Another snow day during which we still have power

I've received more alerts of potential power outages in North Carolina than in any other place I've ever lived, even without adjusting for the fact that I've lived here for a relatively shorter time. Despite this, we've only experienced a few brief power outages. The current snow storm has been no exception; I've received approximately three warnings about a possible loss of power, and here we sit, warm and well-lit. Beyond the presumptive closures of almost everything, here's what happens when it snows here:

 Our tiny pine tree was bent with the weight of the snow and ice, but recovered nicely after being brushed off and coaxed upright once again.

 Cyril was gravely displeased with the weather. Here he is being carried in the front yard to find a place to relieve himself. 

Cyril was much relieved (pun intended) that we could move the yard waste bin and reveal a small patch of grass for him. 

 Once we came back inside, he was very willing to let me try on his winter hat in progress. 

The cats' desire to frolic in the out-of-doors has been conspicuously absent this morning and afternoon.

Just another rainy Sunday and a dog video that is only impressive if you knew Walter (Day #4)

Although people closer to the coast are continuing the feel the effects of the wind and rain from Hurricane Florence, those of us only experiencing the effects of Tropical Depression Florence are mostly doing alright. There are some downed tree limbs, and a little bit of standing water, but mostly we are okay. We keep getting texts from the electric company letting us know that they are working hard. We've had power consistently, so are just keeping our fingers crossed that they can get the lights back on for the many people who are still on flashlights/generators/sunlight.

Yesterday morning it wasn't even raining, and we played outside with the dog. For those you who knew Walter, you may recall that his version of fetch involved running about halfway toward the newly thrown ball before losing interest and eating some grass or a stick. He would then run enthusiastically alongside you while you walked to retrieve the ball and amble back toward whatever the starting point was and repeat the whole process. Fetch with Walter was profoundly aerobic exercise for the person throwing and retrieving the ball, but mostly allowed the dog time to bask in the sun and frolic in the grass a bit. Although I knew that there were Boston Terriers who did fetch things, I'd always attributed Walter's unique approach to the game to his breed. I'd laugh and casually think, "Well, he's definitely not a retriever..." Imagine my surprise, then, when it became clear that Cyril was not only enthusiastic about playing fetch, but was actually pretty good at it. Here's a video of him demonstrating his skills yesterday during the break in the rain:

In the background of the video, you can almost see the most substantial of the branches that fell in our yard, wedged into our baby pine tree such that it looks like some sort of graft/hybrid situation.

The cats have actually been weathering the storm surprisingly well, perhaps because there isn't much thunder, just rain. They have both enjoyed actively participating in our indoor fun ranging from the somewhat typical rainy day activity of board games to Lynn's decidedly unusual Saturday activity of building screens for our windows. The pre- and post- photos of the screens are for another day. 

Eli takes his turn at the board game. 

Eli is fairly certain that the scraps of screen were in fact the entire point of the screen-making enterprise. He will not give them back. Don't even try to take them. 

As I'm writing about the rain and all of the time we've been spending indoors, I am reminded that my Bike MS: Waves to Wine ride is actually next weekend. The hurricane has definitely put a little bit of a damper on my training, but I'm still planning to ride. My distance may be slightly diminished, but my enthusiasm and the need for amazing fundraising efforts to get us toward a world free of MS will not be lessened in the least. I'm a little over halfway toward my goal - can you help me get there? 

Life on the edge (Day #2)

Today was another uneventful day on the edge of Hurricane Florence. We have been following the news, and know that more than half a million people are without power in NC, and that they have already had to do some attic and rooftop rescues of people from New Bern, NC, but the Triangle remains relatively unscathed. We've heard a little thunder, felt a little wind, and noted some rain, but it feels more like an end-of-summer storm than a hurricane.

The sky is a bit grayer today, and there's more rain. Cyril is disinclined to go outside to pee, but otherwise we've had minimal ill effects of the storm. 

