Woohoo! Just finished my last exam, and I'm thrilled! I even think it went pretty well. I have a 3pm flight, so I get to laze about for a few more hours and eat all of the food that I don't want to go bad while I'm gone. And then it's off to snowy California! It's a beautiful day here in New Orleans, but I'm excited to go home and drink hot buttered rum by the fireplace.
Ugh, I just watched a super sad movie and now I feel like crap. Does that ever happen to you? I popped this movie in (I guess that's an antiquated term now--I "slid in a dvd") thinking it would be a stupid, light-hearted romantic comedy that would take me away from physiology for a while, and instead, I end up sobbing (SOBBING) my eyes out and wishing I'd just stuck to the textbooks. It totally snuck up on me!
I'm not going to tell you what the movie was because you'll all make fun of me. It was one of those movies that you see previews for (before a movie you rented, not even on the big screen) and make fun of because it looks so brainless. Like, girlfriend-meets-the-parents-and-they-have-a-really-awkward-weekend brainless. But you're running out of things to put on your netflix queue, so you thought, what the hell. By the way, if anyone has any great movie suggestions, I'm all ears.
Anyway, physio exam tomorrow and I am not a happy camper. But as per my usual, I can't seem to study after 8:30 pm or so, no matter how badly I need to (bad habit for a med student, let me tell you), so I'm thinking about hitting the sack. It was a lovely 76 degrees today, which somewhat redeems the snow last week. But hey! Even though I'm not into living in the frigid snow, I love to visit it (briefly), and if I was going to go somewhere chilly, this is totally where I would go right now:
Incredible, huh? It looks like a toy town. It's Sisimiut, Greenland, and it looks like an amazing place to visit.
I told you--way cold. I love icebergs. Check out this awesome slideshow about Arctic traveling. Beautiful!
I ran some errands today and saw everyone out putting up Christmas decorations on their houses. It's finally starting to put me in the Christmas mood (even though it was a lovely 70 degrees and sunny today). The snow on Thursday certainly helped, but in general, the holiday spirit has been taking a while to hit me.
Christmas is hard not to love. Lights, trees, cold weather, stockings and presents, hot buttered rum by the fireplace, and best of all, I get to see my family! Some higher power has been trying really hard for the past handful of years to stop my family from enjoying Christmas, but we manage to carry on with our normal vigor. I guess it's a healthy combination of present overload, massive amounts of food and liquor, and an inability to stay sad for long when you're surrounded by people that you love, even if those people are brought together by hardship as well as tradition.
Anyway, just feeling a bit melancholy on this day of days, all alone with my little kittens. But my Christmas spirit is putting up a good fight, and I'm so excited to fly home this weekend and see my family! I hear it's snowing there, and while I was less than thrilled with the snow in New Orleans (it's supposed to be warm here, for God's sake!), snow at home is a lovely thing. I hope everyone else is gearing up for the holidays too!
You're having a bad day--nothing seems to be going right. You had to wake up really early and go to boring lectures all day, you have three big tests next week and not nearly enough time to study for them, your hair has been doing this weird thing lately and won't be tamed, and it is effing COLD these days. Also, how did Christmas sneak up on you so quickly, and when exactly are you supposed to do all of the necessary shopping in the next week and a half?
With all of these worries on your mind, where should you go to leave them all behind?
Why, to your very own Free Spirit Sphere in the peaceful rainforest of Vancouver Island, of course!
The motion in a sphere is a slow gentle rocking when the wind blows. The rope tethers are almost vertical which lets the treetops move considerably while hardly moving the sphere at all. The sphere movement is a muted average of the movement of the 3 treetops. When another body inside a sphere shifts his/her weight the motion is abrupt. This is because the mass of the sphere is low. Once one breaks contact with the ground, energy shifts. The magical environment of the forest canopy conjures up thoughts of elves and fairies. One can feel the presence of the forest. That presence seems to dwell in the canopy where it can watch the meanderings below.
Um....heck yeah! I know I'm just a tree-hugging hippie right below the surface, but who wouldn't want to stay in a magic treetop sphere for the weekend? I'll admit that the accommodations sound a little hokey (yet still relaxing and lovely), but I want one for my own backyard! Or strung somewhere up in the redwoods, yeah? Found on this awesome website about strange buildings around the world. Check it out!
