There Are Stars in the Southern Sky

Yesterday, I discovered that I have a CHKD (my hospital) email account. After checking it for the first time ever, I learned that I was not, in fact, left off all the residency email lists as I had previously suspected.

Oh yeah. I'm just that smart.

I'm working the 5p-3a shift tonight, and I just don't wanna. Yesterday was my day off, and I still had my afternoon clinic. Bummer. This is just a weird week schedule-wise; I started off working the dreaded 10a-8p shift for 2 days, then a "day off" which actually was a clinic day, a pseudo-overnight shift tonight, and then a day shift on Friday followed by the return of the 10a-8p shifts over the weekend. I like day shifts, I like night shifts, these shifts that straddle between day and night really just kind of suck your day away.

Step 3 blows. I'll be glad when it's over next week.

I finally did my dreaded trip to the VA DMV, and $335 later I have a driver's license and my car is registered in VA with VA tags soon to be applied. Woo. I'm trying to get a copy of my old title from the NC DMV that proves that I have, in fact, owned my car since 2002 and don't need to pay sales tax on it. Stupid Commonwealth. Sometimes I really, really miss NC.

I haven't slept well the past several nights. Largely because I was on the 5p-3a shift which has completely messed with my internal clock. I also went rock climbing yesterday and did something to my ass. Specifically, my left ass cheek. It HURTS, and it kept me up last night. Thanks to some aleve and some serious stretching in the shower it's a good bit better today, but damn did it hurt last night. After my adventure at the DMV, I came home, at lunch, and by 3pm I was passed out cold on the couch and didn't move until 5pm. The Boy is working a 24-hour tonight, so I brought him dinner and now I'm back on the couch. I think it'll be an early night tonight.

I'm making slow but I like to think steady progress at the rock gym. I'm now the proud owner of my own harness, chalk bag, and shoes, and I love my own equipiment soooo much more than the rental stuff. After awhile the shoes make my feet feel like I've been engaging in Chinese foot binding, but I really do prefer climbing in my own shoes. I have 2 things (well, 3 things) against me at the rock gym: 1) I psych myself out. I get up to a point, can't really figure out how to get to the next grip, and instead of just going for it I stay put and think too much, and in the process of thinking I get too tired which doesn't help the whole not-psyching-myself-out issue. The second issues is that I don't trust my legs enough. This is probably where I'm making the most progress, hence today's butt soreness. Issue 3) my ass. Gravity has fixated itself firmly on my ass, and that's a difficult force to overcome. I have a muscular ass and muscular legs, but it's still a big ass and getting my body into the right angles can be a challenge when gravity is so totally pulling me down. It's frustrating because my sinew-y husband is seriously amazing and Spiderman-likeand he catches on to new problems so quickly when I just don't. I'm having a good time and I am getting better at it, I just wish I was catching on faster.

The good news is that my arms and shoulders are looking pretty good these days, and that's nice. It is doing good things for the self-image.

I'm thinking of getting a W tattooed on the inside of my ankle, for my maiden name. Thoughts? Fonts? I'm thinking something delicate and script-y.

Who do I have to kill to get Anthony Bourdain's or Andrew Zimmerman's job?

Note to self: crock pots work best when turned on.

I am an almost pathologic morning person. If I sleep late, I'm generally up by 8 or 8:30 at the very latest. This can sometimes be a problem as as much as I love morning, I also love the ED, and with the ED comes wacky shifts. Tomorrow, I'm working in the ED from 5p-3a which really isn't a bad shift as far as these things go. What sucks about tomorrow is that I also have clinic, which will go from 12-5. So I'm working 12p-3a tomorrow. Awesome. My solution is that I'm going to stay up late tonight so I can sleep until 10:30ish tomorrow. So I'm going to cook! I raided the Farmer's Market today and while the cantaloupe was only mediocre, the jalapeños, tomatoes, onions, and corn were cheap and looked awesome. And the butcher didn't have any non-frozen chicken roasters, so I got a small ham hock for cheap and also picked up some dried black beans. The beans have been soaking all afternoon, and soon they're going into the crock pot with the veggies and we'll have spicy black bean soup to eat with rice and/or sausage and/or corn bread for the rest of the week. Awesome.