Weathering the storm...

Missing the hurricane (Day #1)

The path of Hurricane Florence was initially predicted to hit the Triangle region of North Carolina. It has since turned south and then will swing around such that much of the state will get much heavier exposure to the storm than we do. We've got all the requisite preparatory things, courtesy of Lynn, so for now all is well.

So far it's sprinkled lightly and there is a breeze that's gotten a bit stronger as the day has gone on. Doesn't much compare to the 105 mph winds that are happening on the Outer Banks right about now... More updates to come.

Back in the saddle, again

Not so much an homage to Gene Autry as just using a turn of phrase to describe the feeling of September, 2018. I'm one month into my faculty job, and in the past few weeks I have been reminded of several things:

• Transitions are hard. No matter how many new positions I start, or how many spreadsheets I create, starting something new is all at once exciting, wonderful, overwhelming, and terrifying.

• When the going gets tough, the tough get on their bicycles. 

Finding time to ride my bike through all of the transitions of 2017 and 2018 has been really difficult. This meant that reprising my #200in2016 endeavors was all but impossible this year, and it made me a little sad to realize how long it had been since I'd ridden my bike. In fairness, only some of this was the crazy nature of my life, because some of it was just because of crazy nature. It has been so hot and humid here! Excuses aside, I've now set up my commuter bike on the trainer upstairs, so while it doesn't commute much at this point, it does provide a convenient way to exercise without leaving the house. I've also signed up for the 2018 Bike MS: Waves to Wine ride. They offer the option to ride as a "Virtual Rider," so I can train and fund raise as part of Team Menstrual Cycles, and then ride on my own in North Carolina at the same time that my team is riding up the coast of Northern California. I've not yet decided what distance I'll be riding - the Saturday routes in California are either 100, 86, 43, or 22 miles, and the Sunday routes are 63 and 42 miles. So far, I'm up to about 20 miles training, putting really only the 40-ish mile distances in range. Further reports to come.

While I'm training, however, I'd love for all of you to donate to Bike MS! I ride every year in honor of an amazing mentor with MS, with the goal of ultimately reaching a world free of MS. This is my fourth Bike MS ride, so consider donating $40 or $400, and it is the team's tenth ride, so $10, $100, or $1,000 all seem reasonable to me! And if you aren't in a place to donate right now, consider reposting this or passing it along to someone who might be.

I got a new bike-mount for my cell phone and I captured this terrible photo without stopping. I think it might be cool to try to get one from the handlebars each ride, but I already forgot to do it on today's ride... 

This is the moonset in the morning before I catch the bus for work. It's already hot out...

The yard that time forgot

We bought our house in the dead of winter, shortly before a record-breaking stretch of low temperatures and snow in the Triangle. When we moved in, we estimated that the back yard hadn't been raked in several years and the front yard had been relatively untended for almost as long. Apart from my successful stint at succulent husbandry, my track record with plants is not good. My somewhat confessional post about the series of Clyde plants I'd nurtured and killed preceded the demise of what at that point was the current plant by just a few short months. Given this history, when it came to tackling our yard I did what any smart person would do and called my mom. Enthusiastic at the idea of being able to transform our yard into something that would quickly become an important stop on any house and garden tour in Durham, she asked for some photos. Sobered at the images of an overgrown disaster in the front, and a scorched-earth-style sand pit in the back, we discussed how best to proceed. As we made plans to tackle the front on her upcoming trip to Durham, she packaged some hostas and a fern from her yard into a Priority Mail box and they were on their way. I managed not to kill them in the few days between their arrival and hers, and we went to work!

