Shoe Love

Cute?

PB Towel Love

This is totally random but I wanted to share my love of the Pottery Barn Classic Towel. M and I bought two sets of them off of our wedding registry and I'm prepared to get rid of my other non PB towels to make way for more of these kind sirs.....

Calgon...Take Me Away

So as you know, I'm antsy to take a vacation....it's a combination of being in school without more than a winter break since January 2007, the fact that I feel so locked in to not using any vacation time to conserve as much as possible for the next two semesters and spring fever. I decided to throw caution to the wind, something I rarely do, and book a vacation without considering the ramifcations of taking time off.

So where to go? I know logically I should go home to WI having not gone for the holidays this year. BUT, going to WI doesn't feel like a vacation. It's wonderful to see friends and family, but M and I have really not taken a non work centered vacation except for our honeymoon which was also close to home. So....I feel it's time.

We're currently researching Northern California and Seattle. I think I'm more excited about Northern California, M's looking into Seattle and seems like he might be leaning that way. So far, I've looked at Big Sur, Carmel and Monterey. I think it would be great to rent a car, drive along the coast with it's sweeping cliffs and crashing waves. Also, we would somewhat be in the area of San Francisco although I'm much less interested in leaving one city and trading it for another.

Flight-wise if we went to California, we wold probably have to fly into San Fran or Oakland...I tried for Santa Cruz or San Jose but those are a no go with my frequent flyer ticket. The real downer is that flying into either of those airports will guarantee us a red eye home....

Some pictures to leave you with....

I Gotta Get Outta This Place

I wanted to post this quick before my post about the rest of the long weekend...

Readers of the blog....I'm looking for travel suggestions!

I have a frequent flyer ticket that I must use before July 31st or it will expire. Of course, I could go home to WI but I was thinking of using to go somewhere I wouldn't normally go....any suggestions??

Post a comment if you have somewhere in your neck of the woods that would make for nice sightseeing!

Real Estate Field Trip and Other Assorted Weekend Doings

On Saturday, M and I did a little real estate tour of all of the houses I had been stalking online. We have decided that the town we live in is too expensive for us to be able to buy there, or if we did buy there the house wouldn't be big enough and would need a ton of work. We started branching out and discovered, obviously, that the further away from the city you get, the more affordable things are. And they have the amenities and space we're looking for. And this would come with a long commute so it will be some give and take for sure. We're not ready to actually start looking looking, but we're going to start going to some open houses just to get a sense of what we could actually get for what we're willing to spend. If we stumble on somethign that is a total steal, we would consider it but otherwise, we're going to keep the cheddar accumulating at our almost non existent interest rate hoping to beef up our down payment to reduce mortgage payments. Just to get a sense of the status of things in our neck of the woods, there are two homes in the entire city selling for $349.9k. This is the cheapest price and both homes are 970 ish square feet, 2 beds 1 bath and total total fixer uppers. Some of the cities we looked at further out don't even have listings priced that high, it would be entirely possible to get a 1250+ square foot home with 3 beds and 1-1.5 baths for 260-300k. Now you see how it would be stupid for us not to move from our 'hood.




I also managed to get in a little shopping this weekend...it's always at this time of year where I start to feel really really sick of wearing the same old sweaters and I wander out into the nearest mall hoping that I will suddenly be inspired by some really awesome and novel ideas in the new spring line. No! Either I'm really boring and keep gravitating to the same things or the same things are constantly being touted as 'New for Spring'. I think it's a little of column A and a little of Column B. I ended up with a black V neck on clearance at Tristan, a few camisoles at the Gap to put under said V neck, and some fun lipsticks from Sephora. I already have more lipstick than I know what to do with so I forced myself to throw out some really old ones that are lingering from my days as a CVS pharmacy techinician back in the early 2000's. I also purchased this T shirt from McSweeney's, a web site featuring short stories and other literary submission categorized into a variety of themes. It never lets me down and always leaves me laughing so I try to support them in troubled times!

Early Valentine's Day

M and I tried to avoid the crowds and hence the bad food by celebrating Valentine's Day last night. I have heard numerous times that since everyone and their brother is going to be out on Valentine's Day, restaurants have many more customers to serve than normal and you can expect the quality of your food to suffer, which seems obvious.

We achieved both goals last night....reservations made several weeks ago got us in right away and good food was had by all...er...both.

We went to Harvest in Harvard Square. We've been there before for brunch...it was good but not anywhere near worth what we paid but we thought we'd give it a shot for dinner. Dinner was really good, M's gnocchi was the best I've ever had and our meat was cooked to perfection. My only complaint is that the tables were very very close together.

