Potter Completed

I just finished Harry Potter today, after spending too much of this last week reading instead of working on an upcoming presentation. That's OK, I still have 2 weeks to do it.

The last 2 Harry Potter books I didn't enjoy quite as much. Book 5, The Order of the Phoenix, I just got tired of Harry being mad at everyone. While Book 6, The Half-Blood Prince, was good, I wasn't drawn into it like I had been by the earlier books in the series. Subsequently I was a touch guarded in my enthusiasm coming up to this release. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, however, gripped me at the beginning of the book and pulled me through with a ferocity that hardly let me attend to my other responsibilities, like eating. It was great, including lots of intrigue, combat, excitement, mystery, and never being certain how it was going to end. In short, it included everything J.K. Rowling should have included in the finale of the series. She also answered all remaining questions and I believe truly ended the series. In short, an A+ novel.

Outside of the wonderful world of Harry Potter, I'm up at Mom and Dad's for the weekend. They are almost all packed up to move to Morgantown in a little over a week. Once they leave I won't be coming up here any more and will need to find new things to do for weeknds. But I'm glad for them, this church has been really difficult for Dad and at this point they're very optimistic about the new church. Also the Morgantown church has worked it out so they will now be providing health insurance for Mom and Dad, so financially it looks like it'll work out ok.

New Computer

I just got a new laptop, it's pretty cool. I'd been talking about it for a while, trying to decide exactly what I wanted and when I should get it. I did a good bit of research, and compared prices for hours up in the NICU while working the night shift. So much infact that I think the resident I was working with got tired of looking over to see what I was doing and seeing laptop info on the screen. But I ordered it in June, it was shipped June 28, and arrived at the parent's house on July 2. That's what, 4 days transit. Not too bad even for any shipping, but they shipped it from Shanghai, so I was really quite impressed.

My new laptop is an HP and has some cool gimmicky stuff in it. There's a built in webcam and a memory card slot, those are cool. But the best part is the fingerprint reader. I love it :). I now can log into my email with a simple swipe of my finger. I guess it's still a security risk if someone steals the laptop because my passwords are stored on it, but it seems pretty safe unless they cut off my finger at the same time. And in that case I have bigger things to worry about than a few lost passwords.

Otherwise I am happily off my NICU night rotation. I don't have another month of nights until January. My next difficult rotation is in September when I do the PICU again. For now however I'm doing a Genetics elective, which is pretty light.

Weird Al

Tonight Becca and I went to the 'Weird Al' Yankovic concert. Here's a picture of me in rapt anticipation of the upcoming concert. As you'll notice I decided to wear a shirt sufficiently in line with the nerdiness of the event.

Once we got there we went and bought a t-shirt. After all, I needed a Weird Al shirt!

Then we went up to our seats and waited. Clap! Clap! Clap! Clap!........Nothing......Clap! Clap! Clap! Clap!.......Nothing........This went on for 30 minutes before Weird Al came out. But I did learn something exciting during this time. Becca told me that going to this concert was the single nerdiest thing she'd ever done. And then, to make it better, I asked her to name the nerdiest thing she'd ever done without me, and she said taking the SAT! She's making a lot of progress toward full nerdiness and I find that quite exciting. :)

Then at 8 it finally happened. Weird Al came out. We then were treated to 2 hrs and 20 min of Weird Al. It was heavenly. We went through most of the songs on the newest album, and many of his older ones. In between many of his songs he played video clips, predominantly from Al TV episodes, including many "celebrity interviews." If you don't know what I mean, look on You Tube sometime and I'm sure you'll find some of them. The videos gave him time to change into various outfits during the concert. For example, he had on Obi-Wan's robs for the Star Wars Saga and Yoda (yes, he did it!) I loved every minute of it. Weird Al is seriously the coolest nerd in the world. That and he's especially active and highly entertaining to watch.

He ended the night doing an encore, which was his long song Albuquerque. It seemed like the perfect way to end the concert.

Also, Ive been trying to decide where this fits in my list of favorite concerts. Before this, I'd say my favorite concert was DC Talk. They put on a good show. However, at this point I have to say Weird Al is my favorite concert. There is simply nothing he does that I don't love.

For those of you who will be going to see him later this summer, get excited. You're in for a very good show!

Teddy Bear Cholla (Choya)

Ok, I know this is a little after the fact and my reading audience (all 4 of you), certainly know this story. However, considering the pain involved, I just had to post it anyway.

I went hiking with Becca this last time I was down there in Sabino Canyon. We've gone there before but this time we did a new hike for us called Blackett's Ridge. Its a difficult hike with a round trip of 6.2 miles. Here's a panoramic picture from the top.





