But someone gave us a rainbow.

After I wrote that post, after I killed the whole day, Serena called, and I went outside for the first time, since the rain had stopped, and I walked along Magazine Street, and there was this rainbow.

"What do you want to wish?" I asked Serena, who's hit the residency wall, two intern years later (combo program).

"I wish no one codes during my next seven nights on."

And I raised my mug to the sky, and toasted, and wished on behalf of my friend on another coast, whose weather is always dry and sunny and relatively insect-free.

"But G," she said, "What do you want to wish?"

"I wish I could lose five pounds?" I ventured.  "Because EMS, man...  But that seems like a shitty wish somehow...  Um, I wish I could not be a shitty doctor?"

And I kept walking down Magazine, and it took me all the way until the turn-about, until I was coming back in the shadows along the park and Serena had hung up and I was alone, spilling cold coffee over my hand, but: A rainbow.  Five years after the flood, a rainbow.

So here, New Orleans.  This wish is for you.

What were you doing five years ago today?

It's about to rain. Really it is raining, a kind of southern drizzle, gray on gray. But there's thunder and when it really starts to pour I'll have to move inside off the side porch so the computer doesn't get wet when the water comes sideways.

It's Katrina V today. I shouldn't really talk about Katrina because I wasn't here then, but Obama's in town -- the Navy boys who are rotating at PublicHospital were all flashing their clearances Friday night at Lucy's -- and the guy in the back unit who does the gardening is outside, too, for this break in the heavy rain, and his radio is on, and someone with a strong Yat accent -- that strange unplaceable mix of Boston and Queens -- is asking cawlers to tell their stories, and his cawler now is Cajun, all dis and dat and N'awlins. Bless this place.

All week there have been photographers around, and newsmen. There was a guy last night in 45 Tchoup with a fancy SLR and the weakest chin I have ever seen, and I looked at him and thought about his airway. Earlier this week I jogged past the Vera memorial on Jackson and Magazine, and a man was standing in front of it, a camera trained on him, and I looked for Simon but I guess he wasn't part of the story they were telling. Last night I read a piece in the New York Times, and I wound up on the Pulitzer website, reading the Times-Picayune archives from those first days after the storm, no one knowing anything, trying to survive. Hell, Stephen Fry was in New Orleans this past week. I mean, what?

On Thursday night we had a party at PastryChief's house, a Resident Wellness event, because in addition to doing the scheduling and the admin junk that comes with being chief, she's interested in our Wellness, capital W, and I know from me that sounds sarcastic but I actually mean it admiringly. So PastryChief had this barbecue, and it wasn't particularly well-attended, but there were twelve of us, and Cisco was there, and I don't remember how we got onto it, but like I've said before, Cisco is a damned storyteller, the kind you only meet a few of in a lifetime, and he started talking about coming back from Lafayette to New Orleans.

Cisco was a med student during Katrina, three weeks into his first year when the city was evacuated. He went home with his wife to Lafayette to wait out the storm; they took her car, left his in the school parking lot. "It was a brand-new Honda Accord," he said. "Leather seats, sunroof, and I bought that car to get through med school and residency, and later I saw it on television, and I called up the insurance agent." Three days later -- and I don't know how he knew anything, how in those first days he figured out how bad it was, and that there were people to help, and how he could help them -- he came back, with his wife's car and his boat hitched to the back of it. He and another friend caravaned, and they came in on I-10, which was barricaded, and they got through the first barricade with their PublicHospital med student IDs. "How are we going to get around the barricades?" Cisco asked. There were more set up, many more, every eight or ten miles going into the city. "We're not stopping any more," said Marsh. "We'll drive on the shoulder. The barricades don't go onto the shoulder." And they did, and no one stopped them.

In the city they put out from the I-10/610 split, the high ground, and they could get as far as the train bridge over I-10 near the pumps and the cemeteries.

