First day of doing stuff

Albeit, not a lot of stuff.

Computer training today, which was about 4 hours of learning how to use a lot of charting techniques I'm probably not really going to need, but it wasn't bad. Entering scrips and having to sign them "MD" in the system adds a level of importance that probably isn't warranted. Had a fabulicious dinner out on Johns Island with some of my co-interns. My colleagues are taking turns on the "provide transportation for Ishie" charity, of which I am the sole beneficiary. I swear, I will eventually get a car.

Next up, pager training on Wednesday. The for real stuff starts on Friday, but then we get the fourth off, so I'm kind of feeling like a bum, but in a good way.

In other news, Charleston has a crapton of mosquitoes. Like more than Grenada. It's amazing. I've counted thirty bites on my legs *tonight*. Time to put that bottle of DEET back by the door.

Requisite Grad Shots

How could I forget?

Today I found an amazing farmers market at Marion Square, thus continuing my increasing love of Charleston. Said market included a roti stand (!!!!?????), banh mi, and beignets. So much for losing weight here. Though the bike helps.

So everyone's just nice here?

Is that the way it works?

I lived in Charlotte, NC when I was in high school and aside from making some amazing friends, mark it down as one of the absolute worst periods of my life. The concept of "nice" when I lived there seemed less to do with nice and more to do with "being completely and often hostilely in my business for no particular reason". I recall specifically an incident where I was wearing the standard issue Nine Inch Nails shirt that EVERYONE in my age bracket owned and a woman walked up to me with "You know that band worships the devil".

So when people say a region is "nice", I generally snort derisively. Which probably isn't nice.

People here are NICE. Like not kidding around nice. And it leads to my getting way more things done in a day than I thought possible. If I don't have this paper or that paper, it's "Oh, well, let me see what I can do... well, we can do everything else today and you can just bring that in on Monday", "Oh, that's fine, your driver's license will be just fine. California? How exciting!" Bam, conversation, bam out. Waitresses, Rite Aid techs, employee health.

So today I managed to get my third, count em, THIRD TB test in as many months, pop onto my bike, take out money from one of my accounts (without a bank card), put money into the other account, get my rent check out of it, pick up a back rack for my brand new bike, and fill a prescription. In about two hours. I don't even know what to do with the extra time. And the feeling of well being. I did spend some of it attempting to put the rack on my bike, which was way harder than it looked, so that drained my goodwill, but then my roommate refilled it, only instead of goodwill, she used moussaka, which I think is an acceptable substitution.

I have another resident mixer party tomorrow. I feel more like I'm courting than working, but I'm certainly not complaining.

I'm hoping for a beach trip this weekend.

Home sweet home in the lowcountry

Sorry for the lack of updates; I've been busier than I've perhaps ever been and having to make a number of spot decisions that have all ended up working out better than anyone could reasonably expect.

Graduation. Awesome. Really had a good time, and saw so many people, some of whom I hadn't seen since Grenada, and it was fantastic. My dad flew up from North Carolina, I took him to see Mary Poppins (on Broooooooaaaaaaaadway), and I got to parade around in my cap and gown (which we actually got to keep this year) plus a hood. They kept the speeches fairly brief and to the point. I'm sure this is horrible sounding to Ivy Leaguers, but after enduring hours of drone in UCD's gymnasium, a succinct presentation that felt like it was *to* us rather than *at* us at Lincoln Center was greatly appreciated. I did get hooded upside down, but I don't think most people would be able to tell. Most importantly, I WALKED WITHOUT A CANE OR A LIMP. WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Weirdly, despite nearly everyone at graduation having both a job and a diploma in hand already, no one took the opportunity to do anything weird.

Incidentally, they played Grenada's national anthem. To the surprise of most, it was not Temperature by Sean Paul.

So the pomp! The circumstance! The OMG I need to move to SC this week and either find a place to live near my hospital and buy a bike or find any place and buy a car!

That bit was a little nerve wracking. My initial living plans fell through so then I thought "I don't have anything to do until a physical/drug test on the 22nd, and then some social stuff, and then orientation the 27th, so I'll find a place when I get there since I have plenty of time." Which is true, but when you're in a moving van driving to a Motel 6 and honestly don't have a real address to give them, it's freaky.

