Too tired to boast... almost...

It's already been a week since my last ride, which is hard to believe. and I'm just getting to this post. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to everyone who donated over $2000 to two great causes, the residents and fellow who helped me to arrange my call schedules so that I wasn't working either Saturday, and to the lovely Lynn, who spent an immense amount of time helping me to get to and from the start- and finish-lines. 

On Friday, September 9 I drove directly from work to Carmel. Early Saturday morning, my cousins and I headed to the starting line for the Best Buddies International Hearst Castle Challenge. I was so nervous that I wouldn't be able to keep up! I held my own for about 65 or 70 miles, thanks mostly to their willingness to let me draft behind them, and then rode with a slighly slower crowd for the next 15 miles. We met up at the last rest stop, and they slowed a bit and I pushed myself, and we all rode in together at Hearst Castle. It was a fantastic ride! I had to work the next day, so I got on the early bus back 100 miles north back to Carmel. I picked up the car, and drove to San Jose, where I met up with Lynn so that she could drive home. I slept most of the way...

I then worked on Sunday, and started my new rotation on Monday. I worked all through the next weekend, only biking as a commuter. On September 24, early in the morning, Lynn dropped me off at Cow Palace for the starting line for BikeMS: Waves to Wine. I rode most of the ride with various Team Menstrual Cycles riders, most of whom were doing some portion of the 82-mile route. I turned off on my own for the inland loop that distinguished the 100-mile route, and found the Marshall Wall to be a scorching, miserable climb that I do not plan to repeat. I was much, much slower without the benefit of my very fast family (7:50 moving time instead of 6:43 moving time), but I still had a great time. I slept on the way home that day, too. 

#200in2016 complete!

Also, thank you to Strava for diligently recording my rides, and to my Nexus 6P which has a decent battery life that allows me to record my rides

My cousin Chris and I in the fog that engulfed almost the entirety of the Best Buddies Ride

A cute lizard that joined me at the Hearst Castle Ranch

Another Menstrual Cyclist tackling Waves to Wine

(Don't worry, I'm stopped and standing on the ground while I take this photo.)

Looking sunny in the official Team Menstrual Cycles jersey

The view from part of the hot, desolate segment of the 100-mile route on the Waves to Wine ride

How far I have come?

As I prepare to move across the country, I’ve been doing some sorting at my mom’s house (read: mostly throwing away things that probably should have been thrown away a long time ago). When I moved out for college, she let me keep a bunch of things there and, although some of it has been culled over the years, there are still some piles. I’m making my way through them, keeping the photos but trashing things that have neither real sentimental value to me nor resale value for others. In my most recent visit, I came upon this:

Lest you feel puzzled, let me clarify. It is a reconstructed mouse skeleton from an owl pellet, posed with a Polly Pocket doll in its mouth climbing the Eiffel Tower, or at least a King-Kong-like-scale replica of that notable monument. I made this in ninth grade biology, learning about skeletal anatomy for the first time. I have only Mr. Bassier, my high school science teacher, to thank encouraging us to not only reconstruct the skeletons, but also pose them creatively. There may have also been a contribution from my already-slightly-off sense of science humor...

Melon Salad

Lynn and I went to Isalita for the first time right before she left. It was amazing, and I can’t wait to go back. We had a wonderful server, and the food was absolutely fantastic. One of the many delicious things I ate there was a melon salad that I tried to reproduce at home, with some moderate success.

Melon Salad   

Cantaloupe (the restaurant used a mix, but I didn’t have that)
Lime juice
Sunflower seeds (would have been better with the pepitas they used)
Cayenne pepper
Salt

Cut up as much cantaloupe (or other melons) as you like. I made one serving at a time to avoid spoilage. Sprinkle the sunflower seeds or pepitas, drizzle the lime juice, and dust the cayenne over it. Sprinkle it with a little salt and enjoy.

On the theme of orange foods, my brother felt that I should have something "aged" for my birthday this year (thanks a bunch, Jake). My gift included some delicious cheeses. Yum!

Amazing voicemails…

For the past several years, every time I’ve listened to my voicemail I’ve also resaved several messages that I just couldn’t bear to delete. Several of them feature one of my best friends singing customized songs for and about me. Many of them feature my hilarious mother. And none of them should ever disappear. When I got a new phone in the fall, I was initially worried that I would lose my precious voicemails. Once I realized that they were tied to my phone number, and not my phone, however, I could rest assured that they were safe. At least for now. I would occasionally worry that I’d push the wrong button and then hang up, losing my message forever, and wonder why there wasn’t a way to transfer these gems to a more permanent home. Apparently Google Voice offers better ways to manage your voicemails, but regular old cell service does not offer a particularly smooth or easy way to transfer voicemails to mp3 files or some format that another program can read. I finally found this page, which explains how to record your voicemails with reasonably high quality into mp3 or other audio format files, and did it this morning.

For your listening pleasure, I present this little treasure, recorded immediately following my mom's dissertation defense in 2010...

Chocolates, again!