Also, I have just discovered Boden. I ordered 2 of the on-sale dresses and a pair of pants and they arrived today, and holy crap are they awesome! My only complaint is that while the pants fit great, they're much more stripe-y than they looked online and I'm not so sure I can pull of the stripe-tasticness of it. But they sure are comfy and they make my ass look hawt.

What I Need To Do Today:
Go to the DMV and get my damn VA license
Clean
Go to the Farmer's Market
Study Study Study
Perhaps roast a chicken to eat on for the rest of the week
A bit more studying

What I Want To Do Today:
Go to Mount Trashmore and run stairs
Then head over to the Farmer's Market
Come back and study
Go back out to Virginia Beach and go to the Rock Gym for some bouldering this afternoon
Study some more
Make something yummy and full o' veggies from the Market for dinner
Camp out on the couch and watch the Olympics

It's a beautiful, sunny, cool day and it seems like such a shame to waste it on the DMV when I'm like a 7 year old who OMG WILL SIMPLY DIE IF I DON'T GET TO PLAY OUTSIDE. While my iPod charges, I'll see if there's another day I could go to the dreaded DMV. *shudder*

The ED is fabulous. I got my hair did yesterday, and while I'm loving the color (dark dark brown! no skunk stripes! faded reddish bits gone!), the cut is just okay. Of course, I found out about a place that primarily does curly hair here in Norfolk about 2 hours before my hair appointment, but ah well. I guess I'll check them out in 6 weeks or so when my dye job needs to be revised. It is fun having a short-ish bob again. I'm back into playing with clips and headbands.

I'm backup call for the ED today, so it's like having a day off but with a pager attached to my hip. We've already been to brunch, so I think we'll be heading out to the climbing wall soon and with 2 small side trips to the recycling center and to Costco. Tonight, the peds program is taking us to see "The Dark Knight" at the The Commodore, which is a dinner theater with an amazing sound system. We've already seen the movie, but squeeeeeee I want to go again! The food isn't spectacular or anything, but it's just fun.

I've actually made some girl friends here in my program. This is good. This is very good. Of course, they're a lot like me and really into beer and sports, and that's also good.

I discovered the Virginia Beach Farmer's Market today. A butcher! A real life butcher! With real fresh meat! I'm so excited. I love butchers; my uncles had a butcher shop down in Florida and it spoiled me for fresh meat at a young age. I got 2 beautiful steaks and a bag of seasoning meat for dinner for the Boy and I tomorrow night. I also have local cabbage, onions, tomatos, milk, half-and-half, bread, cantaloupe, blackberries,and potatoes. Oh, and *squee* butter pecan ice cream. So exciting. I think I'm going to be a regular down at the butcher's shop. I'm going to make a veggie-filled pasta for dinner tonight, and will hopefully have enough left over to bring to work for second dinner. Lunch was the perfect summer sandwich; fresh tomatoes, just picked today, yummy wheat bread, and plenty of mayo, salt, and pepper. It's basic, but it's still my most favorite sandwich.

It's so nice to be back in the emergency department. I still feel like I know much more about adult emergency medicine than pediatric ED, but I am WAY above everyone else when it comes to knowledge about trauma. I should know more; I had 2 months of trauma and 3 months of trauma-lite last year. But it felt good to not feel like a complete bumbling idiot. I thought I was going to be doing most of the lacs (lacerations), but it ended up being more efficient for me to bounce from room to room and supervise the other junior residents as they did lac repairs. I may not be able to treat asthma, but I can sure stitch up a laceration.

The next 3 nights are 9p-7a shifts. I haven't worked straight nights in a long time, so I have a feeling that it's going to be rough transition. Hopefully I can get a nap in before tonight. If I can't, well, that's why I have a coffee maker. Good times.

Seriously cramps, you can go now. And the hormone-fueled rage? You can go to. I have to work in the ED tomorrow and this is not how I want to start off the rotation. I need to make a good impression on this rotation, not snap at children and attendings. That's a bad idea.

I may go to bed soon. I have, after all, been awake for 12 hours.

Dear Cramps:

Stoppit. Stoppit now.