I'd been surfing Craigslist, and found a few leads; contacted one agency that specializes in matching people with roommates, was wandering around roommates.com, and so forth, but then found a place on Craigslist that's biking distance from the hospital, costs half of what my rent was in Brooklyn, and comes complete with one of my new roommates' huge friendly Star Wars-named dog. And available this weekend, which is a plus when you're returning the van on Monday. And y'all... (I can say y'all now that I have an address in the South), this place, which is a for-real house, which I have not lived in since I was 12, has a washer/dryer (the holy grail), a backyard with a fire pit, a balcony, a walk in closet (!!!!), a giant pantry, and a giant kitchen. No words. If these two can be half as cool as my last roommate, I'll be happy, since I got all emotional and weepy when he left.

Dropped by to meet people, confirmed no one was a serial killer, signed the lease, made out the check, rented a storeroom for some of my mom's stuff, hauled that around (Charleston was about 96 degrees today; there were a couple moments where I honestly thought I was going to die), bought a bike, tossed it in the back of the much emptier moving van, went back to the house, dragged everything upstairs while nearly getting killed by my futon (no more bunk bed!) and drove back to the motel.

Whew. It's... done. I have an address in Charleston, a job starting up, I'm a doctor and it all happened. And this particular move even happened without a whole lot of drama or stress, which is completely unheard of in a move. I was much more frazzled and emotional moving from Park Slope to Sunset Park for six weeks because our lease was up.

I have a bicycle! I haven't had a bicycle in four years. I feel so environmentally conscious. Or more realistically, broke, and I don't want to deal with car payments and insurance for a while, though for graduation, my mom gave me enough money for a sizeable down payment. Thanks mom!

So now, the only thing that stands between me and employment is my ability to pee in a cup on demand. Better start drinking!!!!

Lincoln Center's met its match

Grad ceremony today! I get loads of ridiculous looking bling and the hunter green cape/trim thing plus a funny hat and everyone's all "She's a doctor" and I'm all "that's right".

Something like that. Gotta be better than Davis graduation in the rec center with minimal air conditioning and a tortilla fight. I think I get to keep my robes too, so I'm thinking of just wearing them for the foreseeable future, except for a South Carolina summer, it'll probably be hot.

In other "is she a real doctor yet?" news, I got my South Carolina limited license approved today! Wheeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!

Another milestone? So soon?

I think of these events as unique moments that resonate with me specifically and have a simple and precise meaning that I have never experienced before and that others couldn't possibly understand. Perhaps, because I believe that I'm still in high school. Fortunately, there are previous blog entries to remind me (yes, I'm one of those people that occasionally reads her own blog) that I am not unique, this is not unique, and I am going through the exact same cycle of emotions that I do with the onset of any new type of change, and the gradual sinking gut-sick is the exact same level of intestinal ambivalence that it was when I experienced it for my biochem retake. Or when my parents first caught me in a lie.

New York, how I've loved you. I love your people; I love your constant circus, I love the everloving hell out of your food and nightlife; I love my time here. During my stay, I got to live in a place I loved, do largely what I liked, and have the best frigging roommate anyone could want. Having been here for two years now, I even love being all exasperated and snooty about slow-walking tourists.

Grenada, you and I had our fights and our differences. I did threaten to ram inanimate objects in animate humans on multiple occasions and for multiple reasons during my stay in your lush arms, but how much hate can there be when finding a bottle of Ting or Carib in the states sparks a holy grail. And when Grenada Chocolate came to Whole Foods, I thought we were going to launch the Grenada reunion tour right there in the middle of Union Square. I have to love your turtles and your beaches, your hashes and visibly drunk bus drivers.

So now I'm off soon to heart Charleston. Soon. With, predictably, a spurious game plan that requires a lot of begging and luck. And then my four year venture of medical school will be over, and we can only hope that the title of this blog will be "A Caribbean MD WAS good enough for me." Then it's all resident stuff. Orders and charts and such. Deep manly doctor coughs.