Things we did:

• Removed another trash bag's worth of poison ivy from the front yard
• Trimmed the "grass," or what passes for grass in our front yard that is comprised of plants we've tentatively identified as Virginia creeper, mint, crab grass, a small amount of residual poison ivy, and approximately 1,000,000 as yet unidentified weeds
• Dug out four dead or dying shrubs
• Positively identified, rescued, and trained the fig tree that Lynn attempted to demolish in the fall because she thought it was unsightly
• Mixed in some compost into the dirt in front of the house and planted the hostas
• Planted two ferns in the corner by the fence
• Came up with a clever watering scheme that involved using the water from the dehumidier each night to water the hostas in the front yart, and each morning to water the herbs and ferns in the back yard

The results: 

The fig tree! This is after some pruning and also training the three branches to form a trunk. It's starting to look like a proper tree. You can almost see the baby hostas in a line behind it. 

Through circumstances that are beyond the scope of this blog post, I have recently augmented my cicada knowledge, and can tell you that the insect husk you see here on one of the fig leaves is a scissor-grinder cicada, which is, if not annual, more frequent than the q13 or q17 year cicadas that are frequently referenced. 

This Fresno pepper is the only one we've harvested so far this year. There are some flowers on the plant as of this post, so fingers crossed for more.

I candied two green figs! I wasn't sure whether birds would eat them once they were more ripe, so I decided to go for it. They are pretty mild and mostly just taste like sugar with a faint fig undertone, so I'll be hoping for ripe figs for the next batch. 

Reflections, new directions, and pet photos (!)

Tonight is the residency graduation ceremony at many OB/GYN programs across the country, and marks approximately a year since I finished residency and and we moved across the country. I've struggled a bit to get back into the swing of the blog, in part because we've gone through a tremendous number of transitions this year and I think we've hardly had time to process one before another is upon us. I posted earlier this spring about the evolution of the blog, but it was a bit of a half-hearted attempt that left me feeling even less certain about the direction going forward. Here's a short list of some of this year's transitions that I'm hopeful to share more about in the coming year.

I'm so close to being finished with medical training - That's right, folks, it's really happening. For those you who thought I had been in college for the past 17 years, you should stop lamenting my slow progress and start celebrating the fact that in that time I have earned three (3) degrees, one (1) certificate, three (3) medical licenses, four (4) DEA numbers, including a special one for prescribers of medication assisted treatment for opiate use disorder, two (2) bilingual provider certifications, and eligibility to take my general obstetrics and gynecology board exams this winter. I also have a job. I think it's okay to let you all know at this point that I'll be joining my current division of general obstetrics and gynecology as an assistant professor in August. In the coming year, you can expect more thoughts about medical education, work-life balance, and the challenges of providing health care in the prison system.

The weather here is completely different - And it turns out that biking with seasons is a whole different ballgame. It's one that I had blissfully and intentionally forgotten while living in the Bay Area. Aside from the occasional rainy day, I could count on being able to use whatever portion of my free time I desired to ride a bike. Although the fall and early winter in North Carolina were seemingly designed for cycling, the "spring" and "summer" have been nearly indistinguishable and have involved temperatures and humidity that make me hesitant to leave the house walking, much less cycling. Despite this, I have lots of cycling goals for the year to come, so you can look forward to more NC scenery views from the saddle.

We have an extremely anxious dog - Walter's entire life was chronicled on the blog, and it still makes my throat catch a bit to see his name as a label option for each post. Cyril, too, has struggled with the loss mightily. He had some significant anxiety issues when we adopted him, and they worsened appreciably after the attack. It turns out that veterinary medicine offers some of the clearest evidence that medications for anxiety change lives. Our little dog is a patient at the NC State Behavioral Medicine Clinic and in addition to the equivalent of doggie therapy, he is now on lots of anxiolytics. He is making great progress, and you can anticipate some reflections on the challenges of a totally differently high needs dog from our last one.

Eighty-five years of questionable decisions in our house - The "what were they thinking" posts will not stop. I have a back log of "before" and "in the midst of it" photos to share, including some demolition photos from what we have been calling "the forbidden bathroom" due to it's lack of non-rotted structural support. This week will also mark the start of the first professional work on the house.