Now that all of them have been shipped out, I wanted to share another fun holiday recipe. Last year, motivated by something I’d heard on The Splendid Table, I decided to make chocolate bark for some friends and family. This year I did it again. The recipe is included in last year’s post, and on the Splendid Table website. Last year’s flavors: Mexican hot chocolate, candy cane, fleur de sel, and gingerbread. This year I repeated the candy cane, gingerbread, and fleur de sel, but added cinnamon and ginger brown sugar flavors. They were all pretty delicious.

Enjoy!

The chocolate comes in giant bricks...

Then it is transformed into giant sheets!

 I stored each of the different kinds in a bag in the refrigerator.

And then I packaged them in little baggies in little boxes. 

 Martha Stewart, you have my number...

 

Thanksgiving

This year, Thanksgiving was not only a time to reflect on how wonderful it is to spend time with my friends and family, but also a respite from the ridiculous interview season that has consumed most of October, November, and December. I had almost a full week at home over the holiday, and I made the most of it. This was the most delicious part of that week:

 To accommodate everyone, there are little sugar free and gluten-free versions of the pumpkin pie baking on the bottom rack. 

Yum!

Peach Cranberry Pie
adapted liberally from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything

Two batches of pie crust
16 oz frozen peaches, thawed and drained
6-8 oz frozen cranberries, thawed, drained, and sliced lengthwise
3/4 cup sugar
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch
Little bit of milk

Preheat the oven to 425F. Prebake the bottom crust (using a little more than half of your crust dough) for about 10 minutes with foil and pie weights (or dried beans, which is what I use) over it, and for another five minutes with the foil removed, or until it is very slightly brown. While this cools, mix the lemon juice with the peaches and cranberries. Increase the heat of the oven to 450F. Mix together the dry ingredients for the filling and toss the peaches and cranberries with this as well. Roll out the remaining pie dough, and cut it into strips a little less than an inch wide. Once the bottom crust is cool, pile the fruit filling into it. Lay four-five strips of crust across the top of the pie, and attach them to the bottom crust on one side. Starting at one side and working across the pie, weave the perpendicular strips across the pie, over and under the other strips. When it is all woven, press the edges of the strips into the bottom crust. It should look roughly like this when you’re done.

Brush the top crust with a little milk and sugar, and bake for 10 minutes at 450F. Reduce the heat to 350F and back for another 40-50 minutes, until the pie is golden. Let cool and serve warm or at room temperature.

In addition to eating, we also went to the parade, joined by Ash’s mom Cindy. The weather behaved so well that it was an ideal first parade year for her!

The Detroit Mounted Police

The clown fire brigade

Grover visits Detroit

Dear Anonymous

Dear Anonymous commenter,

I’m not sure how many people read the comments on my blog, but those who do have surely noticed a large volume of comments from you, “Anonymous.” I have reason to suspect that you are only a single person, Anonymous, because the tone of your comments is always the same. You do choose interesting moments at which to comment, however, and you are always entertaining. Here are some of the things I have learned about you by reading your comments:

1. You, like everyone else who reads the blog, love Walter. You love him so much that his the primary focus of your comments.
2. You enjoy capitalization of words for EMPHASIS, and wild punctuation!!!! I suspect that you talk like this too.
3. You may be a crazy, dog-loving comparison shopper, given that when I posted about a dog bed, you posted a similar but less expensive one in the comments very, very quickly.
4. You care a lot about my emotional well-being, but somehow not enough to use your name in your posts and reassure me that I don’t have some creepy anonymous follower who may or may not try to steal the dog in my sleep.

I hope that you continue to enjoy the blog, because I continue to enjoy imagining a nameless follower I’ve never met who occasionally frets over my anxiety level, but also needs a regular fix of the puppy photos and has lots of OPINIONS!!!! You leave the oddest anonymous comments I have every seen. Please keep posting.

Sincerely,

Your daughter

PS. That's right, mom, silly letters aside, I know it's you.

PPS. Please don’t bother to start using your actual Google profile to post comments, as the anonymous ones are hilarious.

PPPS. Just for you...

When Walter gets sleepy, he can't keep his tongue in his mouth or ensure that his eyes point in the same direction. So cute!

And the winner is…

Thank you to everyone who took the time to offer me your opinion about which bike ride I should do for my century ride this summer. To refresh, the options were all 100 mile rides in Michigan, on in Ann Arbor, one outside Grand Rapids, and one outside Kalamazoo. Here are the results:

All of you were on board with riding somewhere other than Ann Arbor. Rationale for this included statements like “go see something new” and “you know [Ann Arbor] all too well.” The one vote for the Kalamazoo ride was based on one lovely friend’s happy experience on the west side of the state and her love of the scenery there. The rest of you were wooed by the covered bridges. You made comments like “Bridges! I mean, seriously” and “the scenery will be the best on this one” and overall emphasized the loveliness of the bridges and of that part of the state. One person suggested that covered bridges were “so Iowa,” but did not leave a name for me to follow-up about this assertion. And then there was my mom. She left a treatise on the various tourist attractions around Grand Rapids, including a knit shop she likes nearby and an exhibit at the Gerald R. Ford Museum she thought was worth checking out. I love you mom.