And, like any other time that any change affects my life, I get embroiled in nostalgia and other useless things. Tomorrow is my last day at Other-Job. I have an awesome boss. I do a lot of stuff I like. I have decent autonomy. I like my coworkers. But it has to end. Graduation is on Saturday and a new crop will come in to replace the ones that defected. Do I want to stay? I want to start residency. With all the new challenges that faces.

But I'll do it. I feel, if meekly, ready to take on the world.

Never fear, the crippled doctor is here

So I'm crashing with my mom for a while until the big move... She's a nurse, for context, which keeps my doctor god complex in check while allowing for all the other complexes to seep in.

As you know, I injured myself and have been transitioning from full crutches to one crutch to "f- it; I hate crutches" so I was hobbling around on a camwalker, which was hurting a bit, but not enough to put me back on a crutch. Since I was too cheap to justify buying a cane for myself, mom got me one.

OMG you guys, I'm House. It took four long years, and I didn't get a cane when I sprained my ankle because it's Grenada, but now I have one, and I already feel more curmudgeonly and like I can hit people on the subway in the shins with it. Not because they've done anything... just cuz.

Helps too.

Anyway, I was on my way to dinner in the city when my train refused to leave the station because while the people on public transportation have been awesome to me, the public transportation itself has been almost purposely screwing with me lately.

I thought this unscheduled delay was due to a fairly aggressive panhandler on the train being hunted by the conductor who was on his radio and going up and down the stairs leading off the platform, so I moved to the window to get a better gawking view and saw... horizontal legs. Sigh.

So I said to my mom "Someone's down" and we wandered off to see what we could do. Different homeless guy was seizing so my mom moved him onto his side and I knelt behind him to stabilize. Mom was like "I'm a nurse; she's a doctor" to the conductor and I considered making that wishy washy "sort of" hand motion. An off duty police officer kept people from stepping on us, because they were certainly trying to, while I tried to get a history from the dude who was coming around because during clinicals, I was told (re: yelled at) many times that a good history is the most important part of being a doctor. I overheard the conductor say into the radio "Yeah, we have a doctor as a good samaritan".

Two things. One, I outranked my mother sufficiently to bump her from the billing, despite that she's been a nurse of over 35 years, despite being a greenhorn that's entering a specialty that has less patient contact than a hospital janitor. Two, the whole 'good samaritan' thing that kept me feeling warm and fuzzy back when I could do CPR with impunity is now mildly terrifying since it can have different implications for doctors.

Another thing I learned is that medical conditions are far less terrifying when you've studied them and seen them before. Quick! What do you do when a man near you has a seizure??? Panic! Hold them down! Put something in their mouths! Call an exorcist!

Or roll them on their side and if they're really thrashing, try to keep their head from hitting anything solid. Wait. Hope they breathe shortly. They almost always do. Talk to them as they come out of it. Collect data. Ask about conditions, medications, and previous events. Make sure they're oriented to time place and location. Ask if they hit their head when they fell or if anything hurts. Standard stuff. Mostly it's just waiting around and trying to get bystanders not to step on your patient.

About that last thing... I've been concerned that New York has turned me into more of an asshole than I previously was, which is no small feat. I have, at times, seen someone down but that was surrounded by paramedics that looked like things were under control, and kept right on jogging. I have used my ipod as a defensive weapon since I got it.

However, I have yet to argue with a police officer (he put his badge around his neck) about train schedules while attempting to step over a large half conscious sick guy and two kneeling women. Oh, for and the next person that hassles me for not being more understanding about moms dragging strollers up the stairs, a couple lifted their stroller over this guy to avoid using the other stairwell, while the cop was yelling at them. Family bonding? "This, Jimmy, is how you ignore the homeless. They're not real people, and you must never let them divert you in your quest for killer Thai food. Try not to hit the lady that has the cane on your way over, because she may smack you in the shin with it like that mean man on television."

Bandwagon

Blah blah blah Rapture.

