"Rumble. Transform.  Operation - Tidal wave" 

I just got the first disc of The Transformers ™ sent to me from netflix.  I just watched the first 2 episodes ever.  The coolest!  I’m hooked all over again. 

I remember way too much about the old autobots and decepticons – it’s cool to revisit them.  I plan on watching every episode over time.

Not too much else to report.  Some of you may be aware of my (and George’s) fascination with our friend Pete’s taint.  I’d explain, but anyone who really knows me already knows why it’s funny.  It’s like explaining “POT!”. Anyway, some of the other residents have started to pick up on our near constant joking about Pete’s taint.  (He really does have the best taint – ever).  Anyway, at about 9:15 this morning, George and I were walking to the clinic and we heard an overhead page on the hospital loud speaker system.  Normally, such pages are “Will Dr. Smith please call the Emergency Room” or “Will Anne Jackson please return to the surgical waiting room”.  Well today, we heard “Will Pete Staint please return to the GI Clinic”.  George and I busted up and called the hospital operator to clarify the page.  It turns out our chief resident had set the whole thing up, Bart Simpson prank-call style, essentially putting us all in stitches.

That’s right – we’re professional doctors, and we’re abusing the overhead paging system.  And we love Pete’s taint!

 
Long Time – No Blog

Perhaps it’s time to change that with flagrant overcompensation. Two weeks have gone by since the last entry, and a lot has happened. I find that after these long hiatuses, it is intimidating to sit here and stare at a big open Word ™ document and likewise hard to know where to begin.

To start, I suppose I could say that I’ve updated a few things on my sidebar. I still owe this blog a discussion about the books I’ve been reading and my thoughts. Sadly, I don’t do these things in a timely manner and hence some of the impulse thoughts tend to fade away. The same thing happens with Mick Flicks. Besides “The Corporation”, I have recently seen “I, Robot” and “The Bourne Supremacy” and all certainly deserve their time in the sun on Mick Flicks. (Especially “I, Robot” – man was that movie made for my site).


In other news, I guess I’ve been doin’ stuff and seein’ stuff. I still love the city life. I still drink a little too much about one night each weekend, though the amount has been decreasing, thankfully. I went to a Mariner’s game a couple weekends ago which was good fun. Sitting out in the sun, watching a game – reminded me of the days in San Diego watching the Pads – only some drunk guy wasn’t calling Raul Mondesi a “pussy face” at the top of his lungs in front of about 20 little kids. Nice work that guy, in retrospect.

I won another Super Bowl with the Giants for the fourth year in a row, this time on the white-knuckled ALL-MADDEN setting. I was mildly proud of that. It wasn’t nearly as easy as the other years.

It’s been hot as hell here lately, and there is no air conditioning in this town. As much as I love my apartment, it becomes a sauna in the late afternoon on warm days as the sun beats down the front windows. Oh well, I shan’t complain too much – before I know it the only late afternoon beat-down will be a constant drizzle and dark gray skies.

It’s getting late and I’m tired. I should really update this thing more often. It would be more fun to point out the little day-to-day things that I find funny than keep bringing up big dramatic issues, I think. Not sure what everyone would rather read, though.

Peace.
A Stick and a Burn

Another week has come and gone. What does it all mean? Personally I’m not sure, but if one were to believe the Adbusters I picked up and started reading over the weekend, then one might argue:

“It isn’t just bombs, police raids on TV, and “sleeper cells”: terrorism also comes wrapped in plastic. The embrace of consumer society inflicts a different brand of terror upon the world. The monster ego is born uncontrolled, uninhibited, wanting more and more and more….”

“Perhaps the real posterchild of terrorism is the hyper-commodified, increasingly cosmeticized American self.”

There’s a lot more in the issue, most of it quite thought provoking. All of it is anti-consumerism to the extreme, which is reasonable and makes me hate myself more for buying that Kenneth Cole shirt last week. But oh well, the chicks will dig it. All things in moderation, I say.

Except alcohol. Luckily I only got drunk once this weekend, and not even THAT drunk, just enough to have a mild hangover on Saturday. I suppose I’m still celebrating being done with my second year of residency as carried over from the previous weekend. A few more weekends of this sort of “significant” drinking, though, and I may stumble onto a problem.

And that was my Friday. Pete and Jeff (other friend from work) rolled up to “the city” and we went out to dinner and a few bars. It was fun – my neighborhood is very alive on weekends, sort of the gay/gothic/chic trendy neighborhood – I guess like a mini-Castro but quite unique.

Saturday and Sunday I spent finalizing little tweaks on my place and it is nearly complete – all that is left to be done is for me to hang up a few more pictures and then a side project or two (I would like to buy a new dresser). I really need to post up some pics of the place, and hopefully I’ll get to do that soon.

Saturday night I went and saw “Anchorman” with Gwen. I wasn’t expecting much, but was pleasantly surprised. I won’t give it a full review (and it hardly merits one), but one should note that Will Ferrell is a funny man and can carry a movie, even one as ridiculous and random as “Anchorman”. I laughed and smiled more or less throughout – good stuff, including a hilarious fight scene and bears doing stuff. In conclusion, I, for one, will take “two tickets to the gun show” anytime, anywhere.

The remainder of Sunday I spent transferring old files (mostly MP3’s, videos, and text files [but NOT porn]) from my old computer to my new computer. Now I have a fully organized MP3 library on my new compute. I also said goodbye to the old compute. I deleted almost all the non-essential programs and am preparing to donate it to good will. It hurt, a little, to get rid of the old Quake and Counterstrike, but there it is. The times, they are a changing, somebody once said. Today, I augmented my technofile geek status by purchasing a portable MP3 player, mostly to use when I work out.

At work

I’m doing a cardiology elective this month. Essentially I’m doing a rotation full of cardiology procedures, to include mainly cardiac catheterizations and echocardiograms; all of this is to see if I want to do a fellowship in cardiology. The stuff is really cool (I mean hell, Dr. Dave can tell you that). Today, for example, I put a catheter (a small tube) directly into a man’s coronary arteries (via way of his femoral artery – meaning I stuck his skin with a needle near his groin – feel your pulse between your pelvis and thigh on the right side if you want to know the actual site where the needle hit his skin) under fluoroscopy (real time X-ray) and injected radio-opaque contrast dye to view blockages in his coronary circulation. Then, I watched my staff doctor go after the lesions with balloons (i.e. angioplasty) and other devices such as stents. There’s all sorts of fluid dynamics going in there (for example, we measured pressure gradients from one part of the artery [the proximal portion] to other parts [the more distal portions] to see if the atherosclerotic lesions were hemodynamically significant or not. Was that last sentence nerdy enough for you?). Anyway, I really like this stuff – it is very TANGIBLE medicine, akin to plumbing. You see a blockage, you fix it. Kind of cool. Here are some pics of angiography:

Entry Site
Schematic one
Ignore the Red Circle

A little about echocardiograms


The consideration of fellowship, once again, becomes important, in that it appears that unless I apply for (and get) a fellowship this year, I will more or less have a 95% chance of going to Iraq in the next 2 years. (Yes, this is an increase). The downside of fellowship (again), is that it extends my overall military commitment. And we ALL know how much I love being in the military and don’t regret signing my life away to stay debt free. No really, we all know that.

So, big decisions ahead. More in the future. But I enjoy what I’m doing at work right now. There’s no call and no weekends for the month, and things are generally good. The calm before the storm, at least. J