Aside from these useful comments, I also learned that it is a good idea to use a free text box that asks “who are you?” because while some of you put your names, others of you use descriptive phrases that include childhood nicknames, obscure and anonymous comments about how well I knew/know you, or read entertainingly to the point (i.e., “your mother”) and a full quarter of you used smiley faces in your identification response. This made me happy. Thanks!

I make no commitment to the Covered Bridges ride just yet, but I’m leaning strongly in that direction.

Status/post week one

From Dose of Reality:

I started writing this post last week, but couldn’t find the time to finish it until today… I’m finding inpatient to be much more challenging in terms of finding time for everything. The math:

24 hours in a day

- 10-12 hours in the hospital

- 7 hours of sleeping

5-7 hours in which to do everything else

Since “everything else” includes taking care of the dog, eating, bathing, and walking to and from the hospital, there are really only a few short hours in which to fit in studying, exercising, cooking, and maintaining any kind of social life. Given my limited time, I think I may be sticking with the list format blog posts for a while… Lessons learned:

• It can be difficult not to cry on rounds. This is not, as you might have initially imagined, because it is embarrassing not to know the answers to questions posed to you about your patients. Although that is difficult, I got over it pretty quickly when I realized I knew almost nothing. Instead, sometimes on rounds you have to see parents describing how worried they have been about their children’s health. Watching a parent cry during rounds was one of the hardest things I’ve done this year. I’d never met the patient before, and I knew it would have been inappropriate for me to start bawling, but I still had to work pretty hard not to let the tears slip out.


• Scheduling social events for your days off is important. As much as it seems like a great idea to spend the entire day and night catching up on reading and practice questions (which does, in fact, always sound like a great idea), having a really inflexible schedule can be isolating and lonely.


• Mom makes awesome quiche that is delicious when reheated in the hospital. Enough said. Thanks mom!


• Subscribing to a CSA (community supported agriculture) was a great idea. I can count on having produce at home even when I’m too busy to make it to the store. I’ve been making a lot of salad dressings to keep things interesting.


• I have learned the phrase “status/post”, and I like it. It means “after” something has been intervened on, as in, after the play-doh I put in my sister’s nose when we were little was removed, she was “a 3 year-old girl with play-doh in her nose, status/post removal.”

Apologies for the randomness of these insights (?), but I’m starting on nights in a few short hours and have some stuff to finish up before then!

Brain recovery…

Apparently my last post sounded despondent enough to concern my mother, so here I present to you the post of reassurance. In addition to freaking out a bit about returning to the hospital, I have been doing the following to recover from the stress of defense preparation:

1. Taking gratuitous pictures of the dog. Enough said…

2. Reading books that could in no way be construed as upsetting or stressful. I just finished reading Knit The Season by Kate Jacobs, the third book in the Friday Night Knitting Club series. It was great. The writing was perfectly acceptable, the plot was entertaining, and enjoying it took approximately no effort on my part.

3. Making new brains!

We have a long tradition of making chocolates for big events (graduations, weddings, green card approvals, etc) in our family, and even though I’m not actually getting the PhD for another few years, mom suggested that we make chocolates for my defense (with the promise of more chocolates when I actually graduate). After perusing Amazon’s dazzling array of chocolate molds, I found the brains. They proved to be somewhat larger than expected (the story of my family, I suppose…), but look pretty awesome.

Oh the holidays…

I’m back from a few days with my family and am feeling ready to get back to work. I ate a great deal at both Thanksgivings, spent some lovely quality time with everyone who was in town, and then spent the weekend relaxing at home on my own. Walter helped with laundry today:

I also got to hear the preliminary version of Ruti’s prospectus defense presentation this afternoon, which was lovely. I know she will be so glad when this is over, and I’m excited for the celebration this is to follow. I will be sending Ruti happy vibes all day tomorrow (and particularly around 2pm), and you all should too! Good luck Ruti – you will be awesome!

(Through) Chicago

I returned today from a family wedding outside of Chicago.  Although I’m feeling a little bit behind, I got to see my grandma for the first time in way too long (years…  really…) and had a really nice time with my family.  We went to the botanical gardens near my aunt’s house in the morning, and then headed over to the wedding. 

It was yet another lovely ceremony.  It really makes me happy to see yet another wedding that is so well suited to the couple getting married.  Everything from the welcome dinner to dessert at the reception seemed to fit Kristina and Evan to a tee, and I think everyone else had a great time too!  Congratulations to the newlyweds!

On the way home, we stopped for lunch at an unlikely but incredible Thai restaurant.  It’s called Ban Thai and the proprietor (Jimmy) is one of the friendliest people I’ve run into in a long time.  He introduced himself by name when we came in, and shared with us the history of the restaurant as he brought us our menus.  In addition to the food being delicious (and the lunch specials fantastic), the decor was just lovely.  It’s located on Niles Rd. just off of I-94 in St. Joseph, MI, so if you’re traveling between anywhere east of Ban Thai and Chicago, I’d highly recommend making the stop!

Happy Mother’s Day!

In an homage to mother’s day cards of yesteryear, I offer this message:

Dear mom,

Thanks for being the best mom I ever had.

Love,

Andrea K. K. (in case you weren’t sure which one I was)