Yes, I laughed a lot. Yes, I'm going to a Left Behind BBQ tomorrow (it's a place that serves *amazing* Cajun food, so there's no way I'm missing that), and yes, I drank a beer at 6 PM (my last drink ever was going to be Singha; is that sad?). I'm easily amused, and jump on any meme but lolcats with impunity. I should probably insert a picture of Sad Keanu here with Kanye West's "Imma gonna let you finish" over it to make my point.

Graduation is coming up, and I got my dad's ticket forwarded from Christmas to apply to this one because back in December, one of Orbitz's employees in India spent 45 minutes on the phone with me, Delta, and his manager to apply a refund to my ticket even though it was nonrefundable, because he's frigging awesome and he felt bad for me.

Speaking of human compassion, I tend to be fairly skeptical, and I tend towards social awkwardness as a default, plus I deliberately isolate myself in public places by the enthusiastic use of electronic devices. I'm currently living in the supposedly scariest borough (Brooklyn is gradually being gentrified beyond recognition, so it doesn't really earn me any street cred) of one of the cities in the world that's most known for being populated by rude, miserable people. All that being said, I'm learning if that you ever want a "faith in humanity" refill, crutches.

I know I mentioned this before, but I've been rocking these murder stilts for over a week now, and I'm still astounded every day by how out-of-the-way compassionate EVERYONE is. A guy in Long Island flipped his car around across a double yellow line to give me a ride to work in the rain. A woman drove me from the train station on another day. My coworkers fairly regularly get my coffee from the breakroom, which requires not only making it, but throwing in an extra shot of espresso. I have gotten a seat on trains, subways, and buses EVERY single time. Today, I was rocking the one crutch so I could carry a bag from Target, and had people opening doors left and right, even turning around to go back to help me, and coming up the subway steps, had a guy grab my bag and go all the way up with it without ever taking his ipod off (my kinda guy). People smile at me, chat with me, etc. I'm honestly not sure if that last part is because I'm gimpy or because this is the first time I've made eye contact with strangers deliberately since I moved here, but it makes me feel warm and cuddly.

In other news, being a foreign grad gives me extreme paperwork paranoia, though possibly to my favor. One of the worst things about being an IMG is not 'the stigma', and it's not having the same "Where is Grenada?" conversation with *everyone*, it's the degree of red tape you have to cut through to get anything done. Taking the licensing exams? Costs more money AND you have to be approved through the ECFMG with subsequent paperwork. Graduating from school? Still need that ECFMG certificate. Everything needs backup confirmations, our transcripts still have to be mailed directly and verified for everything. Through the years, you have to manage travel documents, student visas, airfares, apartment leases in other states, weird tax forms, residency applications, loan paperwork, etc. None of the stuff that needs to get done is really in the same place, too. And getting all your health stuff? Good luck. Drug screens? Some hospitals have it, some don't, how it's set up can be difficult. You have all your initial stuff at a hospital; you may have different requirements when you go to different hospitals... argh!

So then you get a residency, and you get sent a package that contains a brick of paperwork, and you're thinking that this process is going to be exactly like school. Half of it won't make sense, most of it will have to be self arranged, and a third of the stuff you send out will not make it to its intended destination. Threats will be held over you. I recall madly faxing paperwork from Canterbury because my loans hadn't been processed because of the hyphen in my name, only to arrive back in Grenada to discover they still weren't through and I was borderlining a leave of absence if I couldn't get this stuff straightened out by way of panicked phone calls to New York from the Chancellery.

But... they tell you the timeline. You send in your application for licensure. You send in the benefits package... I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. I have a set appointment for my physical, titers, and drug screen. I thought I was going to need to scramble to find a BLS class, but they handle that. I keep thinking I've forgotten something and I'm going to show up and they're going to say "Oh, we canceled your residency because we emailed you form L14-A0987 and you never responded, so we assumed you weren't interested anymore." But nope, so far, the coordinator's just emailed me in response to my "DO I NEED _______? OMG" forms with pleasant missives that she's looking forward to meeting me.

It might be time to relax :) How often do you hear that pre-residency?

