This morning we are driving back to Mexico with our new (old) car driven by my sister-in-law, a trooper who wasn’t daunted by the drive (and staying for a mini-vacation). This is my/our first caravan into Mexico. I hate caravans. The drive is stressful and long enough by yourself much less worrying/coordinating about/with someone else. These last 4-5 days have totally and completely beat me up in every way. It’s nothing bad, but I’m tired of seemingly simple–even mundane–things like moving completely kicking my ass. I am so ready to get back and [re]start my life again with a new semester in one week.
I’ll be offline for a few more days still, but I have lots to share afterwards once I FINALLY get quiet time (and back in my house, I hope I can at least get some) to write and reflect.
It is now 01:02:03 on 04/05/06. Enjoy the next 99.99999% of your millenium. 
(The Fire Dog, specifically) — Happy Chinese New Year! I miss being in Houston where I could take part in festivities (usually that means just eating amidst deafening firecrackers in the street, seeing a dragon dance or two), but I’ll deal, especially with an ethics exam tomorrow.
I was actually born in the Year of the Dog, and here are some characteristics (as well as my year) as per the Chinese Zodiac:
The Dog is a giving, compassionate personality. He offers kind words, support and advice to friends and family. He is a listener, always available to lend an ear or a shoulder to a friend in need. They have extremely high standards and expect a lot of themselves and of others. They are loyal and hold a strong outlook about the direction they want their life to take. Once they have committed themselves, there is little to no turning back. They are bold, unafraid to disagree out loud about anything they feel is unjust or unfair. They are easily stressed if a plan does not go accordingly. They find it difficult to relax when there are things to be done.
Guilty as charged! Have a prosperous new year!
So my semester already began, and thankfully it’s been a whole lot of “ho hum.” I shouldn’t say that entirely, but in contrast to how the last semester started (probably intended to be a boot camp ground-you-into-the-dirt-like-maggots-style “Welcome!”), I can get used to this lighter load while it lasts.
My original goal was to switch to WordPress for this blog before school started, but as usual, life–particularly Bob Vila-style domestic chores got in the way. So, I’ll be doing that this week, most likely.
FOR THOSE WITH USERNAMES/PASSWORDS TO THIS SITE:
Sorry, but no usernames will be available for general registration anymore. I did this because I wanted to encourage those that knew me in real life to follow more private details that were not super-secret but not necessarily information I’d want to share with the entirety of the Internet. I’ve decided to devote this blog entirely with what I want to write publicly and nothing more — I’ll have another solution when the time comes for more private writing, but of course, that information would be private. 
So again, thanks to all for reading and I hope to make your experience here better really soon.
The 2005 Medical Weblogs Award nominations have begun! If you have a favorite blog, now is the time to go put in the nomination. Look to this link to see if your favorite(s) is already there. There is a “nominate now” link or just go here to the comments section. Believe it or not, a lot of awesome sites that I read are not yet on the list. I will be adding a few more nominations for some that I really think are egregiously missing, but make haste for adding yours, since the nominations close as of Dec 30th.
I can’t compete with the big dogs for ANY of the categories, especially as a lowly 1st year with not much clinical experience, but I certainly wouldn’t pull a Sean Penn and refuse to accept a nomination if one were so inclined. 
Seriously, if you have any medical blogs you like to read and they are not on the list, show them some love already. Blogging is harder than it looks. ha!
Um, I was trying to update Gallery, the program that powers the photos section on my site, because it wasn’t making thumbnails properly and I thought upgrading would fix it. As is typical, I tried doing the upgrade while doing 3 other things and something went royally wrong, giving back a PHP stack trace and the like. Did I make a backup? Of course I did! Did I make a complete backup including my database? Of course not!
So anyway, hopefully I’ll get it fixed. I shudder at the prospect of either spending the time to isolate the problem (now that my database is probably hosed from the aborted half-upgrade) or spending the time/bandwidth to re-upload all the photos. *sigh*
Thank you to all our men and women in the armed services who are serving or who served our country in this way. You are doing a job I could never do in a hundred years for many reasons. Courage, patriotism, and self-sacrifice takes many forms, but today we honor yours and rightfully so.
My grandfather was a World War II veteran who passed away three years ago. My father-in-law is also a WWII veteran, and today I think of them.
It was a good sports day: the Green Bay Packers (which were embarassingly at 0-4) beat the Saints 52-3. I don’t want to hear about the Packers being a has-been team. Yes, our defense sucks, but the losses of the last three games added up to a measly six points–it was just a slow start. They need to get their asses in gear if they are going to have a decent shot at the playoffs, though. But still, 52?! That’s nearing basketball score territory.