The water was just as high as the bridge, and the boats couldn't get over it. I'd heard this before, that the rail bridge was the border; Naka told me a few weeks ago, as we threw balls for his dogs into the waters of the lake, in another Katrina story I'd never heard. He also plucked people from rooftops in his boat, and he'd deliver them to the rail bridge, and then they'd get on the larger boats that couldn't get across, and go to the I-10/610 split, and from there get on buses to Baton Rouge, or wherever. Out of New Orleans. "I cut a hole in the fence," said Naka, "and until just this past year you could see it from the highway, and every time I went past, I thought, Yeah, I made that."

...

"So I had a small boat," said Cisco. "The engine weighs maybe 250, and so four of us humped it over the bridge," and he makes a face, stretches his arms down, "Urghhhhhhh." "And we did that for the smaller boats. And then, we had to get the boat across. There was a guy there with a chain saw, as we were wondering how to get the boats across, and he looked at the pine trees and said, No problem. And he cut down these pine trees and made a ramp across the bridge, and we'd push the boats up it on one side until the other side tilted down into the water."

"Damn," says someone. "That's, like, some Roman-level shit."

"That same guy had brought six tanks of gasoline and a hand pump, he spent his own money on this stuff, and we would go back to the bridge and refill with this little hand crank. He had an airboat himself, and it had a 1970-something Chevy engine on it, and there was no way we could lift it across the bridge. 'Don't worry about me,' he said. So we all get across the bridge, the smaller boats, and we're about to fan out and start looking for people. And we hear the airboat go away into the distance, and then cut out. And then suddenly the guy floors it, and he *ramps it* over the bridge, comes down, KAFWOOSH! And he shouts, 'And awaaaaaaaayyy we goooo!'" And Cisco's got his forearm in the air, a pointed finger at the ceiling.

I tuned out for a minute: Someone asking me to pass a bottle, pass a bag, and then Cisco's talking, "We didn't know who had died before, and who drowned in the storm."

"What?"

"The cemeteries were flooded, so the coffins floated up, and the bodies, you know, they're all embalmed and shit.  So we couldn't tell who was dead from the storm and who was just dead.  But there were a lot of bodies.

"I'll tell you the moment I knew we were fucked. We were-" and here my memory cuts out, I think it was back on the rail bridge. "This woman made sandwiches. We'd been living on fruit roll-ups, that kind of shit, and she just had ham and white bread and doritos from Wal-Mart, and she layered that meat and doritos on there, old-school, and they were the best sandwiches ever." He makes a c'est bon! gesture, thumb and finger to his lips. "So we're sitting on this bridge, me and Marsh, eating these sandwiches, and as we're sitting there, the water starts to go down. It goes down like six inches in the time we're eating, and we're thinking, Great! They got the pumps working. But it's too fast, even if the pumps are on. Marsh is the one who figured it out. 'No,' he says. 'That's the *tide*.'"

Y'all, even today, when I type it, my skin gets goosebumps. Here, on my back porch, with the warm rain coming down.

"That's the moment we knew we were fucked. New Orleans had gone *tidal*. The levees were broken, and we had a fucking tide. 'You watch,' said Marsh. 'When we come back later, the water will be even higher than it was when we pulled in.' And sure enough, we came back, the water was back up.  The fucking tide, man, in New Orleans."

-----

I told Cisco last night at 45 Tchoup that I have every intention of recording his ass one day, saying those words. Because someone, someone needs to remember this shit.

Last week we had an NPR reporter riding with us on EMS for a night; she's doing a piece on post-Katrina PTSD and suicide, and as I scribbled Adam's number on a piece of paper I said, "This place is so fucking weird, someone should write about it."

And a few weeks ago -- maybe two, three -- I was working in the RTA, and Dr. Tox was there, being his usual warm self, and you have to understand, this man is New Orleans bred, and when he first started talking about his daughter, his daughter who is maybe all of five, and how she knows the NRA rules, "If you see a gun don't touch it, get a grown-up," etc, I thought he was nuts, but also that that's how he is, that's how he always was, that's New Orleans.

