the great pumpkin




As you can see, we went pumpkin picking today at this place. You can see the full photo set on my Flickr account. Oh, so apparently, there's this thing called Flickr! And you put photos on it! And people can look at them! Who knew? (Just kidding, I know I am totally late to the party on that front. I have no idea what Facebook is either.)

a pound of cure





A sign posted next to one of the sky bridges in the hospital, which connects adjoining buildings. It's all part of the hospital's fitness campaign, in which it urges employees to do such things as take the stairs instead of the elevator, or eat vegetables as opposed to slabs of fried lard. (The mascot for this campaign, by the way, is a bumblebee on a treadmill. As in, "BEE fit!" Also, let's BEE friends.)

I suppose they mean well with these little aphorisms, but telling someone that in doing something every single day for an entire year they would only lose ONE MEASLY POUND almost seems discouraging to me. Unless you actually were a bumblebee, in which case a pound would probably be a lot.

re-entry not permitted

A sign posted on the door of the compactor chute next to our apartment:




Usually I love living in the city. But sometimes I don't.

courier service




Yesterday I offered to run a coag sample down to the stat lab prior to surgery. (We needed to know what the patient's INR was off coumadin to see if it was safe to do neuraxial anesthesia). Man, I haven't hand-delivered a sample to the lab since I was a med student. Oh, those were simpler times.

"flush twice if necessary"




Some very...detailed signage in one of the department restrooms. What, no diagrams?

talk about a black cloud




The other day, my assignment was to be the resident on arrests for the day. What this means is that I carry the "arrest pager," and anything there's anyone that needs to be intubated anywhere in the hospital, I'm there, like Johnny on the spot. Overnight, the anesthesia team captain carries the arrest pager until 7:00am, at which point the daytime resident takes over. I got to work a little early, so it was a bit before 7:00am, but since I wasn't doing anything else and I know there's nothing quite as liberating as getting rid of the dead weight of that arrest pager post-call, I decided to pick it up early.

The post-call resident was happy to see me. Handing me the pager, he intoned, "The arrest bag is all stocked. This thing hasn't gone off all night." The instant, and I mean the instant that I touch the pager, it starts beeping for a stat intubation in the CCU.

It probably would not have been a good day to play in the World Championships of Poker either.

america!




Guess where we went with our out-of-town guests yesterday? Man, could this picture possibly be more YAY, AMERICA? All it needs is, like, a bald eagle soaring over a baseball field. While holding a gun in its beak.

how to get kids to hate you

First of all, let me be clear that I know that I don't have the healthiest eating habits. I know that, OK? But at least I'm not a damn hypocrite about it.

My point is that Joe, Joe is the hypocrite. He may not be as unapologetic about it as I, but like most residents (or recent former residents, in his case), he eats like crap during the week. The problem with Joe is that he has to RUIN it for everyone else. For instance, as I have discussed in the past (wow, more than four years ago), how Joe pretends to be healthy is by eating all the junk food that I buy, though never actually buying any on his own, thereby creating the illusion that he is somehow not involved in said junk's food chain. When I finally get after him to REPLACE THE DAMN CANDY THAT YOU FINISHED, OR WE ARE GETTING DIVORCED, he will invariably do something asinine, either buying some crusty old man candy like Dots, or totally betray me by getting a bag of carob drops or some other hippy crap, feigning ignorance. In summary: eats just as much crap as me but refuses to own up to it, and tries to create some cloud cover of pseudo-wholesomeness. These replacement snacks that he buys are enjoyed by no one human, including Joe himself, and they sit in the cupboards for months and years before they are eventually stealthily discarded under cover of darkness.

Joe's sister is coming to visit us this weekend from Baltimore, bringing along her two oldest kids, who are eight and six. In addition to changing the sheets on the guest bed and whatnot, we made plans to do a little food shopping so that there would be enough food for everyone to graze on for the weekend. Joe was in charge of placing the Fresh Direct order. "Make sure to get some snacks for the kids," I reminded him, relishing the role of Fun Aunt. It's not like I wanted him to order pork rinds and a bulk box of candy bars or anything (though both of those items have seen the inside of our snack cupboards) but I was thinking, hey, it's school-aged kids, maybe we could get them a box of cookies, or maybe a carton of ice cream for dessert. However, what Joe decided to order for them was this:




Give him a few years. He's going to be the guy who gives out raisins to the trick-or-treaters. Or a handful of peanuts. Actually, we could just give out little baggies of this snack mix, since I guarantee you that this entire bag will still be around, unopened, on October 31st.

further perils of dressing the same as everyone else




I spent five minutes pawing through this pile trying to locate my white coat this morning. Maybe we should get alphabetized hooks.

let's see george w. bush try to win that one





I'm happy for Al Gore and certainly feel that winning the Nobel Peace Prize is just consolation for "losing" the 2000 presidential election. However, why does he look evil as all hell in these pictures posted in The New York Times, like he's plotting world conquest from within his shadowy cave lair?

babs, in memoriam




This may be difficult to believe, but it wasn't until about a month ago that a Starbucks opened up near [University Hospital]. Guess they didn't think health care workers drank coffee. Anyway, it's there now, across the street from the subway station, and doing a booming business and one might expect.

