Back like a bad penny
To answer Rella’s question, yes, the house in Harbor is still standing. What’s that flowering plant that has blue blooms in basic soil, and red blooms in acidic soil (or vice versa)? Well that plant is HUGE now. Our rosemary bush is still huge, as are our cherry and deodora trees. Most exciting: my Monterey Pine is really tall.
Now that you know what my priorities are . . .
The new flooring looks great as does the new roof. Once we finish siding the garage, we’ll have all new siding and the place will be good as new. On the outside, anyway.
We had a fun vacation, took lots of pictures, but we’re exhausted and y’all will just have to wait.
Didja miss me?
D.
Busy day
* Got up at 7, had breakfast, went to the hospital, got lots of hugs. I’m missed.
* Picked up coffee for Karen, came back to the hotel, mobilized the family. Went out for more coffee for Karen.
* Took Jake to Stout Grove & Smith River. We took tons of photos but I don’t have the adapter for the computer, so you’ll have to wait a bit for our own photos. Here’s one I pinched from the net.
Mother Nature was good to us today. At Smith River alone, we saw a crayfish, dozens if not hundreds of tadpoles, and a similar number of tiny frogs. We found some ripe blackberries which were absolutely die and go to heaven. And the weather, though overcast, was perfect.
* Next we went to Harris Beach and did some rock-climbing and tide-pooling. I wasn’t feeling very well balanced so I didn’t follow Jake out onto the rocks. He, on the other hand, had his usual immortal fearlessness and went further and further out, snapping picture after picture. He knew full well that the tide was coming in but he had to shoot those pictures.
By the time he’d decided to come in, his return path was by no means obvious. With water so shallow, he could have returned in a few minutes if he’d been willing to get his feet wet.
“Don’t worry about it,” I called out to him. “If your feet get wet, we’ll pick up some shoes at Fred Meyer.”
He took this as a challenge. He would NOT let the ocean defeat him! And, indeed, my stubborn son (he gets that from his mother) made it back with dry feet.
* We returned to the hotel, dropped off some blackberries with Karen, and then drove down to Trees of Mystery to buy a redwood burl.
* And then back to the hotel to see if Karen had shaken her headache well enough to come with us to dinner. Sadly no. So Jake and I went out with my former receptionist to Thai House, one of two really great restaurants in Crescent City (the other is Sea West).
* After that, Jake and I drove back to Oregon to meet with Peter, the fellow who is taking care of our house. We had a big discussion over what to do with the place and came up with a plan of attack. And Jake had a long discussion with someone who is roughly his age (Peter’s daughter).
Long day. And now we’re winding down.
D.
So far, so good
No major disasters my last weekend on call. We escaped with our luggage, spent a four-hour holdover at SFO, then took a little 90 min jump to Crescent City. One of my old patients was on the plane, and he even remembered me by name.
Karen hung out at the hotel room while Jake and I had scampi at Beachcomber at the south end of town. First time we had seen the Pacific in two years. Not much has changed here; a little (very little) new construction along Hwy 101, but all in all, not much has changed. It’s overcast and the temp’s in the 60s. Just like the good ol’ days.
Tomorrow: the power Crescent City visit, complete with redwoods and the Smith River and tide pools and a visit to the hospital (hopefully) and dinner with our ex-employees and a trip to our house in Oregon to make sure it’s still standing.
UPDATE: It’s Tuesday morning . . . just got back from the hospital. They want to know when I’m coming back. Sad thing about my current employment situation is that I couldn’t moonlight even if I wanted to — I’m forbidden by contract. So this town (the two counties, really — Del Norte and Curry) will have to keep sending out their ENT patients, at least until the hospital can recruit another doc.
Got lots of hugs this morning. They love me, they really love me! Yes, I’m missed. And I miss them all, too.
D.
Asking for trouble. Begging for it.
I’ve invited my partner and his wife over for dinner tomorrow night. We’re leaving for vacation on Monday, and I want to show them how to feed the frogs.