Ends like it began

Naturally, since having a diploma, an ECFMG certificate, my transcripts, my paperwork in (minus my benefits package, which I have to overnight) is not enough to really *end* the process of being a student at SGU, I figured I'd do what I did when I entered medical school... which is... be on crutches.

Shit. For reference:

One of my earlier posts from the island

I would have said, prior to ripping my plantar fascia, that being on crutches in Grenada is one of the biggest pains in the ass on the planet. Now, I will correct that notion and say that being on crutches in NYC is one of the biggest pains in the ass on the planet. Do you have any idea how many stairs there are in this city? It's obscene.

It's giving me a few perspectives though.

1. While crutches do a great deal to alleviate the pain in your actual foot/leg, they make your upper body feel like you've been rock climbing while an obese child rides you piggy back and periodically kicks you in the stomach.

2. Spring in New York feels like summer in the Sudan to your foot when you have a brace on it.

3. In the NY metro systems, crutches trump visibly pregnant ladies trump old people. Seriously, in a place known for the general malignant nature of its populace, I had crackheads leaping out of the way to surrender a seat to me. It doesn't make me any more of a fan of the Bhutan death march that is getting from the R train to the LIRR at Atlantic terminal, but it still gives me the warm fuzzies.

4. If you're wearing anything with a lower cut than "overalls" or "mom jeans", you have to stop, move your crutches to one hand, and haul the pants up and your shirt down every 10 feet.

5. Dude, you can't carry *anything* with these stupid things. Coffee? Gotta hoof it like Tiny Tim with a caffeine addiction. Purse? Gets caught. Groceries? Yeah frigging right.

6. Handicap bathrooms... so THAT'S what those bars are for.

7. I'm a good little newly minted doctor, thus I don't ride the crutches with in my armpits because I don't want to lose the use of my hands. The result? Extreme rib chafing.

So that's my whine.

Meanwhile... I saw a Broadway show (not Spiderman), which was on my NY bucket list, by taking my mom to see Phantom of the Opera. There was quite a bit of drama on obtaining the tickets, because the ticket broker is operated by imbeciles and the theater doesn't really care since they're not really going for the repeat business. But I managed to get them, and so it was actually really cool. I may have the bug for it, though next time I get tickets, I'm going to see if these bad boy crutches earn me a front spot at TKTS so I can forgo the whole online ticket thing. We also ate at Sardi's, because we had a Groupon and that place is expensive. I discovered my ability to recognize celebrities based on their caricatures is even less impressive than my ability to recognize them when I walk by them (I have poor facial recognition).

What else? Yadda yadda rooftop bar. Yadda yadda endless paperwork for starting residency.

Nomadic drawbacks

I am a nomad, and have been since I was a child, which is why when people ask where in California I'm from, I say "the North", and they think I'm being coy. I try to be more specific with "somewhat orbiting the Bay Area", and they think I'm nuts. Then I say I went to high school in the South, and suddenly, I'm "from the South". It's very difficult to explain to people that grew up in one to two locations, and then have a family home and a place to go, what it's like to kind of be from nowhere except a vague region.

Ultimately though, I sing the praises of being nomadic, and forwarded it to program directors when they were asking me why I suddenly wanted to move from NYC (my "town" of about two years, which is my average staying time) to their town. More often, they assumed I was going "back" to California, which is a safe enough I assumption, since I do love my home state, excepting that I have no family there so other than nostalgia, it doesn't really offer me any reason I'd choose one residency there over one at Other-Desirable-Location.

I've also 'lived' in a lot of places for somewhere between one and three months, which leads to the question "What is your definition of residence?" I had a flat in Prague for a month for a medical selective. Did I "live" there? My mom's a traveler, and the one I stay with when I'm between residences, but she's rarely in the same place for a long time, so if she doesn't "live" there, do I "live" there? It's confusing.