But no. No, what happened was Katrina.

Dr. Tox used to do shifts at OPP -- Orleans Parish Prison. OPP is everything you think it would be, as a big jail in a poor city: There are the guys who haven't been charged yet, the ones who have been charged and who are awaiting trial and can't make bail, and then the guys who have been convicted of anything requiring less than (per rumor) a six-year sentence.  It's crowded, it's underfunded, the men there have hepatitis and tuberculosis and AIDS, and then they show up in the ER because someone, or several someones, decided to kick the crap out of them.  OPP terrifies me.

Anyway.  Dr. Tox.  He had the shift August 29, after Nagin ordered the evacuation, after Charity had gone Code Gray. And then, he couldn't get out.

"The water came up, and we couldn't drive. The prisoners rioted. They were breaking down the concrete. We could hear them; they could get through the concrete but not the steel bars. So they were using, I don't know what, a table as a battering ram, all through the night: wham, wham, wham." He pounds his fist on the desk in the RTA.

My dork-ass mind skips, right there, to the Lord of the Rings, the mines of Moria, drums in the deep.  Sorry, y'all: It's the closest my suburban self can come to that sense of fear:  They are coming.

"How did you guys not get caught?"

"There was one door. One steel door they couldn't get through, and we took a vote..." I don't remember this entire part. There was a vote, the guards and the staffers, and somehow they decided to leave, and they had to wind their way through the prison's back corridors, across the yard, I don't know, all so that the prisoners wouldn't see them. Because the prisoners were free, and there were a lot of them.

Afterwards, after they got out, a Coast Guard boat happened to be passing by, and Dr. Tox climbed on it and hitched a ride down Tulane Avenue to Charity Hospital, where he waited for evacuation with everyone else. Finally they put the critical patients on eighteen-wheelers to the Dome to be helicoptered to the airport -- one of the EMS guys, this last week, pointed to the other helicopter staging area, down by the Convention Center, along with the few ambulances they've still got from before the storm, the ones that weren't ruined, though now they're sitting quiet, unused, tires going flat -- and somehow everyone eventually got to buses, and buses to Baton Rouge, and the story ends with Dr. Tox sitting alone on the side of a highway in BR, waiting for his wife to come pick him up.

He made it back. In a week, he came back.  And as for Orleans Parish Prison, the SWAT team from Angola showed up, and they let their German shepherds go in first, dogs the size of horses, and three hours later they were marching the prisoners out in neat little rows and onto the waiting buses.

"But what I saw at the Superdome," Dr. Tox says. "Everything that was good, and decent in people, it went out the window. People were nasty, they were mean, they were violent, it was 'What can I get for *me*?'. After that I got the guns."

Dr. Tox is the nicest man in the world, and Katrina is why he will shoot to kill.

-----

I don't have much to add; I've told you enough half-remembered secondhand stories for an afternoon. But I wanted you to know. Katrina isn't over here, not yet, maybe not for a lifetime. I told the NPR reporter, and I'm telling you: You think you're past it. You can go about your life in New Orleans -- if you're like me, if you weren't here before, if your personal geography isn't one of used-to-be -- and never know Katrina happened.

And then suddenly you notice the Vera memorial for the very first time.  Or one of your friends tells you a story that makes your skin shiver.

You think Katrina is over, and you forget about it, and then, all of a sudden, it's right next to you.

Looks, brains, and everything.

You can't have them all on an internet blind date, I guess.

You can, however, have dinner at a place that reminds you of that place in Philly.  You know, with the sandwiches and the cheese?  Um... Tria!  Delachaise is like Tria.  Nom.