But I’m on call.
And I have a patient in the hospital with a treacherous airway.
The gods are going to smite me, I just know it.
D.
You can find anything on the Internet
Karen’s watching a National Geographic program on heroin. She asked, “I wonder if it’s possible to purify street heroin.” We’re both former chemists, so we knew that it had to be possible to recrystallize purified heroin from a dirty solution. And we were right.
The link is to Erowid. Here’s Erowid’s mission statement:
Erowid is a member-supported organization providing access to reliable, non-judgmental information about psychoactive plants, chemicals, and related issues. We work with academic, medical, and experiential experts to develop and publish new resources, as well as to improve and increase access to already existing resources. We also strive to ensure that these resources are maintained and preserved as a historical record for the future.
Is that cool or what? I’ve crossed paths with Erowid before, and it sure looks like a fun site to browse, oh, I don’t know, next time you’re wondering whether you can get high smoking banana peels.
Not surprisingly, the instructions for purifying street heroin utilizes reagents that are easy to come by: hydrochloric acid (muriatic acid, which is available at pool supply stores), household ammonia, ethyl ether (the trickiest reagent — the author claims that some diesel starters are ethyl ether) and baking soda. It’s the sort of purification we did a dozen times or more in Organic Chemistry Lab.
Isn’t the Internet a remarkable thing? We take it for granted, but think about it: nearly everything is out there. Knowledge has become democratized to a degree; you still need the education and access to a computer.
When I was a kid, we had to walk up to the TV to change channels (and programs were black-and-white). People spent hundreds of dollars buying multi-volume encyclopedias for their kids. Bookstores like Vroman’s could order books for you if they didn’t have them on the shelves, but you had to count on the completeness of the local library’s card catalog to tell you what was out there.
In the 1960s, this heroin question might have been answerable by organic chemists and, perhaps, educated users who had received the knowledge by oral tradition. And now it’s just a click away.
D.
Inception
Jake and I saw Inception today, and while I liked the movie, it’s one of the trailers that really blew my mind.
They’ve made a movie about the creation of Facebook. No kidding. It’s called The Social Network and the trailer was about as thrilling as the title. While I enjoyed Jessie Eisenberg in Zombieland, I’m not following him to this execrable commercial-as-drama. What’ll be next, You’ve Got Gmail? Unless the Harvard students in this film develop a hunger for human brains, I’ll sit this one out.
But back to Inception. I almost didn’t see it because I happen to dislike Leonardo DiCaprio, or as he’s known in this household, Leonardo DiCrapio. He’s one of those actors (like Tom Cruise) who, for me anyway, always seems like he’s playing a role rather than living the character. Karen sat this one out because she’s even less forgiving than me — she thought his portrayal of Howard Hughes in The Aviator was lifeless.
Having seen the movie, I have one thing to say. Or rather, one thing to photoshop.
Just a few comments for now, since it’s late and I still need to play Civilization IV and kick some Incan ass. (Hey, they started it!) But first, if you haven’t read a review, here’s the movie in a nutshell: DiCaprio’s character (Cobb) and his band of technicians/psychologists/artists (they’re a bit of all three) can delve into a dreamer’s mind to extract secrets. They’re industrial espionage operatives, and they’ve been given a new job: to plant an idea, which in their parlance is known as inception. Cobb would rather not take this one on, since inception is either difficult or impossible (and, we come to learn, dicey emotional turf for him), but his employer, Saito, makes him an offer he can’t refuse. Pull this one off and Saito will fix some pending charges back home that prevent Cobb from returning to his family.
Hey, um . . . now, why couldn’t his family rejoin him in some extradition-less foreign country? Forget it, forget it. Suspend disbelief.
Some thoughts . . .
1. The movie has an interesting narrative structure. Not as ingenious as director Christopher Nolan’s earlier Memento, but still challenging. At one point in the movie, the dreams are nested four deep, so there are five layers of reality (one real one, four dream), and Nolan still manages to tell a clear story.