Suffice it to say, there is a lot going on right now and so I'll share some photos of the pets relaxing to remind you (and me!) to do the same.

Cyril loves relaxing in a lawn chair. He tends to cycle between the sunny grass, the shady grass or pavement, and the lawn chair as his temperature needs demand. 

Eli is perhaps the most effective pet at reminding me to take a break. Here he is, seemingly saying "Now it is my turn to use the computer."

This is not some high-tech cat bed that we are using now. It is a high tech washing machine that the cat is using as a bed. I may or may not have started placing a folded bath mat in the washer for him to sleep on. In my defense, it needed to be washed anyway...

Summer comes to Durham

Although it seems like only a few weeks ago it was 40F and we were feeling chilly, we've had high temperatures above 90F for the past few days and it doesn't exactly feel like spring. Instead, it feels like we've been catapulted into full-on summer. I know that some of you will say that I'm weak after living in San Francisco for four years, and while that is in general a fair criticism, it has already been  up to 97F this week, and that is hot by pretty much any standard. To make the most of this new warmth (or, to survive in this burning hellscape, as Lynn has been calling it), I've been doing a few things.

Bicycling: Riding in Durham is the full experience of road biking. There are busy urban streets with lots of people and cars, protected multi-use paths for pedestrians and cyclists, and long stretches of rural roads with varying degrees of shoulder for safety. I've enjoyed exploring since we moved, although definitely overestimated my capacity to bike in the heat...

Essentials any bike ride... I highly recommend the goddess garden which has a lovely lavender sent and is extremely gentle. The others are great for the body, but leave my face feeling chemically burned...

I'm too far out from my kindergarten days of encylopedic dinosaur knowledge to determine whether this is a brontosaurus, diplodocus, or apatosaurus. Apparently we've all agreed that all three of these actually exist now, in case you missed the dust-up over whether being a brontosaurus was really a thing...

I've biked portions of the American Tobacco Trail, a rails-to-trails conversion that boasts many miles of beautiful (and relatively flat) cycling, the South Ellerbe Creek Trail, which is most notable for having a large dinosaur statue nestled into the trees next to the trail, and the Stadium Drive Trail, which is actually a glorified sidewalk that is great for safe walking and cycling away from cars for beginning cyclists or children, but is not really ideal for a road bike over about 8 mph.

Enjoying our backyard: "Yard" should really be in quotation marks there, as we don't have much grass at all. That said, "enjoying our backyard morass of sand and gravel" doesn't have the same ring to it. Since getting our fence installed, we've loved letting Cyril run around unencumbered by the stresses of other animals, cars, and similar distractions that are profoundly distressing to our tiny, sweet dog. The things we have taken out of the backyard in order to improve it's function and appearance include:

• One third of a phone pole
• An old fence post which was sunk into concrete but not attached to anything else
• Several dump-runs worth of cement chunks, broken bricks, and large rocks
• Five garbage bags filled with poison ivy

That's right, the ground cover that was flourishing that I may have mentioned to some of you was actually just poison ivy. We suspected that there was some after Lynn got a rash, and it was confirmed when our amazing neighbor who installed the fence informed us that our entire yard consisted of poison plants and that he would recommend treating the entire area with herbicide. We may yet use chemicals to kill the remaining plants, but opted for mechanical removal of most of them. 

The before... You can see the green patch in the back near the fence, and you'll have to trust me that it's ALL poison ivy...

 The offending plant itself. You can appreciate how lush and three-leaved it is. 

Rainboots - check, Tyvek suit - check, garden gloves - check, innate immunity to poison ivy - check. That's right, despite walking around in it unawares in my sandals, I have remained unaffected. I also accidentally brushed some of it onto my face during removal, and emerged unscathed.

Cy enjoying the one small patch of non-poison ivy (notably, it's clover, not grass) in the yard. 

