tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57792602024-03-19T05:45:34.068-04:00the underwear drawerMedical school, residency, motherhood, and what happens next.Michelle Auhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04938937923678734252noreply@blogger.comBlogger1550125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5779260.post-87489034714392573232018-06-15T12:11:00.001-04:002018-06-16T12:16:56.698-04:00new scutmonkey: the 6 stages of overnight callThis may be a slight retread if you <a href="https://twitter.com/scutmonkey">follow me on Twitter</a>, but one particularly bad night on call about a month ago, I posted <a href="https://twitter.com/scutmonkey/status/995931213872484354">a poll surveying the worst overnight call phenomena</a>. After that...well, after that it was just a matter of drawing the thing. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5gXxnWB-eiuioD_QSeBld8ax6luEfeqyXAJkXcgjATGX5p0edqrzYScY4hqZWJl47a9S6C26Mxn2QQZncLhExu-xyUh6_ZcGlby4wAQqWERcJK21L7OsBWQYIZbF-7x8v0u7pdg/s1600/call+night+%2528with+title+text%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1227" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5gXxnWB-eiuioD_QSeBld8ax6luEfeqyXAJkXcgjATGX5p0edqrzYScY4hqZWJl47a9S6C26Mxn2QQZncLhExu-xyUh6_ZcGlby4wAQqWERcJK21L7OsBWQYIZbF-7x8v0u7pdg/s640/call+night+%2528with+title+text%2529.jpg" width="491" /></a></div>
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Here, panel by panel:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqZ8ahjrkmcWS6PgT2aMVjRC9lbu0zE8q8XROPxJdIX7UjayDBGfbJCArJd2RN5uyPGJ17Ca5C7dnDchbOOjrwEaaYDYOmN_FFq3c-ITUDn6m5zgLALobz8HGoViZuEq84keHg0Q/s1600/call+night+panel+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="984" data-original-width="1256" height="501" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqZ8ahjrkmcWS6PgT2aMVjRC9lbu0zE8q8XROPxJdIX7UjayDBGfbJCArJd2RN5uyPGJ17Ca5C7dnDchbOOjrwEaaYDYOmN_FFq3c-ITUDn6m5zgLALobz8HGoViZuEq84keHg0Q/s640/call+night+panel+1.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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For those who are curious, I've been meaning to get back into cartooning for a while now (despite the long hiatus I've actually drawn comics...well, basically my whole life, since I was a very small odd child with too few friends and a bit of a defensive sense of humor to match), but as I noted previously, making these comics does take some significant amount of time. I mean, at least the way I do it, which is extremely analog and old school, it involves many inefficient, labor-intensive steps.<br />
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Joe actually got me one of those Wacom tablets about a year ago because I've been yammering about drawing more since forever. He thought, quite logically, that a tablet might be a good tool that could input the my drawings directly into the editing software. It was such a thoughtful gift, but...I don't know. There's something about the tactile sense and resistive friction of drawing with specific tools, and <a href="https://theunderweardrawer.blogspot.com/2018/06/eraserhead.html">I'm picky enough</a> as it is about <a href="https://theunderweardrawer.blogspot.com/2018/06/eraserhead-20.html">my writing implements</a>.<br />
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I <i>did</i> try to do a sort of quick and dirty YEARS ago, with this <a href="https://theunderweardrawer.blogspot.com/2011/07/colonoscopy-face.html">"colonoscopy face"</a> comic...<br />
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...which I deliberately did on a yellow notecard just to force me to treat the exercise it casually. I briefly considered doing more things like that--just casual, tossed off, straight ink to paper, no erasing, no post-processing cleanup, nothing. But the fact is that I don't <i>like</i> things that are careless and tossed off. I want to do things how I want to do them, and how I want to do them necessarily takes a certain amount of time. It just does.<br />
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Anyway, everyone has their weird outlets. Writing and drawing stupid comics are mine. I hope you liked this one.Michelle Auhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04938937923678734252noreply@blogger.com463tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5779260.post-28490183933537504192018-06-07T16:48:00.000-04:002018-06-07T21:04:32.847-04:00shiny new scutmonkey: patient allergy stratificationI don't even remember when the last time it was that I made a new comic (I suspect it was right before I submitted the manuscript for <a href="https://www.amazon.com/This-Wont-Hurt-Bit-Motherhood/dp/0446538248/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1528387668&sr=8-1&keywords=this+won%27t+hurt+a+bit">my book</a> to the publisher,* so that would put me <a href="https://theunderweardrawer.blogspot.com/2008/06/">in the last few weeks of residency</a>, roughly a lifetime ago), and I don't want to make a big thing about this, because the comics...are really pretty stupid. But anyway, here's a new one.<br />
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The comics really do take a lot of work, which is probably why I haven't made a new one in just about a decade. There's the sketching and the penciling and the inking and the erasing and the scanning and the cleaning up and the titles and cropping. To think, I used to go through this entire process <i>every single weekend</i> for three years when I was in college and the <a href="https://theunderweardrawer.blogspot.com/2011/04/vintage.html">cartoonist</a> <a href="https://theunderweardrawer.blogspot.com/2011/04/vintage-maus-moments-things-ive-done.html">for</a> <a href="https://theunderweardrawer.blogspot.com/2011/04/vintage-maus-moments-expecting.html">the</a> <a href="https://theunderweardrawer.blogspot.com/2011/04/vintage-maus-moments-some-scary-things.html">Wellesley</a> <a href="https://theunderweardrawer.blogspot.com/search/label/comics?updated-max=2018-05-15T10:12:00-04:00&max-results=20&start=3&by-date=false">News</a>. This makes me realize that back then, when I thought I was busy, and had so little free time? I had nothing <i>but</i> time. Kids...don't know stuff.<br />
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Anyway, it's many years later now, and I am old, and semi-responsible, so I feel the need as an attending to say: <i>Allergies are real, and can be serious. Listen to your patients. Use common sense, but respect the histories they are giving you. </i><br />
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However, sometimes funny things are funny. Maybe this comic is one of those things. And maybe now you understand why I was on that fine point mechanical pencil bender.<br />
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And here, so you don't hurt your eyes (we're <i>all</i> a decade older now, aren't we?), I have it panel by panel.<br />
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Happy trails.<br />
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* My editor ultimately decided not to include <a href="https://theunderweardrawer.blogspot.com/p/scutmonkey-comics.html">the comics</a> with the book, which...look. At the time, I was a little disappointed, because I'd worked hard on them. But even at the time, I knew it was absolutely the right call. Strong work, Emily Griffin.Michelle Auhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04938937923678734252noreply@blogger.com166tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5779260.post-85569277458996645442018-06-02T23:38:00.001-04:002018-06-03T10:33:00.284-04:00eraserhead 2.0Just a quick <a href="https://theunderweardrawer.blogspot.com/2018/06/eraserhead.html" target="_blank">update</a>:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBpioygMeiMcRGxBr5NslBl6Sfp4jO1IkZQUeKq7rvjeie1mg1Ld67rQ0seTtBaAqGOSeUN_e1WbYt74813BTIzi-PTiYQvM-2ov3I_sBh_lVZS4832CdMPKohFACNDwS-Yl9ncA/s1600/unnamed.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="664" data-original-width="885" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBpioygMeiMcRGxBr5NslBl6Sfp4jO1IkZQUeKq7rvjeie1mg1Ld67rQ0seTtBaAqGOSeUN_e1WbYt74813BTIzi-PTiYQvM-2ov3I_sBh_lVZS4832CdMPKohFACNDwS-Yl9ncA/s640/unnamed.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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I went to my local art supply store today and got this, the <a href="https://www.jetpens.com/Pentel-Graph-Gear-500-Drafting-Pencil-0.5-mm/pd/1238" target="_blank">Pentel GraphGear 500</a> with 0.5mm lead. (I deliberately went to the architecture/drafting section, where they sell all the weird rulers, figuring there I would be among my people.) It's pretty nice. It made suffering through the rest of my Biostats problem set a relative pleasure. (I shouldn't overstate things. I <i>finished</i> the problem set. Period.) The pencil feels good (despite having a non-padded metal grip), the balance is satisfying, and the eraser and lead are of nice quality. I would have preferred a metal body (while the weight is overall substantial, only grip and tip are metal, while the body itself is made of plastic), we can't always have everything we want, at least not in this price range. Or, I guess I could spring for the <a href="https://www.jetpens.com/Pentel-Graph-Gear-1000-Drafting-Pencil-0.5-mm/pd/639" target="_blank">Pentel GraphGear 1000</a>, which has an aluminum body through and through, and <i>must</i> be nicer if for no other reason than 1000 is twice as much as 500, right? MATH.<br />
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If I'm willing to splurge beyond the <a href="https://www.jetpens.com/Pentel-Graph-Gear-1000-Drafting-Pencil-0.5-mm/pd/639" target="_blank">Pentel GraphGear 1000</a>--and I'm not sure that I'm <i>totally</i> willing to go here yet, since I do tend to lose things, and I also have clumsy kleptomaniac kids which is why I can't Have Nice Things--I might go this route:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxzx3MuhRsY9xi0ZovHxchguusRhyphenhyphen4lMxAlk8Kae3SCB7_V7JWUwHjbxp8u0NSrN-Js_HEp_yZ9VNEgM-4XCbKpfwbCrZ19LXo_w6NxF0WMR1Z2i_rOksbAA_mvB1HQCHW_roqMw/s1600/61ZUZmCFMYL._SL1485_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1485" data-original-width="1485" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxzx3MuhRsY9xi0ZovHxchguusRhyphenhyphen4lMxAlk8Kae3SCB7_V7JWUwHjbxp8u0NSrN-Js_HEp_yZ9VNEgM-4XCbKpfwbCrZ19LXo_w6NxF0WMR1Z2i_rOksbAA_mvB1HQCHW_roqMw/s640/61ZUZmCFMYL._SL1485_.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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The <a href="https://www.jetpens.com/Rotring-600-Drafting-Pencil-0.5-mm-Black-Body/pd/6435" target="_blank">rOtring 600 Drafting Pencil</a>. I was originally looking at the <a href="https://www.jetpens.com/Uni-Kuru-Toga-Roulette-Mechanical-Pencil-0.5-mm-Gun-Metallic-Body/pd/6547" target="_blank">Uni Kuru Toga Roulette</a> (by the way, if you ever feel like you're a little too fanatically ardent about your pen and pencil choices, go look at the literally THOUSANDS of reviews on <a href="https://www.jetpens.com/Pencils/ct/1319" target="_blank">JetPens</a> and realize you're not alone) but after hearing a few opinions about how the rotating lead-handling mechanism felt "spongy" and "bouncy" I was like NO THANK YOU MA'AM and turned my gaze towards to rOtring. Again, it's a textured metal grip, which I'm not crazy about--I really don't write as much with pencil as I once did, but I still do want to guard against sore spots and grip fatigue, in case I devolve into pathologic graphomania somehow--but the reviews seem good, and from a purely superficial standpoint, it really does look like a handsome writing implement with a price point to match. Anyway, I'll keep it in mind. I turn 40 in a few weeks, and if I decide to treat myself, maybe I'll go for it.<br />
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(Yes, I did say that I would consider treating myself to a mechanical pencil on my 40th birthday. Carry on.)<br />
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As I mentioned in the comments section yesterday, we are taking a trip to Japan in July, so if there's some crazy Japanese Hotness Mechanical Pencil (or any kind of Japanese Hotness office supplies of any flavor) that I absolutely <i>need</i> to source while I'm in the country, please do let me know. I know it's a family vacation and we should be visiting temples and eating sushi and doing karaoke or some shit, but hey, let's keep an eye on what's important. How else am I going to source <i>cutting edge retractable click eraser technology </i>except in Tokyo, I ask you? It's not possible. In America, we just have to use those giant pink hard trapezoid erasers like a bunch of savages. I know, it's tragic.Michelle Auhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04938937923678734252noreply@blogger.com69tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5779260.post-24143918819008103912018-06-01T20:19:00.002-04:002018-06-01T21:25:24.484-04:00eraserheadI want to talk about mechanical pencils for a second. No, I don't have many friends, why do you ask?<br />
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So I'm in the market for a new mechanical pencil. I would like to use it for math-ish homework, but also for precision line drawing--not so much shading, so a firm fine-ish point would be better. The platonic ideal I have in mind is a pencil I used ages ago as my primary drawing tool, but I've moved literally 6 times in the past 12 years and I can't for the life of me find the one I used to use. (Yes, I've looked. Yes, I only had one.) But here's a description. It was a metal-bodied mechanical pencil, which likely held 0.5mm lead (my preferred note-taking lead in med school). It had a nice weight to it, and though it was a narrow barrel, it had a wider foam rubber grip that made it easier to hold. The grip was SOFT but NON-TEXTURED (I cannot emphasize this enough) so that it relieved grip fatigue but also did not produce any unpleasant pressure points. The hold of the barrel on the lead was firm, so it did not have any unsettling give to it like some tips do (are you familiar with mechanical pencils that have some "bounce" to them when you write? That's some bullshit) and because of this it delivered exquisite control over the line. The eraser was but a nubbin, but it was a dynamo at erasing fine lines, and if you used it judiciously for detail work, it would last for quite a while. I can't remember the brand of this pencil--I want to say it was either a Zebra or Pentel, but neither maker has anything on the market at present that looks <i>quiiiiite</i> like what I'm looking for.<br />
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Here are some other pencils I've used in the recent past.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYpltD_yG7lI8TL6zO5G8HHCxoZpOiLMiK7Dp7rVp_AsjOOyMLAJ0e91iIcyI6P3WW4M3OlfJie2FYsyYzoM9-0hCHuHRM2p27N4GNv6rPhlSZO3_ckM22XIxeCpBHiHgmb3K0_w/s1600/71ZyaD06HSL._SL1147_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1147" data-original-width="619" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYpltD_yG7lI8TL6zO5G8HHCxoZpOiLMiK7Dp7rVp_AsjOOyMLAJ0e91iIcyI6P3WW4M3OlfJie2FYsyYzoM9-0hCHuHRM2p27N4GNv6rPhlSZO3_ckM22XIxeCpBHiHgmb3K0_w/s640/71ZyaD06HSL._SL1147_.jpg" width="345" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://www.amazon.com/BIC-Xtra-Precision-Mechanical-Metallic-24-Count/dp/B001CDEUBO/ref=sr_1_1?s=office-products&ie=UTF8&qid=1527899700&sr=1-1&keywords=bic+mechanical+pencils+0.5" target="_blank">The Bic disposable mechanical pencil</a>. I've used these since college. They're...fine. I'd use it for taking notes that I didn't need to be particularly neat. It wouldn't break my heart to lose them, and so I did, often. But the barrel is a little small and hard, and my hand would get tired often if I used them for prolonged periods. Also, the eraser is shit.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyuye8y6IzVYYsV5MaxRKIVQvVO271h1nKlnzigfskljH6jQTYTi_GHUIqi3w6_UECyuRmKAx1MgMybIizEpdKGg3BfMo2-u1Ga1KPpO84ejMkXBxdF48hkAiOcnIkgWobL8L6hQ/s1600/71wW6OfZnPL._SL1500_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="683" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyuye8y6IzVYYsV5MaxRKIVQvVO271h1nKlnzigfskljH6jQTYTi_GHUIqi3w6_UECyuRmKAx1MgMybIizEpdKGg3BfMo2-u1Ga1KPpO84ejMkXBxdF48hkAiOcnIkgWobL8L6hQ/s640/71wW6OfZnPL._SL1500_.jpg" width="291" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://www.amazon.com/June-Gold-Mechanical-Dispensers-Convenient/dp/B01M0FWZQ2/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?ie=UTF8&qid=1527899072&sr=8-1-spons&keywords=mechanical+pencils+0.9&psc=1">This Pentel twist-erase situation</a>. They're OK. The barrel is nicer (wider, and though the rubberized grip is ribbed, it's not ridged in an way that hurts your hand), and it sports nice long eraser refills. It clicks lead from the top, not like those pencils that have their clickers on the <i>side</i>, where the <i>grip</i> is, like some kind of LUNATIC PENCIL which doesn't understand that THAT'S WHERE YOU HOLD THE PENCIL WHEN YOU WRITE, WHY WOULD YOU PUT THE LEAD ADVANCEMENT BUTTON RIGHT WHERE YOU'RE HOLDING IT TO DO WORK? (Sorry. I have Many Pencil Opinions.) But the lead it comes with is garbage (yes, I know I can swap the lead out) and something with how the mechanism holds the lead it place feels not quite firm, like there's some wobble or give to it. Again, it's OK. I use it to do my stats homework. But I miss my old pencil.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg00H3e1QMSulfXeR4ji9glwbG6b_nVwHW51XeTuUbVZHiucrsbCNMlU977GR2pFdtt9YlhPcDvLQXDhnPNhSUFeTNQkt3FG__RhSh0p767lx14MG8UMruCQHPIVp-jgZbCcxzgwQ/s1600/919hnk4v9UL._SL1500_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="1500" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg00H3e1QMSulfXeR4ji9glwbG6b_nVwHW51XeTuUbVZHiucrsbCNMlU977GR2pFdtt9YlhPcDvLQXDhnPNhSUFeTNQkt3FG__RhSh0p767lx14MG8UMruCQHPIVp-jgZbCcxzgwQ/s640/919hnk4v9UL._SL1500_.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/June-Gold-Mechanical-Dispensers-Convenient/dp/B01M0FWZQ2/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?ie=UTF8&qid=1527899072&sr=8-1-spons&keywords=mechanical+pencils+0.9&psc=1">These pencils</a> are garbage, which is why I get them for my kids. (She said lovingly.) They cost $20 for a million of them and they come in that fat lead that is harder to break. I also keep a bunch of them in a jar on the piano, so that kids who come over for chamber music rehearsal can use them to mark up their music. If someone takes or loses these pencils, I could not give less of a shit, but I will not touch them to do my own work. They also have that illogical side lead advancement mechanism, because TRASH.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUcBHpuyDx5n_1tYn-NPQYmqtFeaIAiDRiQSAjAVmvSguFKSgjbMYW1HWA1UUFMn1gQZZjBDvvQK-MYhj4cGiuBLwq6U3nhMtK5bzNhZSxkK5SCd2751n7gUAKlBCrWPjDHKjAGQ/s1600/51WSsuj--7L._SL1500_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="154" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUcBHpuyDx5n_1tYn-NPQYmqtFeaIAiDRiQSAjAVmvSguFKSgjbMYW1HWA1UUFMn1gQZZjBDvvQK-MYhj4cGiuBLwq6U3nhMtK5bzNhZSxkK5SCd2751n7gUAKlBCrWPjDHKjAGQ/s640/51WSsuj--7L._SL1500_.jpg" width="66" /></a></div>
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So I was looking at this pencil (the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Pentel-Automatic-Drafting-Brushed-PG1015A/dp/B000GAU2RU/ref=sr_1_5?s=office-products&ie=UTF8&qid=1527899735&sr=1-5&keywords=pentel+mechanical+pencil+0.5" target="_blank">Pentel Graph Gear 1000 Automatic Drafting Pencil in 0.5mm</a>), because it looked like it might have some of the features I was looking for, but...I don't know. The eraser is spot on, and in fact makes me think that the pencil in my memory was a Pentel. But the nubbled grip and the textured metal looks...painful. The pocket clip looks kind of high profile, or prone to breakage. And the price tag. I can't remember how much my original Platonic Ideal mechanical cost (and in fact, I might not have purchased it at all in the first place--it's entirely possible I stole it from Joe and just kept it because MARRIAGE) but for upwards of $9, would I be too worried about losing it to use it? Probably I could find it cheaper off Amazon (Amazon does tend to charge a markup for teeny weeny cheaper items that cost more to ship than to buy), but...so lazy. I have also glanced at <a href="https://www.jetpens.com/Mechanical-Pencils/ct/45" target="_blank">some of the pencils on JetPens</a>, but some of the nicer ones cost, like, $20-$30 each, so if they're not going to make me breakfast in the morning, they're really going to have to be something special. (Which is not to say I am not open to being convinced--I have a gaping soft spot for office supplies.)<br />
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Tell me what pencil I should buy. Thank you for your pity.Michelle Auhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04938937923678734252noreply@blogger.com59tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5779260.post-20345494199122390192018-05-29T20:14:00.002-04:002018-05-29T21:01:32.050-04:00one flew over<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDYLYQOHODZaLlkwo8GO3tI4V1el-kjSrYXU4eVQJ9FN4QfdFrQiNrYM7E_jbLEkusy_Vgk_wo6Z3gD0eMvNsWwnHio_yHMLg5FEOMDd4YxDJYUChf0YN753Pi0jq6B3mAtbQo_g/s1600/IMG_6616.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDYLYQOHODZaLlkwo8GO3tI4V1el-kjSrYXU4eVQJ9FN4QfdFrQiNrYM7E_jbLEkusy_Vgk_wo6Z3gD0eMvNsWwnHio_yHMLg5FEOMDd4YxDJYUChf0YN753Pi0jq6B3mAtbQo_g/s640/IMG_6616.JPG" width="640" /></a><br />
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So we had this bird nest in our garage. Our nanny first noticed it a few weeks ago, high up on a shelf something like eight, nine feet up, propped on a shelf against a corner, atop of a pack of Costco bulk terry cloth towels. We've had a broken window in the garage for...I don't know, probably going on a year now (don't judge), and I suppose it was only natural that at some point, a bird might find its way indoors and make itself at home.<br />
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"What <i>kind</i> of bird?" a few people at work asked me when I brought it up, but I couldn't really say, since I never actually saw anyone <i>in</i> the nest. For all I knew, the nest could have been there for months, and I just never noticed it sitting there, high above my head.<br />
