my "golden weekend" was spent in grand rapids. SIGH I had such a good time :) had so much good food too. Homecooked japanese meal on friday, a nice meal at a cafe the next day, bombay cuisine today :) yum. Thanks guys for the fun times, it's always great to go back to recharge. Hopefully I'll see y'all again soon...my next golden weekend perhaps? :) ¶ 20:26

Sunday night at home is always a time to reflect. :) So reflect I shall...mirror, mirror on the bedroom door where was my life at this time before :P heehee whatever...

I was at the steiner house last night for their beginning of the semester bash and realized that with the exception of Alexey, the entire house had changed (turned over as they say). Everyone else that i had lived with in that house was gone...it's an eerie sort of feeling. It's as if the house I had lived in was gone. I spent my first year in Cleveland in that house, it was the best of my 3 yrs here so far, and I dearly miss those friends I made and the times we had. hehe from the underwear Abba party I walked in on, to getting speakers dropped on my head by Deepa, all the dinners we cooked and shared together, late night study sessions and massages in the dining room, and yes even all the controversies that silly sri lankan caused. I go back to that house and all the memories flood back, but it's not the same, it's a different house with different people even though we're still dancing to the same track of songs in the living room. i wonder if we'll all ever meet again. ¶ 21:26

http://theunderweardrawer.homestead.com/obgyn1.html hahaha so true so true :) It's nice to know that the hell you go through sometimes as a med student is a fairly universal experience :) This ob/gyn comic strip is so accurate in so many ways that it's scary :)

On a very different note....here's an interesting essay:
Have peace activists ever stopped war? ¶ 12:19

Great ending to a long day. met up with some friends to watch a silly movie (shaolin soccer) and hangout. It's seems like ages since I'd last seen these guys. Turned my day around, so thanks guys. Hope I dream of yellow tulips tonight...I love yellow tulips.
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ack it's such a crazy night. there's not a resident in sight and i'm left in the meantime to answer questions from the nursing staff, consulting docs, and deal with issues that come up with our patients on the floor on my own! this sucks...I have no clue what i'm doing...i put in random orders and make the best decisions that I can about what they throw at me and if i'm lucky my wandering around the floor will lead me to someone i can get to approve and sign these orders. podiatry comes in and tells me to get 1 patient ready for surgery tomorrow, so...take care of food/fluids/imaging/consults. ACK. to top things off my new intern never fills me in on plans for my patients so i'm perpetually trying to catch up and left looking like a fool on rounds b/c he hasn't bothered to mention changes/new orders. argh. Well half the time anyways...the other half of the time he leaves me to manage my patients on my own ... who knows what the heck i'm doing to these people.. ¶ 19:41

hmm...so i was with my brother at the asian store a few weeks ago when we ran across this fish..it's been ages since I've seen it :). We used to have so many of them in the water back home...I remember stepping on one once, lol. Such an odd looking fish...kinda somewhere between a stingray and a flounder...with it's eyes both on top and to the side like a fish sliced in half, flattened, with it's one eye shifted over to the otherside. weird looking, but really good eating :P ¶ 18:51

hospitals are strange places late at night...rather quiet and eerie. Can't quite explain the feeling...everything that happens in teh wee hours of the morning seems strange...oddly enhanced. Maybe b/c I'm more involved w/direct pt care late at night since half the staff is gone. The rooms are all dark with coughing, snoring, restless pts...since I'm here at the VA there's always the occasional moaning or screaming or muttering pt whose doors u quickly pass. All teh visitors are gone and the nurses are mostly at their stations talking and watching blinking flashing monitors. I spend these late evenings wandering around trying to figure out how to manage my cases or trying my hand at procedures like lavages and blood draws or sitting in the company of rather loopy and chronically sleep deprived residents. ¶ 12:45

There are days when I get to the hospital and just hate to be there...usually it wears off with the first patient I see, but the baseline "i'm just so sick of going through this" remains somewhere just under the surface. Doesn't seem to be too uncommon judging from conversations I've had with fellow students. I know it's almost over "technically" seeing that I graduate in 2007, but residency starts soon after. Thank goodness for friends, but it's rough when most of those around me are going through the same thing, noone really has much time. *sigh* Off to the VA for another long call day. ¶ 06:45

WEll I'm back in Cleveland, can't say it's great to be back, but I can't complain about the welcome I received either :P. funny story...I went over to the Steiner house last night to say "hello" to whoever may be left around for the holidays. I was greeted at the door very enthusiastically by 5 boys, lol. TUrns out they have been deprived of all female company since Dec. 29 when the last girl in the house left for break. So I was their honored guest as the first girl of 2006 in their lives, hahaha, they even put a note across the dining room blackboard for me, gave me a cold bottle of german beer, and entertained me for the next 2 hrs. This morning I woke up and found emails from Diana, guess I'm the hot topic of the steiner house listserve for visiting these poor deprived boys. :P Who'd a thunk it. Oh well, the evening was fun in either case, made me laugh and being Cleveland not so bad *wink* but i do hope those girls return soon, those guys are going batty all alone having to cook and clean that huge house on their own. ¶ 06:55

Happy New year folks :) some photos from our Islands of Adventure/Universal Studios evening...Hello 2006...
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