He's a nice guy, checks all the boxes: PhD in English, tenure-track in Baton Rouge, Jewish.  Grew up in New York and Connecticut, and after that our paths mirrored, sort-of: Chicago, Philly, St. Louis, Atlanta, here.  Or up the river.  We overlapped in so many cities without meeting it'd be a charming story to tell our offspring if only I liked him enough to bear them...  Anyway, nice guy, smart obviously, into me, and... Yankee.  Nasal as all hell, an overloud laugh, not as funny as I'd like him to be, and I guess... I guess if I don't want to mack on you at the end of the first date I'll never want to mack on you.  The things I know about myself!  They are pretty consistent.

(I am still surprised that I find a Mississippi accent more attractive than a New York one.  What the hell, self?)

Our opposing feelings were so obvious, apparently, that when he stood to order at the bar, one of the girls at the next table turned to me and said, "Girl, he is all into you, and you... are not feeling it," and I laughed and said, "Yeah, I know.  Also, I could not help overhearing y'all's conversation earlier, and I so much agree: When it is over, it is *over*, and also, it is a shame when you cannot fall in love with that friend your mom loves so much."  And basically it was girl-gab for the next twenty minutes until they left, while the guy sat somewhat participating but also not.

In a perfect world, there would have been a polite way to leave with them.  One turned out to be an almost-finished dental student at PublicHospital, though, so maybe I'll see her again.  (HIIIIIII pretty blonde be my friend? You are clever and not nasal!)  (This is why I have such voice paranoia.  I mean, obviously I don't, because I am loud and talk a lot, but on recordings I am always like, "... Damn, I have an annoying voice."  Because voices are *important* and if you have a not-sexy voice I will not want to sex you.  The end.)  (It is not the only reason I do not want to sex him but anyway.)

So!  That was the internet date.  I ate cheese.  I drank wine.  I did not die.  I'm not into him.  THE END.

"Have you ever seen a bloody Chuck E. Cheese ticket?"

The young nursing student was going through the latest trauma patient's pockets; the teen and his three new bullets had rolled off to CT, and the student was cataloging belongings to be locked up by security.  Watch, bloodied t-shirt, the boxers we cut off, and then...

"Have you ever seen a bloody Chuck E. Cheese ticket?" said the nurse.  And he held it up.

"Hold still," I said.  "That's going to be my photo."

Here is what it is like to grow up in New Orleans:

So I was probably the only one cheering "Make-outs! Make-outs!" at the television at the St. Charles Tavern this morning.

(Unrelated:

Mimosa and ham and cheese omelette: Breakfast of champions.)

But come on, you know it would be awesome.

Yet another night in the RTA.

Fast track has become RTA here at PublicHospital. It's... kind of a cluster. The flow is messy and chaotic and staff-dependent, and there aren't enough nurses, and... blah.

Point is, this:

Sigh.

I very rarely get truly angry at patients, but this guy, UGH.

Saints season is coming.

In the bitty break room at PublicHospital, spotted last night:

Y'all. I... $350? Really? I mean, I understand, Saints versus Falcons, but it's a *football game*. And you could watch it on the TV from here. For free. At a bar.

Ugh.

(PS: Is there a word for the literary device, or perhaps regionalism, wherein the speaker uses superfluous definite articles? Eg, "at the Wal-Mart," or "on the TV"? Because both of those phrasings strike me as very country or very Southern, and I just wanted y'all's opinion.)

(PPS: Last night I used the phrase "in the AM" and then I said aloud, "Oh, god, my Yankee friends are going to laugh at me." And then later I said, "Bless his heart." And then I said, "Shit.")

In which I flirt with a pair of Canadian journalists who then go home to Canada.

Why can I never train my hair to do this curl on purpose? Why?

-----

"You're Jewish?" he said, screwing up his face.

I shrugged.

"It's okay," he said.  "I'm Canadian."

Ah, clever, quippy boys.  I will never meet you in real life.  By which I mean, when you're not leaving again.

-----

After a drug rep dinner at Morton's, it seems like a really good idea to go out in the Quarter, and then to Lucy's, and then to that bar across the street from Lucy's, and then to that place that's almost under the highway, the Rusty Nail? maybe? I mean, you don't have to work until 3 PM.