2. Which is not to say that the plot doesn’t have problems. Jake and I being Hoffmans, we promptly tore it apart not five minutes out of the theater.
Which is not to say that we didn’t still enjoy it.
3. Nolan wrote the screenplay, too, and he made superb use of a literary device known as resonance — repetition of a word or image (in Inception‘s case, some of both) to achieve depth and emotional punch. Marvelous work.
4. This movie is a smorgasbord of former child actors. Lukas Haas (remember the kid in Witness?) is here, as is Joseph Gordon-Levitt (“Third Rock from the Sun”). Ellen Page was in two TV shows as a kid: something called “Pit Pony” and another something called “Trailer Park Boys.” And Leonardo DiCaprio made his bones as a teenager in “Santa Barbara,” “Roseanne,” and “Parenthood.”
5. The science is bankrupt, inasmuch as Nolan perpetuates an old myth that time passes more slowly in dreams than it does in the real world. Did I say that right? In other words, five minutes in a dream equals one hour in the real world, something like that, and the deeper nested you are in dreams, the more the time dilation is magnified. Not a minor plot point — crucial, in fact.
A renowned sleep and dream researcher named William Dement determined something like 40 years ago that time passes at the same rate in dreams as it does in the real world. He did this by waking subjects up at a specified time following the onset of REM sleep and asking them to recount what they had experienced. Repeatedly, five minutes of dream time contained about five minutes worth of stuff, ten minutes encompassed ten minutes, and so forth.
But don’t let that spoil your enjoyment of the movie.
5. One thing I really, really liked: you know how in caper movies (think Raiders of the Lost Ark, for example), the premise and the characters are set up in the beginning with an action-packed caper holding plenty of near-disasters, but the final result is oh so slick? Well in Inception, the initial caper goes to hell and then gets worse. So refreshing. Also refreshing: it’s a movie about dreams, and yet Nolan avoided scenes with gratuitous sex and nudity.
That’s it for now . . . what did you think?
D.
Live anywhere & do well
We lost one of our ophthalmologists today — she’s heading up to the Bay Area to join a private practice. As I left her going away party, I told her that she’ll need to install a dry sauna into her home. She gave me a confused smile, so I added, “To remember us by. But you’ll also have to throw in some cow manure.”
That about sums up my son’s impression of Bako. It’s hot and half the time it smells of cow manure (or, for the sake of variety, garbage). He’s decided he wants to settle eventually in a place more like southwestern Oregon, where he grew up.
“Jake,” I told him, “the sad fact is, you’ll go where the jobs are.” And it is a sad fact. The climate here is miserable, the opposite end of the spectrum from the Pacific Northwest, but I’m happier here because the job is better. Not that I disliked my patients up north — they weren’t the problem. But down here I’m a part of something bigger than myself and it feels good.
And if climate change would bring the Pacific Ocean to our city limits, and also give us an average summer’s day of 70F, I’d really be happy, but I fear climate change ain’t heading in that direction.
I told Jake that the key, the Holy Grail, would be a live-anywhere job that (A) he enjoys, (B) makes him a good living, and (C) cannot be outsourced. The only things that came to mind were “screen doctor” and “bestselling novelist,” but those are things I might enjoy. Jake dislikes writing (though he is good at it). Consultancy jobs satisfy all but (C), unless Jake were to super-specialize in just the right niche topic.
As much as I hate to admit it, medicine satisfies a lot of these requirements (unless you want to live in an in-demand area like San Diego, the Bay Area, or Seattle — but even then the jobs are there, provided you’re willing to make some compromises). I doubt Jake would want to go into medicine, but I must observe that the same thing that attracted me to medicine is still true: he would never be out of work.
It’s a harsh, unpredictable world out there. Just as for my patients I wish I had a crystal ball, I wish I had one for my son, too.
D.
Creatures of meme
How many can you recognize?
Too tired to blog right now. I come home, cook dinner, go to the gym, come home again, crash.
D.