No love,
Me

I have survived my first month of peds! And you know, I actually liked it. A lot. My team was awesome, my attendings make time for teaching every. single. day., and my patients are seriously, seriously cute. I mean really, very few of my patients hugged me last year where they almost all hug me now. I'm so in love with the babies (and trying to suppress teh baby rabies that they give me...so far the suppression is going well). Some of my patients are heartbreaking, but it's so amazing to see people actually get better. I do miss the OR, but I'd forgotten how much fun medicine could be. And pediatric medicine so trumps adult medicine. And have I mentioned the support that the residency program here gives us? Holy crap. We have a brand-spanking new lounge that's just amazing...4 bedrooms, a kitchen, 2 bathrooms, a huge meeting room, a seperate computer room, and a big plasma tv. Seriously? Awesome.

I love living in Ghent. It's awesome. I rarely drive, we walk to all these good (and some not so good) restaurants, I'm close to the farmer's market (OMG fresh produce and poultry and all locally grown and cheap and YUM). The past several weeks, the Boy and I have been going to The VA Beach Rock Gym, with one of the PICU attendings, and I've discovered that my husband is actually Spider Man. We're going enough now that we've ordered our own climbing harnesses, and at our next pay check we'll likely order shoes. It's so much fun, even if the shoes do make your feet scream in pain. When not at the Rock Gym, I've been hanging out at Mount Trashmore to run stairs (3 sets of stairs, each goes up about 60 feet), and to walk the trails. Between those 2 things, I've gotten some ass-kicking workouts in the past several weeks. Good times. I feel better when my muscles are slightly sore and noodly.

One of the difficult things about living here is leaving my hairstylist. Helen has been doing my hair since I was in college; even in med school, I would drive back home to have her do my hair. She just does it right (even that last time when it turned orange in pieces). But I don't have time to drive 3 hours home to have my hair cut and colored, and I desperately need it cut and colored because oh sweet jeebus I'm looking like a cocker spaniel. So I'm having my hair done by a stranger for the first time in EIGHT YEARS next week, and I feel like I'm cheating on Helen.

The Boy is working his first 24-hour attending shift today, so wish him luck. I'm working my first shift in the pedi ED tomorrow, and that'll be fun. This afternoon I'm locking myself up to do some dictations. I should be able to knock them out pretty quickly. I hope.

All in all, things are good. Very good.

...or everything and the kitchen sink.

So the Boy and I were sitting on the couch, waiting to put a batch of cookies in the oven, when all of a sudden we hear a "pop" and small crash come from the kitchen. It sounded like a stack of pots falling over, except that there were no pots to fall over. Instead, our sink has decided to make a break from our countertop and completely disassociate from its granite bindings. In a fortunate coincidence, there was a paint can strategically located below the main pipe out of the sink, which is keeping the sing from crashing down completely and spilling the liquid contents everywhere. Yes, we had soapy water in the sink as the Boy was washing his cookie-making utensils. So behold! Our sunken sink.




At least our granite is pretty, right? The plumber will be here in about 20 mins. He's already said that he probably can't do anything tonight but will swing by and take a look at it, and then be back in the morning to fix it. We're getting pizza for dinner.

I'm now a pediatrics resident. I've got 2 calls down and everything. And let me just say; I love this program. It's such an amazing change to work with people who are generally happy people. Yes, I curse more than most of them (with the exception of my husband), and yes, I am still learning the pediatric ropes, and yes, sometimes I do miss the OR, but overall this is such a good change. My classmates are awesome, my patients are incredibly cute, and I love love love love living with the Boy. I do a lot of the cooking, he does a lot of the cleaning, and we both spoil the dog. This is an arrangement I can live with. And call? Wow. Call is SO MUCH BETTER. It's amazing the difference that a) having a reasonable patient load and b) having supportive senior residents makes. I mean, truly amazing. I may get done with call much later than I did with surgery, but I don't feel like ass all day long.

In other news, dear god in heaven my body is turning against me. Damn you, Jorge! I swear when I decide to go off birth control I had better get pregnant fast because these cramps suck. I'm going to go read in bed with a heating pad and call it a night.

As a bassoonist, I have the same part as the cellos in this damn song. There's nothing like soothing classical music to inspire firey burning anger in my heart.