3 PM is not as late as you think it is when you don't get home until 3:30 or go to bed until 8. Just, um, FYI.

I love my workplace because of this.

11:10 PM, I'm rounding with Pizza when Berd hustles through. He just graduated and started his fellowship in international medicine; of course, when I say "started," I mean, "he built it and is the first one."  It helps that he's a supergenius, Berd is; chiefdom, papers, ran journal club, actually reads the journals (who does that?), going-going-going. (His girlfriend, one of our current chiefs, is the same but different: Chiefdom, genius, and bakes the gourmet cakes for our monthly birthday celebrations. What?  I will never be these people.)

Point is, Berd is funny as hell too, low-toned sarcastic, and the *real* point is, he walks through and Pizza and I are rounding, and Berd just grabs for Pizza's balls, and Pizza catches it just in time, jumps away, and Berd looks back and nods and then we go on talking about bed 19.

So Berd is staff now, more or less.

And then later in the night he cycles through again -- he's working RTA -- and says, Hey, G, you're looking good.  I'm wearing makeup, I say, and I am: I met Jess (Dean's Jess) and a friend of hers for dinner at Atchafalaya before my shift started, before I had to abandon them and rush over here to change into scrubs and work.

He mouths something.  Again.  Oh, no, wait, did I say "mouths"?  I meant he says it, out loud: "You getting some?"

"No," I say.  And I shift my weight forward just a little bit, lead with my pubic symphysis.  "You see that?" I say.  "That was a pelvic thrust."

So. My program.

Dinner with Jessica.

(Yes, the first of two totally unrelated blog posts about last night.)

So Jessica was in town with a friend of hers last night -- well, Monday to Wednesday, I guess -- and we went out to dinner last night (at Atchafalaya, which was just as delicious as always, and also packed, which is nice to see on a Tuesday; I'm rooting for that place to stay open always, obviously). Point is, Jess told a Dean story, and I basically have to repeat it, because it is totally Dean.

Jess baked a pie. For Dean. She baked a chocolate pie, as a surprise, and then she shoved the pie behind everything else in the refrigerator, and stacked all the food in front, and wiped down the counters and washed the dishes and had the whole room cleaned up just in time.

And Dean walked in.

And there was a *single chocolate chip* on the counter. Which, incidentally, is totally the right color to conceal chocolate chips.

Dean: "Where did this chocolate chip come from?"

Jess: "I don't know. Maybe it's from a cookie?"

Dean: "But we don't have chocolate chip cookies. And it's not the right kind."

Jess: "I don't know, maybe the cleaning service people were eating cookies."

Dean: "Why would the cleaning service leave a chocolate chip on the counter?"

So Dean? *Investigates.* He doesn't shrug off the presence of a single chocolate chip on the counter as something that just happens sometimes in the course of one's daily kitchen life. No, he *investigates.*

Dean opens the refrigerator.

Dean: "Why is the fridge all messed up?"

Jess: "Um..."

Dean: [rummaging]

Jess: "Okay, Dean, okay. I *baked a pie*. It was a *surprise*."

Dean: "... I was *hoping* that was it!"

So there you have it, the essence of Dean. (1) Logically, he will jump from "single unexplained chocolate chip on the counter" to "surprise chocolate pie in the refrigerator." But (2) he won't go out and just *say* it. He will deduce it. He will prove it. And he will not take no for an answer.

Incidentally, he argued against the existence of Santa Claus with the kids across the street when he was four.

So that's Dean.

Ha. Best story ever.

Accidental cemetery tour: Valient Cemetery, New Orleans.

I meant to bike to the pool and go swimming after my night shift.  I did, I swear!  But I didn't leave the hospital 'til almost 8, and the pool is uptown at the JCC, St. Charles and Jefferson, and it's only open for laps from 7:30 'til 9, and then it closes again until noon.
I biked out along whatever the hell, not my usual route, Oretha C Haley, maybe, but I wound up on Danneel, winding my way through Central City.  It was humid, getting warmer, and I was sweating with my bag around my shoulders, and running out of time.  It was getting towards 8:20 already.