Here's what I had:

Maine Lobster & Armagnac Soup
King Trumpet Mushrooms & Marcona Almonds

Wolfe’s Neck Farm Center Cut Ribeye
King Trumpets Mushrooms, Haricot Verts, Yukon Gold Potato Risotto & Bordelaise Sauce

Here's what M had:

Taylor Bay Scallops
Meyer Lemon Gnocchi, Celery & Pomegranate

Jamison Farm Lamb
Coffee Roasted Leg & Braised Belly, Cucumber, Eggplant Panisse, Sumac Yogurt & Cocoa Lamb Jus

Clinical Week 3

This week I saw 4 or 5 patients who were in for follow up. They didn't have any major issues so they were the 'easy' patients. I did full physicals on them and wrote their note which I sent to my preceptor for approval. The full physicals in the real world are obviously abbreviations of what we learned in clinical, but there are times when I'll need to pull out some of those techniques depending on what people are presenting with...

Here's the run down for this week:
Shoulder pain
General F/U
RUE cellulitis F/U
Increased lipase, general F/U
F/U URI and prostatitis
F/U for neurological sx
General F/U
? Asthma exacerbation vs bronchitis
eye pain, HA

Brush Up

Here are the words I need to look up for this week's clinical. Some I am acquainted with but need to know more in depth and other's I've got no flipping clue!


pericarditis

friable cervix

Charcot neuroarthropathy

pantalar fusion with nailing

Scheurmanns kyphosis

arthodesis

strabismus

Knitting Nirvana

S and I made the trek to Northampton today to visit the illustrious and larger than life Webs. If you live anywhere in the vicinity....and I encourage you to expand your definition of vicinity for this place, trust me it's worth it....you've got to get here.

The store itself is the largest yarn store I've ever been to and then the whole warehouse is open for customers perusal of their backstock in addition to discounted yarns which are offered at a deep discount. Most knitters are already in the know about this place, but if you're one of those unfortunate knitters who have not yet discovered them, you can thank me later.

In addition to having a huge selection and fantastic customer service, they also offer 20-25% discounts off of most yarn purchases once you hit $60 which is not hard to do with quality yarn. Another great thing about them is that the shipping rate is actually whatever the post office charges them instead of being a huge inflated fee as many other online stores do. They will estimate the cost for you and then if it's less, you are charged less. I love these people!

Here's the breakdown of my purchases:
Valley Yarns Berkshire Bulky in Oatmeal for Mom's blanket
RYC Luxury Cotton DK in Cabbage for something random for me which I have yet to figure out. This was totally an impulse buy from the warehouse section.
Berroco Comfort for a coworkers baby blanket.

I got ahead of myself, I meant to tell you this in an orderly fashion but I got too excited about Webs. Once we had arrived in Northampton, S and I had lunch at Haymarket. It's a bookstore and a cafe, although I must confess, I didn't really notice the books. I would call it more of a cafe than a bookstore. One caveat, they only serve vegetarian food...just a little FYI. The atmostphere was really cozy and nice and fairly busy, as in stake out a table and do not leave it's side as we made the misake of doing.

On our way home, we stopped at Rao's for some coffee for M. They are lucky the coffee is so good becuase the guy that waited on me, as I was dropping $30 at the coffee shop, was a total tool. Typical guy working in a coffee shop in a college town....silently judging you as you order. He was downright gruff and short with me, I felt I should have apologized for being there. Like I said, luckily the coffee is so great and luckier for us, we can get it locally.

Clinical Week 2

I survived week 2 of clinical. This week we saw about half of the patients that we did for week 1. We dared to look ahead for week 3 and there are currently 13 patients scheduled, booked every 30 minutes beginning at 9am going straight through till after 3pm.

Here's this week's lineup:
Right tibial wound infection
General follow up (I did the complete physical and wrote the note!)
General follow up, sciatic pain
Right knee pain, neck pain, wart
Left hip infection, abx taper

Fartlek

I really enjoy that word! It's Swedish or Norwegian for interval training and I've recently embraced it as a way to make my hour of cardio breeze by. Today's interval included:

5 minutes of running at 5.0 mph at level 1 incline followed a 2 minute period of walking at 3.5 mph at a level 6 incline.

I went to the gym both yesterday and today, but yesterday was rushed because I had a ton of things to do before I had to start the lasagna and I got a crappy treadmill...the kind you are supposed to do if you have bad knees, it has more give but it's much harder!!

I really enjoyed my work out today, now since I'm not able to go to the gym after work during the week, it's a treat to go and decompress on the weekends.

February Meat Pick Up

This month's bounty includes:

A few pounds of ground beef
Chicken legs
Leg of Lamb
3 Garlic and Cheese Sausages
Maple Cured Ham Steak
2 Portherhouse Steaks