Today was at times annoying political, then disheartning and overwhelming, then long and tiring. I would like to turn into a vegetable and enjoy my Tuesday night TV but instead the kettle will go on, the caffeine will pass from the tea to my cup, straight through to my veins and I will work, and work, and work until Neuro makes sense or until I drown in my big, pink mug. I'm loving Neuro but I'm hating this block.

The drive back up to Edmonton is never as much fun as the one down to Calgary. This reading week was no different =) Not terribly exciting, lotsa studying, but good all the same.

It's weird to think that this is my last reading week. That this summer is my last summer break. That this minimum-wage job will be my last minimum-wage job *crosses fingers*. That somewhere between now and next year we enter that funny in-between stage that is being a student intern. And soon enough after that comes your first "real" job.

Happy Birthday Tru!

Sorry we can't all be there to stuff you full of Towa (not that fantastic this time around btw) but we'd be there if we could =) Love you!!!

Home for the next few days so blogging will likely slow to a crawl especially when the boy comes home (tomorrow!). In the meantime though, I've been busy spending lots of time with my mommy. Not only does she feed me and grill me about my grades, she takes me shopping! And the two of us shopped up a storm at Holt Renfrew, resulting in a bee-YOO-tiful blue Medformal dress for myself and celebratory coffees for both of us.

One of these days someone needs to go through and classify all the different types of 'buys': There's the splurge - amazing when it works out, a source of lifelong regret when it doesn't.
The purchase of necessity - never really that satisfying but easily justified.
The 'finally' buy - well researched, you've stopped into pretty much every store that carries said item and when you FINALLY find the perfect buy, well there are few things that can top that feeling.

This dress was a 'finally' buy, I've been looking since last May and finding this dress was delightfully satisfying. Haha, next comes a new winter dress coat. My current one has been with me for 7 years (it'll be hard to say goodbye =) and I've managed to wear through one my pockets and the back panels, and have completely shredded the lining in the sleeves.

Today's so unbelievably cold I felt my face would fall off. Remember when you were a kid and it was extremely uncool to be caught wearing long johns to school (although everyone's parents made them do it) and even worse was to have one of those ski masks that covered everything but your eyes and mouth. Walking to school today I would've given just about anything for those two items. Brrr....I've never been so tempted to drive 2 blocks in my life.

Confusing day. Trying to set up electives is a whole new set of hoops to jump through. I finally have a Pediatric Neurology elective set up although it won't be until May 2007, and I have an Internal Medicine elective half set up for September. Best of all, all my electives will be in Calgary so I can come home for a little while at least.

A non-grouchy post =) Back in October I submitted an abstract for a child neurology conference and I've just heard that it's been accepted! This is a first for me.

Over the years I've grown accustomed to research-related failures. My first summer I worked for 4 months and only managed to successfully insert my construct the last week I was there. My second summer was more productive but not publishable material. My third summer, the project that was designed to take me 4 months took me 1.5 weeks and I spent the rest of the summer twiddling my thumbs and doing odd jobs. Oh well, at least I got a free trip to Toronto and lots of flirting time out of it =)

Last summer was great. I finally had a project that I could get excited about, that allowed me to go into clinic and talk to patients and that introduced me to a field I can see myself potentially going into. And on top of that I got a free Palm (a nice one too!), 2 free textbooks, an amazing boss and now an abstract. Woohoo!

Oh boo...we lost our waterpolo final 6-4 tonight. It got pretty heated and we were pretty upset about some of the calls that were made. The whole season they've been pretty lax about making calls but tonight they seemed to call just about everything, and we didn't even realize that these things were penalties! For example, in one instance we got called for 'swarming'; I call it playing defense. Oh, and I got called for using foul language =) But in the end, they just played better than we did and we weren't playing our best =(

I've noticed some of my friends getting a little punchier lately. It's been tough. This block is so badly done that it would be laughable were I not the one suffering through it. Last year, people complained because they were spending far too much time in the classroom. Literally 8 to 5 every single day. So this year they decided to swing to the other extreme and give us NO clinical lectures. We get taught basic anatomy and basic pathology but absolutely everything else is supposed to be self-study and then we go to small groups to 'reinforce' (read: learn for the very first time) the material. I'm learning about half of these diseases from emedicine.com and the other half from old American Family Physician articles.

I completely fail to understand why there is no middle ground, why they couldn't choose some of the less complicated topics and have us study those on our own. Maybe they just had problems choosing and said "to hell with it, let's just give them a copy of the Medical Council of Canada guidelines and let them figure it out themselves and we can all go down to Tijuana with the extra dough we're making for 'teaching' *evil snickers*". And it's starting to show, not just through the exponential increase in complaining but also through the frustration that people express during small groups and the mini-breakdowns that I see happening around me (granted there's track selection stress too).

At the end of the day you're so freakin' powerless that it's enough to drive any sane person crazy. I can complain about my block all I want, but I can't fix it for myself or for my classmates. I can go out, buy a general neurology textbook and learn this block by correspondence (even though I pay 12k a year to have it taught to me) and if I'm lucky, they'll listen to us and next year's class will be back in the lecture hall from 8 until 5 again. I can analyze the tracks all I want but in the end, a computer will randomly choose names and if I happen to come up near the end, well I'll just have to suck it up. And that's just how it is. And it just blows.

Gah! I got my second-last favorite track. Which means that I start 3rd year with 6 weeks of electives and will come off like a bumbling buffoon to anyone who has the misfortune to run into me on the services where I want to make the best possible impression. Bahbahbahhumbug.

Just came back from our annual wellbeing conference in Banff, a delightful excuse to have a party surrounded by some amazing scenery. It was a lot of fun. I learned alot about my classmates, in sessions but mostly outside of them. What never ceases to amaze me is the amount of depth that lies within each one of us. You think you know a person, and then you see them at the bar =) You think you know a person and then you watch how they act in the anatomy lab. I missed my boy ALOT this weekend. Especially because my 3 roommates' boyfriends were all able to come with us, and the girls were just incredibly nice and thoughtful and abounding in awesomeness. Some amazing food, better-than-average speakers, less than ideal sleep, a very nice dip in the hotsprings (too bad the changing rooms were RANCID...pictures to follow) and a very long ride home on the world's hottest bus (temperature-wise). Were decency not a factor, I think my friends and I would gladly have stripped down to our skivvies.

The asian girls minus Lindy (our token white girl)

The nice thing about birthdays is that you get first dibs on the food!

Quote of the day:

"A rose is a rose is a rose...but if you tend and nurture the rose that is neuropathology, it will bloom!"