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However, the nest apparently <i>did</i> have an inhabitant, and around Mother's Day, she let us know.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgd30HjNqMDky3LtUq3sWmmFD9mzPXzs7zrm8AJD6_6OP95X0vhgMpX7Z0Z-K5y_cd8vb4SvbKSw7iRdDaMv481eEk_GJ-Bdlc5zwntOFrcrMBXkkJuQ-hVLadwljSGk3GMHehu7A/s1600/IMG_6615.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgd30HjNqMDky3LtUq3sWmmFD9mzPXzs7zrm8AJD6_6OP95X0vhgMpX7Z0Z-K5y_cd8vb4SvbKSw7iRdDaMv481eEk_GJ-Bdlc5zwntOFrcrMBXkkJuQ-hVLadwljSGk3GMHehu7A/s640/IMG_6615.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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This also gave me a slightly more specific answer to the "What kind of bird?" question, because at least now I could say, "The kind of bird that lays eggs that look like <i>that</i>." </div>
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The consensus in the anesthesia lounge, both from the build of the nest and the speckling on the eggs, was that these were <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolina_wren" target="_blank">Carolina wrens</a>. There were five little eggs tucked in there, the size of those Cadbury chocolate eggs with the candy shells sold around Easter (they're what M&Ms <i>should</i> ideally be, in my opinion--better chocolate, thicker shell), and while it certainly made me somewhat monstrous for thinking of this mother bird's clutch of eggs in terms of snack food, I'm sure in the wild, outside of the safety of the high shelf in our garage, the eggs would be a snack for <i>someone</i>.</div>
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I had no idea what the gestational age of a baby bird is, particularly when the species is unknown. So I checked on this clutch of eggs a few times, but not daily, as I didn't want to spook the mom (again, I'd never seen her in the nest, for all I knew she'd <i>already</i> abandoned the eggs that the creepy Chinese lady kept peeking at), and anyway, it's not like anything interesting was happening.</div>
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Then, one weekend about a week and a half ago while I was in New York, I got a picture text from Joe. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPm69d978vEn_th9eaSaeA9KXJ_0FHikvR8bTc9uwKLBjKCz8WU9d-tbYu7854Fv0RLhhD9GC4Qv77IigdHwRhnwE0U_cRLq7ZmMlVvJ72LIMNQdblRbsAd8lZNUIxAujWoKf8oA/s1600/IMG_6719.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPm69d978vEn_th9eaSaeA9KXJ_0FHikvR8bTc9uwKLBjKCz8WU9d-tbYu7854Fv0RLhhD9GC4Qv77IigdHwRhnwE0U_cRLq7ZmMlVvJ72LIMNQdblRbsAd8lZNUIxAujWoKf8oA/s640/IMG_6719.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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"I'm not sure if they're dead," his text read, "they're not moving. Maybe the garage was too hot for them?"</div>
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Since I was not there, I couldn't really weigh in, and I certainly couldn't tell from the photo. What could we have done, anyway? Put a little mirror under their beaks to see if it fogged up? Put on teeny tiny EKG leads? Put them on ECMO?</div>
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"Don't touch them," is all I could think of to reply, "and don't show the kids, it'll make them sad." It was a still photo, but Joe assured me that a video would look no different. And hell, babies that you can't see moving or breathing at all? Sounded pretty dead to me.</div>
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When I got home at the end of the weekend, the first thing I did (well, in truth it was maybe the third thing, after putting down my luggage and going to the bathroom) was stand on a chair, put my camera on a selfie stick telescoped out as long as it would go, and take a picture of the nest.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVPJQkQvpRRJ4RRNoEwcnP_EGZuAkQgxjL69bGdg514XtqwKth8ZsfcIKDiBlnGYTmMq1h9_nYzVw5i93nL-jYyp_dkaN8M8TcK2IZv1PrF84ESrSZa0sJyaiLQU1PZUFbMwmlyw/s1600/IMG_6739.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVPJQkQvpRRJ4RRNoEwcnP_EGZuAkQgxjL69bGdg514XtqwKth8ZsfcIKDiBlnGYTmMq1h9_nYzVw5i93nL-jYyp_dkaN8M8TcK2IZv1PrF84ESrSZa0sJyaiLQU1PZUFbMwmlyw/s640/IMG_6739.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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They were not dead. </div>
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I exhaled a long breath I didn't realize I'd been holding in up until that moment.</div>
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When I took the MCATs back in--good lord, I think it was the summer of 1997--I remember this one section in the "critical analysis and reasoning" section. This is the part of the test where they give you some deathly dense and deliberately boring excerpt of technical writing and ask you a lot of questions about it afterwards to ascertain that you were able to not only stay awake, but actually retain and synthesize the information. (While this might be a reasonable test for how you would fare in med school, I will venture to say that it has only marginal bearing determining how good of a doctor you might eventually become.) Anyway, most of the sections were, as I said, deliberately inscrutable--an excerpt from a technical manual about how to extract aluminum via electrolysis, for example--but some reading selections were sort of interesting, probably by accident. </div>
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This one I recall was about the breeding habits of certain birds in which "obligate sibicide" was the norm. Meaning: the bird will lay two or more eggs, and as a necessary evolutionary flourish, survival of the fittest, the stronger siblings will kill one or more of the weaker ones. <i>Always</i>. As a rule. I obviously didn't retain too much of what else I had read (though, to be fair, it was more than 20 years ago), but I figured, hey, five eggs is a <i>lot</i> of eggs. Probably by design. It was probably normal to lose a few by attrition. It's likely what we should expect, in fact.</div>
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I checked the nest every day (at this point Joe had set up our tallest ladder by the shelving and just left it there because apparently I was becoming the goddamn Birdman of Alcatraz and the ladder was heavy) but I would always approach with this vague, atavistic dread that at some point I'd happen onto one or two or five dead baby birds.</div>
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But there were no dead baby birds. Every time I peeked at them (just peeked, never touched), I did a quick head count. I couldn't tell them apart, I didn't <i>name</i> them or anything, I wasn't <i>crazy</i>--but just a quick head count. <i>One, two, three, four, five.</i> Every day, all five were there. </div>
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Sometimes they would be in a different order, sometimes a few of them would be hiding in the back, but always, every day, five of them. They grew.</div>
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And grew.</div>
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And <i>grew</i>, until their ceiling hung with vines, and the walls become the world all around.</div>
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Yesterday, when I went to peek at the birds, it started to look a bit crowded. There was that adolescent gangliness to the brood--they still all seemed content to stay inside, they had a few tufts of baby down showing through, but the nest suddenly seemed like all arms and legs. </div>
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And then this morning, just like that...</div>
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...they were gone. </div>
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Joe caught a glimpse of one of the no-longer-babies early this morning, hopping around on a cardboard box by the recycling bin, virtually indistinguishable from the adult birds we'd seen about, but for the few sprigs of downy fuzz it had yet to shed. But by the time I got home from work, none of them were left. The garage was suddenly very quiet.</div>
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I'm not totally sure why I'm telling this non-story. After all, it's not really that interesting--lots of people find birds nests near their houses, baby animals come and go all spring and summer, the "empty nest" analogy as applied to human children is trite and hoary, and something I honestly don't really know about yet. (Soon, yes. But not yet.)</div>
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I think it was my reaction to the birds. The way I automatically assumed the worst. I think this happens at work a lot--in fact, I think the reason I sometimes assume the worst is <i>because</i> of the work I do. It's like a protective mechanism. You learn the statistics, you recognize patterns, you make predictions, you prepare yourself. Hope for the best, sure; but always, always, <i>always</i> prepare for the worst. Prepare yourself for the bad outcome and you'll never be surprised or disappointed. It's the bad outcomes you allow to blindside you that will truly break your heart.</div>
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But you don't <i>always</i> get a bad outcome. Even sometimes, when you <i>should</i> get a bad outcome, when you fully expect it...you don't. You're surprised the other way. People beat incredible odds. Genuine miracles happen. </div>
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When I was a resident doing a rotation in the cardiothoracic ICU, there was a saying we'd murmur to each other back and forth on rounds, under our breath. Well, it was maybe not even so much a saying so much as it was a known phenomenon. <i>"You fly or you die." </i>Patients who had major cardiac surgery seemed to have two paths. Either they would do great--they would fly--or they would limp out of their moment of crisis, hobble through the next few days and weeks, accruing one complication after another, and eventually, succumb. It wasn't absolute, but it held true enough that it was accepted as near uniform fact. <i>You fly or you die.</i></div>
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Life is not nearly as uniform or algorithmic as we would sometimes like it to be, of course. The comfort of a logically predicated outcome and the inurement against heartbreak can sometimes close you off to the possibility of an improbable result. Worse yet, sometimes one becomes <i>so</i> jaded against good things happening that the possibility of a good result seems less likely than it should.</div>
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I'm not saying that having five baby birds born in our garage and having all of them survive to leave the nest is an improbable result. From most of my limited conversations with other people who've had firsthand experience in such matters (so...two conversations, then) this in fact seems par for the course. </div>
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But maybe that's not the point either. Maybe the point is just that surprise and delight can sometimes go hand in hand. And that delight can be found in the most improbable places, exactly when you least expect it.</div>
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Michelle Auhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04938937923678734252noreply@blogger.com89tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5779260.post-67801119990392881982018-05-24T09:41:00.000-04:002018-05-24T09:50:14.091-04:00vintage scutmonkey: psychOK, I think this is the last of this throwback series. It also happens to be the first "Scutmonkey" comic I wrote (even before <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjr2t_f2B-ERH5cGumSuwPNXUyNVZOQbmiWMHzYzlrrYwvfkZFpVkwxdXpNQHyfdHHRluTQnvp44sSKsrNy0NXzDvhnkUr23bxRtePP0pLGsBem3BophjcCbD5VwL668o3-M_kH/s1600-h/12+Types+of+Med+Students+on+one+page+(small).jpg">"The Twelve Types of Med Students,"</a> even*), and I finished it about a month before I graduated from med school. It seems that the Wayback Machine doesn't archive every last image in a deep side branch of your main blog, which is why half the panels are kind of greyscale and janky (photos of a photocopy, you know). But hopefully it's all still legible.<br />
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Two small points. One is that I think it's not necessarily the kind of topic I'd write about so freely now, because, you know, mental health awareness is important and sensitive and all that. But for what it's worth, every single patient interaction or expressed delusion in this comic was absolutely true, almost to the word (if somewhat condensed in certain cases). Actually, <i>all</i> of it is true, right down to what people wore. (I was mesmerized by the chunky pendants and flowing tops my course director wore and therefore studied them in great depth before drawing them...badly.)<br />
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Second point. The building we used to refer to as the "old Psych Institute," shown in the first and last panel of the comic, is now the School of Public Health at Columbia. It's the exact same building--it even still reads "Psychiatric Institute" in the carved stone arch over the door--but, you know, they put up a new sign at eye level. So the one part of this comic that's not true is that I never went back. <a href="https://theunderweardrawer.blogspot.com/2017/09/back-to-school.html">I am back</a>, and the location seems like a tiny bit of poetic justice.<br />
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<br />
* <i>Edited to add:</i> I was wrong. I looked at the dates and I finished <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjr2t_f2B-ERH5cGumSuwPNXUyNVZOQbmiWMHzYzlrrYwvfkZFpVkwxdXpNQHyfdHHRluTQnvp44sSKsrNy0NXzDvhnkUr23bxRtePP0pLGsBem3BophjcCbD5VwL668o3-M_kH/s1600-h/12+Types+of+Med+Students+on+one+page+(small).jpg">"The Twelve Types of Medical Students"</a> 2 days before I finished this one. I had likely started this one first, though, because, you know, it took longer.Michelle Auhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04938937923678734252noreply@blogger.com186tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5779260.post-92207203923897239212018-05-21T21:27:00.001-04:002018-05-24T09:41:57.490-04:00vintage scutmonkey: doctor idThis is a rare bird indeed, in that it is the one Scutmonkey comic that I never disseminated widely. I in fact never completed this strip. This string of panels originally ran with the tag line, <i>"To Be Continued..." </i>but I never followed it up, because...I don't know. I think it just never felt very funny to me. Don't get me wrong, for someone who has worked in the Peds ER, there is a decent dose of acerbic humor in there, but on the whole, when taken with the other comics I wrote, it felt...kind of darkly bitter. A little too much dark, and a little too much bitter.<br />
<br />
In retrospect--and I don't think I needed that much distance from that time to realize this, I think I even realized it at the time--there was a point in my first year of Peds residency when I was likely borderline clinically depressed. It was circumstantial depression, certainly--I think many of us were at the time--but nonetheless it was a period of my life that both imprinted deeply and which I don't remember well. Day blended into night, one rotation blended into the next, there was very little time, very little spontaneity, very few genuine sparks of joy that I can recall. This had very little to do with my residency program per se (to this day I have nothing but good things to say about my Pediatrics residency, which turned out some of the finest doctors I know), but had everything to do with the nature of residency itself, which somehow, despite all best intentions, tends to bleed the humanity out of the young people training to take care of human beings at their most needy and vulnerable. It's quite a paradox, when you think about it.<br />
<br />
So despite the fact that I cringe a bit reading this now, remember the place I was in when I wrote this, I'll republish this nubbin of a comic from the archives anyway. But I will also link these two things. <br />
<br />
One is <a href="https://theunderweardrawer.blogspot.com/search?q=it+gets+better">this older blog entry I wrote seven years ago, entitled, "It Gets Better."</a><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The lowest point in my residency was in January of my intern year. I was a Pediatrics resident back then, doing a month-long rotation on "Team 2," which is what we called the general inpatient pediatric team, with a focus on the patients on our liver transplant service. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It was a very long month.<br />
<br />
I'd get to work at around 5:45 every morning to pre-round, and invariably leave after dark every night--not difficult, considering that, in January, it seemed like it started to get dark around 3:30pm every day. I was there much later than that, of course--most nights I'd leave around 7:00pm, unless I was on call, in which case I'd leave at around 10:00am the following morning. We'd have pre-rounds and then rounds, then attending rounds and work rounds, followed by teaching rounds and radiology rounds, with time at the end of the day for sign-out rounds. Twice a week we'd have Grand Rounds and Chief of Service Rounds. How we ever got anything done with all this rounding, I'll never know. How I ever got to spend time with any patients in between all these rounds is even more of a mystery. It just felt like a day of endless, endless scut. Losing the forest for the trees. It would be a day full of writing down numbers and pagers beeping and phone calls and faxes and entering computer orders, and not nearly enough time practicing medicine or spending time with patients. And then I'd go home and collapse and wake up at 4:15 the next morning to go in and do it all again... </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
And let's get this straight. I <i>liked</i> residency. Really, I did. Yes, it was hard, and yes, I was tired basically all the time, but I expected that, and now that it's over, most of my memories are affectionate. Residency, like medical school, was full of stories, and many of them, in retrospect, are funny--not at the expense of patients, but at my <i>own</i> expense, because Lord, how serious and inexperienced and bumblingly well-intentioned I was! But that first January of my intern year, I was very close to being clinically depressed. It just all felt so grim and featureless and endless, and I felt more and more like I was just some kind of task-programmed automaton, not like the doctor that I thought I was supposed to be at this point.<br />
<br />
I wanted to quit. Not just quit being a Pediatrics resident, but quit medicine altogether. I was unhappy. I didn't like my life. I wanted to be done. I know that <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjr2t_f2B-ERH5cGumSuwPNXUyNVZOQbmiWMHzYzlrrYwvfkZFpVkwxdXpNQHyfdHHRluTQnvp44sSKsrNy0NXzDvhnkUr23bxRtePP0pLGsBem3BophjcCbD5VwL668o3-M_kH/s1600-h/12+Types+of+Med+Students+on+one+page+(small).jpg" target="_blank">this comic</a> was intended to be a joke, but there were time, <i>real</i> times, when I passed by a Gap or a Starbucks or whatever, saw that they were hiring, and seriously considered stopping by to fill out an application. At least they don't make you take call at The Gap, folding chambray button-down shirts at 2:00am. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Now I'm going to tell you a secret. Everyone who has been through a residency has felt this way at some point. <i>Everyone</i>. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Maybe you're feeling this way right now. So here's another secret. There's more to life than this. Even though it feels like residency is your life, it's not. There's more to life. There's more to <i>you</i>. And it gets better.<br />
<br />
<i>It gets better.</i></blockquote>
<br />
The second thing I would like to say is this. I am not a great person, and I know this. The people who work in the Peds ER are...incredible. Phenomenal. Superhuman. It is one of the rotations during my residency--both residencies--where I learned the most, and one of the rotations from which I have retained the most indelible memories. There's <a href="https://www.amazon.com/This-Wont-Hurt-Bit-Motherhood/dp/0446538248/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1526952260&sr=8-1&keywords=michelle+au" target="_blank">a chapter from my book</a>, and though this is one of the less sensational excerpts (you would have never centered an episode of ER around it, for example), it's still the one that sticks with me the most.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<br />
...[T]here are some subtle changes of the twenty-four hour cycle that, to the experienced eye, can give some clue as to what time of day it is, but otherwise, days and nights in the ER are all pretty much the same, a constant stream of low-grade urgencies punctuated by the occasional heart-stopping emergency. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In fact, the only event that allows me to reliably tell time in the ER is the 3:00 a.m. sandwich drop, wherein a café across the street, just prior to receiving their bakery-fresh goods for the morning, drops off heaping mounds of day-olds for the patients and staff of the Peds ER to pick through. Walk through the Peds ER at three thirty in the morning and you will find leftover yogurt cups lined with soggy scrims of granola, see patient attacking chicken salad wraps, and watch ward clerks turn away from their work stations to deal with a mouthful of cheese danish. "Try the turkey sandwich," the attending urges a floridly tattooed teenager with the air of insider knowledge, "the bread is really good." </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
At these times, the ER feels like it could be anyplace where unlikely company is trapped together for an interminable wait. The DMV, the passport office, an airport terminal after all outgoing flights have been canceled due to a storm.</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
Anyway.<i> Dr. Id. </i>We don't often immortalize the worst of ourselves in amber, but it's still important to remember that there was a time when that person was there. Is <i>still</i> there at times. And to remember the small moments of happiness and good humor, no matter how inconsequential. And to know that it gets better. To know that <i>you</i> get better too.<br />