Another awesome win was the Houston Astros beating the Atlanta Braves in a record-making 18 innings. Roger “Rocket” Clemens came through as a reliever in the 15th inning to pitch three shut-out innings on a day he wasn’t even supposed to pitch! Incredible. Now the ’stros face the Cardinals in the NLCS. I would have said if the Astros got this far, they’d lose to St. Louis easy, but after how deep everyone went this last game, I’m not so sure. Play ball!
Oh yeah, and the Dallas Cowboys beat the Eagles. Not a huge Cowboys fan, but they are better to watch now that they have a halfway decent QB. The best part of the game was watching McNabb constantly go to ground. Sweet.
Hello everybody, I’m Raul, Rico and Claudia’s cousin. I’ll write an about page soon, but to the subject I wanted to comment about:
Six Flags has officially announced that it will close ASTROWORLD at the end of 2005 and sell it. http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/front/3350688
It seems that the value of the land is now more than the operational profit of the park itself. So it will probably be razed in order to sell it to future owners. I will sob uncontrollably when I drive by and see a freaking Super Wal mart and Best Buy on the site wherer I forged many childhhood memories.
Don’t get me wrong, I in a way I understand. Land inside, or close to the inner loop in houston, is very coveted, so I can reluctantly accept the decision in a cold, calculated sense. Sentiment don’t pay the bills, and tranditional theme parks aren’t the ‘it’ thing for kids anymore.
Hell, even the nuns with the St. Joseph’s CHRISTUS group here in houston have decided recently to sell the long lived downtown St. Joseph’s charity hospital here and sell to private organizations because they can’t pay the bills and the land is worth too damn much. The nuns basically said that they can only perform charity if they can afford it. Unfortunately, the hospital depends on money from the church, and with the recent sex scandals ands subsequent lawsuits depleting some, ahem, coffers, from what I understand that broke the camel’s back and they had to sell. Good news is that I understand that it is most likely to be sold to another health organization that is private in nature and continue as a health care provider, but that would pretty much mean a severe cut of providing health care to those who can’t afford it.
But that’s what we have underpaid medical residents for though, huh?
One of the reasons I’ve blogged so little in spite of tremendous activity in our lives here is the hassle we’ve had moving in. A lot of our stuff was damaged in the move from the movers and/or the assholes at the bridge when they inspected the truck (in our absence, since we left ahead of the moving truck of course), so we have to follow up with that. Plus, since moving in, we have had the following to deal with:
- Termites–live termites that were eating the baseboards (now fumigated)
- Fumigator drilled holes in floor to put treatment, left us with ripped apart walls baseboards and — duh — holes in the floor!
- Cabinet doors falling off under the sink
- Dripping sink faucet
- Dripping toilet
- Dripping water heater
- Unpacking, organzing
- Oven that turns off on its own, leaving gas to leak out after flame goes out
- Oven that has no rack
- Unpacking, organzing
- No 220V plug (or 30A gauge wiring) for our electric dryer; moreover, since we can’t plug it in and it’s a stackable unit, we can’t even verify much less use the washer, even though it should only really need the standard 110V plug
- Trying different means of cooling. We tried a prison-looking evaporative cooler that not only did not cool, but raised the humidity to 95% wherever we put it. We bought a little 8K BTU A/C for the computer/study room, but no standard windows means I’ve had to try different planks of wood for the A/C housing. We’ve been to Home Depot (thank God there is one and they cut wood to specifications) many times.
- Unpacking, organizing, cleaning
- Organizing, cleaning
- Cleaning
- etc.
It’s a much smaller apartment than what we’re used to, as well as the fact that Mexicans are pretty small in general, so doorways/hallways, kitchen width, etc. all made for little Mexicans, not 6′ 350lb Americans.
The good thing is that our landord, an soon-to-be-retiring engineer, is a very straight-up, honest and professional man who is committed to make sure that for his part, everything gets fixed. It’s just the inescapable reality that this is Mexico and in Mexico things move slow, 9:00 AM means sometime before lunch, and after lunch means 3:00 PM or after. It took 2 hours to go to Telmex to get our phone service ordered, about an hour or so for Megacable with a 10 day wait, and on and on. Laundry is piling up, and we are having to clean up not only after ourselves, but after all the men that are coming by to fix things.
I’m just thankful that people are coming by. I just want it overwith so I can relax.
July 9, 2006 6:44 am | 