Mom-'n'-Pop-coffee-outlet crushing aside, I have no problem with Starbucks, but can't help but to fondly remember what used to occupy this store space at the corner prior to the inevitable landing of the monolith. Well, immediately prior, it was a Washington Mutual bank, which didn't really hold my (or the neighborhood's, apparently) interest. But before that, when I was a medical student, it used to be the site of BABS, which according to the overhanging sign was a nursing uniform store. I say "according to the sign" because you would not necessarily infer that from the window display at BABS, which mostly consisted of various spicy pieces of lace and imitation satin lingerie. Nor were men left out--I still remember the men's G-string that was displayed in the window around Christmas when I was a second-year med student, a saucy little number shaped like an elephant's head. With a trunk. Um...yes.

a jolly good fellow

Today I had a meeting with my department chairman and the director of the Regional Anesthesia fellowship at [University Hospital]. They said some words. Then I said some words. We all agreed that they had very nicely appointed offices. And later that day, I signed on as one of their fellows in Regional Anesthesia for the upcoming academic year. So you know what this means.




All that neuromuscular anatomy that I learned in medical school and rapidly forgot immediately after the final exam, on the assumption that "I'll never actually need to know this stuff"? I WAS WRONG.

pushing tin




We get a lot of air traffic over Manhattan. Either that, or we just have a lot of very skinny, linear clouds criss-crossing each other. A meterologic phenomenon!

routines

Weekend days where neither Joe and I are working are routinely spent pretty much the same way. We wake up. We go to the neighborhood diner to have breakfast. We stop off to get coffee on the way to the playground. At the playground, Cal engages in hijinks. Upon completion of said hijinks, we head home for lunch and naptime, stopping off to go to the ATM and run whatever errands need to be run. We are boring, predictable people.



Watching the dogs at the dog run. Joe wants to know if you are Sarah Conner. (Don't say yes.)




There's this art installation at Madison Square Park that we're hoping they will never take down. It's this life-size silvery metal replica of two interlinked trees, and it's just gorgeous. It went up this past spring, and it would be great if the could keep it up through the winter, but Madison Square Park seems to like to rotate its art with the seasons, so it will probably be gone pretty soon. Possibly replaced with something hideous. A couple of years ago, the winter art piece was this gigantic orange A-frame metal beam. For quite a while, before I realized that it was an art installation, I thought it was just scaffolding.



We walked by a sporting goods store on our way back from the park. Unfortunately, it looks like the person who made up this window display forgot to put pants on the male mannequin. Or perhaps that's the look now.



There was a street fair that we passed by on our way to the bank. Along with the standard booths of gyros and $5 pashminas, we also saw a stand selling five million bajillion model cars. The big mistake we made was stopping. After we finally managed to drag him away, the screams of protest really interfered with my ability to browse for knockoff bags and warehouse overstock socks.



More unclad mannequin legs, which for some reason were duct taped to the scaffolding outside the Housing Works. Naked plastic asses! They're so hot right now.

warning, nerd humor ahead




Up on the second story above this sushi restaurant near Irving Place is the so-called "In Situ Salon." Which I suppose means that they trim your hair while it's still on your head, as opposed to removing it and trimming it in a petri dish.

"good" dog carl





I've figured out the solution to all of Britney Spears' childcare problems. She should get a rotweiller.

note to self: get some paper

I need to stop using my leg as a note pad.

mothra




Another sweater destroyed by moths. We have a little bit of a moth problem in this house. While I certainly don't begrudge the moths their right to exist, and I haven't been as vigilant on the prevention front as I should have been (mothballs or cedar chip satchels or what have you), I just think that it's out of pure spite that every single one of my moth-eaten sweaters has a hole right in the center of the chest or abdomen. Why must they make a hole where it is most noticeable? A little hole on the sleeve, maybe along a cuff, or along the lower border of the ribbing, maybe even in the back. But right front and center, every single time? Now they're just being mean.

windbreaker season, again

sorry, surly

A sign outside a tapas restaurant. Ah alcohol, the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.