I'm trying something new today. I've been wanting a pair of white pants. I know what you're thinking; Sarah, you're not a small girl, your ass isn't one that is meant for the most unforgiving pant color, and you're going to have to be very choosy with your underwear for this venture. And that's all true, but they're light and summery and bright and I live in a beach town now and I don't have to wear the white coat anymore and dammit, I want to try something new. So I went looking for white pants today. I found a pair of white chinos at J. Crew that seemed like they would work. Nice thick, heavy material, but they didn't have my size. I'm pretty reliably a size 10 regular length on the bottom these days, and they didn't have it. They did have a 12 short, however. So I tried those. And glory be, that was a good call. The 12s are long enough and big enough on me that the short length isn't an issue, and the extra room in the waist and butt is a good thing for white pants. They don't look see-through, and the panty line of doom has become much less of an issue. And they were $20! And there was 25% taken off at the register! And I had a gift card! Great success!

For my next trick, I'll actually wear these pants in public and attempt to not spill anything on them. But right now I'm just going to revel in the fact that I found them.

If smoky.

As many of you know, The Great Dismal Swamp is on fire. The Swamp is a really cool place, and unfortunately the fire has largely gone to the peaty bottom of the swamp, which means it's just smoldering away and without a prolonged rain, its likely to keep smoldering for most of the summer. It also means that this area is incredibly smoky. Lots of people are having respiratory problems, and it's sucked me into it. My eyes burn, my sinuses burn, and I'm a snotty, coughing mess. It's not cool. But oh well; I'm just glad I don't have asthma. Even the hospital smells like smoke, and for obvious reasons this means bad things for the kids with respiratory problems.

Other than that, life is good. My classmates are awesome, and it's amazing the difference between the way this program treats its residents verses my old program. We went on a cruise around Norfolk on a huge sailboat the other night, and Friday night a bunch of us went out. Even me. Yes, I went out. Really. And had fun. Yesterday, the Boy was actually with me (damn night shifts) so we went shopping for his graduation/house warming gift from his mom. His new dresser not only looks nice, but the drawers will actually close and that'll be a nice change from his current set of dressers. Last night was date night, and he cooked for me. I could get used to this whole married-and-living-together thing.

Today is gym (with my glasses, boo), some chore-type things, and perhaps a run to the mall and the grocery store. Mostly, I've got big plans to lounge. Tomorrow is my last day of orientation, Tuesday is my first day as a kiddie doctor and also my first day of call. Get this I don't have any cross-cover on this rotation! How awesome is that!! Maybe my perceptions are a bit warped, but this seems so very doable.

I think we may officially be unpacked. 1 more trip to the box recycling center tomorrow and I'm going to call it sufficient for the parental visit this weekend. Things aren't up on the walls and the guest room still has many, many boxes in it (sorry, Erik), but I have an idea of where to put things and the boxes are at least neatly arranged and contain things that we don't want/need out at the moment. Good lord we have a lot of books.

On that note, the Boy and I are both book people. We love books. We collect books. Books find our way into our grubby little paws and we devour them as fast as we can. In both of our old places, it was not unusual to find stacks of books piled on anything resembling a flat surface. We're very possessive about our books. And I have to say, it's very strange and a bit disquieting to see my books mingling on a shelf with someone else's books. On the other hand, I have a whole (free!) new library of books to read.

Oh, and crisis with wedding pics averted. The website has been re-released for a month, and we're going to pick out pics to buy and wedding album pics. Good stuff. I really do love our photographer.

Fuck. I think our wedding online photo album has expired and I never got to order any pictures. Hopefully, this can be resolved. I also still don't have our wedding album.

Fuck.

I firmly believe that there is a special place in hell for the administrators of the Virginia DMV. Going to any DMV is a painful process, but the Virginia DMV is especially heinous.

Bastards. Makes me want to just keep everything registered in NC.

The house (squee, it still makes me squee) is coming along well. We're close enough to being unpacked that it seems like the end is in site. Which is good because the family--both of them-- descends on Friday afternoon.

Tomorrow means standing in line at the DMV (groan), getting my TB mask (groan), and more unpacking. I am going to take a break and cook dinner for the Boy. It really is nice living with him, even if thanks to his schedule I'm not seeing him as much as I'd like. Stupid night float.

On the other hand, I love living here. It's been smoky thanks to the wildfires in NE NC, but I really do like living here. This is a beautiful time to be in this city; there are tons of festivals and concerts, and in this neighborhood everyone walks or bikes. It's beautiful.