<br />
<br />
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It gets better, and <i>you</i> get better too.Michelle Auhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04938937923678734252noreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5779260.post-30596981387378982412018-05-15T10:12:00.000-04:002018-05-24T09:42:33.069-04:00vintage scutmonkey: OB-GynBelatedly in honor of Mother's Day and peri-maternal services (cervixes?), another visit in the wayback machine. Happy Tuesday, and may all your splash-proof booties be knee-high.<br />
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<br />Michelle Auhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04938937923678734252noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5779260.post-60954196665936488432018-05-12T18:43:00.000-04:002018-05-13T00:51:18.460-04:00vintage scutmonkey: surgerySo starting in 2000, and for more than a decade thereafter, I used to have part of my blog hosted on a platform called Homestead. (<i>The fuck</i>, you say? Shut up, it was the early 2000s, we didn't have nice things back then.) Homestead was clunky and hard to navigate and ugly as sin, and they also charged me upwards of $400 a year in annual hosting fees. As a <i>resident</i> I paid this. I mean, my God. Every July they would <strike>extort me</strike> remind me to cough up this renewal fee, and every July I would put off the payment as late as possible until they threatened to wipe all my data, at which point I'd pay and they'd keep my files online for another year. Anyway, one summer, many years ago, I just decided not to renew, they made good with their promise, and anyway, that's why the oldest strata of archives on this seventeen year-old blog have been fittingly lost in the ether. (That's an anesthesia joke for you. Not a good one, I admit, but...there really aren't that many great anesthesia jokes.)<br />
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Anyway, I do mourn the loss of those first three years of archives (as much for their Web 1.0-tackiness as for the content itself), but one thing that I didn't count on happening was that I would lose the scans of the first three long-form Scutmonkey comics I ever made, about three third-year clinical rotations I did in medical school: Psych, OB-Gyn, and Surgery. I am certain that the original hard copies remain somewhere in my possession, but I've moved 5 different times since then, and whatever logical location they once were stored is unclear. (I had also scanned them at some point, but, again, that was five hard drives and fifteen years ago--not every file has migrated intact.) So while I somewhat regret the archival loss of proto-me in medical school (only somewhat because let's be real--between the ages of 21 and 24, I was even stupider than I am now), what I really regret is the loss of the cached images of those first three long-form Scutmonkey comics.<br />
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I'm going to continue to look for the original hard copies, as I'm certain that they are merely displaced, though hopefully not irrevocably. But in my search, I did find something close--the two remaining copies of the handmade booklets I made and sold of the Scutmonkey comics, optimistically named "Issue #1" of the series. In truth it was the <i>only</i> issue I ever made. I wrote a dozen more comics in various forms for Scutmonkey, but that scan and Xerox, cardstock and staple zine-form of publication was on its way out, if it hadn't already become well extinct even before I cranked out "Issue #1." But in this form, the three original long-form Scutmonkey comics still exist.<br />
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Here's the last one of those, entitled (rather straightforwardly): <i>Surgery</i>. The images below are janky, because they are very "your mom texting you a photo of a photo," but I'm doing this quick and dirty, and it gets the point across. Forgive the slight image bleed-through, it was printed on cheap paper, both because I myself was cheap, but because the booklet had to be thin enough to be stapled through. (#thepast)<br />
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Mack, looking through this comic book earlier today, asked, a little puzzled: "Is this, like, supposed to be...for humor?" I don't know, son. I really don't know.<br />
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<br />
May all your dressings remain clean, dry, and intact. I'll post the Ob-Gyn comic once I summon the will to rotate and crop all those photos of photos too.<br />
<br />
EDITED TO ADD: Thanks to Daisy Porter in the comments, I have found cached copies of the super old archives and extracted clean images from the Wayback Machine, thus enabling me to un-jank these images. Thanks, Daisy!Michelle Auhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04938937923678734252noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5779260.post-46599350743941927332018-04-29T07:55:00.000-04:002018-04-29T09:01:30.904-04:00a dog's life<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAkJNh1KP27-fCD76hoCqP3e8lcF2K1mrwJUCcT50J1h9O366MDDdvyi8tndFVamsw0slIevudwpAeEPKU4Jo40NQZ-mnyCGmgUjIbQTwFKdepFxlOETPFkOl9P8r8Qwz1pB-D2g/s1600/DSC_0088.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1064" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAkJNh1KP27-fCD76hoCqP3e8lcF2K1mrwJUCcT50J1h9O366MDDdvyi8tndFVamsw0slIevudwpAeEPKU4Jo40NQZ-mnyCGmgUjIbQTwFKdepFxlOETPFkOl9P8r8Qwz1pB-D2g/s640/DSC_0088.jpg" width="424" /></a></div>
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<i>Cooper, New York City, 2007</i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 12pt;">1.</span></div>
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="35" SemiHidden="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid"/>
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" Name="Revision"/>
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 6"/>
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 6"/>
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="19" QFormat="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="31" QFormat="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="32" QFormat="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="33" QFormat="true" Name="Book Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="37" SemiHidden="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="41" Name="Plain Table 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="42" Name="Plain Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="43" Name="Plain Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="44" Name="Plain Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="45" Name="Plain Table 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="40" Name="Grid Table Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46" Name="Grid Table 1 Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51" Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52" Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 2"/>
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<!--EndFragment--><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">Thursday morning, I woke
up, got my kids ready and took them to school. I came home, tidied up the rest
of the dishes, and gave my dog Cooper an indulgent breakfast: a full can of her
favorite soft dog food—not just a quarter of a can mixed in with her dry food
like usual, but the whole thing, every last bit, all to herself. After she
finished, I carried her to my car. We drove to the vet, where a kind
receptionist showed me into an exam room, past a potted ficus plant and a cheerful
wooden sign reading, “Think PAWS-ITIVELY!” I sat down on a bench. Cooper stuck
her head behind my knees.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 12pt;">And then we killed my dog.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">2.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">Cooper was a really old
dog. She lived to be fifteen and a half, which in human years would make her
(let’s see, multiply by seven, carry the three…) <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a million</i>. Our dog was a million years old. Approximately. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">We’d adopted Cooper from
the animal shelter back when she was a nine week old puppy small enough to tuck
into the crook of my elbow. She was a black lab mix (mixed with what, we never quite
determined) who came to us with a shaved belly and a crooked spaying scar
inelegantly perforated with royal blue vicryl suture. As fourth year medical
students, we fussed over this scar, criticized the surgical knots with a
superiority born of inexperience, and treated Cooper like a dress rehearsal
stand-in for a baby, which in most ways she was.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">Cooper lived with us in
six different homes, through medical school and residency and fellowship and
our first “real” jobs. We have three children who have never known a life
without Cooper in the background. She grudgingly tolerated the insult of our
second dog, Spot, who we adopted three years ago not <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">explicitly</i> as a spare, but certainly with an unspoken shared awareness
that our first dog had could not live forever. When we adopted Cooper, I was 24
years old. This summer, I turn 40. My entire adult life, she’s been there.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">And now, she’s not anymore.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">3.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">She’d had arthritis for
many years, though it had gotten much worse in the last year or two. Her hips
were stiff, and she had progressive trouble walking, or even standing up at
times. I noticed increasing muscle atrophy in her back legs, which would sometimes
lose footing on our hardwood floors. Sometimes she would fall and not be able
to get up again without assistance. Sometimes she wouldn’t even <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">try</i> to get up anymore, and we’d only
find her there on the floor hours later, uncomfortable but oddly still, just staring
at us.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">Joe and I are
doctors, so with a performative sense of brio learned on the job, we moved her
dog bed to the middle of the living room rug, where the textured floor could
help her back legs gain purchase. We built her a ramp with a rubberized surface
leading down to the backyard so she would no longer have to negotiate the
steps. I joked about buying a Hoyer lift, a hydraulic sling we use at the
hospital to move patients too weak to move themselves. There’s a certain grim
absurdist humor one develops after years working in a hospital, and the visual
of the Hoyer lift plays right into that—patients invariably ended up looking
like perverse babies, dangling there as though carried in the beak of some
giant mechanical stork. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">We got her prescription
anti-inflammatories to help her discomfort, and when, after a month, it was
clear these measures were not enough, we added on tramadol, an opioid pain
medication. Each solution helped a little bit, and for a time, but nothing ever
really helped <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that</i> much. At some
point, I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I saw her tail wagging.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">Her appetite, which had
always been appallingly bottomless, started to fail. She had increasing trouble
keeping food down. We started getting her special soft food and mixed in with
her dry kibble to tempt her—this, too, helped a little bit, but only for a while.
Her ribs and pelvic bones started to show. Her fur became dull. She started to
look like she was shrinking inside herself, a smaller dog wearing a too-large
fur coat, pulled out of mothballs from the back of the closet for one last
night out on the town.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">4.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">But this is not meant to
be a maudlin reflection piece about my old dead dog. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">I have a
healthy respect for the blessing of a good death, a mortal welcome not
overstayed. Having taken care of many terminally ill patients over the last
decade and a half, I realize that the greater injustice is often not the death
itself, but the way that we—as doctors, as families—sometimes just can’t let
people die quickly. No one just <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">dies</i>
anymore, they die long, protracted deaths, perforated by painful procedures in
cold harshly lit rooms; sleepless nights spent in uncomfortable beds in the
middle of squalling wards where the lights never fully turn off; tolerating
needle sticks and tubes and medications and plastic, which only seem to
multiply exponentially even as their own bodies are withering away. Joe and I have talked
about not wanting to subject ourselves or anyone we loved to this type of
death. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">When it’s my time, </i>we’ve said,
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">just let me go</i>. A death by lightning
strike, not slow asphyxiation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">And yet, even knowing
this, there was that moment of hesitation when it came to choosing the death
for our dog. Our <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">dog</i>. Not a human,
not a parent, not a patient, but a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">dog</i>,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>one who had already lived and
improbably long life and appeared to have no personal opinions on the matter.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">We thought: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">But she’s still doing fine, right?<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">We thought: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Maybe there’s something else we could try.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">We thought: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">How will we know when it’s time?<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">We thought: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Are we doing this for her, or are we doing
this for ourselves?<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">She became more unsteady.
We started having to carry her in and out of the house because she could no
longer walk down the stairs. The pain medications didn’t seem to be working
anymore. She appeared more confused, getting lost in her own house. She started
losing interest in people.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">We’d made one appointment
at the vet a month earlier, and in a spasm of doubt, cancelled the night
before. A week ago we made another appointment. This one, we kept.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">5.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">Sometimes having a little
clinical distance helps. Though I hate leading with this (generally I find very
little good comes from telling people you are a doctor), I made sure to mention
that I was an anesthesiologist so I would not be spared any technical details
of the process. I wanted the reassurance of understanding the pharmacology, the
protocol, to grab on to the quotidian comforts of considering administration
routes and uptake and circulation time instead of thinking too hard what was
going to happen next.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">The tech moved the exam
table over to the side and put a plush bath mat on the ground, which she then covered
with a thick white towel. Cooper could do whatever made her most comfortable,
she explained, but this would be warm and soft if she wanted to lie down later
on.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">The veterinarian entered
holding a 10 mL syringe filled with a radioactive-looking bright yellow
solution. This, she had explained earlier, was the first phase, a sedative cocktail
which would be administered intramuscularly to make Cooper “very sleepy and
very comfortable.” It consisted of midazolam (a benzodiazepine), ketamine (a
dissociative anesthetic), and a drug called acepromazine, which in humans had
originally been used as an antipsychotic, but is now almost exclusively used in
veterinary medicine as a potent sedative. Cooper’s only protest was the
handling of her sore back leg for the injection, but she did not react to the
needle stick at all.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">This phase took about
fifteen minutes. At first I let Cooper pace around the room. She was still
exploring the corners, sniffing the floor. She was panting—Cooper didn’t like
the vet’s office, the smell of it made her anxious. I patted her on the neck
and watched.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">Over the next few minutes,
the panting slowed down, then stopped. She started to look more unsteady on her
feet. Her atrophied back legs started to cross and slide on the linoleum, just
like they sometimes did at home before she fell. Gently, I lifted her one last
time and positioned her on the soft towel, her front paws on either side of her
face, her back legs curled behind her. She looked around, breathing slowly. I
looked back at her and stroked her head.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia";"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia";"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjshWH8g0ZjEzcqYW1Zs3wqT02qYgsoIg6XDhkbBdkuD_CEhXcGwzC6y2cUr_2fQqGJDwwNIOP7-BwadXaMGY-nGnANkiLIkKcfwz29CTb8mnu8H80NXurZ2hJopiogZbHtcjGhtg/s1600/IMG_5558.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjshWH8g0ZjEzcqYW1Zs3wqT02qYgsoIg6XDhkbBdkuD_CEhXcGwzC6y2cUr_2fQqGJDwwNIOP7-BwadXaMGY-nGnANkiLIkKcfwz29CTb8mnu8H80NXurZ2hJopiogZbHtcjGhtg/s640/IMG_5558.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "georgia";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">The vet came back in, this
time with a 5 mL syringe filled with a hot pink solution</span><i style="font-family: georgia;">. All the syringes at the vet’s office look like they came out the
props department of a science show,</i><span style="font-family: "georgia";"> I thought to myself. At the hospital,
almost all the medications we drew into syringes were clear and colorless. This
cheerful-looking syringe held the lethal dose of pentobarbital.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">It all happened very fast
after that. The vet wiped down Cooper’s back leg with an alcohol wipe (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Why?</i> I wondered, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">surely antisepsis surely is no longer a concern</i>—but maybe wetting
down the fur made palpating a vein easier) and injected a 22-gauge butterfly
needle. I saw the flash of blood tracing back into the tubing and knew she had
gotten in on the first pass. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nice work!</i>
I thought reflexively, though it seemed like a weird thing to say out loud in
the moment, so I didn’t. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">Slowly, she injected the
pentobarbital, and flushed it through the short tubing with a small amount of
saline. She talked to Cooper throughout. “You’re a beautiful girl. Yes, such a
good dog. You’re OK. What a good, long life you’ve had. Yes, sweet girl.” It
only took about a minute. Cooper’s eyes were still open, but I could see that
she was no longer breathing. The vet touched one finger to Cooper’s eye and
noted that she had lost her corneal reflex. She took out her stethoscope and
listened to Cooper’s chest. There was silence for a few seconds. Then she
nodded. “She’s gone.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">I said, “That’s it?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">6.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">In the time after Cooper
had gotten her first shot but before the pentobarbital, I mentioned to the vet
that I was working on a piece about end-of-life care in human patients. I told
her I appreciated the fact that euthanasia was an available option. After all,
our dog didn’t have <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">cancer</i> or
anything. She wasn’t <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">actively</i> dying.
I don’t even know that she was suffering in any overt way that she could
communicate to us. But we just wanted to afford her the dignity of a gentle
death while she was still capable of having good days. “With human patients,” I
said, “it’s different. It feels like this is not a choice. With human patients,
we always want to ramp up, do more. It’s always about trying the next thing,
and the next, and the next. It’s about exhausting all options rather than
choosing the most humane one. With human patients…” I paused, thought a bit.
“With human patients, sometimes it feels like we just…can’t…ever…stop.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">The vet nodded—she’d heard
this before. Conversationally, she noted, “The suicide rate among veterinarians
is very high.” I glanced up, concerned. She continued, “Not because of the
stresses of the job, though I’m sure there’s some of that too. But the rate is
high because we get to see <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">this</i>.” She
gestured to Cooper, at both of our feet, breathing deeply. I thought about how
Cooper used to dream. She’d be lying there asleep, making little half-barks,
her legs twitching, her breath catching in her chest as though she were running
full-out, chasing after some ball or squirrel only she could see. I wondered if
she was dreaming right now.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">“You get to see this?” I
asked. I didn’t quite understand. Was she saying that having to euthanize pets
day after day was a psychological strain?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">She redirected me. “We get
to see <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">this</i>. We’re familiar with it.
