the underwear drawer

a good way to kill eighty minutes on a rainy morning

I'm post-call today, so after dropping Cal off at school I took Mack to the Fernbank Museum of Natural History, because it seemed enriching somehow, and at bare minimum, it was indoors. (It's raining today.) All it did was make me miss the real Natural History Museum. I know it's not the museum's fault--it's small and doesn't have a lot of exhibits so it does the best with what it has, but there was not a lot to look at is all I'm saying. They also seem to have overestimated mine (and everyone else's) level of interest with the history of Georgia's marshlands. However, there were some dinosaurs, so that's something.




Despite it's drawbacks, we do have a family membership to this museum, as we do to a handful of other child-friendly area attractions, not because we're such civic boosters (though I do think that the Zoo Atlanta membership is worth it) but because the tickets are so ridiculously overpriced that if you're planning on going more than once a year with any permutation of adults and children, getting a membership is likely fiscally advisable. Also you feel less bad about leaving after an hour and a half when you don't have to pay for your ticket each and every time.




(Not pictured, Laura Dern elbow-deep in a pile of poo. That was me, later. Thanks, Mack!)


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With respect to yesterday's post, a couple of people guessed correctly that the picture showed the fluid head of the extracorporeal shockwave lithotripsy...uh, thinger...for pulverizing kidney stones. The one thing I have learned from providing countless anesthetics for cystoscopy is: NEVER GET A KIDNEY STONE. That is all. As for the three older "identify that medical equipment" posts, the answers are: a water cooler for the OR table cooling blanket used during a cerebral aneurysm clipping; a variety of neurosurgical headholders (Mayfield pins, horseshoe, whatnot), and "candy cane" leg holders for the lithotomy position. All disgusting in different ways.

As you were.