End of semester and vacation!
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Loading ...My semester is done! I actually made it through the semester, illnesses and all, incredible life stresses (more on that will be shared soon) and all with all As and Bs. I’m pretty excited. You may now refer to me as “eighth of Doctor,” thank you very much. 
With the end of the semester comes the wholly deserved, golden chalice of reward that we all look forward to (and as I’m constantly reminded by party-pooper types I know further in their careers, what will never again happen outside medical school): a near month of vacation! Woohoo! The immediate future is consumed not as much by celebration of semester’s end, but the frantic packing of moving from our crappy apartment to a nice, 3-bedroom house with room to spare. We’re stretching our budget taking it, but staying here was no longer an option, for reasons I shall, again, share later.
As for my vacation, I can’t help myself but make a to-do list, so I thought I’d share as I think “out loud” about what I plan to do:
- Rest.
- Spend time with friends and family that I miss.
- Never use the alarm clock.
- Finally spend lots of quality time with my wife without having to look at my watch or check the calendar for test dates
- Eat lots of food I miss. From Whataburger to family home cooking, to just about every damn “ethnic” food I can get my hands on, particularly when I travel again to Houston, I will be hitting Vietnamese, Thai and Lebanese places with a vengeance that will be the stuff of legends…”Mommy? Tell me the story when that crazy fat man took our restaurant hostage claiming to be a Mexican prisoner of war…please?”
- Relax.
- I’ll take my G5 home, brick that it is, so I can finally use the downtime to organize the my files into a workable “system” for future medical school semesters. One amasses mega amounts of info, and just throwing it into a “MedSchool” folder in your Documents folder, even if you subdivide by subject, simply doesn’t cut it when you add the CDs of info that other students pass around. Also, backup strategy for the above, because I already lost some documents.
- Sleep.
- Move my primary email to Gmail once and for all. I will still publish the same old address, I’ll just use GMail behind the scenes. Unlike before where I am chained to a computer in a computational lab or a work computer all day (vs. home), in med school I’m all over the place, and I want the mobile flexibility.
- Watch TV with impunity without shame or guilt, but that’s hard because even out of school, I feel I have to be doing something always, even if it’s just “self” projects.
- Shop for stuff that we can’t get here and load up, including stuff for our new house.
- Maybe, just maybe, spend some shadow O.R./clinic time with my surgeon friend/mentor
- Seriously, re-do this blog so that it resembles something usable. I think Drupal may not be the way to go after all, and I’ll probably go back to using WordPress since all my grand plans for a site that makes people weep with options and resources for music, culinary resources, medicine and science is just too much for me to handle if I want to be responsible scholastically.
- Read some fiction for a change
- Did I mention sleep?
As soon as the move is done, and loose ends are tied up, it’s a 14 hour road trip back to Texas through Mexico’s mountainous highways (mostly downhill, going from 5700 feet to ~5), probably starting Thursday of this coming week. I can’t wait!!
Medical School, Personal, Travel | enrico | 
December 11, 2005 1:15 am
By enrico, December 16, 2005 @ 12:01 am
I never learn
Thanks Punchberry!
I am commenting on my own post because after re-reading it, I realized that I’ve already exceeded the time I have on vacation if I did all the above…sheesh!
By Punchberry, December 13, 2005 @ 5:03 pm
Congratulations!
Congratulations on finishing another semester! I just found your blog for the first time, and really enjoyed reading it.