How easy it is. How peaceful. How merciful. You’re right, it’s not like this
for human patients at all. It’s something we’re allowed to do for the animals
we love, but not for the people.” Cooper’s breathing was slowing down. I hadn’t
seen her this comfortable in years. Every muscle in her body was relaxed. For
the first time in a long while, it was clear she was in absolutely no pain. “So
for many veterinarians, when their time comes, they look at their options and
think, ‘Well, screw <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">this</i>.’ And we
know how to do it.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">I considered this for a
moment. The vet injected the pentobarbital. After it was over, she left us
alone, and told me that the room was mine and that I should take all the time
that I needed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">7.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">So now I got to see it
too.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia"; mso-themecolor: text1;">Every doctor has witnessed the opposite scenario. Patients ill and in
pain, suffering the tail end of a dwindling life yet not actively dying, unable
to do anything but agree to the next indignity, and the next, and the next. We
see these patients again and again because they keep getting sent back to us
for more. They do not have the choice to opt out while their good days still
outnumber the bad. And pretty soon they are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">all</i>
bad days, just so many of them, one blending into the next, on and on until
it’s unclear what precisely we’re trying to gain. Is it even for the patient
anymore? Or is it for ourselves, the doctors, because <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">more</i> is all we’re trained to do?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin: 13.5pt 0in; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia"; mso-themecolor: text1;">Every doctor has seen this play out many times over, and every doctor
has felt party to the crime. Major surgeries on critically ill patients that
will not extend their lives, but only extend the amount of time they spend
suffering in them. Medications that beget more medications, treatments that
only invite further interventions. Procedures to insert feeding tubes,
tracheostomies and indwelling IV lines on patients who might have died
peacefully months ago, except that we just wouldn’t let them. “What exactly are
we <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">doing</i> here?” we’ve all thought on countless
occasions. “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Why</i> is this happening?
Someone needs to say ‘no.’ This is crazy. It needs to stop.” But there’s a big
divide between <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">letting</i> a patient die
and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">helping</i> a patient to die
peacefully and with dignity, and that is a line that, as physicians, we have
yet to negotiate. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin: 13.5pt 0in; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia"; mso-themecolor: text1;">The American College of Physician’s position is that physician-assisted
suicide is “</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-themecolor: text1;">problematic given the
nature of the patient–physician relationship, affects trust in the relationship
and in the profession, and fundamentally alters the medical profession's role
in society.” The American Medical Association agrees, opining that “</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia";">permitting physicians to engage in
assisted suicide would ultimately cause more harm than good,” and that
“[p]hysician-assisted suicide is fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s
role as healer”. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin: 13.5pt 0in; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia";">I agree the
issue is not straightforward, and I have only limited insight into the full
scope of ethical scenarios to which physician-assisted suicide might give rise.
But I do object to the language the AMA uses, that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“[p]hysician-assisted suicide is fundamentally incompatible with the
physician’s role as healer”.</i> I think this too narrowly defines the role of
the physician, and the responsibilities to our patients. Yes, as physicians, healing
is a large part of our job, but sometimes people can no longer be healed. What,
then, does our role become? When the treatment goals turn from cure to care,
are we offering all we could humanely provide?</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia"; mso-themecolor: text1;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt; mso-themecolor: text1;">Mahatma Gandhi once said, </span><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "georgia";">“The
greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">animals</span> are treated.” In some cases, however, the options we
give our animals are kinder than those we offer our people. Few argue with the
logic of offering compassionate euthanasia to companion animals who have reached
the end of life or who are suffering unduly. It’s hard, then, not to wonder why
it is so unthinkable to offer the same comfort to our human patients should they ask.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia"; mso-themecolor: text1;">Physicians wield an incredible power over our patients’ lives, and that
power must ultimately be tempered with humanity and mercy. This becomes all the
more important closer to the end of life as our options dwindle, because no
longer being able to cure the patient does not mean we lose all ability to take
care of them. We can still do more even in the absence of doing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">more</i>—the simple mercy of being able to say,
as our veterinarian did, “It’s OK to have reached this point. And it’s OK if
you’ve decided to stop. I’m here. I can help.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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-->Michelle Auhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04938937923678734252noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5779260.post-38292488987821882552017-09-23T17:25:00.001-04:002017-09-23T19:23:45.743-04:00young girls have picked them every oneDespite the fact that it's eighty skrillion degrees outdoors in the sun, it's officially Fall, which (at least around here) is the season for a particular brand of autumnal barnyard revels. Most of these places are pretty much the same. There are pumpkins, usually some variant of bounce apparatus, listless animals to pet, perhaps some sort of giant PVC tube slide done on the cheap, a corn maze, hayrides, a train ride where the train cars are inexplicably spotted like a Holstein cow 50% of the time, and perhaps cider with donuts. Standard.<br />
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That's not that interesting, because we've all been there, done that. But today we returned to a place we went to last year, <a href="http://southernbellefarm.com/" target="_blank">Southern Belle Farm</a>. The reason we went back to Southern Belle Farm is because they have a pick your own flower field. You heard me. PICK YOUR OWN FLOWERS. This...is different!</div>
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A few reasons we like this place. One is that, unlike <a href="http://theunderweardrawer.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-cider-house-rules.html" target="_blank">the apple orchard we went to two weeks ago</a>, they don't nickel and dime you for every damn thing. One ticket for admission covers everything you could possibly want to do, unless you want to buy food. Second reason is that it's very well-kept. Well laid out, neat, clean, and (at least on the two occasions we've been there), not crowded. Third reason is that right there. <i>Pick your own flowers. </i></div>
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The flowers are beautiful. I don't know what kind they are (maybe someone could chime in if you recognize them), but there's a giant field of them, organized into deep rows. Flower picking is included in the price of admission ($14 per person between the ages of 3 and 65 years old). You just go in and pick as many as you want to take home. Last time we came we didn't know about the pick your own flowers, so we weren't quite prepared. The stems are pretty fibrous so it's hard to pick them with just your hands, and also we didn't have anywhere to put the flowers, so they were all wilted and dead by the time we got home. But this time I was <i>prepared</i>, boy. I had a bucket. I had cold water . I had <i>garden shears</i> for each kid. FORESIGHT IS 20/20 (is a thing that over-planners should smugly start saying).</div>
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Oh, and just this last. On our way to the car, we passed the corn maze. My kids don't want to do cornmazes anymore because the last time we did one we got lost (an anxiety-provoking experience enhanced by the fact that I was actually on backup call that day and anxious about my potential for ready egress already) but I don't think this formative trauma prevents them from standing <i>near</i> corn. (Yet. I suppose there's still time for them to be PTSDed by the Iowa caucus later on.) So I told them to stand amidst the corn and peek their faces out, because that would be a great "Children of the Corn" joke that might be funny...to me. It was a marginal success, if you consider the margin to be the floor. Maybe in addition to garden shears, I should have brought scythes.</div>
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(Thanks to Andrew Moore for recommending this place to us last year. We'll miss you, Good Andrew.)</div>
Michelle Auhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04938937923678734252noreply@blogger.com167tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5779260.post-47893908597120804262017-09-20T12:53:00.002-04:002017-09-23T17:29:52.554-04:00back in the saddle again<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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So here's the thing about going back to school when you really haven't been in the classroom for the past...oh, let's say 16 years. (I am lopping off the last two years of med school in this calculation, since that was really more clinical than didactic, and really more indentured servitude than clinical.)<br />
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First of all, I can't remember the last time I've had to sit still for as long as I was in class over the course of the last weekend. And I'm <i>old!</i> Sitting still should be my default state at this point, and as I get older I expect I'll get increasingly horizontal until finally, I'm dead. (Meanwhile, also because old: reminiscing/bitching about how the good old days were better than this all bullshit.)<br />
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Second: I am trapped in amber. School is different now. I see it with my kids (Cal in particular has a particularly robust online curriculum in middle school, and he'll usually get all his homework assignments to complete and hand in online, or complete group projects via Google Hangout and the like), but I am a traditionalist. I don't like to consume didactic material on a screen. I need to read on paper. I need to write notes with a pen. I like touching things. Consuming information of a certain sort on line is like trying to eat after contracting cholera--it all just goes right through me. I don't know if it's simply a matter of preference or motor processing or what, but after a few half-hearted attempts at reading online, I just had to print out all my course materials from online and keep it in a binder, which I had to do at home because Columbia refused to do it for us, citing a grand school philosophy of environmental awareness and conservation. (My take? Fuck you, trees. Get in my printer.)<br />
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Third: There are a lot of words I haven't had to apply to myself personally in a while, and it feels weird to say them. I have "homework" to do. I have "problem sets." There are "papers" to write and "finals" to take. I have to locate and use a "pencil."<br />
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So in sum, this is all very different and disorienting and it's a lot of work. <br />
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I kind of love it.<br />
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Carry on.<br />
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P.S. Oh yes, many of you have told me that my page has been loading slowly and crashing with some frequency. So first, disclaimer: I don't actually know how computers work anymore, so this might be a bit of a process to fix. But second, I tried to streamline a few things on the sidebar that I think were causing problems (I suspect the Tumblr code widget was going Skynet), so if this has helped, or if it's all still exactly the same degree of shittiness, let me know, and for what it's worth I will tinker some more.Michelle Auhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04938937923678734252noreply@blogger.com35tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5779260.post-70771617850081685382017-09-10T22:19:00.000-04:002017-09-10T22:19:21.206-04:00high water markHurricane Irma hasn't arrive in our area yet, but somehow she's already caused some flooding here.<br />
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(We were trying to fill our bathtub with clean water in case anything came up, but then we lost track of how full the bathtub was getting and it overflowed. This reminds me of when we're starting a case in the OR, make a hash of the A-line or central line or what have you, and dryly note, "Anesthesia EBL: 10 mL." We caused the very problem we were trying to avoid.)<br />
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So, Hurricane Irma's set to arrive here tomorrow. Our friends to the south obviously have it <i>much</i> worse than us, so it feels insulting to even tangentially compare our situation to theirs. But Atlanta is...bad at weather. So. The kids have no school for the next two days. Joe cancelled his clinic tomorrow. We got a few extra flashlights to keep on hand. (We had a bunch already, but somehow they always wander, because the kids think that flashlights are toys, which I guess they kind of are until you actually need them.) We filled up a bunch of thermoses with fresh water. We are charging all our stuff, and all our accessory battery packs, just in case the power goes out. (This is actually the most likely scenario, as the power goes out with some regularity even under normal bad weather conditions.) We opened up the pool cover and checked all the gutters. And, of course, we tried to save a bathtub full of fresh water just in case.<br />
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I honestly think it's not going to be a really big deal, in the end, but Governor Deal has declared a state of emergency (which I think it's likely the most prudent decision), so what can you do? I'll be heading in to work tomorrow (ahead of the bad weather, I think--I don't believe it's supposed to get bad until the afternoon) but I'm pretty sure that as extreme weather shelters go, a hospital is probably not a bad place to be.<br />
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Everyone stay safe, drive slow, and I'll see you at work tomorrow.Michelle Auhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04938937923678734252noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5779260.post-86231143155724117242017-09-09T19:20:00.001-04:002017-09-09T19:20:34.995-04:00the cider house RULES!...is a joke that has surely never been made before!<br />
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(Sorry John Irving. Maybe if your books weren't so fucking depressing people wouldn't need to make jokes about them to laugh through the pain. A Prayer for Owen Meany? More like A Prayer for Owen SADDIE, am I right?)<br />
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(I'll...show myself out.)<br />
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Anyway. Where was I? Oh right. Today we went apple picking, because it's fall and the weather is beautiful and there's no way you would know that Hurricaine Irma will be up in our zone by the day after tomorrow. (Though hopefully just a tropical storm by then. Floridian friends, stay safe.) My kids like to pick things (noses, fruit, and scabs, in that order), you know I have a thing about getting out of the house on the weekends, and going apple picking means a higher than average chance of getting to eat a fried apple pie, which was the best thing they had at McDonalds before they decided to change the recipe and ruined my entire life.<br />
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(When I was about nine or ten, my family and I went to Paris, where I realized that McDonalds was still making their apple pies there in the old fashioned manner--that is to say, apples in a crust cooked directly in the deep fryer, served fresh.) And honest to god I think I ate a McDonalds apple pie there just about every single day of our trip. To Paris. Fuck off, <i>galettes des pommes</i>, I'm eating this other, better thing right now.)<br />
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The apple orchard we went to was <a href="http://www.reeceorchards.com/">B. J. Reece Apple House</a>, where we'd gone apple picking last year. B. J. Reece is located in Ellijay, GA, where all the other apple orchards are, and they have a reasonably large variety of apples that reach peak season throughout the fall. I think right now, pretty early in the season, we were picking Golden and Red Delicious, Red Romes, and Galas--though we didn't get to the Galas because they were across the road and our bags were full by the time we finished one side of the orchard.<br />
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B. J. Reece also has your standard panoply of of Farm FFamily FFFun activities, though they do nickel and dime you <i>a la carte</i>. $12 per peck sized back of apples, $5 per person for admission, $3 per person for the petting zoo, $2 per for the bouncing pillow. Because of this piecemeal ticketing process, the check-in process is a bit annoying (and not precisely cheap), but...I get it. They need to keep the lights on. I have no idea how these places ever really make money, frankly.<br />
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We only ended up doing the petting zoo, and the giant slide (which, thankfully, was included in the price of admission rather than a separate ticket). The petting zoo was quite nice. They had your standard animals (there are always goats), but they also had puppies and kittens (I KNOW) and a baby cow, who was not at <i>all</i> interested in being pet, but very cute, and will probably teach you Important Life Lessons <i>à la</i> City Slickers.<br />
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This chicken thinks he's FABULOUS.<br />
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Also, these asshole turkeys. Why do they always have turkeys at a petting zoo? WHO WANTS TO PET A TURKEY? LOOK AT THEM.<br />
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B. J. Reece also has a market and bakery that sells your usual stuff. Pre-picked apples, farm fresh vegetables, honey, jams and jellies, hot sauces, baked goods, boiled peanuts, popcorn, cider, that kind of thing. They also have a bit of a lunch operation, though I don't think they've fully ramped up for the season yet, as the only food they had on offer were hot dogs. <br />
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I included this because I've seen clover honey before, but...cotton honey? That's a thing? (I guess it must be. I'm no apiologist.)<br />
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One last plus of going to an apple orchard early-ish in the season is you can still try to get in your family picture for your holiday cards. These never turn out that great (because usually we take the photos ourselves, quite often using a selfie stick, which is what you do when you are too cheap and/of self-conscious to hire someone to take family photos for you), but aside from general too-sunny squintiness, I think we made out OK this year.<br />
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Now to defensively eat apples for the next three months.Michelle Auhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04938937923678734252noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5779260.post-45323082742374047232017-09-08T19:26:00.000-04:002017-09-08T20:05:14.131-04:00office spaceThat face when you realize that instead of having <i>one</i> written assignment due for your Healthcare Management class on Thursday, you actually have <i>three</i> written assignments due.<br />
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Where do you find a place to do work? I've always had trouble really getting work done at home. <i>Always</i>. It's not a matter of not having enough space. I have space. <i>Physical</i> space, I mean. We even have a room designated as an "office," though in recent years there has been some creep as one kid or two have gradually taken over my desk to use my computer for this that or the other thing. But it doesn't even really matter--even with the separate room, and even with the door closed, and indeed, even when no one is home but me, I find it very distracting to work at home. There's just too much else to do. I could do my work, <i>or</i> I could put another load of laundry in. Or clean up the living room. Or start prepping dinner. Or let the dogs out. Or let the dogs in. And hmm, this keyboard seems awfully dusty. (Smash cut to a 30 minute quest to find that one compressed air blower thingy that I'm sure I saw coming out of a box when we first moved here more than three years ago.) And on and on. So it's not so much a matter of finding the space, you see. It's just a matter of finding the correct sensory deprivation tank.<br />
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My go-to for the past decade-plus has always been to go to a Starbucks. Starbuckseseseses are generic and neutral enough, and if you bring headphones, reasonably quiet. (Though I did memorize the entire Beck "Mutations" album in med school against my will because apparently that's all they ever played at that Starbucks on 103rd and Broadway while I was studying for Step 1 of the Boards. "It's nobody's fault, nobody's fault, but my oooooown.")<br />
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My only real problem with Starbucks is...well, there are two problems. One is that you kind of have to pay to be there. It's not a rule, of course, but what kind of ass parks themselves in a coffeeshop for hours without buying something? So that's four or five bucks right there. (Sometimes, when I would really stay there all damn day, as I did during med school to study, or in residency while writing my book, I would buy a drink in addition to the cheapest real food item possible, which was usually an egg salad sandwich. I...don't like egg salad sandwiches that much anymore.)<br />
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But the issue of rent is to be expected. My real problem was more of a sensory one. I have headphones, I stay in the corner, I don't lollygag at what other people are doing. But the <i>smell</i>. I don't know if they have a roaster on site, or if that's just the smell of coffee itself brewing, but if you sit in a Starbucks for a few hours, you're going to smell like you just walked out of a bonfire. <i>Everything</i>. Your hair, your clothes, your skin, the inside of your nose. You smell like an arsonist. You smell like you just finished smoking four packs of cigarettes.<br />
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Anyway, I know this is, like, the most obvious solution in the world, but today I tried something new.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsl1UeiGJyd4NHCr_eM8P25fXua_3Wx5q6YsYrUhuYIUu_DAB8M0Q9rGnf-9CSmdJxEgmss8XK0B681OuXPsnPxtDlaNvYqeYry982nf-Uefjyyz6sEbH2ciXLwi4ggZRC4L96HQ/s1600/IMG_2170.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsl1UeiGJyd4NHCr_eM8P25fXua_3Wx5q6YsYrUhuYIUu_DAB8M0Q9rGnf-9CSmdJxEgmss8XK0B681OuXPsnPxtDlaNvYqeYry982nf-Uefjyyz6sEbH2ciXLwi4ggZRC4L96HQ/s640/IMG_2170.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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The library. I know, duh. THE LIBRARY. This was a nice library! So quiet! Such beautiful natural light! Such a delicious old book smell when you walk in the door! So close to my house! So <i>free!</i> <br />
