What Medical School Looks Like II

Sometimes, at 9:30 pm, medical school looks like this. Dear Husband tells me there was a sound track that went with this image, but blogspot doesn't support wav or midi files, which is really too bad, isn't it? I mean, isn't that just too bad?

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Birthday Season

It's birthday season in the Double-Doctor house! Today Dear Husband's brother called to wish him a belated birthday and me a happy birthday. DH says he'll call back tomorrow, just in time to wish his brother "Feliz cumpleanos" himself. Meanwhile, my younger brother's natal day is at the end of the month. Gotta love July.

To celebrate, we carpooled with some friends to an "authentic" German restaurant, complete with stuffed hunting trophies on the walls and waitresses in dirndls. We enjoyed goulasch, sausages, schnitzels, asparagus, Spätzle, and potatoes every which way. And of course some Wein und Bier. A big favorite at the table was the Mettwurst, a paprika-spiced spreadable sausage. On top of all that, there was live accordion music, and when another couple needed a lesson on how to polka, DH and I got up and showed them how it's done!



Below is our birthday loot. So many sweet or funny cards. In the background are the cloth napkins my mother gifted us, "so [we] can be green together." She also got me the tshirt from Girl Scouts' "Ban Bossy" campaign. Whatever critiques I might make about Sheryl Sandberg's individual solutions to structural problems facing women, the campaign hits home for me, because I was labelled "bossy" while growing up. Some of that is attributable to being a know-it-all older sister, but some was surely also due to gendered perceptions of leadership. I am glad that Girl Scouts was there to help me grow into a confident and more thoughtful woman.

I asked DH to buy me the book, Beyond Bratwurst: A History of Food in Germany. When he teased me about having yet another book to read for my dissertation, I retorted that it's for my book. "Oh, well that's good," he replied, "because it's too late to read anything else for your dissertation!" Today I learned that "I" had bought him new organ shoes. Happy birthday to us!

What Happens If You Push Her Buttons?

Fourth in the FrauDoktorDoctor line of action figures, the Medical Student comes in a short white jacket with her name embroidered on the left and four external and two internal pockets to hold all her supplies. She wears "sensible" shoes with orthotics to support her arches during the long days rounding in the hospital. (Good thing she received money for her graduation, because these were $$$.) Miniature stethoscope available in hunter green or burgundy red.

If you push the button on her back, she repeats several phrases: "Hi, I'm the medical student." "Vancomycin?" "I'm sooo tired." and "I don't know, but I will look it up!"








This figurine comes with two sets of accessories:

The Medical Student Survival Pak includes a variety of "pocket snacks" and toiletries, including ear plugs for studying (...yeah that's it, studying...) at the hospital; a Maxwell's Guide; and the latest History and Physical Exam reference book.

The Medical Student Deluxe Pak contains name tags for each hospital she rotates through; a reflex hammer; a neurological exam kit; two tuning forks (128 and 256 Hz); and a pager programmed with the loudest, most annoying beep known to humankind.

Folding whitecoat clipboard with stickers on the outside with useful information like normal lab values and how to read an EKG sold separately.

***Now get a set of matching scrubs for just $19.95! Sale ends September 1.***

You may also like our other student action figures: Biker Graduate Student, Card-Carrying Union Member, The Dissertator, and Conference Goer.

How Does Your Garden Grow? 2 of 3

For the previous post about our garden, click here. For the later post, click here.

I am the proud owner of several pieces of yard art, most of which were gifts. For instance, I asked Dear Husband to buy me this little hummingbird as an early Valentine's Day present when we visited the Indianapolis Museum Art in January. I'm a sucker for glass art, and it was a nice reminder of the spring to come. My parents found me the metal spinning butterfly (below left), which for years floated over our sideboard in the dining room, before I finally bought some garden stakes and installed it over the back bed of short hostas. I purchased this lovely Merlady (below right) from a local art gallery's going-out-of-business sale just last month. I love its collage style. I imagine her splashed over green waves of hosta leaves.

