Pontificum Scriblerus

Every time we go away these days, there is an unavoidable musical chairs game of keys.  Somebody gets the mailbox key, someone else gets my house keys so they can come and feed Blueberry, hubby's house keys get left at my parents' so they can use the car, etc etc etc.  So, it's no small wonder that one of these days something would go awry, as things tend to do around me. We just came back from a lovely long weekend at a lakeside golf resort, where we took walks in the woods, ate barbeque pork nachos, soaked in an infinity pool, and watched my friend get married.  I had taken a day off on Monday so I could relax, and catch up with Munchkin, who stayed back with my parents.  We had left Hubby's car at my office parking lot, thinking that we would pick it up on the way back.  We pulled into our driveway, and Hubby exclaimed: "what the fuck!! Where is my car!"  and then, as we both realized that it was still in the parking lot, we both said, "Oh, fuck!...

We all know this about me: I am easily influenced, highly impressionable and moderately obsessive.  But even I am surprised. You see, I read a book. To put this in context, this is probably the first non-science book I read in several months.  I was on vacation, and a friend lent me her Kindle.  Upon her recommendation, I delved into The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain.  It is about Ernest Hemingway's first wife and their beautiful yet wrenching love story, marriage and demise.  I don't even know very much about Ernest Hemingway, and have not read much of his writing because in high school, when I took American literature, I happened to have a very anti-establishment teacher (ironically, educated at Harvard and Yale), who concentrated mostly on African American, feminist and gay/lesbian literature instead of "dead white male" literature.  She had a vendetta against "dead white males."  While others read The Great Gatsby, I read Olivia Butler, the name ...

I have not written in a while, mostly because I've been uninspired. To write something good, you have to be in the midst of some sort of angst, I'm convinced of that. Otherwise, everything sounds canned. What did I have to anguish about? I like my job, I love my kid, I hate the neighborhood - but how much can I really whine about that? All equals lack of posts. But something happened last week that ignited my passions more than the average bit. And forgive me if I have discussed this before, and am repeating myself. So, I'm at the hospital rounding. I run into a fellow young doc from my company. Turns out, he just had a baby. We're both sitting over open charts, pens in hand, making co-worker smalltalk in low tones. Oh, is it your first baby? Oh, it's your third baby! Oh, how very fun, congratulations! Is your wife also physician? No, he says, she is in finance. She was working her tail off with the first two, and never saw them, so now, with the thi...

Ignore the above "pun" as the ramblings of a very tired test-taker who has had it with the very word "boards." What I was trying to convey by using such a terrible play on words is that taking the GI boards was torture. However, it is over - for now. I walked out of that indescript building on Devonshire Street thinking, okay, THIS is when they all will surely find out that I have been faking it all along. As I posted on FB for all to see: for 40% of the questions, all the answers looked right. 40% none of them looked right; 5% were about nutrition - and anything with the word "selenium" in it was taking a hit for the team. For the last 15%, I just simply had no clue and picked "a." The next day, when I rejoined reality, I had some crazy amount of patients to see, and faked them ALL out by getting it done. It was the same building where I took the medicine boards a mere 4 years earlier. Has it really been 4 years? That's a really long ...

My family and I packed up our belongings and moved for the 9th time in the last decade. So, after a brief happy period living where I always thought I'd live, I've moved progressively further away with each uprooting. We had an F town, then half hour west past the boroughs, and now, I'm in absolute no man's land! It's not quite the Cape, it's not quite Rhode Island, it's past the South Shore... It's the hole inbetween. Furthermore, I have landed squarely in the woods. I mean, there is a veritable jungle outside my door. The house we got is this little box-like cottage with windows all around, which, by the way, was especially fun last Sunday during hurricane Irene. Enclosed in our little box, watching the trees bend, and the backyard get littered with what used to be mighty branches, I felt like Dorothy, whose little trailer was about to be blown off to Oz. Incidentally, we were in the hurricane hotspot of the heaviest power outages and largest a...