the underwear drawer

on the subject of carpetbaggers

I have decided (though clearly more in a pique of frustration more than anything else) that I am not going to try and sleep while taking Team Captain call anymore. It's just too painful. Now, it's one thing to be on call and up all night. That's expected. But sometimes late at night, when the ORs wind down and the PACU is tucked in and all your juniors are sleeping, it seems reasonable to think that you can lie down for a little while. But what usually happens (or maybe it just feels this way) is that the second you start to drift off to sleep, you get paged. The very second. I would rather just stay up all night pacing the halls than be repeatedly woken up every time I start to fall asleep. I'm pretty sure that that's some sort of spirit-breaking method employed to torture prisoners of war.

So Joe and I are starting to plot and plan about how we are going to furnish and decorate our new home in Atlanta, and one of our plans is to get a couple of area rugs for the ground floor. I am generally anti-rug (I feel like it's somehow unhygienic, all that absorptive surface area), but we are renting and we don't want to scratch up the hardwood too much.

We are thinking of getting Flor tiles, which basically consists of roughly 20" x 20" rug building blocks that you can assemble to cover the desired area. The benefit being that they are easy to clean and if irrevocably stained, can at least be swapped out in favor of replacement tiles. Also, they look kind of cool, though they are a tad pricey, so I have to think about what the best plan would be for covering the select areas of floor we need to protect without breaking the bank.



The cool think about Flor is that they will send you 6" x 6" sample squares to play with, to mix and match as you will, build little carpet towers, step on with bare feet, assessing for softness or what have you. I think they send you 6 sample squares for $5.00, which, after evaluated and scrutinized, make fine stepping stones for games of "Don't Step In The Lava."

(Oh, I realize I never gave the answer to that Name the O.R. Equipment question from a few days ago. Most people were right--it is a heating/cooling blanket. Well, not the blanket itself, but the actual temperature control mechanism. For certain types of surgery, particularly those where blood flow to the brain may be compromised for some period of time, we will cool the patients for "cerebral protection." In this case, I was doing anesthesia for the clipping of a cerebral aneurysm.)