Here we have before and after photographs from our deck. The bed has been full of lilies and hostas since the first round of gardening in 2009. I installed the blue rain barrel several years ago with the help of a friend from church. The bronze windcatcher was a gift from my aunt and uncle outside Dallas, and my mother gave me the plant stand for my spider plants. You can see the deck got stained once; it's our next project for the summer. Maybe you can see the swing in the background? After we moved in, I got rid of the old bland cushions and got some red ones with fern leaves; they were tucked back into the shed before I took this photo. We also acquired a glass-topped table and some chairs on a Memorial-Day sale a few years back; we like to have dinner out here when the weather is nice. I always tell Dear Husband that it somehow seems so "civilized" to eat in the middle of so much nature.

Not shown: the two pink flamingos I bought at the grocery store right after we bought the house, as a sort of joining-the-homeowners-club gift to myself. I thought they were rather classy, being made out of wood rather than plastic, but they didn't stand up to the Midwest winters very well and have long since been dispatched to the great Key West in the sky, where it never snows.

How Does Your Garden Grow? 1 of 3

Here's a photo essay about the gardens in our backyard. When we bought our house back in 2008, the beds consisted of rocks, weeds, plastic sheeting, and some dead bush stumps. The next summer, we pulled everything up and traded the rocks for some hosta plants from friends from church. Another one gave us some lilies, and I bought some ground cover plants. There was just onnnne bed in the corner we never got around to, so after doing absolutely no gardening last summer while I prepared to pre-defend my dissertation, I vowed that this was the summer I would clear out that bed and transplant some of the large leafy hostas that had proliferated so amazingly.

That was then, this is now.

Here is the lilac bush I put in behind the (freshly painted) garage. It may be next summer before I find the strength and time to clear out the weeds in these beds--just in time to put the house on the market to sell when we move to my residency.

For the second installment, click here. For the third installment, click here.

(Mis)Happy Fourth of July

One of the few things that went just right was dessert:
real vanilla ice cream with peaches, blueberries, and
raspberries from the farmers market. After dinner I'd
packed everything in tupperware, in my lunchbox, in the
freezer, so it was barely melted by the time we ate it.

Our Fourth of July consisted of a series of minor mishaps that didn't manage to spoil our enjoyment. It all started with a hefty package of ribs I had bought at the farmers market. I sent DH out to light the coals while I worked on the fixings inside (Thai rice noodles and raw veggies). Our timing would have been great, but the coals didn't "take" the first time. A scrap of paper, half a dozen matches, a little more lighter fluid, and several minutes later we finally had a fire. Maybe too much fire. Half an hour or so later, the ribs turned out fine, slathered in a mixture of plum sauce, hoisin sauce, sesame seed oil, and soy sauce. (Same great sauce as last time, but the ribs were actually cooked through this time!)

We cleaned up and then listened to A Capitol Fourth on our local public radio station while working on our respective computers. Finally it was time to hop on our bicycles and head into town to watch the fireworks. With 45 minutes to go, the traffic wasn't too bad, but as we got closer, I noticed many people camping out in a nearby park, and even in parking lots along the main artery. We pulled over to discuss the relative de/merits of being in front of the bandstand (music) or farther back (more light pollution but easier to get out afterwards). With 30 minutes to go, traffic had increased considerably, I decided we shouldn't chance the major 4-way intersection in the dark on our bikes, so we turned south and ended up in a field behind the Hooters and the Steak N Shake. This turned out to be due west of the launch site, which would have been great, if we hadn't managed to plant ourselves directly behind a light pole. Go figure.

DH said he'd had enough of peppy popular patriotic tunes already, but he lent me his phone to try to download the radio app so we could listen to the local broadcast anyway. I had even brought my earbuds so we could both listen without disturbing the people sitting around us. It would have been great, but his phone wouldn't connect to the internet and/or download the Apple-affiliated program. So we just curled up on our blanket and watched the show. The whole half hour we only talked once about whether the money could be better spent on our struggling local public libraries. I was proud of our restraint.

Afterwards, we ditched the main thoroughfares and biked home by side roads with a number of other folks. That would have been great, if DH's headlight hadn't died and the residential roads around here had streetlamps. Between the two of us we had enough wattage to arrive safely home sweet home. It was a (mis)happy Fourth of July. We hope yours was at least as enjoyable!