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I don't know why I'd ruled this option out in the past, but I've had several formative bad experiences trying to get real work done in a library. In med school, people would get weirdly territorial about their study spaces, and I would leave all their stuff by choice carrels or tables (and I mean STUFF--not just books, but changes of socks, full meals, honest to god desk lamps that they toted in from home) and their general gunnerishness turned me off. (Sorry, fellow med students. You're great, but recognize that there was a point in our career development where we were all borderline intolerable.) As for my regular neighborhood public library, this may have just been my area in New York, but our local branch library was more a place where pleasantly demented seniors would come read all the newspapers on Earth (licking their fingers before turning each page, which is something they somehow managed to do <i>loudly</i>), and where homeless dudes would come in out of the cold and wash up in the bathrooms. Which is fine, but maybe just not the ideal space to try to do some hard core memorization. Or even soft core memorization. Or barely legal memorization. Because I would get really interested in the side stories. Like: how many newspapers can you read in one day? Did you bring them into the library from home? What's the <i>point</i> of reading a two year-old newspaper cover to cover? I HAVE QUESTIONS.<br />
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Are you able to work at home? How do you do it? Do you have kids? Don't they always want to talk to you? How do you minimize distraction? How do you carve out the mental space for this work but not that work? These are things that I'm going to need to start to address more, once I start having to do more school work after hours, in the margins of my day. But when I'm able to use it, the library is going to be a nice option.Michelle Auhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04938937923678734252noreply@blogger.com47tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5779260.post-41219018417242352152017-09-07T15:02:00.001-04:002017-09-07T16:12:24.583-04:00reading the roomI'm going to be out of town for four days next week (see: <a href="http://theunderweardrawer.blogspot.com/2017/09/back-to-school.html" target="_blank">yesterday's post</a>), so I signed up to be the "parent reader" for Nina's kindergarten class today. Because of guilt. Oh yeah, also I wanted to promote literacy and volunteer my time and surprise my kid at school. But mainly guilt.<br />
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I've done this "parent reader" gig a few times in the past, and I've learned a few things along the way. The first time I did it this, when Cal was in Pre-K, it took a lot more planning and schedule swapping (I was still working full time back then), so it was a higher pressure situation all around. I actually had to get some kind of special dispensation from the teacher to switch slots, since "parent readers" were supposed to come in <i>only</i> for the kids' SUPER DUPER ALL ABOUT ME SUPERSTAR week, and on Cal's original week I was work-scheduled up to the gills. (Cal went to a private school in midtown Atlanta at the time, and as a general rule I've noticed private schools are much less understanding about parents not being able to drop every damn thing and show up midday for stuff on short notice.) But anyway, that first time, the book I brought was...well, I <i>thought</i> it was a good idea. It was one of Cal's favorite books. It was by Dr. Seuss. We had a big hardcover with pictures that everyone could see, even all the way in the back. I loved this book as a kid myself. Right here:<br />
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<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Happy-Birthday-You-Dr-Seuss/dp/0394800761/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1504794550&sr=8-1&keywords=happy+birthday+doctor+seuss" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="520" data-original-width="520" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-tsO17_bv1CEH9UDIkVnomS4hbxxSqfNzq2Tf1gTdAzeJAnrzs8i-AbPvlhJu7e8Og4MPLbZpQPGlegKpyoZmkowWotuEW1s1ymuyKLFhud6j6i38xQu2D0fk1lSyt3lXtIAi5Q/s640/11400597.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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MAJOR ERROR. First of all, the book is 64 pages long. Second of all, it has <i>way</i> too many words. Third, too much lingual dexterity is required, so you can only read it so fast.<br />
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Oh, brother.<br />
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I think by page four of the Happy Birthday book, the kids in the class were flopping around on the floor, running around the back of the room, and generally talking through the whole thing. (Even <i>my own kid</i> was losing interest, and this was HIS BOOK.) I think I skipped a whole chunk of pages in the middle, just to get through it (no one noticed), and at the end, one of the teachers came up to me and said (sympathetically, helpfully), "Yeah, I find that...<i>shorter</i> books are...usually better choices."<br />
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I'm not a naturally performative person. I will read to my own kids but I don't naturally have the type of personality that makes me want to read to <i>all</i> kids. I'm not even sure that I <i>like</i> most kids that aren't my own kids. But I can limp through this "parent reader" type of thing OK, because now I know to make better book choices. In sum:<br />
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<blockquote>
* Keep it short. </blockquote>
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* Keep it pithy. </blockquote>
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* It doesn't matter if it's "too easy" for your kid. The other kids don't care how sophisticated your child's taste is, and the teacher isn't making judgements on your household or your kids' I.Q. if you end up choosing <u>SPIDER-MAN'S POP-UP LASER TAG ADVENTURE</u> for your parent reader selection, so long as the kids in the class stay out of her hair for ten minutes so she can check her e-mail and finish her sandwich.</blockquote>
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* Pick books that are funny, where you can really act out the voices, are almost always successful if you're willing to go there. </blockquote>
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* For God's sake, don't read <u>The Giving Tree</u> unless you want to cry in front of a bunch of five-year olds like some kind of psycho. In fact, I try to stay away from melancholia altogether, because I hate feelings. <u><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Where-Wild-Things-Maurice-Sendak/dp/0060254920/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1504799915&sr=8-1&keywords=where+the+wild+things+are" target="_blank">Where the Wild Things Are</a></u>? Get outta here. <u><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Runaway-Bunny-Margaret-Wise-Brown/dp/0064430189/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1504799935&sr=1-1&keywords=runaway+bunny" target="_blank">The Runaway Bunny</a></u>? Fuck you.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
* Bring a selection, and let the kids choose, but know that there will be split votes and you'll have to end up reading pretty much all of them.</blockquote>
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So here are the ones I brought. <br />
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Not pictured: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Push-Button-Bill-Cotter/dp/1492607630/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1504794614&sr=1-1&keywords=don%27t+push+the+button" target="_blank">Don't Push the Button</a> (which is kind of a dumb book, but interactive--and yes, I know the book was not written for me, but it's still dumb) and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Monster-Sesame-Street-Birds-Favorites/dp/0375805613/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1504794710&sr=1-1&keywords=the+monster+at+the+end+of+this+book" target="_blank">The Monster at the End of This Book</a>, which is actually the <i>perfect</i> book for this kind of thing, but it's only available in teeny tiny board book or Little Golden Book size, and also I can't find our copy. (Those groovy fonts, tho!)<br />
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We ended up having time to read three. <u>Don't Push the Button</u> as a warm-up act, <a href="http://theunderweardrawer.blogspot.com/2017/09/back-to-school.html">This Is Not My Hat</a> as the headliner (I like the art in that one, as well as in John Klassen's other book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/I-Want-My-Hat-Back/dp/0763655988/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1504799084&sr=8-2&keywords=this+is+not+my+hat">I Want My Hat Back</a>--first in a three part hat <i>oeuvre</i>, I suppose), and closing with that old evergreen <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Let-Pigeon-Drive-Bus/dp/078681988X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1504799460&sr=1-1&keywords=don%27t+let+the+pigeon+drive+the+bus" target="_blank">Don't Let The Pigeon Drive the Bus</a>.<br />
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"How come you have so many funny books?" this one kid in the front row asked me at the end. Like it was some kind of <i>accident</i>. Kid, you don't even know.Michelle Auhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04938937923678734252noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5779260.post-6309568219967064372017-09-06T16:12:00.001-04:002017-09-06T19:12:37.380-04:00back to schoolI've enjoyed seeing everyone's back to school photos of social media these past few weeks, though they make me realize that I must be either one click off age-wise or else totally disconnected from current parenting trends, as I have never in my life taken a picture of my kid holding a sign (or if you want to get real fancy, a <a href="https://www.lakeside.com/Home-Decor/Wall-Art---Frames/School+Memories+Chalkboard+Signs/prod2660147.jmp?cid=GooglePLA-177420015&ukwcid=+&product_id=177420015&adpos=1o2&creative=106300818648&device=c&matchtype=&network=g&gclid=Cj0KCQjwub7NBRDJARIsAP7wlT-OAGJABZYWCWIaWr_nBE6fJ6hXZjsIV6DWLBRsf9YPSxKtMmcZjIYaAmNmEALw_wcB" target="_blank">blackboard</a>) broadcasting what grade they were going into. (Another trend that either came later or else that I just totally ignored was that thing where you put a <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0711L4FV3?psc=1" target="_blank">giant sticker</a> on the front of your kids' onesie telling everyone how many months old they are.) I mean, not that I don't take a picture of my kids on approximately the first day of school, because I do...<a href="http://michelleau.tumblr.com/post/164417769981/my-kids-went-back-to-school-two-weeks-ago-but-i" target="_blank">kind of</a>. But it just seems like there are so many <i>things</i> and <i>rituals</i> and <i>accoutrement</i> now. Like the child-rearing industry is slowly becoming the bridal industry.<br />
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But speaking of back to school...<br />
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Around the end of last year (right around, oh, say...Wednesday November 9th), I started thinking about how I could get more involved in healthcare on a broader level. I love my job and have no plans to stop being an anesthesiologist, but I also wanted to do something...else. Something <i>more</i>. Something less zoomed in, something a little more macro, something more policy and population-based. A broader way to help out. So what I decided to do was to go back to school and get a Masters of Public Health.<br />
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This was not an easy decision. Getting this degree is going to take a lot of time. It comes with a not-inconsequential monetary cost. I don't "need" to do it, and in most ways it's going to make my life a lot harder. It's not linked to any particular path for upward mobility or higher earning power, and I'm not looking to switch jobs. Almost no one that I'm close to understands why I want to do this, or thinks its remotely a good idea. (My parents seemed initially excited at the news, but then rapidly realized that I said I was getting an MPH, not an MBA, as they misheard. They were much less excited after that.) Oh, and also, I don't really have a really good specific idea of what exactly I want to <i>do</i> with this degree when (or if) I finally complete it. If I'm going to be totally honest, the only real reason I want to go back to school is because I want to learn more about public health, and can only hope that in the process of going through the coursework I'm going to find a useful, real-life way to marry this knowledge with my current career and find a good, real-world application for it. But I don't know what that's going to look like yet.<br />
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So anyway, that's happening. I've been accepted to the <a href="https://www.mailman.columbia.edu/" target="_blank">Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia</a>, and will be starting their part-time executive MPH program next week. "Part-time" means I still will working my normal job, exactly the same as before. It also means a lot of remote work and an online curriculum, though once a month, for one long weekend (Thursday through Sunday, all day long), I will be flying into New York and completing my in-person classroom requirement. This, every month, for two years. We had an on-campus orientation in August. The first official day of classes is next week on September 14th. If I can get through this all without losing my mind, I'll be slated to graduate in August of 2019.<br />
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The time investment. The time investment is...a lot. I take it seriously. I work part-time at the hospital, but I have three kids (which is why I went part-time in the first place), and kids don't just go on auto-pilot. Doing this program necessarily translates into less time for me for them. It means more time in the evening spent in front of books, more than twice as many weekends I will be out of the picture, less flexibility for everyone all around. This was Joe's main objection to me starting this program. I don't think I'm airing any dirty laundry by talking about this, because he'd tell you just as easily: he doesn't think this is such a great idea. He's <i>nominally</i> supportive, and by that I guess I just mean he would never tell me explicitly not to do it. But for our family, I know he'd really rather I just...didn't. He doesn't see why we spent so many years getting to a point where our life was finally getting easier only to deliberately make it harder again.<br />
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But that was my exact thinking, only in reverse. We have three kids. Our youngest, Nina, just started kindergarten this year. I'm not saying our kids still aren't youngish (they are), or that they don't need me as much (they do, though the ways in which they need me are less about immediate survival and more about presence and guidance and...well, I guess I do all the food shopping and cooking, so, yes, maybe a little bit of survival). But it's a bit easier now. We have some breathing room. We have margins. What do you do with that elasticity? What else do you want to do? What's important to you? Is it about the luxury of empty space, or is it about the luxury to take on more? To do more with your life? What comes next? <br />
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Also. I finished residency nine years ago. Nine years into private practice. I <i>love</i> my current job, I love taking care of patients. It's the most rewarding, immediate, and intimate type of service I could ever hope to provide. (I know I'm supposed to say, "outside of parenthood" right here, but I won't. It's not that I don't think parenthood is important, I just feel it's a completely different thing.) But I feel like there's more I want to do. I just don't know how yet, so I want to learn. Because life is not lived in order to be easy. Life is lived to be worthwhile.<br />
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And honestly, once I decided to go ahead and do this thing, part of me was really tickled and excited about the idea of going back to school. It's been a long time. And I like school. I like learning. I like knowing things. I especially like knowing things that I feel I should know already. I've been doing some pre-reading for some of my classes, and there are so many things I'm learning now--about healthcare economics, policy, the history of Medicare and Medicaid--that I can't believe I hadn't been explicitly taught before. And the fact that I'll be back at school right where I started, at Columbia, on the health science campus...I just get a kick out of returning "home." (Columbia friends: the School of Public Health is located in the old Psych Institute, next door to the new Psych Institute, two doors down from our first year <strike></strike>prison dorm rooms in Bard Hall. That was a grim little block wasn't it?)<br />
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So anyway. That's what's new with me. How have you been doing?Michelle Auhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04938937923678734252noreply@blogger.com212tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5779260.post-80554964035689620492017-09-05T21:31:00.000-04:002017-09-09T19:21:00.365-04:00shovel all the coal in, gotta keep it rollin' / woo, woo, Chattanooga, there you are<br />
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(I know I said I'd update Chattanooga Day Two yesterday, but I LIED.)<br />
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Day Two in Chattanooga had a leisurely start. We had one destination in mind (about which more later), but this place did not open until noon, and we had some time to kill before then. So we decided to take a five minute-ish walk over to the <a href="http://choochoo.com/">Chattanooga Choo Choo</a> for brunch. <br />
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The Chattanooga Choo Choo is a hotel built in an old decommissioned railway station, with guest rooms both inside the terminal building and in the Pullman train cars, the latter of which are on the old rails out back behind the lobby. Don't get me wrong, our Air BnB was nice, but if I had know that we could have slept on a train? Bitch, <i>we would have been sleeping on a train.</i> (I mean, probably. I <i>did</i> like having a king-sized bed at our townhouse, though. And laundry facilities. And, you know, a shower where I could move my arms around.) But even non-guests of the hotel were free to wander the grounds, and check out the lobby in the old terminal building, which had a Great Gatsby feel that I enjoyed very much. Even the bathrooms were neat, and reminded me of the bathrooms in my old elementary school (plus a chandelier, minus the off-color graffito-tagging).<br />
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We had breakfast at the <a href="https://frothymonkey.com/">Frothy Monkey</a>, just off the main lobby, which inhabited a gorgeous, high-ceilinged space and featured a solid breakfast/brunch menu. The wait time for our food was a bit long, but it was Sunday brunch, nothing unexpected. <br />
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Out in the back courtyard of the hotel, by the train tracks, there were a slew of outdoor games. I wish we had known about them beforehand--I would have sent my kids to go play out there rather than waiting at our table FOREVER (in their estimation) for the food. But here's one of the purposes of me writing this recap: now <i>you</i> know. They had a few games of oversized Jenga, cornhole, and a bocce court, which my kids were obsessed with. Nina, in particular, was freakishly <i>great</i> at bocce. Meaning she beat pretty much everyone she played with, and I can assure you we were not pulling our punches. She's an old Italian man at core, I guess. I sure hope she gets that bocce scholarship when the time comes. (Other PRO TIP: they don't actually care who comes in to play with their stuff. We happened to have just eaten at the breakfast place, but you could also just wander in off the street and play a few rounds, no one was checking, and I think the trains and the station alone are area attractions.)<br />
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Our real destination that day, however, was <a href="http://www.lakewinnie.com/">Lake Winnie</a>. Lake Winnie (<i>née</i> Winnepesaukah) is a local "family amusement park" (which I guess they make a point of noting, to distinguish it from all those porn and booze-soaked regular amusement parks) that I was attracted to because of, rather than in in spite of, its old-school bootleg charm. Less than 15 minutes from the Southside neighborhood where we were staying, it was technically located over the Tennessee-Georgia state line, but close enough to Chattanooga to be a local attraction (and a pretty great one at that, if you aren't too concerned about culture and learning and whatnot). It was a good time.<br />
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They had your standard state fair type amusement rides. Bumper cars, Tilt-a-Whirl, a bootleg Dumbo ride (conveniently called "Jumbo" so you REALLY WINK WINK NUDGE NUDGE GET IT), midway games, and an old wooden coaster called "The Cannonball" which was ominously closed for a good hour and a half hours after the park opening for inspection and maintenance. My two boys rode it anyway. They didn't die.<br />
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Oh right, also, there was this thing, which was featured, in all different color schemes and iterations, some with name tags ("Sneaky" was one) around the park. Seemed pretty creepy and like it would invite all sorts of bad behavior or Instagram photo opps, but IT'S OK, IT'S A FAMILY AMUSEMENT PARK* YOU GUYS.<br />
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But I think the real draw of Lake Winnie was the waterpark. The waterpark was, I believe, put in much later as an afterthought, but in my estimation it's <i>way</i> better than the regular amusement park in terms of bang for your buck. (Though: disclaimer, I personally dislike thrill rides, and several of my kids and for sure my spouse are prone to motion sickness. It doesn't mean they don't go on the rides anyway, but afterwards...regrets, we've had a few.) But back to the waterpark. A good number of waterslides, ranging from body slides to tube-ride spaghetti slides to a quad-pack of those super-steep wedgie-inducers; a lazy river, two water playground ares for the smaller kids, a some aquatic obstacles. The height cutoff was 42 inches for even the most demanding of rides, which meant that none of my kids were excluded from anything (thus eliminating the potential for needless jealousies and strife), and everything was neat and clean and no one caught herpangina. (<i>Yet</i>. I suppose I could be jumping the gun with our "HYGIENE COP IS PLEASED" all-clear signal. But it all <i>looked</i> very clean, and I didn't see any floating Band-Aids or errant turds anywhere in sight our whole time there. (Though I did see a lot of interesting tattoos.)<br />
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(Yes, we shelled out the big bucks for Dippin' Dots. No, I don't care if my kids go to college or not. Yes, I am Sean Spicer, and complained loudly while eating all of it.)<br />
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We stayed at Lake Winnie for about three and half hours. I think we could have stayed longer, but my kids were getting a bit tired, and I'm in a firm believer in the "too much of a good thing" principle. (In a word: <i>don't</i>.) So we headed back to the apartment, vegged out for about an hour and a half, and then headed back out for dinner.<br />
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Dinner was at <a href="http://www.stirchattanooga.com/">Stir</a>, one door over from the Frothy Monkey where we had brunch. It. Was. GOOD. I deliberately wanted to choose a place that didn't have too much of a "southern food" emphasis (personally I can't eat like that for more than a day and a half--really became a problem that time I went to the ASA in New Orleans and by the time I got home I never wanted to eat again) but Stir was more of an oyster bar slash elevated American fare with some Southern farm to table thrown in to round it out. I would have more pictures of what we ate, but it was gone by the time photography occurred to me. (Also, I know this is such a stupid dumb precious hipster thing, but I <i>love</i> it when a place has artisanal ice. It fascinates me--the dimensions, the clarity, the way it looks in the glass. I ordered an Old-Fashioned 80% for the ice cube. And then I ordered a second one because <i>someone</i> drank most of my first glass. And then my kids ate a third of my oysters so WHAT THE HELL DID I EVEN GET TO EAT THAT NIGHT?)<br />