On the way up we stopped to take a picture of ourselves. It was on a nice flat rock overlooking Tucson. After we took the picture I went to push myself up with my left hand and pushed it onto a teddy bear cholla, seen here. As you can see from a distance it looks soft and fluffy, thus the name. Well, trust me, its alternative name, the Jumping Cholla, is more descriptive because this innocent enough looking plant drops small cactus balls which are full of sharp needles. Those needles lodged themselves into my fingers and did not want to let go. We couldn't get the cactus off my hand until another hiker took two rocks, sandwiched the cactus between the rocks and ripped it away, leaving some of the needles still sticking in my fingers which we then had to pull out individually. They hurt. Just to make me feel better Becca took a picture of the offending cactus segment for posterity's sake.

When we got home we looked up the cactus to find the name. On a later search I found this last picture which is an electron microscope picture of a teddy bear cholla needle showing thousands of little barbs on each needle which made them harder and more painful to pull out.

So, the moral of the story is if you go hiking in a desert, which I highly recommend, please for the love of God make sure to look where you put your hands because there can be some painful consequences if you don't. :)

Sabino Canyon

Well, before I get ready to go back out to see Becca again I guess I aught to first write another blog as promised from the last trip.

One of the other things we did while I was in Arizona was go hiking at Sabino Canyon in Coronado National Forest. It's pretty close to Becca's house so it's a good place to go for a hike and has trails that are not so challenging that we'd die. We decided to hike about 3.7 miles, which we finished in about 2 hours. It was really quite pretty, as you can see from the pictures.

Other things we did included my cooking a wonderful dinner for Becca including but not limited to Tiramisu which was especially tasty. Only about 2/5 for originality but 9/10 for taste. We also spent quite a while at Kohl's and bought me an insane amount of new clothing, but it was for an average savings of 70%, so I couldn't complain except that I was tired of trying on pants by the end. :) Guess that's what happens when I go 3 1/2 years without buying new clothes.

Monday and Tuesday of this week I take Step 3 of the USMLE, which is the US medical liscensing exams. They'll be long, tiring, and most certainly difficult but it'll be good to have them out of the way.

Skiing in Arizona

Hi! I'm back from seeing Becca in Arizona so I thought I'd get back to blogging. I'll start with our opening weekend in which we drove up to the White Mountain Apache Reservation. There we went skiing at Sunrise Ski Park. It was great. Neither of us had been skiing for years so we were at fairly similar skill levels.

We did a good job staying on our skis and not falling with one exception. In my infinite wisdom I decided that we were doing so well that we could go ahead and try a short stretch of blue hill called Crown Dancer (if you don't know, the slopes are color coded, from green to blue to black in increasing difficulty.) After all I'd done blue hills in Ohio without difficulty so I thought it would be ok. Well, I now appreciate the idea that at better ski resorts the slopes are harder. We fell a lot. Actually, we fell so much that we gave up and ultimately walked down until getting to a green section. The other picture is looking back up at the hill we walked down. If you don't think it looks too bad, try it :)

After that we stayed in the green slopes and were much happier. We had aspirations of going snow shoeing the next day but we were both so sore we instead swung over to Phoenix on the way back to Tucson and stopped at Ikea to do some shopping, which was safe as well.

There's more to my week down there but I'll describe it later.

End of PICU

Here I am, finally doing another post, it's only been a month since my last post. But as I said in my first post, I'm still doing them more often than Erik :).

Last month I was in the PICU and was regularly busy, that is why I haven't been posting lately, that and I was having a tough time thinking of things to say up here. During the PICU month I was on call overnight every 3rd night, which means I spent a lot of time at the hospital recently. But it really went well. I learned a lot about intensive care medicine and am continuing to feel more confident with time. We had many sick children to care for, including a few post op from cardiac surgery to correct congenital heart defects, which were good learning experiences. I was in my first code blue, which was both a good experience and bad because the child died. I am glad to be finished with the PICU for now and am certainly enjoying my current cardiology rotation, but it was a good experience and I'm glad to have done it.

Even though I was in the PICU for the month I did have the chance to be up at my parents when Erik and Gina were up there. I always enjoy seeing them and playing games, and now that Jenna is more interactive and talking more its a lot of fun to be around her. She's pretty smart, and as you can see from the Christmas picture of her she's cute as well. Also, they brought this great book called the brick testament in which some guy had inllustrated Genesis with Legos. If you want to see it go to http://www.thebricktestament.com/ It's pretty funny.

Ok, thats all I can write for one day. Remember everyone, GO BUCKS!!!