Shouzer

I’m not sure how many of you folks have heard, but Stephen Colbert announced he’s running for president (…in South Carolina, heh). According to Jordy, he plans to run as both a democrat and republican, which makes it just that much better.

I happened to be flipping through the channels the other day, and I caught O’Reilly talking about it. He had some “behavior analyst” person or something on, too. It was hilarious. The conclusion good ‘ol Bill came to was that Colbert is “just trying to be hip.” Oh thanks, Billy. I guess that’s your attempt to belittle him, eh? He must be doing something right…

I will never understand the propensity for professors to schedule an exam immediately following mitderms.  Now I know I’m on quarters and it’s compressed, but come on!  We just finished studying our asses off and there’s no time for a break. 

I guess I really shouldn’t be complaining.  I did afterall choose to go to grad school.  But still, when your study guide for a midterm is >150 pages, and you just had the test on Thursday, there is no need to have another exam the following Friday.

So, yes, I’m still alive and I still visit Shouzer and try to stay current on everyone’s happenings. Unfortunately school hasn’t been allowing me the time to post much. Luckily though I can actually take a bit to fix that.

I just finished my midterms this past Friday. That was the first thing, being in the sixth week of a 10-week quarter this fast was a wake up call in terms of time management and study habits. Having spent my whole life in semesters, this was a huge adjustment. Second, working has been kicking my ass and not in the fun way of long days in a busy ER with multiple traumas. Don’t worry Harlow, no more gruesome stories from me anymore.

I traded in fun in the ER for fun running a simulation lab for medical students and residents in the anesthesia program at Rush. It isn’t what I wanted to do–I really did want to work in an ER up here–but I had to take what I could get. I have learned more about anesthesia though by working in their simulation lab, and it has presented me with some great networking opportunities so I suppose it isn’t all that bad, right?

A few weeks ago I had a run in with the vacuum cleaner in the dark hallway of my apartment. It resulted in a fracture and dislocation. Thankfully, Al came over the next day and reduced my toe. I would have done it myself, but hey, it hurt like a bitch to touch so there was no way I could make myself do it. Al did great, and I have the satisfaction of knowing I was his first live patient he treated all on his own. Great job, Dr. Abalos! It’s healing well, by the way.

In some exciting non school/work news, I did do something entertaining last night. Scott and I went to see Kathy Griffin live at The Chicago Theatre. Her stand up was awesome! I don’t know if any of you watch her show on Bravo Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List, but I highly recommend it.

Kathy has been in the news a bit recently for her “controversial” Emmy acceptance speech. I think her speech is great and dead-on. Here’s a clip of it and her subsequent interview on Larry King, in which she goes on to explain the meaning of her speech…but that meaning apparently fell on deaf ears to some.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbziBwi489Q

As I said, her routine was excellent. I think anyone that can make a crowd laugh as much as she did last night for 1.5 hours straight through deserves major props. In my mind she isn’t on the D-List (and hasn’t been for some time, I might add). She has great sass and a rapid-fire wit and knows how to use it.

Hope everyone is doing well.  I’m outta here!

Kyle was explaning to me yesterday that oftentimes cable companies will broadcast a number of channels in HD for free. Typically this means all the major networks like ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox. As it happens, that’s the case for me with Comcast, and I didn’t even know it. I’ve had my TV for a month now, and I hadn’t watched any HD TV yet.

But late is better than never, I suppose. Right now as I type this, I’m watching the Broncos on Sunday Night Football in glorious HD. It’s really a huge difference compared to standard definition.

Now I just need the Broncos to get their heads out of their asses and finish this game out. So far it looks like they’re trying their best to lose. Two losses in a row is never a good thing, much less four.

[Edit:] I’ve had a number of people point out that I accidentally wrote about PuzzzleCrack 2008 in this post as opposed to 2007. Feel free to mock my stupidity.

I’ve been rather silent lately, and I attribute that primarily to the fact that I’ve been legitimately busy for quite a while.  The one highlight from all this, though, was a successful running of PuzzleCrack 2008.

As you might recall, our team won last year, and so we took it over this year.  It ended up going very well, but it was extremely grueling.  Before the week started, I thought were were pretty much ready to go.  Boy, was I wrong.

We ended up staying up into the morning every day working on the next day’s puzzle.  I don’t know how much sleep we averaged, but it couldn’t have been much–I know we were all tired all day every day.  I still haven’t really “caught up” on my sleep yet, either, as I’ve been staying up late most of my nights back here working…

I got back from a one week vacation to Vietnam last night. I find the whole concept of me taking a vacation at this point in my life quite ironic as I consider my foray to Bangkok to be a one year holiday. And why would anyone need a break from their holiday? That just makes no sense.

What is even weirder is coming back to Bangkok at the end of the one week vacation. It was one of those semi-exhausting traveling vacations where I saw loads of stuff at the expense of basic human comforts like sleep. This is the type of vacation where I would normally come back home and collapse into the warmth of my home’s embrace. I wanted to do that when I got back to my apartment in Bangkok last night, but I laid there pondering the feeling at the same time. I in no way consider Bangkok to be my home, and yet here I was relieved to be back in my faux-home’s warm embrace. After that realization, it felt more like a pat on the shoulder.

I had a great time in Vietnam though. To say that it is beautiful would be an understatement. I saw magnificent limestone mountain peaks jutting up out of the ocean at Halong Bay, terraced rice patties carved into the sides of rolling hills in Sapa, and more limestone peaks lining a stream at Perfume Pagoda. Normally, I’d have a rolling narrative of my splendid adventures, but I’m tired of writing those. I’d also normally have some pictures as well, but a pickpocket stole my camera in Hanoi. I’m not upset about it though, these things happen.

Evidently, Duke professors have figured out what the appendix is for.

Ten minutes ago I came to the conclusion that I seem to have mixed up the order of days in the week. I’m almost 100% certain that yesterday was Friday, and to the best of my knowledge, every Friday night that I’ve ever fallen asleep in life I have awoken to Saturday, be it morning or one late afternoon (ie. “You guys are my friends!”) Well today is not Saturday. It just can’t be. You see, I was looking forward to watching some college football in HD, because this is the first weekend since I’ve had my new Philips 32″ LCD with an ATSC/QAM tuner that receives the four major networks’ hi-definition parallels. So I flipped over to my TiVo guide to check out who was playing the 11:00AM games that I have been with me in the central standard time zone for as long as I can remember. No games. What? No games. Noon? No. One? No. Wouldn’t you, too, start questioning the sun and moon at this point?

So I will be left with ESPN and The Deuce (not in HD. Fsk!) for my football until 2:30, when ABC and CBS decide that their viewing audience will have had enough of cartoons and infomercials. Or maybe the weekend bypassed me this week (it is my first weekend as a 23 yo), and this is actually Monday. That’d be alright because then I would get to see MNF on NBC – d’oh! – ESPN bought that. Can we just skip to Tuesday?

That’s right, I’ve got more pictures for you. The first set is an update of my ever-expanding Bangkok folder. Enjoy:
Bangkok

I think the new ones are towards the end, but not quite the very last ones. The last pictures in that folder came off a different camera, and the pictures are sorted by name. I’ve tried to change it, but I’ve never been successful. Basically, I just don’t care enough to do anything about it.

I recently made all of my travel pictures public here. However, I took some shots of my kids today that won’t show up there. It seems somewhat wrong to put those on the internet for all to see, like an invasion of privacy or something. Anyway, if anyone wants to see them, I will email you the link to the private album, assuming you aren’t a known child pornographer or something, then you can’t have them.