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After dinner we walked back to our Air BnB and watched Wonder Woman, because Feminism. And that was our Chattanooga weekend. In sum: 36 hours was just about right. Did we do everything we were interested in doing? No. Do I want to move to Chattanooga? No. Will we be back to visit? Probably. It's close, it's easy, and my kids had a great weekend. Which means we had a great weekend too.<br />
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Regarding the song "Chattanooga Choo Choo," which I somehow know very well--I had a Glenn Miller's "This Is Jazz" Greatest Hits CD and listened to it when I was in college on a fairly regular basis. Because I am, and have always been, geriatric. "Chattanooga Choo Choo" and "Pennsylvania 6-5000" were among my favorite songs on that CD, so I guess we'll be going to Philly next chance we get. (The best part of the latter song is when they chant, "Pennsylvania Six-Five-Oh-Oh-Oh," and if you disagree with me on this point I will fight you.)<br />
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* Oh, one last thing. When we were leaving the water park through the main amusement park, I got chased down by one of the park attendants, who said he couldn't allow me to keep walking. I was wearing a one-piece bathing suit (full coverage, no parts showing--particularly because I have no parts to show) but he wouldn't let me proceed until I covered up. "That's fine," I told him pleasantly, "let me just get my clothes from my bag." (Joe was still walking and carrying the bag and about 30 feet ahead of me.) But the park attendant stood directly in my path blocking my way and literally wouldn't let me keep walking any further all bare naked as I was. So I had to call Joe on his cell phone (he didn't hear me yelling) and have him double back to bring me my shorts. It's not the park attendant's fault--he was just doing his job and doesn't make the rules--but yeah, wow, FAMILY PARK INDEED.Michelle Auhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04938937923678734252noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5779260.post-35985807851259912222017-09-03T21:31:00.000-04:002017-09-09T19:21:11.639-04:00bend and ear and listen to my version / of a really solid Tennessee excursion<br />
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Ever since I moved to Atlanta (good God, <i>nine</i> years ago), people have been expressing, or at least <i>feigning</i> utter surprise, that I have never been to Chattanooga. "YOU'VE NEVER BEEN?" everyone always says, aghast, like I'm some kind of Abnormal, even though, GUESS WHAT, there are lots of places I haven't yet been, and Chattanooga hasn't really exactly numbered on my "must see before I die" list of travel destinations. But I wasn't opposed to the notion of visiting Chattanooga either (truth is I simply knew nothing about it apart from the Glenn Miller song), and so when we had a Labor Day weekend with no plans and neither of us on call, we figured, fuck it, let's just go.<br />
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The drive from Atlanta to Chattanooga is just a hair under two hours, and though I usually like to get an earlier start on travel, Cal had a lesson Saturday morning which meant we couldn't hit the road until just about 10:30am. So when we arrived to Chattanooga, the first order of business was finding some lunch. We ate at the <a href="https://maplestreetbiscuits.com/">Maple Street Biscuit Company</a> in the downtown area, conveniently located near the area's largest attractions.<br />
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So the thing about Chattanooga, like many cities of its ilk, is that if you're visiting here you should expect to eat a <i>lot</i> of Southern food. This place was no exception, and they did it well. Breakfast all day, specialty biscuits, dishes served with a side order of heparin and a statin to garnish. Joe happens to be something of a healthier eater, leading quite often to a phenomenon that occurs in restaurants where we eat together; when they bring our food, they reflexively put <i>his</i> order in front of <i>me</i>. I guess they always assume The Salad is for The Lady, whereas in reality, I usually am the one ordering the atheroma on a platter. I appreciated the presentation of the salad, but it's just not one of those things that I will usually eat on purpose. Salad should, in my opinion, be consumed purely incidentally. No, YOU shut up.<br />
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I do a fair amount of research before we travel (lodging, attractions, dining, mapping out the relative distances between each on Google Maps and creating elaborate itineraries with drive times and walkability indices) and the reason I had picked this particular restaurant beforehand was because it was within walking distance of our first destination, which was the <a href="http://cdmfun.org/">Creative Discovery Museum</a>. Atlanta's own children museum is, in my opinion, <i>barely</i> a museum (I think at the bare minimum a museum should expend a little effort to teach you something--I would have no objection to them calling the Children's Museum of Atlanta an indoor play space, for instance, and <i>yes</i> I know kids learn by playing, but the word museum needs to <i>mean</i> something) but I'd heard good things about the children's museum in Chattanooga, and <a href="https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g54946-d104475-Reviews-Creative_Discovery_Museum-Chattanooga_Tennessee.html" target="_blank">per Trip Advisor</a> it looked extensive and worth a visit. <br />
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I've discussed in the past that when you have a pretty big age spread in your kids (to recap, my oldest son in 12 and in the 8th grade, my youngest kid is 5 and in kindergarten--I also believe that there is a middle kid somewhere in there) often times the activities you pick are not ideally suited for one or the other bookend kids, simply based on age. This was one such experience. Absolutely not a complaint at all--this was a great museum, and I would go again--but it's ideally for kids under the age of 10. (That's the party line of the museum, though personally I think 8 is kind of the max cutoff for solidly buying into the experience.) Anyway, there were still a few things Cal got a kick out of--for example, there was an exhibit where you could design your own roller coaster (employing the principles of potential and kinetic energy, angular momentum and that sort of thing)--and as the oldest he's generally game to just sort of get dragged along in any number of activities that are pitched somewhat too young for him. But I only put this footnote in to warn people that, if you have a family of older elementary or middle schoolers, this might not be the destination squarely suited for your party.<br />
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(Chattanooga also has quite a large <a href="http://www.tnaqua.org/">aquarium</a>--this is just down the street from the Creative Discovery Museum and almost certainly the bigger attraction--but the reason we didn't go there is because we live in Atlanta, where we have <a href="http://www.georgiaaquarium.org/">quite a good aquarium ourselves</a>. So I didn't much see the point of driving two hours to go to another, different aquarium, particularly since we only planned to be in town for 36 hours. However, the aquarium might be a better option for kids with the age spread we have, and if we ever return to Chattanooga we may check it out.)<br />
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After the Creative Discovery Museum, we checked into our Air BnB, which is always somehow thrilling for my kids, though of course we engaged in the standard squabble over bedding options. This particular place we're renting has a master bedroom with a king (which was, as we'd determined beforehand, <i>for the grown ups</i>--though we did let Nina in bed with us so she could be the hellish kicking crossbar of the "H" all night), one full-sized bed (which my boys determined was NOT BIG ENOUGH for the two of them to share) and a full-sized pullout couch in the living room. There was a bit of a fuss over who would take the less choice sleeping arrangements (determined originally to be the sleeper sofa--I told them they'd have to take turns), followed by a whiplash-inducing flip-flop after I made up the pull-out reeeeeeal nice that the <i>sofa</i> was now, in fact, the prized bed, with the full-sized real mattress downgraded to Utter Bullshit. There is, by the way, quite literally nothing my kids aren't able to argue about. It's truly a gift. (She said modestly.)<br />
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After a little rest and a change of wardrobe (the printmaking exhibit at the museum did a number on our clothes by way of inkpad application gone horribly wrong), we headed out for some dinner and recreation at <a href="http://thesouthsidesocial.com/">Southside Social</a>, which was about a 10 minute walk from our apartment. Southside Social is...well, they're a self-described "family-friendly boutique bowling alley," but I think what would be more accurate is that it's a family-friendly bar and restaurant with lots of activities on site. <br />
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In addition to a 10-lane bowling alley, they also have ping pong, skee ball, pool, shuffle board, an outdoor courtyard with corn hole and horseshoes and firepits, that kind of thing. Basically it's place you can park yourself for a few hours and let you kids play while you have a beer. There is no cost to do any of the activities outside of bowling (though you do have to let them hold on to your ID to check out ping pong paddles or pool balls or corn hole beanbags or what have you), and the food, while not sensational, was solid and well-priced. Just your typical bar fare. Burgers and pizza and shrimp tacos and Ceasar salad (ordered by...not me). The fish and chips were solid.<br />
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Southside Social allows kids on site until 9:00pm (at which point they bring out the strippers and start playing Platoon on all the flat screen TVs, I guess?) but we left just shy of 8:00 because Joe pointed out that the Florida State-Alabama game was starting up soon, at which time the place would rapidly become "intolerable." (His words. I love sports, as you know. The Nye Mets are my favorite squadron.) So we took a short walk over to the <a href="https://thehotchocolatier.com/">Hot Chocolatier</a> down by the main Southside drag. This is sort of a boutique chocolate shop that also serves drinks and desserts, and since it was the only place nearby that even approximated an ice cream shop, I'm sure they do some good business. The boys each had a gelato, and Nina and I each had a "frozen hot chocolate," which is nowhere near as good as the ones they serve at <a href="http://www.serendipity3.com/">Serendipity 3</a> in New York, but it was very sweet, so...that's fine too. <br />
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One more quick note about this neighborhood. I think it has a lot of character. I think there is the chance that some people walking around might feel that it looks kind of dodgy--and in some cases, <i>smell</i> kind of dodgy, as there's a chicken processing plant down the street that lends a particular and not-so pleasant aroma to the air (to the point that neighbors directing us to Southside Social gave us walking instructions that bypassed that block entirely). But I kind of like the grittiness of the environs. It's not glossy or pretty for the most part, but it feels real, and I like seeing the crumbling facades and bygone signage and architecture of an old city before it gets replaced by the new. <br />
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Judging from the types of restaurants in this neighborhood, this may be in the process of slow change. But having a chance to peek under the rapidly spreading patina of homogenization is, I think, quite charming, and I've been enjoying it.<br />
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Tomorrow, Day 2 of 2. (Dinner in the diner, nothing could be finer, than to have your ham 'n' eggs in Carolina.)Michelle Auhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04938937923678734252noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5779260.post-70295256042601330842017-04-15T22:04:00.000-04:002017-04-15T22:16:04.406-04:00weekend warriorsI have this phenomenon in my house--you may be familiar with it in your own--where I need to get my kids out of the house on weekends to do <i>something</i>. It barely matters what. Really, it could be anything. The playground is a nice, easy choice. Or hiking, we like to do that. If it's rainy or cold, the <a href="http://www.georgiaaquarium.org/">Georgia Aquarium</a> is clutch, or the <a href="http://tellusmuseum.org/">Tellus Science Museum</a>, or sometimes (when we're feeling a little least earnest in our intentions), any of a number of indoor playgrounds, plus or minus go karts. But the reason I need to get my kids out of the house on weekends is the same reason you need to walk your dogs. Well, maybe not in order to poop on the street, but really, the point of taking kids out on the weekend is to <i>wear them out</i>. You need to take that full gas tank full of hyperactive aimless kid juice and <i>run it down</i>, my droogs. Otherwise, the kids start to get bored. And when they get bored, they get fractious. And when they get fractious, they start to complain, and I can't be hearing <i>any</i> of that, because the complaining inevitably leads to screentime begging, which is THE WORST KIND OF BEGGING. (Generally speaking, my kids only get screen time on the weekends, and they know this, so this leads to a kind of hoarding mentality about screen time that is somewhat counterproductive. It's like food insecurity that you sometimes see in kids who grew up not having enough to eat, only my kids have had plenty to eat, and also they get plenty of screentime, so everyone shut up, don't you know I grew up unironically using a rotary phone, yet still, to my knowledge, have never complained about boredom as much as you three seem to?) <br />
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Sometimes on the weekend, they will be playing very nicely with each other in the morning, and Joe will suggest, <i>hey, maybe we'll just let them hang out at home and do nothing and just have a low-key morning at home</i>. And...OK, look. I love my spouse, I cherish his input, but sometimes I also wonder when he will ever get tired of being WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING, ALL THE TIME, EVER. Because what happens is this. The kids play very nicely at home for a few hours. But then they get bored. And then they start complaining, "What are we going to <i>do</i> today? Where are we going to <i>go?</i> Why can't we go out to do something <i>else?</i>" Like we were cruelly holding them captive at home against their will! But by then, it's too late! The opportunity window has closed! By the time you let them realize that going out is the best course of action, it's too late to go out to do anything good, and then they're pissed, and you're pissed, and everyone is pissed, and in order to defuse the situation you just end up letting them play Minecraft for a million hours which makes them even more avolitional and makes you feel guilty for being That Piece of Shit Parent and then your weekend is RUINED.<br />
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I put this out there because several people have told me that I seem to take my kids to do a lot of things on the weekends, but it's really not anything that reflects well on me, because the only reason I get them out of the house is because I DON'T WANT TO DEAL WITH THE COMPLAINING. I don't want to hear it, I don't want to respond to it, I don't want to try to troubleshoot it, and I certainly don't want to feel guilty for how I eventually deal with it. I don't want to do <i>any</i> of that. I just want to avoid the whole thing. Hence, the weekend activities.<br />
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So. This morning we went to do some strawberry picking at <a href="http://www.washingtonfarms.net/">Washington Farms</a>.<br />
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We have gone fruit picking many, many times before, though never at <a href="http://www.washingtonfarms.net/">Washington Farms</a>. The reasons we went to that particular location this weekend are as follows.<br />
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1.) They sent me an email from their mailing list, so I remembered that they existed.<br />
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2.) I usually buy two flats of strawberries from Costco per week, but this past week the strawberries they had on offer looked like hot moldy garbage, and...<br />
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3.) I saw some mention of a Super Spring Saturday petting zoo. Nina likes petting zoos.<br />
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So, Washington Farms! Bright and early this morning! So here was the part where I had to steer my kids into the skid a little bit. It's still the beginning of strawberry season in Georgia, so the crop isn't <i>so</i> robust yet, and I was worried that they would get picked out if we didn't show up early enough. (Their website warned of the same, and actually suggested that people call them to check on crop availability before driving in.) So I wanted to get to the farm on the earlier side. However, waking your kids up even five minutes earlier than they prefer to wake on the weekends is a recipe for them deciding that they don't <i>waaaaaant</i> to go pick strawberries. Why do we <i>haaaaaave</i> to go? Why can't we get strawberries at the <i>stooooooore?</i> So, what's a loving, engaged parent to do in response? Why, merrily ignore them, of course! (Really, what I said was this. <i>I know. You </i>think<i> you don't want to go. But trust me, you're going to have fun</i>.)<br />
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And they did.<br />
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Washington Farms was having a Super Spring Saturday this weekend, which means that in addition to the strawberry picking, there was your standard variety of Family FFarm FFFun offerings on tap, including A Bounce Thing:<br />
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An Animal Thing:<br />
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A Weird PVC Tubing Slide Thing:<br />
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And a Thing Where One of Your Kids Somehow Gets Buried In a Mound of Dried Corn:<br />
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Anyway, Washington Farms. Strawberry picking was a success, although now I feel like we're going to be basically eating strawberries defensively until they're all gone. (Last time we went strawberry picking, <a href="http://michelleau.tumblr.com/post/120355204951/it-was-fun-to-pick-the-berries-ourselves-but">I made strawberry jelly</a>, though I think I screwed up the recipe somehow, mostly because I didn't follow the recipe on the pectin box exactly. They told me how much sugar to put in and it was an almost sarcastic amount of sugar, and I though <i>surely, that can't be right, and I'm a doctor, therefore I know EVERYTHING,</i> so I cut it by 25%. So it turns out that the instructions were screaming at me to follow what they said the letter for a reason, because that jelly turned out kinda...not so jelled. But anyway. Color me chastised.) The Spring Fun activities were truly fun, and although we only spent about 45 minutes doing the actual fruit picking, we probably spent another 3+ hours there just doing the rest of the stuff. That coupled with the hour it took to drive home means that my kids didn't <i>start</i> thinking about screen time until past 4:00pm. And that, my friends, is what we call #winning. I've already cleared a place on my desk for my Parent of the Year award--it can sit right next to that pile of school papers I forgot to sign and the class pictures I forgot to pay for but also never returned. What? WHAT?Michelle Auhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04938937923678734252noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5779260.post-31046551637714352592017-04-09T06:00:00.000-04:002017-04-09T08:46:43.094-04:00April in Paris: Voyager Avec Enfants (chez nous, a recap)I think I promised at the beginning of the week that I would give a little review of the apartment where we stayed, and though I almost don't want to, just to keep competition down for the same apartment should we want to book it again in the future, that's a pretty asshole reason to not share something good with other people.<br />
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The rental company we used was <a href="https://www.parisperfect.com/">Paris Perfect</a>, and the apartment we rented was <a href="https://www.parisperfect.com/apartments-for-rent-in-paris/bergerac.php">The Bergerac</a>, which was in the 7th arrondissement on the Avenue de la Bourdonnais, basically one block away from the base of the Eiffel Tower. I picked this neighborhood for two reasons.<br />
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One, which I mentioned before, is that every single kid (even Nina) knew that the Eiffel Tower was in France. So I wanted to be close enough that they could <i>see</i> it every day, and have the view itself substitute in for any desire they might have to actually go up <i>into</i> the tower. I mean...look. If any one of our kids had expressed a strong interest to go up into the tower, we would have acquiesced--the key to a trip like this with young kids is letting them choose the things that are interesting to them, rather than just steering them hither and yon. But, do I really want to stand in line for two hours to wait for an elevator, in order to see the <i>inside</i> of a structure that looks way more interesting from the <i>outside? </i>Not so much. (Full disclosure, I grew up in New York City, and I have not once gone up to the observation deck of the Empire State Building either.)<br />
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The second reason I chose this apartment was for its proximity to the Champs de Mars. Though we only ended up going there twice (because we spent plenty of time in other parks around the city), the idea of having a large open green space for the kids just a block away from us was a huge draw. The downside of staying in the 7th arrondisment, I'll say, is that since it is kind of a tourist hub, some of the stores (like grocery stores, fruit stands, boulangeries, restaurants) seemed like they sold things at a bit of a markup. But, you know, that's just how it goes sometimes.<br />
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So, the specifics. The apartment was 3 bedrooms, two baths, but really I should clarify that it was more one full bath and two half-baths. (One of the half-bathrooms was purely a shower/bathing room, while the other half-bathroom was more of your standard powder room.) There was WiFi (a little slow but enough for utility purposes), two TVs, and a ton of power adaptors sitting in a basket for you to use. The apartment was about 750 square feet overall, with a small open galley kitchen off a living/dining room and not much more common space other than that. It was plenty of space. I mean, if we lived there for real, year-round, with three children, I'm sure it would rapidly feel more cramped. But the thing is that we didn't have any <i>stuff</i> with us, so we never felt crammed in or cluttered. And 750 square feet is, of course, about three times larger than your standard hotel room. So it was more than enough space for a one week vacation, and they laid everything out very well.<br />
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So just a quick walk through, then.<br />
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The living/dining room is just next to the front door, on the left. It has a small but comfortable sitting area with a coffee table, and a dining table right next to it. The dining table was set quite nicely when we first checked in--six full place settings with wine glasses, two candleholders and the like; but we moved that all out of the way when we got in there because KIDS BE BREAKING SHIT. But as you can see there's plenty of place for people to spread out, plenty of easy, comfy furniture, that kind of thing.</div>