I still haven't found my camera cord, so even though I took pictures of the snow today, I can't post them. But the New York Times has a lovely photo of the Quarter in their pictures of the day!
Good bunch of pictures today, as always. Another of my favorites:
They also have some haunting pictures of the cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe on their homepage. Worth a look-see.
You'll never believe it--it snowed here today! Snowed. An honest to goodness snow storm. It was really coming down! Pretty incredible, considering it was a perfect 80 degrees not three days ago. I thought I moved to New Orleans to escape this crap! On the bright side, no one in New Orleans can handle the white stuff, so a bunch of crap I didn't want to do today was canceled! Very convenient. So I'm at home wearing: thigh high socks, short fuzzy socks, sweat pants, leg warmers, slippers, knit hat, turtle neck shirt, sweater, scarf, and a robe over it all. My little gas heaters aren't quite cutting it.
That being said, does anyone out there who knows how to knit want to make me one of these?
Doesn't it look warm and wonderful? You can get your own draft dodger (or one for your freezing friend) from this cute shop. Sigh...I should really learn how to knit something other than a potholder.
Well, back to studying metabolism. The beautiful church down the street is playing "Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer" on its bells, I have a fresh cup of coffee, and my two kittens are sleeping next to me on the desk. Cuddled together, without fighting! Life could be worse.
New baby girl kitten! Adopted from my histology professor--aren't I a suck up? She and Stokely...well, I'm sure they'll get along a little better soon! Cross your fingers. She's a sweetie, although it was tough to get her to sit still for these pictures. Sorry about the grainy laptop photos--I can't find my camera cord!
I had such a productive weekend! I actually sat down and studied for more than ten minutes in a row, for the first time in a good while. I just can't seem to concentrate these days. Which is unfortunate, because this block (which started Monday) is only two weeks long, which means we have three exams next week.
I'm trying to study right now, which isn't going as well as I'd hoped. I'm sitting in a room at the top floor of Tulane's Poydras building, which is where the standardized patient program is housed. The SP program is one of the neatest things about Tulane. They employ a staff of actors who pretend to be patients, and it's through them that we learn to interact with patients. There's a whole "clinic" up here, and we learn to do all of our exams with the SPs, from patient interviewing to the really fun stuff. One of the reasons is that I can't study is that I'm sitting in a room with a bunch of T2s (study rooms are a hot commodity these days) who are waiting to be called in to learn digital rectal exams. Oh baby. Anal jokes abound.
The SPs get paid pretty well, as you can imagine. I just came out of a session on patient counseling that was really great, although he was acting like such a difficult guy that it was pretty frustrating sometimes. But it is really nice to be put through all of this stuff before treating real live patients.
Ugh, I guess I'd better go. Sorry this was kind of an empty post. This is what I've been staring at for the past hour and a half:
Well, variations on the same theme. Anyway, things to do, places to be. Later kids.
Hey all you lovely people! Long time no talk. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, it's been a long few weeks! I spent a lovely Thanksgiving break in New Jersey/New York area with Andrew--man, is it cold there! Like, actually cold cold, not New Orleans cold. This was never more apparent to me last week than when I accidentally locked myself out of Andrew's house (while he was at work in the city) and had to spend three hours outside, searching for a spare key/a way to break in. In my pajamas. With his senile little Maltese sitting on the porch and barking at me. Good times.
But really, other than that, it was a wonderful trip. I got to spend time with my man, eat Chipotle (and, um, turkey and all that), go shopping in Manhattan, enjoy wonderful New Jersey pizza and bagels, and my kitten didn't even make a scene on the airplane. What else could I ask for?
And now it's back to school. This whole past week I've had an awful cold, so I still haven't really gotten into the swing of things. Physiology? Histology? Wha?
I wanted to share with you a truly wonderful video that the fabulous Miss Havisham posted. Like me, she likes watching disgusting things being extracted from people's bodies--it makes me want to be her best friend. It's a video of a bot fly larva being pulled from a man's back, where it was hoping to grow into a nice happy little adult bot fly and then crawl out (read all about bot flies here). Hope you enjoy it as much as I did!