I bring this up because I'm filling out what is known among scientific communities as a metric s*** ton of paperwork. Among this are applications for my state medical license, a background check, medical paperwork, tax forms, and so forth. List residences for the last seven years? Gods. Where do I start? My dad's address is frequently listed as my permanent address, but I don't live there... My roommate's name is on the lease and mine isn't. I lived in a country for two years that doesn't so much have addresses as locations, so some poor investigator is going to have to try and figure out how to pull up paperwork for "In the Cool Runnings apartment building on the Dusty Highway". When I told people to send stuff there, they got upset and thought I was kidding. When I wasn't in Grenada, I was in and out of different states (or countries) for anywhere from two weeks to three months.

And it continues. I don't have an address for new town yet. I'm moving out of this apartment next week and crashing at my mom's place in Brooklyn until it's time to move... this results in my initial paperwork being sent to this address, my future licensing paperwork being sent to her address, and my tax forms being listed under my dad's address because that'll be more relevant after I start residency, and as mentioned, don't know where I'm living.

If all of this certification, licensing, tax paperwork goes through without a hitch, I'll eat an okra and canned tuna sandwich. If all that doesn't gum the gears, I'm sure Old Reliable, aka, my wonky last name, will seal the "you have to resend this with ___________" deal.

Please refer to me as Dr MD... btw, I'm a doctor...

Oh wait... but I said I was going to talk about other stuff.

Fair enough. I'm starting to feel so far removed from medicine (actually studying it, not rabbiting on about it) that it's kind of frightening.

Stuff I've done in the last few months:

Watched: Usual Suspects, Super Troopers, Run Lola Run, Requiem for a Dream, Lolita (Jeremy Irons version), Sweeney Todd, the Birdcage, the King's Speech, Gattaca, the first season of the Walking Dead, nearly all of Cowboy Bebop and I'm restarting the X-Files. All on the train. I'm thinking of writing a slow ballad dedicated to my iPhone called "I love you more than I've ever loved anything (club remix)".

I'm also just now realizing that my list of recently watched media is kind of disturbing fired off like that. King's Speech may be the sole source of "Not weird". I like Modern Family. That's normal, right? Why am I thinking about this?

Marched through Times Square in search of student rush tickets for Broadway shows fruitlessly. If someone can score me 30 dollar seats to Book of Mormon or American Idiot, I'll... seriously... don't ask. Walked past the Spiderman theater and snickered.

Eaten: Cuban, Mexican, Ethiopian, South Indian, North Indian, Indo-Caribbean, vegan kosher Indian (I have a problem).

Attended: Baby shower, comedy shows, burlesque, several birthdays, few music places.

Studied for Step 3.

You'd think I could crack a book somewhere between the first half of Kick-ass (couldn't do it; audio didn't sync and I still want to punch Nicolas Cage in the mouth any time he's onscreen) and episode 17 Inuyasha but nope. Hoping that instinct to learn *anything* kicks back in. I balk when someone tries to teach me any factoid at this point. "Hey, you know that movie was based on a true story about..." "NO LEARNING!!!!! MUST MAINTAIN IGNORANCE SPIRAL!!! MUST TYPE IN ALL CAPS!11!11!!omglol"

But the title... I got my residency contract today (woot!) which not only gives me a paperwork to-do list, but it's the first time (aside from my diploma, which rocks) that I've seen my for-real name with abbreviations and prefixes and such other than a few mistakes with the USMLE letters and a few interview invites.

And the best thing is that while I don't know if it's standard for contract language, because let's be honest, none of us have read a contract since you were able to click the "I Agree" button on your computer in 1996, but it's written out insanely often. "Dr. Ishie, MD. Contract for one year of being a physician, a PGY-1, a doctor, at our hospital, which employs doctors, where she will be doctoring the doctor stethoscope white coat malpractice DEA license."

Incidentally, do I need a DEA license? I can't imagine a scenario where I could use it that wouldn't end with a ride in the back of a police car. I'm similarly curious about the ACLS training.

And this time, it's for real-for real

So, I'm a real M.D. now.

I'm getting excitement-overloaded, if such a thing exists. Black Monday, woot, Match Day, woot, last day of clinicals, woot, file closed out, woot, diploma date, woot. It's like if Mardi Gras were once a week. Going from "Congratulations!!" to "Congratulations? Right? Are you a doctor yet? No? Good god, how much paperwork can there be?"

