Puzzles and tricks

Last week Alex promised Allie more Sam videos, so here ya go! Replete with our standard gold-plated production values, to say nothing of the editing botch job. Eh. Good thing the kid's pretty cute.

Blogging fail

I can’t help thinking that when I read back over these posts next year, it will seem like my intern year was composed entirely of days off spent at the spa. I’m off today, sitting with my post-pedicure toes under a dryer, wondering how many minutes are required before I can safely slip my sandals back on.

It’s early in the afternoon, but already, it’s been a productive day. Since Sam went to bed last night, I’ve performed the final post-mortem on our Thursday night dinner party (read: two hours of scrubbing dishes, the stove, the kitchen floor), done three loads of laundry, finished up a few nagging research details and sent them to my advisor, planned our family menu for the upcoming week, gone to three grocery stores and dropped off a donation at Goodwill. Now Sam is napping, and I’m blogging. I’m hoping my toes dry in time for me to get in a short nap myself before he wakes up.

I love not being at the hospital. Oh, how I love it.

But that’s not what I wanted this blog to be about. I wanted this blog to be about my life at the hospital and about my patients. It’s not that there’s a scarcity of stories to tell. Just in the last couple of weeks I’ve dealt with addiction and psychosis, sepsis, flash pulmonary edema. I’ve called strangers in the middle of the night to tell them a loved one is unexpectedly dying. Alcohol withdrawal. Heart attacks. But I’m finding it very hard to find the space and the energy to tell those stories.

On a lighter note, Sam loves to watch Brian in the kitchen lately, which Brian facilitates by letting Sam stand on a dining room chair so he can see up on the counter. Downside here, obviously, is that Sam tends to fall off the chair. I've been thinking about buying this:

... but the $200 pricetag has dissuaded me. So tonight while I was napping on the couch, Brian fashioned a solution out of a dining room chair, an old bike tube, two C clamps and some zip ties:

Aaaaaand now I'm thinking $200 sounds like kind of a bargain, now that you mention it.