The evolution of the blog

May is the month when "Blogiversary" pops up on my calendar alerts and this year brings us to lucky thirteen. I'm a few days late, but I like to pause for at least one post in May in which I reflect on what brings me back to the blog, and maybe what draws you all. I wish I had access to some of the content trackers and analytic software that the media researchers use to follow trends, because I would love to use data to watch the evolution of the blog, but I don't. Back in 2011, I used a web applet called Wordle to make some cool word clouds from my blog feed. Unfortunately, that website no longer accepts RSS feeds, but I've found a less sophisticated one, TagCrowd, that I think will nonetheless give some interesting insights into the focus of the blog over the years (2005-2018).

Some things to remember as you scroll through:

1. The words are alphabetical, which is not as aesthetic as the Wordle clouds. 
2. The app doesn't recognize words like "San Francisco" or "shave ice" as one word, so you'll see those words pop up separately, which seems out of place. 
3. There isn't one for 2014. There were no posts that years as it was the second half of my intern year and the first half of my second year of residency. This was a low time.
4. Some of the words that show up in the formatting of the posts, like "pm" for the time of day, are among the most common. I tried to exclude some of the most obvious (like "comments"), but got a little lazy as I went on with this. I've selected a threshold of seven appearances, and included a maximum of 100 words in for each year, so take them with a grain of salt. 
5. The filter on this applet for "regularly used words" is not as good. For example, it highlights "really" in many of these clouds. I suppose I should broaden the range of adjectives I use, but it should also use a better filter, really. 
6. Some years there just aren't a lot of posts. The first year (2005) is one of these, which is why it looks like buying eggs was in fact the most significant thing that happened all year. 

Here they are, from stratus, to cumulus, to cirrus, the word clouds of Someday I'll be Dr. Dre...

Return to Step 1: There was/is more stuff on the floors than you could possibly have imagined

Work on the house is, as you might expect, somehow both fast and slow at the same time. Although things are accomplished every day, and we are making plans for some of the huge changes (hello, new roof!), it often feels like parts of it will take forever. Like the floors.

You'll recall that I posted about removing the horrifying flooring early. We pulled up carpet in the whole downstairs, and removed some random paneling and plywood that were on the floors also. This revealed some incredible peel-and-stick tile in the living room, dining room, guest bedroom, and the entire upstairs. Lynn is basically an adhesive removing machine with the heat gun as her bionic hand, but it is slow work! Let this be a lesson to everyone - If you have nice hardwood flooring and don't want to refinish it, put a layer of something that is easily removed, like weird wood paneling or plywood down on the floor before you semi-permanently adhere linoleum to it. You will be happy you did if you later recant your objection to refinishing, and I would argue that if you could refer people to this blog that it would actually increase the resale value of the home. What are a few small nail holes between friends?

NB: If you use giant nails that leave 1/4" holes in the wood, no one will like you. You have to use something small that doesn't require a hammer, a pry bar, and a miracle to get out without leaving a huge chunk missing from the floor. 

This is early days in this project...

The heat gun in action!

After the heat gun, the industrial vat of coconut oil makes an appearance. It does a remarkably good job of un-sticking the last little bits of adhesive and the dog loves it! 

Ultimately the floors are lovely. Unclear whether they are stained different colors in different rooms, but we can work with that. 

Progress in the living room...

Massive progress in the study!

In loving memory

As some of you already know, and most of the rest of you have guessed after reading the title of this post, Walter died on March 25, 2018. He fought valiantly in the hospital, surprising all the staff with his impressive recovery after all of his surgery and his ridiculous demeanor in the most challenging of circumstances. Despite their amazing care, on Sunday morning he suffered a catastrophic neurological event that left him not himself and working hard to breath. We waited through the day, and it became clear that he would not get better. We said goodbye in the evening. He was the best dog we could ever have hoped to have, and we will love him forever.

 

 

 

 

These are just a few of the photos of Walter that have graced the posts of this blog. You can find more here.