And then I passed this cemetery at Danneel and Valence.

Annnnd I stopped.  Obviously.  I can always go to the pool... some other time.

Scenes of quiet ruin.

It's a little neglected, Valient is. Not actively vandalized, just overgrown and quiet. A woman was walking her wee dog past, and a man was making circles of the block, and a flock of parakeets (YES) kept shifting between the power lines overhead, but otherwise the streets were quiet, too.

Basically it was perfect.

There's no information for me online about Valient.  The earliest graves I saw were from the first half of the 1800s, but not *early* 1800s; I'll say 1840s but that's just a guess.  It looks to be Catholic, though it'd also be very like New Orleans not to care.

And that's all I know.

(A warning that I have retouched the hell out of most of these photos, because I only had my phone with me, and it is also August in New Orleans, which means a permanent humid mist in the air.)

I retouched the hell out of this one so you could read the writing (if you click, anyway).  Look!  The women get biographies!  Amazing.

This one I contrasted so y'all could appreciate the leaf motif on the left.  Yay, graves, giving me home decorating ideas again.

This photograph made the blog entry because, well, because most photographs are making the blog entry, but also because this name is pretty awesome.

Vista.  Lower graves, you see, than St. Louis Cemetery or Lafayette, only a few true mausoleums.

DO NOT CUT OR SPRAY.

Another pretty good name.

Flowers (or weeds).

This woman also got a little bit of a bio, which is nice.

He was a *wagoner* in World War I.  A wagoner!  Remember those?

I am calling this St. Jude only because of those Cajun romance novels.

I mean, I understand that you made it, you stamp it, but it seems in bad taste, no?

Of course, at least it's not astroturf.

Creepy angel.

And another of St. Jude.

1897 NEW LADIES PROVIDENCE BENEVOLENT MUTUAL AID ASSOCIATION 1908

And a misplaced handle.

I can't make out whose mega-crypt this is.  The last word on top is LODGE.

 SOCIETA DI M.B.S. ANTIONIO DI PADONA

These bricks read "ST. JOE."  Which is charming.

See, now that's a crypt.  Pile on in, kids!

*That's* your hospital?  Well, I think I found the problem...

The top inscription is just LADIES & GENTLEMEN, and there's a date of 1893 on the right; otherwise, I can't make it out.

Remember how I mentioned that New Orleanians go and celebrate All Saints' Day by decorating their relatives' graves, etc?  I'm just wondering whether Saints balloons are typical.  I'm thinking yes.

Okay, okay, so I know the top inscription is MOTHER, but somehow I just find the idea of an OTHER in death really amusing.

"Who's that?"
 "Oh, this is my plus-one for all eternity.  Say hello to Sally, kids.  Your mother?  Oh, she couldn't make it."

Okay, in my head, it's amusing.

And finally, two views of the sky:

Which just remind me of that painting I like so much that I had to go digging through my postcard collection to find it for y'all.  It's George Inness' "Early Morning Tarpon Springs":

You guys, when I talk about a Southern sky?  This is what I'm talking about.

It's nice to work at a place with IV fluids and zofran.

So let's just say my first shift as charge resident started out not with a bang but a whimper.

Or, rather, I woke up today and felt poorly. Gagged a little. Call it the seafood I cooked last night, but I was nauseated. (Not nauseous. For whatever reason, the one point of English usage at which Louisianans excel is the distinction between nauseated and nauseous.) Annnd... then I went running. Briefly. In the heat.

Oh, also I threw up the water I tried to drink.

Point being, I felt much better after throwing up. I drove to work, rounds started, and we hit bed 10 or so (of 17 in the front and then 18 to 29 in the back) and I just... felt... bad.

