thankful.

i have so much to be thankful about this year, though i may complain. i am thankful for all of the babies who have arrived safely this month (and that their moms are safe, too!). i'm thankful that i am not spending the holiday in the hospital like some of my patients are. i am also thankful i am not spending the day in the hospital like some of my coresidents are.


callie is thankful for the chair that i dragged out of the trash room, which she uses as her combination bed/jungle gym/scratching post. i am so thankful that her fur is growing back that i let her scratch it. (plus, i got it in the trash room.) i am also thankful that we did not get bedbugs after that adventure.


i hope you all have lots to be thankful for! happy thanksgiving!

flashback.

i want to address something i saw at at the mall the other day. what the hell is this ? are we in 1988? is the gap really selling acid-washed-stirrup-legging-jeans? where's my debbie gibson tape?

more disturbing, perhaps, is that i can kind of see how it would be practical to wear them under a knee-high boot. kind of.

share your thoughts, please. i don't know how to feel.

pea soup gets such a bad rap.

you know what i love in the fall? a big bowl of soup. i made some soup tonight, to distract myself from the horror of vacation ending. ugh, what a pile of papers awaits in the office, to be sure. anyway, you, too could make this soup. it involves an onion, 4-5 carrots, and a package of baby portabello mushrooms chopped up and sauteed in olive oil for a while. with a few cloves of garlic. then, some curry powder (6 teaspoons from the indian store will make you a fairly spicy soup). then, add a little water - just to cover the veggies - and simmer for a while. then, take about half the vegetables and blend them in the food processor, and then dump them back in the pot. with, oh, let's say 6 more cups of water. add a pound of dried split peas. and simmer the heck out of it, adding more water as needed. salt and pepper as you please. mmmm. hearty fall soup. maybe next week will be squash soup!

ok, it may not look like much. but i liked it. enough to make it twice.

you know what really made my night, though? this pillsbury bread i found at the shaw's:

is it bakery bread? no, not exactly. does it have a touch of hydrogenated oil? yes, even though it claims 0 grams of trans fats. is it a glycemic nightmare? i suppose. is it pretty awesome to pull a piping hot loaf of bread out of the oven with essentially no effort? yes, yes it is.

so lazy.

sorry to be so absent for so long. mostly i don't have much to report. i took step 3 last week, then i went on vacation. part of the time i was in sunny FL, pina colada in hand, but a lot of the week looked like this:

in case you can't tell, this is me with both cat and laptop on my lap, watching movies from netflix. with parker posey in them. actually, it was kind of awesome. back to work tomorrow! next vacation in t-2.5 months.

south beach, bringin' the heat.

in an effort to keep my reading relevant, and on the heels of reliving the gilded age in newport, i decided to head next to miami, the closest i could get to cuba without violating embargoes and/or my love of capitalism, and (re)read the old man and the sea.

ok, fine, that's not why i went to miami, but i did go to miami (and west palm beach) this past week. nothing like florida in august! let's be honest, west palm beach was kind of a letdown. i forgot that it's made for old people and golfers. the nightlife was... nonexistent. we thought we'd missed the downtown, but it turned out we drove right through it. oh well. i have higher hopes for palm beach in the winter when it's... POLO SEASON!

i did, however, really enjoy the John D. MacArthur Beach State Park. right in the midst of condo-filled north palm beach, it's got a beautiful beach (Photo taken through my sunscreen-streaked phone):



with nary a tar ball in sight, and beautiful, warm, clear water. i wish my skin were better suited for the sun, but after two hours and several applications of spf 50-80, i was spotting new freckles by the second. and i had to go. to get to and from the beach, you cross this beautiful freshwater area, full of all kinds of waterfowl, giant catfish, and schools of other fish jumping out of the water. they promised manatees, but i didn't see any.



i also was too hot to take advantage of the nature trails, but i'm sure they were lovely... and a bargain with admission at $5 a carload! seriously, if you find yourself in the area i would recommend stopping by.

and, while i am a long-avowed hater of florida stemming from the Great Blistering Sunburn of 2001, i did really like miami. it had such a nice latin american feel with empanadas in the bakery and ... the mojitos, oh the mojitos. darnit, massachusetts, why'd you have to go outlaw happy hour? what's so wrong about 2-for-1 pint-sized mixed drinks at 11 am? not a darn thing. in the end, this tried-and-true new englander almost became a convert. but, i had a little friend waiting for me at home (and a pesky commitment to residency) so here i am.



[in the interest of full disclosure, i did start the old man and the sea, but i haven't gotten very far.]

addendum: the park is on jack nicklaus drive, and while i do know who jack nicklaus is, i have to ask... does anyone else picture this when they hear that name?


... anyone?

book report.

true to form, it's mid-late august and i am just hammering out my first summer reading book - the great gatsby.



did i even read books in high school? what was i doing? i remember barely being interested enough to keep the characters straight, and vaguely confusing jordan and daisy. i don't even know what was going on. but what a great story! i feel like the writing was really... vivid. or something? i just felt like i was really in the valley of the ashes, you know? or on gatsby's lawn staring off at that green light. (pardon. while i used to be a very literate person and even know how to say things like "organic metaphor" in spanish, i know mostly write in medical style. which is to say, almost entirely lacking in subjects for sentences. so much for that liberal arts education.) but my point was that i got way more out of it the second time around. also, reading all about the gilded age dovetailed perfectly with my trip to newport this weekend for a wedding. so pretty. such gorgeous houses. such a gorgeous wedding! (congrats, amy!)



also, check out this video from the times. this looks like so much fun! i don't care if nobody is under 50, i want to join them.

next up, old man and the sea.

summer reading!

probably, you hated summer reading. i have to tell you that my first experience with summer reading was horrible. i was in between 8th and 9th grade, gearing up to leave tiny st. mary's school for Public School. i wasn't sure what happened in Public School, but i was pretty sure that people lit things (or people) on fire and gangs roamed the halls, preying on the weak. or so they said in catholic school. anyway, i was pretty scared about the kind of crowd i'd be running with in (nerd alert) Honors English, Honors Global Studies, and Honors Earth Science. and what would i wear without uniforms to fall back on? (answer: flannel shirts and overalls. i know.) and what if everyone knew more than me? if i had no friends? one thing i hadn't thought to worry about though. nobody told me about the summer reading! and one day, in august, my horseback riding friend who was already a public school ruffian mentioned summer reading and i was like, what the heck are you talking about? a downward spiral of anxiety and defeat ensued, but i went to the library, found my five books (five!) and hammered them out before school started.

after that (nerd alert) i have to admit i kind of liked summer reading. and think of all the classic books i read! i think i underappreciated them. sure, the great gatsby and the old man and the sea are slim novels with a fairly limited vocabulary. but did f. scott fitzgerald really write for acne-ridden 14 year-olds in hormonal overdrive? no he did not.

so, my point. there is a lovely little theater near me called the strand theatre that on monday nights in the summer has "monday night classics". this monday's feature was to kill a mockingbird. i was in the hospital, so i couldn't make it, but it got me thinking. i know that i read that book a million years ago, but what was it even about? and then...

1. i should do something more meaningful than updating facebook or watching whole seasons of 30 rock.
2. i've been meaning to read more.
3. but nothing too serious.
3a. definitely nothing medical.
4. and i hardly ever use my library card.
5. and i have that $20 barnes and noble gift card.

and so i am going to reinstate summer reading. i think i'd like to start with gatsby. and to kill a mockingbird. maybe some john steinbeck. so many options.

tell me, what would you reread in your free time?