Surreal

. ...And then an airplane crashed into my high school. - Click this link for pictures - .

Mourn the Downed Wildebeest

The move is done and I'm in Roanoke now. To tell the truth, I'm kind of having a rough time of it. I keep telling myself it's going to get better, and I'm sure it really is going to get better, but for the first time in my life I'm honestly homesick. Embarrassingly so. Bordering on huddle-in-a-blanket-and-cry-on-the-floor homesick. Making matters worse, I lost a dear friend on moving day: My piano. If you've ever known me, you've known my funky old piano. My dad bought it at an army surplus auction when I was about 3 years old and brought it home on the back of his big orange work truck. It turns out that before it was auctioned to dad, it had been through the Korean war, the Viet Nam war, then got sold a few different times over the years to a few different military families who each painted it a different hideous shade of brown or green. It was a dismal burnt-caramel brown color when it finally came to live with us. The auction lot number was still written on the front in black magic marker, and took many years to fully scrub off. I was the only kid in my family who ever really learned to play it, plus I spent several long messy days stripping off all those hideous paint layers, so when I finished high school my parents gave the piano to me. It has moved with me 8 times since then. From Eagar to Tucson, then to another apartment in Tucson, a house in Tucson, an apartment in Rochester, a house in Rochester, another apartment in Rochester, and another one after that. At the second Rochester apartment, it lost a wheel in the process of going down 9 steps when I moved in or perhaps while coming back up those 9 steps when I moved out (...my deepest apologies to the inevitable hernias induced in the 3 guys who helped get it back up those stairs). And then it made its final move to Roanoke, where even though the landlord had promised the apartment would be ground floor and the piano would roll right in, there were five steps to climb up to reach the door. There was no way to get it in. I don't know 3 strong guys here. There was no affordable way to put it in storage. So it sat in the moving truck, homeless, for a full day while I thought about how to avoid saying goodbye to it. I didn't win. I decided to donate it to Goodwill. As a final insult to injury, during the drive to Goodwill it suddenly spun around in the otherwise-empty truck and fell down flat on its back on the floor. BOOM. Looking at it like that -- with all of its keys lifted out of place like old yellowed teeth trying to fall out of an old brown mouth, and its lid flown open, and its front panel popped from its hinges, and its legs in the air -- it looked like a dying wildebeest. I found some highway maintenance workers mowing grass on the nearby roadside and asked them to help me stand it back up (...my sincerest apologies yet again, for causing three more hernias, but my sincerest thanks to these three pallbearers). Then I rolled it into Goodwill. They said they're going to auction it off. Maybe at the auction the high bidder will be a hard-working man who'll drive it home on the back of his big orange work truck and let his 3-year-old daughter learn to play it. Maybe. I want to go home.

Reunited and it's understood...

Lots going on here, but not much time to write about it... Medical School Graduation at the Mayo Clinic! Surreal. Thank you to everyone who sent happy thoughts my way. :-)

Jacobs family reunion! It's been over ten years since we've all been together, but my whole family came to Minnesota for graduation! It meant a lot to me to have them here. I love them so much.

Camping trip to a deserted island! Look up the fascinating history of Rock Island, WI, if you have a chance.

Next up: Moving to Virginia tomorrow to start residency. I'm guessing this blog will be out of commission for a little while until I'm settled in there. Wish me luck!

The Bachelorette Cake

This is my friend/classmate Erin. She's getting married in 10 days.

(No, not to this guy, despite his oaken viking allure.)Naturally, we threw her a bachelorette party. (1960's themed because she loves the Beatles) Naturally, there were games at the party. The best one was inspired by cake. You see, as another friend of ours had been planning her own wedding a few years ago, she came across this designer cake. Yes, those are funky gray mushrooms plunked onto an otherwise okay cake. She thought it was the most hideous thing she'd ever laid eyes on. Inspired by the horrid mushroom cake, our bachelorette party game challenge was to make the ugliest wedding cake imaginable with a $5 budget, 45 minutes, a pre-cooked sheetcake, a tub of frosting, and variety pack of food coloring. Our group decided to make a replica of this outstanding Rochester, MN, landmark: The Corn Water Tower

We even smashed real corn into the frosting to give it the authenticity that any true cake masterpiece needs.

After an exciting judging by the party hostess' upstairs neighbor, Guido (an archetypically foreign middle-aged man wearing spandex shorts, a linen shirt unbuttoned halfway down, and a leather newsboy cap), we were declared the winners. Ugly cake prizes for all!

Here's the runner-up entry, complete with a Dollar Store cake topper in which the bride is pregnant:

Spider Man

I came home from the hospital today, went to punch in the front door code for the apartment building, and suddenly encountered this foul beast behind the plastic in the right-hand side of the display:

Can't see the grossness? Let me zoom in.

And zoom again.

Although I have to admire the ingenuity of the little guy -- what with finding a way off the ground, through the wall, behind the box wiring, and into the enclosed display screen, then having the audacity to build a web there -- the fact still remains that he's a fat, repusively beige, loathesome arachnid.

I honestly can't decide whether I'm impressed or grossed out.

Baby shower, and Speed-eating power!

The awesome girlies in my class will take any opportunity to get together. And if we're getting together, there's usually a costume theme. These pics are from Erica's baby shower. Since she's a classy girl from Tennessee the theme was Southern Belle (hence the flowered dresses and froofy garden-party hats). Not everyone had a southern belle outfit, but Erica also likes horses so we expanded the theme to include that (hence the cowgirl costumes). And I didn't have either type of costume, so I went as Taco Bell instead of Southern Belle (hence the packet of mild sauce pinned to my shirt). The coolest part of the shower was that she requested that we write our messages in children's books instead of on cards, so she came away from the baby shower with a great little library of books to read to the baby. It's such a great idea! She liked the cake!

We also played a new twist on the classic baby shower game -- you know, the one in which you taste a mystery baby food and guess the flavor? Except they made it into competitive speed-eating, where one teammate has to feed the other one the mystery baby food as fast as possible.

This is Molly, who mercilessly shoveled plum-apple goop down my throat. That look on my face is a mix of strangulation and competitiveness (it's hard to do Eye of the Tiger when you're choking on baby goop). Meanwhile, the look on Molly's face is pure sadistic joy.

And we clenched the victory!

Cake Fair, Mendelssohn Aire, and the Handy-Dandy Bedside Chair

1. Diaper Cake My classmate's wife is having a baby girl, and what could be more practical than diapers as a baby shower gift? Thank you for teaching me how to to make this diaper cake, Bonnie! 2. Opera Lite My church group went to see Mendelssohn's oratorio, "Elijah," this weekend. An oratorio is basically an opera, but without the costumes or choreography -- during Mendelssohn's time, the Catholic church frowned on gaudy pageantry during Lent, so the theatre houses came up with oratorios as a way to fill the season. I'm not normally into opera, but this one was amazing! They had a 50-piece orchestra, 100-person choir, and the program had every music lyric referenced back to the Bible verse it came from. 3. My new job as a delivery truck driver My friends have started to refer to my car as "The Hot Nazi," because of its German roots. (Maybe this new nickname is bad kharma coming back to bite me for all those times I referred to Katy's Z-car with the red velvet/leather interior as "The Brothel.") Anyway, this week, I was working with Mayo's home hospice department and they asked me if I could take my car to deliver something to one of the hospice patients' houses. After I agreed, I found out that the cargo was an adult bedside commode chair, and the delivery site was a farm way out in the boondocks at the end of a 6-mile dirt road. I'm happy to report that the Hot Nazi did just fine with this glamorous task. Potty delivery mission accomplished!