Redwing, Jenga Fling, Cookie Thing

Sometimes my life is lame, so even the highlights are kind of beige instead of neon. That disclaimer stated, here are some highlights from the past week anyhow:

1. Rock climbing outdoors

You may have heard a vicious rumor that Minnesota has no actual mountains. Well, it's true. But Redwing, MN, does have an awesome cliff-faced bluff with about a hundred different bolted sport climbs like these:

2. Dinner and game night

It turns out that my friends Jorge and Val play a really hard-core version of Jenga in which you stack the removed blocks back on top as badly and haphazardly as possible. Hence, the helically-skewed, triple-piled, antennae-topped wreck you see here, moments before it crashed to its death:

3. This hand-lettered sign for cookies

An innocent descriptor of the cookie variety? Or an ominous warning about where these cookies have been? I don't know. All I know is that there's a very unfortunate space in the middle of that first word there. And yes, I realize that giggling about this in the middle of the convenience store (...and then taking a picture of it, no less) makes me, like, 6 years old.

My Pseudo-Disney Non-Vacation

Have you heard of that getting-to-know-you game called "I've Never"? A group of people sit in a circle of chairs with one less chair than the number of people, then the leftover person has to stand in the middle of the circle and say something they've never done. Anyone sitting down who has done the stated activity has to get out of their chair and scramble into a new one, leaving a new person leftover in the middle of the circle. Well, my go-to statement for that game has always been that I've Never been to a Disney theme park. And even though I spent the last 4 days in Orlando, FL, it's still true. I was there for a research conference, but didn't actually get to do anything legitimately Disney. Instead, I had a pseudo-Disney vacation during breaks between conference lectures! Wooo-hooooo, Behold! I took a picture of a Disney park transportation bus as it drove by! I explored the boardwalk studded with tacky souvenir shops near Disney World! I snapped a shot of Disney's Epcot Center! (...from the highway, across a parking lot, while lost, moments before doing a U-turn in my rental car in order to avoid having to actually pay to get inside the official park). Squint and look in the middle of the picture just above the treeline! I went inside of a Disney resort hotel! The Swan & Dolphin! (...it's where the conference was held. My actual hotel lodgings were much less Disney and much less dinero.) Swan: Dolphin: And by the way: I'm no marine biologist, but that's no dolphin. Maybe they didn't think "The Swan & Trout" sounded as classy.

In a suspenseful pseudo-Disney climax, I presented my research project at the biggest national pediatric eye conference of the year!

The project was on acquired nonaccommodative esotropia (translation: kids who suddenly go cross-eyed even though their eyes were straight before, and the crossing can't be fixed with strong glasses).

And in a super pseudo-Disney happy ending, my poster won an award for Best in Show! (Look closely at the upper left corner of the picture and you'll see a cute little blue ribbon on the display board.) The last time I won anything "Best in Show" was at the poultry barn of the 1995 county fair for a pair of cantankerous geese. The fair folks gave me a $3 prize. The ophtho research conference folks only gave me a hearty handshake. Apparently, the more lucrative career is in poultry, not medicine.

Clichés about life

It's impossible to fully appreciate Spring unless you've lived in Minnesota. The wintertime here is so long and bitterly cold -- months of frigid wind and ice, all the trees bare, all the ground covered with 2 feet of accumulated snow from November to March. If you go outside for 30 seconds with wet hair, it flash freezes into crunchy icicles (...hair-cicles?). The piles of plowed snow on the sides of the road are taller than I am, and all full of muck and road salt and little things that froze to death. There is nothing alive out there. It's inconceivable that anything could possibly survive. Then suddenly one day the sun comes out and the snow melts. The next day, the grass is green. The next week, the great outdoors is packed with squirrels, bunnies, and little chirpy birds like something straight out of a Disney cartoon. The week after that, the trees bust out into so many flowers they weigh the branches down. It's like life returns with a vengeance, desperate to prove that it's vigorous and vital, even after what it had to endure all winter. Spring here is more than a season, it's a resurrection. Never ceases to amaze me.

Mohawk mornings

One of the perks of having short hair is that when I roll out of bed every morning, I get to encounter this in the mirror and laugh:

It's like a wee little squirrel nests in it while I'm asleep.

Laundry Day

In my whole life, I've only lived in maybe two places that had a truly reliable washer and dryer inside the house. The rest of the time, I've shared the joy of a communal laundry room or a public laundromat. There's nothing quite as riveting as watching the folks who come through to do their laundry on an average Saturday morning. And there's nothing quite as frustrating as coming downstairs to retrieve your clothes only to find that they were prematurely evicted from the dryer and piled in a wet heap on the floor so that someone else can dry a pair of shorts and a single sock.

Today as I was in my apartment building's laundry room, adding my last scoop of detergent, an old lady came in to move her clothes from the washer to the dryer. Suddenly deciding that this was an ideal setting for female bonding and the passage of wisdom, she pulled out a bra from her laundry load and told me "This is my best bra. Look at it. It's a good one. Lots of support. I never leave it down here to go through the dryer because someone will take it. That's what people will do with a good bra -- they'll steal it."

Beware the bra thieves. You can't be too careful these days.

I'm going to miss this

I'm going to graduate in 1 month 15 days. Yeek. The fact that I'll suddenly be a doctor at the end of May feels like an elaborate practical joke that the medical school is playing on me and on society.

While trying to wrap my head around this, I'm also trying to get ready for a cross-country move. Mainly that involves sitting ineptly in my apartment, looking around at all the stuff I'll have to pack. On my super-motivated days, I scheme about which department store alleys I might be able to hoarde some moving boxes from.

The problem is partly exhaustion caused by the freaky random night shifts I'm scheduled for during the Emergency Medicine rotation I'm on, but mostly it's that I really like this apartment and would happily just cuddle into it for a very long time. I'm going to miss this place. The landlady let me pick the paint myself. There's even a little tucked-away spot for my funky old piano. And for the first time in my life, I've been unable to kill the house plants because kitchen gets so much light!

I found this dining room set on Craigs list. The whole thing had to be disassembled -- even the chairs -- in order to fit it all into the back of my friend's little car to drive it back from the Twin Cities.

Sigh. Moving on.