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The view from the living room. Every window facing this direction opened fully, and had a small balcony from which to admire the view. The size of the windows in all the rooms also meant that the apartment got an admirable amount of light throughout the day. This exposure faces west-ish, and you get some very nice vantage of the sky and the clouds around the Eiffel Tower at sunset.</div>
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The kitchen is right off the dining table. It is small, but very functional. There is a four burner induction stove top, a smallish (by American standards--probably average to good-sized by French apartment standards) Liebehrr fridge just to the left of that, camouflaged with wood. There is also a dishwasher just to the left of the sink, and a Nespresso machine. The apartment kitchen was already stocked with Nespresso pods, salt, pepper, cooking oil, sugar, and dishwasher pods, garbage bags, paper towels; so really all we had to get was actual perishable food to make breakfast most mornings. There was a good stash of cutlery and flatware, and many, many wineglasses and champagne glasses, but (curiously) no bowls. That is why you see that box of Special K sitting there unopened, because apparently, for our kids, the idea of eating cereal out of a mug was A BRIDGE TOO FAR.</div>
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Again, the kitchen was small, but workable. Most mornings both Joe and I were on breakfast duty at the same time, and while you couldn't, say, have the dishwasher open <i>and</i> have two people working in there, you could definitely have one adult cooking eggs while the other scootched behind to grab milk or juice from the fridge, wash some berries, slice some bread, whatever. </div>
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Continuing down the main hallway, you have a view of all three bedrooms, as well as one of the half baths at the end of the hall. I can see now in this picture that the front hall runner is a little crooked, and because I have PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEMS, this is making my brain itch. (I like it when things line up at right angles.)</div>
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The first door on the right is the twin bedroom, where Cal slept. The window overlooks the courtyard (translation: not much of a view, as it's where the building keeps its garbage and recycling bins), but it still gets plenty of light, and it's also the only bedroom with its own (small) <i>en suite </i>bathroom. There's a shower, a toilet, and a sink in there, very compact but functional. Sorry, I would have taken a picture of the bathroom, but Cal was actually in there using it when I was taking these pictures.</div>
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Second bedroom on the right was the queen bedroom, which we had the two little kids share. There's not much more to the bedroom but this (I mean, there are nightstands, and a small console table at the foot of the bed) but again, more than enough space for the purposes of sleeping. This also overlooked the courtyard, and again got plenty of sunlight, which I like to think helped with the jet lag.</div>
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The master bedroom was the last door on the left, and like the living room, had a perfect view of the Eiffel Tower with a small balcony to step out onto. This is a king sized bed, but I think it could be separated into two twins if that's what you needed--you could see the impression of the seam through the sheets. All the mattresses, by the way, had under-bed storage, and in that way they were able to make the most out of the space they had. This bedroom had a small closet (with a safe inside), some shelving, a bureau, and two nightstands, but overall the apartment had very little closet space, which, for a short-term vacation rental, probably is not that much of a concern. But just to make my point, I show you this:</div>
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There was no coat closet. You can see all the way on the right of the photo, there was a small, thin closet, almost like a broom closet, where they kept some umbrellas for guests to use, but otherwise this apartment made ingenious use of hooks on the walls to maximize their storage space. I happen to like the functionality of hooks on the walls (and in fact, at home, I turned a storage closet in our garage into a full-on cloak room, like the ones they had at school), so I thought having our coats hanging on the door worked out just great. And again, for a short-term vacation rental, who cares about storage space? It's not like I had to find a place to shove that crazy breadmaker we got as a wedding present.</div>
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OK, the bathroom. This was the biggest bathroom in the apartment, but somehow didn't have a toilet in it. I apologize for all the counter mess, by the way--if you want the nice real estate photos, there are <a href="https://www.parisperfect.com/apartments-for-rent-in-paris/bergerac.php" target="_blank">better ones on the website</a>, but THIS IS REAL LIFE, PEOPLE. It did, however, have a full sized bath and shower, a double sink, and most importantly of all...</div>
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A washer and dryer. hidden away in a cupboard This was key for us, as it allowed us to pack much lighter. Kids, as you know, make a mess of their clothes, and the younger they are, the more they tend to do this. I usually have a coefficient that I use to calculate how many changes of clothes I need to bring for each kid if I can't actually do laundry on a trip. For a kid like Cal, for example, the coefficient is 1.0, because he can usually be entrusted to keep a single outfit clean for the entire day, which means I can just pack one outfit for every day we plan to be away. For a kid like Nina, my coefficient is somewhere between 1.5 and 2.0, because she's a messier eater, and she ends up in the dirt more, things like that. When my kids were babies--say under the age of two, the coefficient was closer to 3.0. BEHOLD, THE NERDIEST WAY TO THINK ABOUT PACKING CLOTHES, EVER. Anyway, having a washer and dryer on vacation is critical. The machines were small, and you couldn't run them after 10:00pm (#apartmentlife), but they were <i>there</i>, they <i>worked</i>, and we used them <i>every single day</i>. I love you, teeny Miele washer and dryer. (We packed our own laundry pods and dryer sheets, but the apartment actually provided a stash of their own detergent pods, which was quite nice.)</div>
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Oh, and this isn't very exciting--I probably shouldn't end the tour on this, but whatever--this is the other half bathroom, right by the front door. The space is tight enough, by the way, that if you had the door to this half bath open, you actually could not open the front door. So it was a series of negotiations every time you want to enter or exit.</div>
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Final logistical point. This apartment is on the sixth floor, which is the same as the seventh floor in America. There is an elevator in the building (not a given in Paris, so already we were doing good!) but it's really quite small, and up a small set of stairs, so ADA compliant this place ain't. </div>
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My sense is that most of the people who actually live in the building take the stairs most of the time. Joe and the boys in fact took the stairs most of the time too, because they liked to race up and down to see if they could beat the elevator (they always did--the elevator is not that fast) but the stairs are narrow and curving and dark in the evenings--again, if mobility is an issue for you, this might not be the right apartment. But if you aren't claustrophobic, or else don't mind taking the stairs plus/minus your luggage, it's not going to a huge issue.</div>
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So! In sum! Compact apartment. Great (though not ADA compliant) layout for a family of five. Excellent use of space, good partitioning, convenient neighborhood (if a bit touristy), amazing view. Also, after staying there for a week, Joe has decided that now <i>we</i> need to get a Nespresso machine, so at least you know that we tried all the appliances and found them perfectly delightful.</div>
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We just got home to Atlanta this afternoon. Charles De Gaulle was pretty hectic (I know most people don't take it seriously when they advise to arrive a full three hours before your flight, but if you're flying out of CDG, do yourself a favor and <i>really</i> plan to arrive three hours before your flight) but the trip was smooth, and as much as we were all not ready for our vacation to end, it's good to be home. Thanks for following along, and while this was just six days with my particular kids, I hope that sharing the experience will be helpful to people looking to plan a similar trip with their own children. This trip was--I can say this now, since we're safely back home--an unequivocal success, and we're all looking forward to our next trip, wherever it may be. So, just to open it up for discussion, where should we take our kids next time, and what should we do there? Rome? Greece? Spain? Amsterdam? Or somewhere totally different, like Japan? Any suggestions in the comments are appreciated. It's never too early to start planning, after all, and it's always nice to have something to look forward to. <i>Allons-y!</i></div>
Michelle Auhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04938937923678734252noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5779260.post-11403216118752562222017-04-08T00:10:00.000-04:002017-04-08T18:21:22.154-04:00April in Paris: Voyager Avec Enfants (Day Six)The theme of day 6 was: <i>less fartsy, more artsy.</i><br />
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The second guided tour I planned for this trip was a family experience for the Louvre. Because the thing is, I was pretty close to skipping the Louvre on this trip entirely. Cal would have been in the bag for it (to a degree), and Mack may have been interested to see the Mona Lisa and a few other pieces of art that he recognized, though not that much beyond that. But Nina, I thought, was not the right age at all for a classic art museum. Too big, not interactive enough, too many people in the way, too many queues, too much walking--it would all have translated into: "When are we going to do something <i>I </i>want to do?" in about ten minutes. (Maybe seven. Five and a half. Thirty seconds.) So...probably skip the Louvre this time around, right? At least until all my kids were older.<br />
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The thing is, Cal just read <u>The DaVinci Code</u> (yes, I know there is some weird pagan sex scene in it, but don't be scandalized and email me; I've read it myself and I think it's tame and not gratuitous and also, I don't care) so he was actually pretty interested in the Louvre. He was interested in the art, but also, he was interested in the building itself, and the layout, and the logistics of the museum--how vast it is, the number of exhibits inside, the different styles of art in each gallery. When we were planning this trip to Paris, he specifically asked me if we were going to the Louvre. So after that point...we were. <br />
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However, in an effort to make it just a <i>little</i> more palatable for the little kids, I booked this family tour through <a href="https://parismuse.com/">Paris Muse</a> called <a href="https://parismuse.com/tours/paris-muse-clues-louvre-tour/">"Louvre Clues,"</a> which would turn an informative art history tour of the major points of interest into a bit of an interactive scavenger hunt. The tour was a private tour with just our family and one guide, and included was the price of a "skip the line" ticket for admission, two hours with a guide, educational materials and a game for the kids, as well as a "treasure" at the end of the scavenger hunt that the children would have to find using clues gathered throughout the excursion. Was it more expensive than just going to the Louvre and seeing it ourselves? Yes, of course it was. But look, the Louvre is <i>huge</i>, we don't know where anything is nor the best ways to navigate the galleries, and of course, Joe and I know jack fucking shit about art history. So given the chance to be taught, and to have someone teach our kids in a highly palatable way--I was sold. <br />
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(Oh, it occurred to me this morning that I should say that I am not affiliated at all with any of the services I'm recommending. I don't even do Amazon affiliate codes in my links anymore, because...I don't know. I mean, I <i>have</i> a job. This is just me talking about stuff I liked. I don't get anything for doing any of it, except that I read plenty of other people's reviews before taking this trip, so it feels good to give something back in the form of my own recommendations. Need a penny, take a penny; have a penny, leave a penny.)<br />
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How the tour worked was this. After meeting our guide and getting into the building, she handed our kids these activity books, with eight "clues," each of which corresponded to a different gallery at the Louvre. We moved from Ancient Mesopotamia through the art of the Renaissance, and at each gallery she would pick one point of interest and teach our kids something about a particular piece of art, or a particular style of art from that time period. After that, she would give them a task. For example, <i>"In this gallery, find another piece of art that shows the same symbols as the ones we saw here, and tell me in what city it was made." </i>And off they would go, striding through the gallery to find the next "clue" to write down in their notebooks. At the end, all the clues fit together to spell out two specific words, which gave them the hidden location of the "treasure" which had been hidden for them earlier in the day. And throughout, of course, we got to see many of the main points of interest at the Louvre, including a stone inscribed with Hammurabi's code, the Venus de Milo, the Winged Victory of Samothrace...and, <i>bien sur</i>, the Mona Lisa. It really was pretty fun, and I personally learned a ton. (Disclosure: I didn't know <i>anything</i> to start with, so the bar was low.)<br />
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The tour ended in a most satisfying way (treasure was unearthed, and Nina even got to PUSH SOME BUTTONS in order to get the treasure out, OMG BUTTONS), and I would wholeheartedly endorse this tour as a little bit of a vacation splurge if you want to take somewhat younger kids to the Louvre and actually want the experience to be special and fun, rather than a recreation of Dante's Inferno. I think the "puzzles" were somewhat too easy for a kid Cal's age, but whatever, he would have gone to the museum happily anyway--the elaborate construct was less to sell him on the museum excursion than to sell the other two. (And anyway, scavenger hunt aside, he learned a <i>lot</i> from our guide, so he was happy to play along.) The educational details of the tour may also have been pitched just slightly too high for Nina, who maybe has less of a...<i>nuanced</i>...appreciation for art history and technique than the rest of us. That said, the guide was really good at pointing out concrete details in pieces of art that Nina could easily identify, and Nina definitely liked the activity book and filling in the words once the boys fed her the clues. And of course, at the end of the scavenger hunt, Nina was <i>more</i> than happy to accept the "treasure" for all of us.<br />
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The thing with having a spread of kids is that no one thing is really going to be absolutely ideal for <i>everyone</i> (unless it's, you know, a trip to the candy store) but the one thing that really pleased me is that for once, it was the activity pitched just <i>perfectly</i> to our middle kid, who--let's be honest--can tend to get overlooked sometimes. So finding the one activity that was right up his alley, while being fun and agreeable for the rest, was exactly the right thing for us this morning.<br />
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The tour lasted just about two hours, after which point we were happy but pretty hungry, so we got some lunch at the restaurant in the Louvre lobby (it was fine) and then headed out through the courtyard back to the Jardin des Tuileries, where we had been <a href="http://theunderweardrawer.blogspot.fr/2017/04/april-in-paris-voyager-avec-enfants-day_4.html" target="_blank">our second day in Paris</a>. I thought the little kids might want to run off some of their energy at the playground there, or at the pay-to-play trampoline park (swear to God) next to the playground, but no. They just literally wanted to run, <i>period</i>. So they did some timed foot races for a while, and then they remembered that there was a carousel with ice cream nearby, so we did that for a bit too.<br />
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The thing we really wanted to do after the Jardin des Tuilieries was this thing:<br />
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which is essentially a giant ferris wheel located at Place de la Concorde. (I believe it is called <a href="http://en.parisinfo.com/paris-show-exhibition/136037/big-wheel-on-place-de-la-concorde">Le Grand Roue de Paris</a>, because...<i>accurate</i>.) But since we were already in Jardin des Tuileries and we were already in art mode with museum passes in our pockets, we decided to make a <i>really quick stop</i> (to the kids: <i>we swear! really quick! you gotta see this though! it'll be good for you!</i>) to visit Monet's water lilies at the <a href="http://www.musee-orangerie.fr/" target="_blank">Musée de l'Orangerie</a>. I'm not going to say the kids were really gung ho about MORE ART, but I think they did enjoy the gallery itself when we got in there. Monet's pieces are displayed in these two perfectly serene white oval rooms with ambient light and four curved canvases each, and even though Joe and I didn't do as good a job as our guide at the Louvre, we tried to explain a little bit about Impressionism and the significance of these pieces of art. I also noted that Claude Monet PROBABLY had glaucoma, which seems like it would be more Joe's purview, but whatever, I got there first.<br />
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All that crappy LEARNING dispensed with, we were now free to enjoy Le Grand Roue de Paris. Some logistical things to know. It is much smaller than the London Eye, so all "pods" are single party, and our family of five all fit into one. The ticket prices were as you would expect--$12 for adults, $6 for kids aged 3-10. The ride does not go fast (translation: if you're a weenie about heights, you don't feel a dropping sensation as you're moving down), and you go around the wheel exactly twice, which gives you a chance to snap the pictures that you missed the first time around. Go on a nice clear day, bring your camera, and it's worth it.<br />
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We Uber-ed back home after that point to do some preliminary packing (other practical notation: Uber service in Paris is very robust), and headed back out to Les Cocotte for dinner, because it was our last night and we wanted to eat somewhere nice. Our flight back to Atlanta leaves tomorrow at 10:35am, and though not one of us is <i>quite</i> ready to go home, I like to think that we just have ample reason to plan a return trip in the future. If and when I can, I will try to do a recap when we get back of our Paris apartment itself, with a pictorial walk-through and a review of our rental experience. Until then, wish us safe travels in the morning, and that all our deep venous structures may stay free of thrombosis. <i>À bientôt!</i><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm-0KFdLL7N9uLd7d_hSIlSeqKh_P8NrE5Q10WxxvpQQlysd-euZk_C9kApLKsm0k0Z8QAw4ioDA1FNrxGdwzEtrb62uQ8GCj6znJplT9AXGniI_emLmP3AJ8IoGNWXifb7xhyVw/s1600/IMG_2919.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm-0KFdLL7N9uLd7d_hSIlSeqKh_P8NrE5Q10WxxvpQQlysd-euZk_C9kApLKsm0k0Z8QAw4ioDA1FNrxGdwzEtrb62uQ8GCj6znJplT9AXGniI_emLmP3AJ8IoGNWXifb7xhyVw/s640/IMG_2919.JPG" width="480" /></a></div>Michelle Auhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04938937923678734252noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5779260.post-54140357649183834772017-04-07T02:47:00.001-04:002017-04-07T17:40:19.977-04:00April in Paris: Voyager Avec Enfants (Day Five)<i>"A touts les glories de la France."</i><br />
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Coming into this trip, I scheduled two guided tours, and deliberately put them at the end of the trip. I wanted to leave things a little open-ended and less time-pressured at the start of the week, just to allow for jet lag and child recalcitrance and the general unpredictability of kid life. However, I <i>did</i> have two organized excursions I wanted for us to do, the first of which was a bike tour of the grounds at the Palace of Versailles.<br />
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Generally speaking, there's enough in the city of Paris to do with kids, particularly if you're only planning to be here for less than a week, as we are. However, Mack just finished an architecture unit at school, and for his final project he and his partner chose to do a presentation about the palace of Versailles. So we <i>had</i> to go, if for no other reason than to let him see that Versailles did in fact exist outside of a book. (Oh who am I kidding, they probably did the bulk of their research on Wikipedia, because kids these days.)<br />
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I booked the tour with the <a href="https://www.bluefox.travel/paris/versailles-bike-tour">Bluefox Travel Company</a>, formerly called Blue Bike Tours. The instructions for the day were relatively straightforward. <br />
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We were to meet at the Gare Saint-Lazare train station in front of Platform #1 for the 9:00am train to Versailles. Gare Saint-Lazare is a huge commuter hub by the look of things (think Grand Central, but bigger), and about 15 minutes from our apartment via Uber at that time of day. Being neurotic people, we woke the kids up at 7:00am (this went over just as well as you might imagine), had breakfast at home, and showed up at the train station 45 minutes early just to make sure we could find the platform and that rush hour traffic wouldn’t screw us. We did, and it didn’t. So we killed some time at a Starbucks there, which was different from an American Starbucks located in a busy commuter train station during rush hour in that it was relatively empty. (Cal insisted the Parisian Starbucks hot chocolate tasted better than in the States, but I think it tasted pretty much the same.)<br />
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The train ride to Versailles took about 40 minutes, and even without the tour guide, it would have been pretty easy—on that train line, Paris Gare Saint-Lazare is one terminus, while Versailles is the other. So we just had to stay on the train until everyone got off. <br />
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The plan for the day had been pretty well spelled out beforehand by our tour guide (an Midwestern expat and therefore was not only able to speak flawless English, she was able to make a lot of idiom-laden English jokes, which made things much more lively for the kids). From the train station, we were to walk to a nearby freshmarket to pick up provisions for our picnic on the grounds of Versailles later in the day. After that, we would go pick up our bikes, and ride them a short distance to the grounds of the palace. We would spend most of the morning riding our bikes around to various stops along the grounds, learn some history, and then end the day with a 3:30 “fast pass” entrance into the palace of Versailles itself. So, yes, quite a full day. People with kids who still nap, or who cannot nap in a bike seat, be advised.<br />
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The fresh market was awesome. It’s obviously a touristy area, because of its proximity to the Palace of Versailles, but this was clearly a market frequented by locals, and many of the shopkeepers spoke limited English, which is just fine—again, I should have made more effort to brush up on my French. But given that it was a market, we made out pretty well by smiling and pointing, and in the end we made out with a nice picnic lunch—salami, some slices of Comte cheese (a good recommendation from our tour guide, who it just so happened was from Wisconsin and whose parents ran a dairy farm), baguettes, olives, a bunch of grapes and a small box of strawberries.<br />
