Maybe it's just an alliteration thing

2003-01-30 - 11:00 a.m.

Last night I played in another volleyball game. It was a ton of fun. I so love that game. I arrived in the mood to kick some ass, and I believe I was fairly successful in that endeavor. Only five people showed up on my team. It was Kevin, Dave, and Terry for guys and then me and the girl with the broken wrist who's name I still didn't catch. I guess her wrist is doing better now. Good enough to pass the ball and serve underhand at any rate. I mentioned earlier that there is a rule that if the ball is hit three times, at least one of those hits must be by a woman. Since I was one of two women and the only one without a hurt wrist, I was in on almost every single play. That totally rocked. And my game was on almost the whole night. During the second game I went through a period where every ball I hit seemed to go out of bounds by about two inches. It was frustrating, but I got through it. So we played three rally-point games to 25 and we won all three of them even though the other team had six able-bodied players.

On the way home from the game last night I witnessed a car accident. I was sitting at a red light in a turn lane, listening to Wynonna Judd sing "Mama, He's Crazy" on the radio, while waiting to turn left. The light to go straight turned from green to yellow and almost immediately I heard squealing tires. It lasted for what seemed like quite a long time and then a Dodge Shadow or something similar came to a stop to my right a few feet into the crosswalk. It looked like a pretty sudden stop, but not sudden enough to account for the squealing. And indeed, as I was making this observation, the squealing continued. Then there was an ugly crunch as a black Jetta slammed into the back of the Dodge pushing it about a quarter of the way into the intersection. The Dodge limped through the intersection and pulled over to the side of the road while the Jetta stayed stopped at the stop light. I didn't know if I was supposed to stick around as a witness or what, but I had 6 hours until my alarm clock was going to go off and I still hadn't showered so instead I committed the Jetta's license plate to memory in case he decided to run and then waited to make sure he was going to pull over when the light turned green. He did, so I went home.

Yesterday was a fairly big day in the world of things I do on the internet. First of all, I received my first book from Swappingtons. It was actually sent out on the 23rd which was very speedy. It had to come all the way from Canada, so I guess that's why it took so long. Thanks Asteroidbelt! The other thing that happened is from a site that I used to frequent about a year ago. The site is Where's George? and it tracks paper money. You register your bills and then write a little note on them telling people to check out the website. Then you spend them and see where they end up. Anyway, I registered a lot of money there last year and didn't get too much response so I quit. But I received an e-mail telling me that one of the bills I registered over a year ago had been re-entered. Pretty cool, eh? You can go here to see.

Last night I also went to the gym. I remembered to set the incline this time and it was much, much harder than last time. I can't believe how slow I still am. I think back to how easily eight-minute miles came back in my youth and all I can do is sigh and hope that someday I will be able to do that again. Yesterday I ran a mile in about 9:15. My goal is to get down to that eight-minute mile again. And then faster than that. And then be able to maintain it for long distances. Ha ha, am I a dreamer or what? Yesterday I did the 5k in 31:34 and then walked for most of the rest of my 40 minutes. I went a total of 3.75 miles.

So today is my last day of SGI. I ran into one of the med students on my team as I was coming into the hospital this morning. She told me that one of our patients had died during the night. That makes me so mad and sad and frustrated. We also got a new attending today. They only seem to last about a week on the SGI service. This one today told us that just because some members of our team have to go to the OR early in the morning, doesn't mean that the rest of the team should have to suffer by finishing rounds before they leave, so while he is the attending they will be rounding at a reasonable hour. And I will be gone! If only he had come a week earlier.

I did end up talking to the Mole yesterday afternoon about my schedule. Turns out he actually sat down and made up a schedule for the whole rest of my residency. No more of this living day to day business. So on Monday I'm starting infectious diseases (ID) with Scotch. I requested this rotation because I'm horrible at ID. But now I, in all my laziness, am regretting it a bit. You can bet, O Month of February, that I will be whining quite a bit about feeling stupid. There are worse things than having to wake up early in the morning, and I will soon be experiencing some of them. After ID I will be doing Management with Cheesecake, Med Safety, and then CCU. I have one last rotation after that but it is still TBA pending a decision by me.

The Mole and I have a lot of trouble communicating. I don't know what the problem is, but for some reason we just don't understand each other. We understand the words coming out of each other's mouths, but we just don't get it. Does that make any sense? It's like we completely misread each other's body language. We don't get each other's sense of humors. I realize that I say things intended to make light of something and he thinks I'm completely serious. And I think that happens the other way around too, only I don't realize those quite so quickly. Plus, even when we're both serious, we just misinterpret things. Even the very first assignment on the very first day got messed up through a miscommunication. He told me he wanted it handwritten not printed. To me that meant that it had to be written by hand, not typed up and printed by a printer. To him that meant it had to be in cursive, not printing. I wrote it out by hand, printing as I always do. When I handed it to him he thought I was purposefully doing what he specifically and clearly asked me not to do. It was a mess. And things haven't changed. Although at least we both, I think, have recognized our communication difficulties.

I talked with my parents a bit about Quincy yesterday. My mom took the paper that had the job offer on it to her work to show her friends. She was impressed by how much they are paying and the nice work schedule. I don't think she realizes that the pay there isn't really that great. It's about average pharmacist pay. She was telling me that one of her friends suggested that I go work there for a year to make enough money to pay off my loans and then move on. I didn't tell her that there is nowhere I could move onto from there that I'd want to go. I figured I could tell her that is my plan and then just never leave. So she told me that and then we started discussing possible living arrangements there. When my dad walked in the room and asked what we were talking about my mom told him we were talking about the Quincy job and then she added, "But we were only joking." I made a weird half shrugging gesture and my mom said, "Or maybe we weren't..." Then my dad and I left for the gym so that was the end of the discussion. But, the important part is they don't think it's crazy. At least not completely crazy. I think they like the idea but think that I don't. So, who knows? This may happen!