Chicago thus far

I’ve been here only twice before: first for my written boards, then for my orals. Yeah, they couldn’t manage to hold them both in a two-day interval. If they had, how could they have justified charging separately for the two tests? (Solution: charge double for the two. We still would have saved a bundle on plane fares and hotel costs.)

My impressions from before: not much. When you’re taking your boards, you’re in high stress mode. Forever after, you tell yourself, hospitals and potential employers will want to know if you passed the first time through. (In reality? Not so much.) So all I remember is that Chicago and That Big Lake Out There are remarkably beautiful, and that I wouldn’t mind coming back under less stressful circumstances.

And here I am, twelve years later.

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The Coriolis effect

I feel crappy. What did I eat today that had beef in it? And what have I done with my life? Where am I going, and who will I be when I get there?

Ah, forget it. Check out Wikipedia’s page on Common Misconceptions (hat tip to my son. How does he find these things?) Should I add one in the health category: ear wax isn’t really wax?

This one was interesting:

The Coriolis effect does not determine the direction that water rotates in a bathtub drain or a flushing toilet. The Coriolis force is relatively small; it appears over large scales (like weather systems) or in systems such as the Foucault pendulum in which the small influence is allowed to accumulate over time. In a bathtub or toilet, the flow of the water over the basin itself produces forces that dwarf the Coriolis force. In addition, most toilets inject water into the bowl at an angle, causing a spin too fast to be affected by the Coriolis effect.

Need a fact which will win you drinks at the bar? Here:

The Earth’s North Magnetic Pole is not a north magnetic pole, but rather a south magnetic pole. Since a compass needle is a magnet whose “North” end has standard north polarity, and since magnetic poles are attracted to their opposites, the compass needle points to the magnetic south pole of the Earth’s magnetic field. Therefore, the Arctic pole is a south-type pole, while the Antarctic pole is a north-type pole.

You’re welcome.

D.

Nothing tonight

I’m too busy watching all of the Sarah Palin Vlogs.

THANKS, Corn Dog.

D.

Live blogging tonight

If I can snag the laptop from Karen, I’ll try to go live at around 8 Pacific. If you don’t see me by 8:30, some new disaster has befallen me.

***

Jake’s playing Spore right now. Not exactly a huge run on the game locally; I arrived at Circuit City just past their opening, realized I had forgotten my wallet, and got back at around 10:25 AM. They still had plenty of games. I even saved $30 on the purchase. How, you ask? By not buying the deluxe $79.99 version, of course!

***

Made a run to the mall today for socks. One new thing about this area is anonymity. In Crescent City and Brookings, I couldn’t go anywhere without running into people who knew me (patients and hospital staff, mostly). Here? No one knows me.

It’s not good, it’s not bad. Just different.

D.

I’m looking at this house’s last remaining nest of chaos.

It’s nearly done. Three weeks after moving to Santa Rosa, it’s nearly done. I can walk through the house without seeing a single box or orange packing label, all the pets are happy, everything is in its place (well, except for the flatware which never materialized. And the toaster oven. And the blender. And Karen’s super-duper-expensive paring knife), and there’s a minimum of clutter overall.

I’m in the computer room, which is a bit vague because nearly every room up here is a computer room. (more…)

Limited services

. . . until my life settles down.

Quickie: over at Daily Kos, Granny Doc rants on the idiocy of political correctness. It’s a great read. Snip:

I was once chastised, right here, for referring to myself as an Old Woman!  Aside from the simple fact that I am, indeed, an old woman – having outlived 99% of all of the women born on this planet through out human history – the correction came from a very young woman who imagined the term to be insulting.  Fear of aging, a common source of reality denial in our culture, made any reference to my own age an intrusion of reality that was denounced.

Reminds me of how I once received hate mail for a caption on a photo of me and Karen that I used on my medical website. This was a great photo (one of my favorites) of the two of us together when I was in med school. The caption read, “The proprietors, before they turned old and gray.” The hate mailer accused me of buying into our youth-worshiping society blah blah blah. Jeez.

D.

Jake’s question

If you could talk to one person who has died, whom would you choose and why?

I chose Gilda Radner and Philip K. Dick — Gilda because I miss her, PKD because I suspect that conversation would have to be memorable.

D.

A non-kvetching post

I don’t handle moves well, as my emotionally bruised family will attest. Same thing happened when I left University of Texas in ’98. I think it’s the loss which drags me down the most; and, ultimately, it’s the kind of people I come from — people who focus on the empty part of that half-filled cup. So it takes a conscious effort on my part to turn my attention to what’s good about this change.

Kenney Mencher has a series of half-empty/half-full. Check it out.

Here are some of the good things about moving to Santa Rosa . . .

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It’s all over

‘Cept the unpacking.

I like the unloading phase best of all. Something nice* about filling an empty structure with all of our junk, then watching the new home take shape. Something especially nice about coming in $1400 below the estimate because I was that successful at throwing stuff out, selling stuff, and giving stuff away. Give yourself a pat on the back, Walnut.

I like the loading phase least of all. It was rough seeing the office emptied, stripped of its me-ness, turned into a generic office; and my home? Jeez. Now it really looks like a warehouse.

Maybe I’m more Zen than I give myself credit. I thought I would feel more sadness leaving the Brookings house behind, but all I felt was stress, anxiety over the upcoming drive, and fatigue. No tears over inanimate objects, even if it is a house we’ve lived in for the past eight years.

How was the drive with Noah’s Ark? Not bad. The cats were good about not pooping or peeing, thankfully, so the only bad smells came from the ferrets. I screwed things up, though. Karen had told me to lower the back seat so that the trunk would get air conditioned, too. I’m not sure this would have worked — the cat carrier is awfully big, so I don’t know if it would have fit with the seat down. And I remember being so delighted to squeeze the cat carrier, degu carrier, and ferret carrier in the back seat that I didn’t stop to consider other packing strategies.

But I think the tarantulas and poison dart frogs came through it all okay. I haven’t checked every single tarantula cage, but every one I’ve checked is viable.

Now we’re wondering what to do with the ferrets, or as we call them in California where ferrets are illegal**, guinea pigs. We’re renting, so we don’t want to let the ferrets poop just anywhere. They’re resolutely resistant to litter box training, too, unless they’re in their own cage. Can’t keep ’em in the cage all the time, though, since they get stir crazy.

They’re leash trained, so one solution would be to let them walk around in the back yard. But it seems somehow criminal to restrain their natural rambunctiousness.

My preferred solution: we watch them like hawks while they’re out and pick them up the instant they head for a corner to poop. Pop ’em back into the cage and let them use their litter box. They might poop on our clothes or on the floor, but at least we’ll know where it is so that we can clean it up instantly. And at least they won’t poop in the corner, where they’ll stain the base boards.

Tomorrow the unpacking begins. We’re spending tonight in a hotel (hence my internet connection). After this, I’ll be out of touch until we get our internet back. See ya!

D.

*And MANLY.

**But don’t tell PetCo, where they sell a full line of ferret products.

Stressed

Portrait of the Blogger as a Middle-aged Man:

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