Diaphoretic. Queasy. I needed water. If I fainted now, at least, I was surrounded by doctors... Could I sneak off for a drink of water? I had coffee at the desk and... I needed to sit. I took a few -- ten -- steps back from the main group. I didn't have these beds anyway; Rik was taking them. I sat at the nurse's stand. Put my hands to my head.

Now everyone was staring. Were they staring? They looked like they were staring.

We moved into the next room. I felt a little better, hauled my butt up, followed them.

"You look like shit," said one of the attendings. "Yeah, I... threw up a couple of times today. I think it's food poisoning." "Do you want to go home?" "G, go home!" said the chorus. "No, I'm... okay. Really." They looked at me. We rounded in the back, quickly. "Okay, so what's going on with you?" said the attending afterwards. "I'm just dehydrated, I think," I said. "You're really pale," she said. She pulled my eyelids. "Well, your conj look okay." Perk, PGY4 (now), was nearby. "Let us give you a liter of fluid and some zofran over in the RTA," he said. "Cz can cover back here." "But..." I said.

So I went to RTA for an hour, and Bethany stuck a 20 in my left AC, and let a liter run in, and hit me with some zofran (interestingly, I didn't taste the normal saline -- some patients taste salt with IV flushes -- but I did taste the zofran, a weird synthetic plastic taste), and I sipped ice water, and an hour and a half later I went and took over my beds from Cz.

"I'm okay," I said. "I'm okay."

And I am.

But it's a nice workplace perk, IV fluids.

Also, it is both nice and disappointing to know that my illnesses are apparently really, really visible to a crowd of fifteen.

-----

Annnnd I have a text from Shel offering to work tonight's shift for me if necessary.

Bless her, but: Shel wasn't even *at work* today.

Oh, my gossipy, gossipy program.

Yay zofran.

New friends and parties.

So Friday night, I biked uptown to join Sarah (a girl at met at the YoungJewsSchmoozeWhilePretendingToCelebrateTheSolstice thing) at her friend's house party. And lo, one of the people there -- and keep in mind, this is a totally unrelated social group -- is an MS4 at my hospital. He rotated in my ER (though not specifically under me), so we recognized one another (or rather, he recognized me, and I was like, "... oh, yeah"). New Orleans! Officially too small. (Seriously, there were all of ten people at this house party, and one of them is In My Circle.)

And Saturday, I went to an attending's dog's birthday party (yes, really); he's one of the staff at ThePrivateO, a graduate of my own program somewhere in the seven-to-ten-years-ago era. It was only minimally awkward; I wasn't sure whether it was a "bring anyone" party or not, and since this attending didn't mention bringing a friend, I didn't.  And I was the only resident there.  Oops.

Anyway, it was fine, I mean, minus being the only single person who didn't know anyone else except one of the hosts.  But said host rented a snowball machine, and provided liquor to pour on top of those snowballs, and I may not be the biggest fan of snowballs versus, say, ice cream, but you know, you mix a little coconut cream snowball and a little vanilla vodka and you're in business.  Plus, Manchu chicken wings.  YOU GUYS THEY ARE SO GOOD.

So that was the weekend.  I had some relevant story to tell here but now I forget it.

It's that time of the year again.

When my excuse for not running has gone from "it's cold/raining" to "OH MY GOD I AM NEVER GOING OUTSIDE AGAIN."

Best Car Ever?

After the gym (and my bicycle was undisturbed this time, yay):

You know, when I was a kid, I always thought I would be the one to decorate my car/bike/house utterly ridiculously like this... and then it turns out, no, I'm pretty lazy.

Anyway.

Because sometimes it makes sense to go to Kinko's at 1 AM.

And it's just weird, you know, how that section of St. Charles goes from being all CBD, prime real estate, etc etc, to being... well, dead, and then on the other side of the highway it picks up in about a mile, from Lower Garden District, to *Uptown*.

Ah, cities.  And specifically this one.

Private Hospital World is Occasionally Quiet.

And blocks far, far fewer websites than PublicHospital does.