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After that it was another short walk to the bike storage shed, which was actually an old converted horse stable. OK, so second parent concern—I was worried that they wouldn’t have bikes the right size for my kids. Cal could proooooobably ride an adult bike, but Mack rides a 20 inch bike at home, and Nina only rides with training wheels, and even with those, not very fast and not very far. However, when I booked the tour, they said specifically they had accommodations for kids from infants on up, so I took a leap of faith and booked the damn thing, hoping that the “accommodation” wouldn’t be something unworkable, like trying to cram her into a kiddie seat on the back of Joe’s bike. (I suspect she’s a bit too big for a kiddie seat, though a two or three year old would probably be fine in one.) Anyway, I didn’t have to worry. Cal and Mack each got kid bikes that were the perfect size for them, and Nina’s bike situation—well, this was our favorite of all. (I include this level of detail only because it was not clear on the site, but it was also vital to our enjoyment of the day.)<br />
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They had this little tandem bike attachment that we could hook onto the back of Joe’s bike. With the seat all the way down, it was the perfect size for her, and she was so proud that she actually got to bike with everyone else and pedal. It’s not a sham bike, the gears really engaged, and Joe said having her in the back actually made his biking a lot easier, particularly going up hills. So! This bicycle built for two was a great solution. Also important to know: yes, they really did have helmets, and the helmets came in all sizes. After adjusting the bikes and practicing in a small cul de sac for a little bit, the guide led us through the streets (through a few busy intersections, but the motorists were all very polite) onto the grounds of Versailles. Know that I would never let my kids bike in any trafficked area at home—it just makes me nervous—but the guide actually requested that all kids stay right up behind her bike at the front of the line so she could help steer them through traffic better, and we followed along behind. It worked out fine.<br />
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The ride through the grounds was amazingly picturesque. I’m convinced it’s really the best way to cover the area we did—we saw some people renting golf carts on site, and many others walked, of course, but there’s simply much too much ground to cover in a short amount of time unless you have a bike. (Sorry I don't have more pictures of the actual paths, but I'm not a good enough cyclist to ride one-handed and take pictures with the other.) We stopped at a few scenic turnouts where we got a few history lessons about the construction of Versailles, the history of the Palace, the last four King Louis (“Should we honor our treaty, King Louis’ head?”), and, of course, Marie Antoinette. Our stop for lunch was right at one end of the Grand Canal where we got an unobstructed sweeping view right to the palace, and with the sunshine and the good food, it was absolutely gorgeous.<br />
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After lunch, we made a few stops to check out some of the “smaller” buildings, like the Grand Trianon and the Petite Trianon. We also parked our bikes and walked a bit of a way towards the back through Marie-Antoinette’s private hamlet, where there were actually some farm animals wandering around. (I think I saw pigs, donkeys, rabbits, and some fish in the pond. You weren’t allowed to feed or pet them, but the kids still liked it.) Following that, we rode our bikes back out of the grounds to the bike shed, and then walked a short distance (really just back across the street) to the main Palace building, where we had “skip-the-line” tour tickets.<br />
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Now, at this point in the day (almost 4:00pm, after an early wake-up and a full day of biking and walking), the kids were kind of hitting the wall, so we really didn’t spend that much time walking through the rooms in the Palace or through the gardens in the back. But we saw most of the main attractions, including the Hall of Mirrors, and the package included an audio tour handset that was pretty helpful. (You’ve probably seen these at museums before—each point of interest is labeled with a number, you punch the number into the handset, and a cultivated voice gives you a brief explanation of what you’re looking at and the history. And if all else fails, pushing buttons is always kind of fun.) <br />
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The tour group split up once we got to the palace, to give people a chance to peel off and do their own thing if they wanted to. I think some (adults) elected to spend more time in the palace and have dinner nearby, but we just took a brief run through the highlights before taking a 20 minute walk back to the train station and heading back to Paris. (Just as a point of logistics, I should mention that the tour also provided both train tickets there and back, and gave them to us at the beginning of the day. The return tickets could be used at any time, and per our guide trains leave for Paris roughly every 15-20 minutes. We got lucky and caught a train right before it pulled out of the station.) Again, it was about a 40 minute train ride, which was just fine, because we were all beat and happy for the chance to sit down.<br />
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Dinner was at <a href="http://www.maisonconstant.com/cafe-constant/">Café Constant</a> on Rue Saint-Dominique, the restaurant we ate at <a href="http://theunderweardrawer.blogspot.fr/2017/04/april-in-paris-voyager-avec-des-enfants.html">our first night here</a>, and where Nina had fallen asleep at the table. This meal was even better than the first one we had, probably because we were all awake enough to eat it. Mack, who is turning into quite an adventurous eater, actually ordered the scallop, salmon and sea bass tartare appetizer, which was served carpaccio-style (marinated with ginger and lemon) on the half shell. Other very good dishes included my veal cutlet with white Tarbais beans, which was homey and rustic, but there will be no picture of it unless you have an upper endoscopy scope and are prepared to go fishing. What? It’s true.<br />
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After dinner, we walked home and collapsed. Well, <i>I</i> collapsed. The kids were weirdly energetic, because kids are paradoxical that way. Dear children, your limitless energy intrigues me, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.<br />
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See you tomorrow, for the recap of our last day in Paris.Michelle Auhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04938937923678734252noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5779260.post-54847170540807494572017-04-06T00:00:00.000-04:002017-04-06T00:02:14.655-04:00April in Paris: Voyager Avec Enfants (Day Four)I had a whole itinerary for the Day 4, though what we ended up doing was…slightly different. But we’ll get there. <br />
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Breakfast in the morning was a relaxed affair <i>chez-nous</i> again, and by the time we left the apartment, around 10:30am, we had plans to walk across the bridge at Passerelle Debilly to take 72 line of the city bus up to the <a href="https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en" target="_blank">Centre Pompidou</a>. The Pompidou Center is architecturally unique, of course, and between the modern art and the <a href="https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/Visit/Exploring-as-a-family" target="_blank">robust children’s programming</a> I’d read about, I figured we could spend most of the morning there into the early afternoon.<br />
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The bus ride was fine, and easy to negotiate. We’d bought a ten pack of tickets (for, I believe, 14 Euros) at the tabac across the street from our apartment beforehand, so after navigating how to get to our closest bus stop, the hardest part was just figuring out how to feed the tickets into the pay meter up by the driver. Per Google maps, that particular bus at that time of day comes every 20 minutes, and while we must have <i>just</i> missed a bus by the time we got there, the wait didn’t seem too bad, and the ride was smooth.<br />
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The fly in the ointment came in the form of this announcement. And, to be clear, I <i>had</i> checked the website for the Centre Pompidou the night before to make sure it was open, not wanting a repeat of yesterday’s missed visit to the Natural History museum.<br />
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<i>(“Due to a strike, the Centre Pompidou is actually closed. Thank you for understanding.”)</i><br />
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It’s the <i>“actually”</i> that gets me. Why you gotta be all bitchy, scrolling sign?<br />
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So anyway, modern art was apparently not happening today. After weighing our options and seeing what was nearby (-ish), we decided to walk to <a href="http://en.parisinfo.com/paris-museum-monument/71393/Jardin-du-Luxembourg" target="_blank">Luxembourg Gardens</a>, where word had it there were magnificent grounds to stroll, as well as (this part was key) a pretty big children’s playground. The thing with kids is that you kind of have to strike while the iron is hot, which is why we tend to front-load our more intense activities towards the beginning of the day. Once that early timeframe is thwarted, we tend to get a lot more whining, a lot more, “What are we doing <i>no-ow? </i>Why do we <i>haaaave</i> to?” and <i>so</i> much more foot dragging. So making the Plan B location a playground was a reaction to this inevitable blowback, though since it was located within a larger historical site, this was kind of like making a nice bed of spinach on top of which we set a big mound of ice cream. Something for everyone.<br />
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The Jardin de Luxembourg was magnificent as expected, and the playground was truly very nice, and much more extensive than the one at Jardin des Tulieries. One thing you do need to know about it, however, is that it’s a pay-to-play playground. Kids over a certain age (I’m sorry, I should have paid more attention, but once I saw all my kids were over the cutoff I kind of didn’t care anymore) cost 2.50 Euros to get in, and their corresponding adults cost 1.50 Euros. YES, ADULTS HAVE TO PAY TO GET IN, WHAT IS THIS BULLSHIT. That said…it really <i>was</i> a great playground, and for almost two hours of nonstop fun, the 10 Euros was well worth it in my mind. But to give you as much information as possible to determine if the trip is worth it for you, here are some pictures and panoramic video, including video of what I thought was the standout piece of playground equipment there, though technically for ages 7 and up. (I think some younger kids were riding on this thing, and no one was enforcing this age cutoff in particular. Really, I think that, within reason, most kids five and up would do just fine on this, though obviously you know your own kids, and are the best judges of how firmly they’ll hang onto the zip line thinger.)<br />
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There are some nice snack stands close to the playground, peddling foods ranging from your basic kid impulse buy sugar bombs (sweet crepes, ice cream, candy) to some more substantial fare, like hot and cold sandwiches, salads, fries and drinks. After the playground we refueled for a bit before deciding that we were not going to be thwarted by museum closures TWO DAYS IN A ROW, BY GOD. So we were going to head back to the Natural History Museum at the Jardin des Plantes to see what we missed yesterday. <br />
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Now, on this plan, I'll fully admit that I was on the fence. Go <i>back</i> to Jardin des Plantes? This late in the day? It seemed like a recipe for overtired children and science-whining to me, which is worse than any other kind of whining because I take it personally somehow. But I acquiesced, and I'm so glad I did. Because the Natural History Museum? <i>100% worth it</i>. These are some shots from the <a href="http://www.grandegaleriedelevolution.fr/" target="_blank">Grande Galerie D’Évolution</a>, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Natural History Museum mounted and presented so exquisitely. And you were able to get so close to everything. There was hardly any glass, very few ropes—the exhibits were cordoned off, but way down low, so they didn’t block your sight-line, and so while it was grand, it all felt very intimate as well. It was amazing. The kids <i>loved</i> it. <br />
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There was a pretty good <a href="http://www.galeriedesenfants.fr/" target="_blank">children’s exhibit</a> on the side of the gallery too (an extra 2 Euros on top of the price of a regular ticket)—all hands on stuff, well done—but at the point that we reached that part I think the kids had kind of hit the wall stamina-wise, so we started to think about heading back towards home for dinner. Being rather too lazy to think of something new (and me rather too risk averse to chance having a bad meal), we went back to Les Cocottes, where I actually managed to get pictures of some of the food this time.<br />
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We have an early morning planned for Day 5, so we headed home in anticipation of bedtime, picking up some baguettes on the way for breakfast in the morning. I entrusted Mack to carry the goods, which was…maybe a mistake. But he left us with half a loaf, at least.<br />
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See you tomorrow.Michelle Auhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04938937923678734252noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5779260.post-10930696436709858712017-04-05T03:01:00.002-04:002017-04-05T16:20:13.030-04:00April in Paris: Voyager Avec Enfants (Day Three)So, Day 3!<br />
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We let the kids sleep in a bit because we’d had a late night the day before and not any time-sensitive itinerary for the day anyway. While they were sleeping, I headed out to pick up some stuff to make breakfast at home—baguettes at a nearby boulangerie called Le Champ des Délices, and some basic groceries at a small chain market on the corner called Franprix. The cashier was, I think, somewhat annoyed that I didn’t speak French, which…fair enough. People in the States get irrationally pissed at those who don’t speak English, and I suppose I could have brushed up a bit before we made our trip. Despite the fact that I took French for something like four years in high school (much longer if you count elementary school, which I don’t really, as the instruction then was barely formalized) I can barely speak a word now aside from isolated phrases. Ever since I learned medical Spanish (badly), it has corrupted my French to the point that even if I try to speak French, Spanish just comes out of my mouth instead. But one thing this trip has made me realize—though it really didn’t help that much in the Franprix—that I understand much more spoken or written French than I thought I did. Even now, two and a half decades after taking my French Regents exam (don’t worry about it, it’s a New York thing) and gleefully decided that I wasn’t going to take French class any more, ever.<br />
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(<i>"Hey Henri, check out this asshole tourist posing with her baguettes poking up in the picture. So basic."</i>)<br />
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Anyway, the supermarket. Two things that didn’t occur to me. One is that they don’t automatically bag up your groceries at a European supermarket, and that if you want a plastic shopping bag, it costs extra. I had a small backpack with me, so I crammed what I could in there (I had bought butter, milk, eggs, juice, yogurt, cereal that type of stuff) and carried the rest in my arms. I really should have just asked for a bag, but I had already paid, and also this mild discomfort with trying to speak French with this woman who acted like she kind of hated me.<br />
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Second thing: it took me a long time to find the eggs in this supermarket. It was a tiny store—in New York, we’d almost call it a bodega, except they didn’t sell any Tropical Fantasy fruit drink or lottery scratch-off cards—but I must have circled it five, six time. I asked the cashier, and she pointed broadly, with annoyance, to somewhere in the back of the store. Again, I looked in the dairy aisle, by the milk and butter and cheese—nothing. Finally, I found the eggs, and instantly realized why I hadn’t seen them. They were just sitting on the shelf, unrefrigerated. I had forgotten that they don’t refrigerate eggs in Europe. I think I’d read something about this before—something about the different way that we clean our eggshells for sale in the US strips the shells of their outer coating (I want to say “cuticle?” That may not be right but I am too lazy at this moment to look it up) and reveals a porocity to the shell that mandates refrigeration. Anyway! I thought that was interesting. The cashier, less so.<br />
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Eventually the kids <strike>woke up</strike> were forcibly ejected from slumber by their cruel parents, at 10:30am, and we had some breakfast at home. It was a small kitchen in a 750 sf apartment but they’ve used the space quite well, and we had pretty much everything we needed for making breakfast, except for (oddly) bowls, which were nowhere to be found. So the cereal remained uneaten, but the kids dove into everything else, particularly the bread, which was still warm and amazingly good. <br />
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Our plan for the day had been to take the Batobus to the <a href="http://www.jardindesplantes.net/">Jardin des Plantes</a>, where there was a <a href="http://www.mnhn.fr/">Natural History Museum</a> with a “<a href="http://www.grandegaleriedelevolution.fr/">Grande Galerie de L’Évolution</a>.” I had seen pictures online, and tell me whether or not this looks awesome.<br />
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I mean, right?<br />
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The other reason we had the Natural History Museum on our itinerary for that particular day is that the Batobus ticket I’d purchased was a two day pass, and wanted to pick a location that was along the Seiene, so we could take the boat there. (Batobus mandates that you need to use the pass on two <i>consecutive</i> days.) So off we went. <br />
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The Jardin des Plantes was one of the eight stops on the Batobus, one stop after the Notre Dame stop, and again the weather was quite nice, so the ride passed quickly. As we were pulling up alongside our dock, however (here’s the part where I heroically REMEMBERED FRENCH STUFF) the boat captain announced a list of attractions nearby, including the Natural History Museum and the Hall of Evolution, both of which were <i>“fermé aujourd’hui.”</i> And, you know, it’s my own fault, I should have checked that the place was actually open before we made the trip, but it just never occurred to me that a museum would be closed on a non-holiday Tuesday. (In New York, the convention for museums is to be closed on Mondays, which, yes, doesn’t mean that’s the convention everywhere, but I’m just explaining why it didn’t cross my mind.) So…closed. <i>Sad trombone</i>.<br />
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Luckily there’s actually plenty to do in the park, some of which we’d intended to do originally, and probably wouldn’t have had time to see if the museum had actually been open. So maybe it worked out for the best. So the big hit of the day was going to <a href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9nagerie_du_jardin_des_plantes" target="_blank">Le Menagerie</a>, which surprised me by being a very decent-sized zoo in the middle of the gardens. I had been anticipating something more on the scale of the Central Park zoo, which is a perfectly nice city zoo as well, but small. This was bigger, and they had many more animals, including some improbably large ones. There were no elephants or giraffes (that we saw—I mean, I suppose they could have had some stuffed in a closet somewhere in the back) and no pandas like in the Atlanta zoo, but they had orangutans, big cats, alligators, and a tapir that looked kind of like a panda except it, you know, actually walked around and looked alive.<br />
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(<i>To the tiger at the zoo, Madeline just said, "Pooh pooh."</i>)<br />
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So we ended up spending a good couple of hours at the zoo, after which point we exited and strolled around the gardens in the park for a bit. I don’t know how it would look in the winter—probably not that impressive, landscaping aside—but in the Spring, it’s a knockout. And of course there was another carousel, which, once spotted, we had to ride (in the words of George Mallory), “because it was there.”<br />
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We had had some so-so meals the day before, mostly eaten out of haste and convenience than anything else, so yesterday we really wanted to make an effort to have a nice dinner. Breakfast was so late in the day we figured it was OK if we just had a snack midday instead of lunch, with the plan to grab an early dinner at <a href="http://www.maisonconstant.com/les-cocottes-tour-eiffel/">Les Cocottes</a> near our apartment. I’m glad we planned to do this, as it was truly a surprisingly good restaurant. Seasonal menu, simple preparation, delicate flavors, good value. Yes, we were hungry, and that helped. But we’re already planning to go back later in the week.<br />
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Here the kids are digging into their appetizers. I would have taken pictures of the entrees too, but I couldn’t because we were too busy eating. Cal had a lobster bisque that had a really deep, concentrated shellfish flavor; Mack had the vegetable soup of the day, which turned out to be a blended mushroom soup that was smooth and earthy an a little smoky, a quality enhanced by the chunks of bacon thrown in; and Nina stole my langoustine ravioli with artichoke mousseline and a shellfish coulis, because she’s a jerk. (It’s fine, I was happy to eat what she had originally ordered, which was the mushroom soup. But I’m getting the langoustine again next time we go.) The entrees were similarly excellent, as were the desserts. (<a href="http://www.maisonconstant.com/les-cocottes-tour-eiffel/files/2012/08/Carte-cocottes-30mars2017.pdf">You can read the menu here</a> if you’re into food porn.) <br />
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So yes, the meal was worth planning ahead, and if you get there early on a weekday, you probably don’t need a reservation, although from the sound of things they were booked solid from 8:00pm until closing time at 11:00pm. The staff there were also very kind to our kids. Nothing was dumbed down for them, there were no crappy kids’ menus and they didn’t overcook the boys’s steaks (which they ordered medium rare and were served as such). When we walked in with three kids, they didn’t roll their eyes and in fact seated us right at the front of the restaurant instead of shoving us in the back, which is a thing that happens sometimes. So! Les Cocottes! We’ll be back.<br />
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In an effort to avoid a repeat of the night before (which was fine, but the kids stayed up too late and therefore slept <i>in</i> too late as well, like a bunch of damn teenagers) we called it an early night and were home by 8:00pm, in bed by 9:30pm. I still would like to go back to the Museum of Natural History at some point, but I guess it will have to be on a future trip, and definitely not on a Tuesday.Michelle Auhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04938937923678734252noreply@blogger.com8