, picking out necklaces and outfits.  After years of having trouble finding clothes big enough to fit my beautiful sex goddess I took a cue from my son and went to the kids section.  She actually fits the kiddie clothes. 

Next we journeyed to the grocery store for the weeks shopping and to grab a cake.  Then back home to clean the house, do the weeks laundry, prep for dinner and about that time the call came to pick Ikuko up. 

Spontaneously, instead of heading right home we detoured to the local co-op.  I’d been wanting to try my hand at roast lamb but had never been able to find a leg of lamb at any grocery store of meat market.  Some locals had mentioned that the co-op might have some and surprisingly they did.

While we were there I can into a patient of mine.  An elderly local dentist who is as sweet as they come, but has no interest in listening to my medical advice.  Her whole family are doctors, making the lack of compliance difficult, and her daughter an anesthesiologist was in town and she wanted to introduce her to my wife and I. 

Back home I had fun trying out a leg of lamb for the first time and throwing a little birthday party bash.  Halo was enjoying it more than anyone even though it wasn’t his birthday.  He insisted on relighting the birthday candles after the first go-round so that he could blow them out too.

A week later is his birthday, so Iku and I both are taking off and looking forward to more family time.

Technorati Tags: birthday,lamb,cooking

Live Writer goes Live

Woke up this morning, to find the laptop had rebooted itself. Automatic updates had been installed including for Live Writer, which hadn’t been working since I transitioned from XP to Vista. On a whim, I tried LW again and this time it connected.

So this is a test post. Checking to see if it’ll publish and it will include photos uploaded from offline.

Lifestream

A while back, Yongfook changed his old blog to a new Lifestream.  The concept is simple and elegant–the internet is full of free services for publishing different media (video, pictures) and types of text (blog posts, links, twitter-style what-I’m-doing-now posts) that are free and well designed.  The blog itself is nice but really only seems worth posting when you’re writing a significant portion of text.  When the post is smaller, or just about a single picture it seems a bit overkill.  Jay Parkinson, M.D. seemed to think similarly and switched to a tumblelog from a blog to simplify his publishing.  I tried Tumblr and liked it well enough, but it still wasn’t as crystal as Yongfook.com.  Then I found a Tumblr theme by Heather Rivers that was similar to YF and set up my feeds in the Tumblr settings to import my Flickr, WordPress, Del.icio.us (which hasn’t worked yet), Youtube and whatever else I may want later.  I’m quite happy with the results and it has refreshed my interest in blogging.

April

You’ve started another month.  This time you’ll be the senior resident of a general medicine team at the veteran’s administration hospital.

On the plus side, the work load overall tends to be somewhat less with more time to study and teach, parking is available on the days you’re on-call and post-call, you can enter all your orders in the computer, your students can actually write the notes while you just tag addendums, and you have less physical ground to cover as your patients are more centrally located.

The bad includes all the typical VA crap: substandard quality of equipment, laboratory, radiology, and nursing; tons of beaurocratic nonsense; and a vaguely disconcerting smell.  Also, you’re on overnight call every 4.

So far your students seem to be very hard working and competent, your intern the same and your attending quite reasonable.  The weather has gotten quite a bit warmer so it’s actually fun to be riding your moped into work.

You think this will be a good month.

Merry More

We added a couple ferrets to our family yesterday–an albino and named Susie after the Calvin and Hobbes character and a light grey we’ll be calling Hobbes.  Susie is aggressive and violent; Hobbes is reserved and methodical.

Silk

Life had been exceptionally good lately.  A few months ago you learned that you were going to be accepted to a fellowship program outside of the official matching program.  Relief and calm accompanied the knowledge that your continual application process that started in high school has ended.  You finally know what your professional occupation will be–a Rheumatologist.  Sure, there will be future jobs to apply for and other like applications, but the major defining factor is over.  In a year and a half, three years after finishing medical school, you’ll finish your internal medicine training and begin your sub-specialty training.  It will be nice to concentrate on one particular area rather than being a jack-of-all-trades.

Money is still in short supply and harder than ever to pry from the fingers of payors: patient’s, insurance companies and the government.  Still, more is starting to come in than go out and we are beginning to pay off Iku’s loans beyond the minimum payment.

You are even managing to make a few dollars on the side with drug company marketing surveys.With this you are able to buy yourself a few toys on the side.  Currently you wait for your Kindle, a toy, but also given the vast amount of reading you do for work, a tool as well.  We must work and play, so combining the two is the only way to enjoy life well.

Tumblr

I like wordpress a lot. I like being able to write long stories but it can be so lengthy a process to log in and write that for shorter items or mere links to things it often doesn’t seem worth it. Tumblr gets around that by making it easy to post quick items. I’ve been using it a lot lately. What I’d really like to do is convert it into a Lifestream like Yongfook.  Follow my Tumblr via RSS, the main page or the link to the right –>.

Pennies for My Thoughts

Someone is going to be releasing a drug given as either an IV infusion once weekly for moderate to severe chronic pain.  It is an agent that inhibits nerve growth factor.  Why is this important to me?  Because I just made $225 doing a marketing survey about it.  That makes $315 in the bank and $500 on the way.  Looks like I’ll be able to snake myself either a Kindle, a Nokia N810 or an iTouch plus a new lens for my camera and something for the wife as well.  Kinda sad how I have to whore myself out like that for a little spending money with my paycheck going for living expenses and student loans but on the other hand, when you live in this great country you have to find little stuff like that to complain about as we’re lacking in real problems like mass starvation, genocide etc.