April 8th? Diploma date. Which is good, because between March 25th (last day of clinicals) and now, I really didn't know what to call myself. Was I a student? Not really; I wasn't in school. Was I a doctor? Not really. Hadn't reached my graduation date. The graduation *walk* is in June, so that'll be another woot (though I'll get a few months rest in between), but that's so I can see if the third time's the charm for not tripping over a too-long gown in heels.

This may mean that over the course of the next few months, I may... possibly, be able to start talking about things other than school, the Match, patients, and so forth. It's like a whole new social realm has opened up to me. I can talk about... Futurama again, if the bastard ever shows a new frigging episode. Seriously, seen A Clockwork Origin like five times. I need a fix.

Then residency will start, and I'll be able to bore people in an even more specialized niche. Learning medicine with goats on your lawn could at least be conceivably interesting to people not doing it. Classifying seminomas? Oh, get ready friends and family... Come July, I'm going to take you to EPIC boredom. We're talking longing for filibuster boredom. Last half hour of 2001: A Space Odyssey boredom. Yes, I went there.

Seeing as that last remark probably pissed off a good half of you, I figured this would be a good time to beg for help again. Anyone know any tried and true method of purging a particularly insidious Google redirect virus without using Combofix? The program won't run because there's some lurking AVG file haunting my computer despite my disabling it and then uninstalling the full app. TDSS Killer isn't touching it, Malwarebytes keeps helping me with the stuff it tries to download onto my computer when I space out and click a google link (I can remove Windows Security with my eyes closed by this point), but the redirect remains. And I didn't realize HOW MUCH I google random crap until I can't click on it anymore. I'm not above mucking with the registry. Just call me the latchHKey kid.

And users of better computers, have at me for not having a Macbook. I will keep my infection-ridden Dell computer duct taped together until July if it kills me. Which it may. Didn't some of these bad boys catch on fire?

Sigh...

This turned into rain cancellation.

Plus side, I have tickets to some future Yankees game, and I got to see the stadium, which was pretty cool. They were selling Cracker Jacks in the stand and everything. And who can turn down $11 Miller Lite? Don't answer the last one.

They played a ton of rain related music, which is good, because it turns out I like a lot of songs about rain. The Rain Song, by Led Zeppelin, No Rain, and a bunch of others whose names I don't remember right now.

So wah, first Yankees game a wash, but I'm going to get to one before I leave NYC. It's on the bucket list. Since I'm venturing into the Bronx now, I'm probably also going to try to squeeze in a trip to the zoo sometime now that they found the cobra.

Rain rain go away!!!

First Yankees game ever and it's threatening to rain us out??? Nooooooo!!!!!

Rock Fever Revenge

Maybe it's the disgusting weather, but I've been really getting sappily nolstalgic for Grenada this last couple of weeks. Maybe it's also because people are leaving the area, so it reminds me a lot of those last weeks of Grenada.

And I really did have fun my last year. That encompassed my Prague trip, late night swim trips to Grand Anse beach, wrestling in Morne Rouge. I've been going through my pictures and getting all smiley and such. Then I feel like I've really been lucky as a person to get to do all this stuff and come out of it, and then I feel a touch of guilt for being such a whiny little prat so much.

Stay tuned for whiny prathood! Next week!

In the interim, here's some pictures that made me feel all sweet and fluffy. I'll probably post more occasionally now that I actually have time to sort, and to make up for the fact that I haven't been posting pictures in forever. So Grenada...

And here's a little taste of Prague... This was the view down the street from the place we met for conferences and to meet up to go to the hospital.

If I could give some Monday morning quarterbacking to the people in the midst of this... I spent a lot of time miserable. Not all of it, by any remote bit, but too much. I focused on how much this that or the other thing was screwing me (as noted on my blog), how hot it was, how nasty the men could be, interrupted by childish bickering with people.

If you're on the island, take a deep breath every now and again and just look at it. Think about where you are and how few people get to do what you're doing.

Then go back to remembering how much you loathe learning cancer treatment drugs. (I'm realistic in my nostalgia). Enjoy!