it's memorial day weekend and i'm taking a break from medicine.  but just so you don't think i only do foolish things in my exam room (click here for brilliant example), i will tell you about my weekend, ahem, yearlong project.  i love to make things, and that, coupled with my unfailing overconfidence, leads me and my reluctant hubby down many paths.  so i wanted to make a hanging daybed for my back porch.  i worked on it last summer, but never quite got it done, but today was the day to finish it and get it hung.

if you've ever declared you could do it yourself, then you already know that every project has its 'duh' moment(s).  this one came when i tied and fringed all the knots at the bottom of the ropes before putting them through the holes in the bed frame.  i was just really excited to see what they would look like, all knotty and fringy. thankfully, my kind hubby, after just a brief gloating that it was me and not him that messed up, helped me untie and retie all the knots.  now if only my porch wasn't swarming with stink bugs...

just pondering things

if we live into our eighties, why do our bodies peak in our twenties?

rilke hits the nail on the head

i can't say i'm familiar with his whole body of work, but my dad made sure my sisters and i each had our own copy of rainer maria rilke's Letters to a Young Poet.  so today i was looking for a rilke quote to share with my niece who is graduating from high school this spring (i was looking for the one about living into the answers in your life) and i stumbled across this one (also by rilke):

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

if you have been reading my blog (thank you for that!) you may have noticed that i haven't posted much lately.  i am currently being defeated by my electronic health record.  it is tedious, time consuming, tiring and just generally a huge amount of work.  it is definitely sapping my creative energy.  but, BUT, i will survive, i will ultimately triumph, and i will move on to be defeated by greater things!

not getting the logic

my patient thought it would be helpful to take her left over bowel prep to 'flush out' her gastroenteritis.  she'll be doing some flushing, that's for sure.

an aha moment, or two

no matter how hard i try (okay, maybe not that hard) i can't seem to get in and out of the exam room as quickly as my male counterpart.  then i read a study that showed that men spoke on average 2000 words a day, while women spoke 7000.  aha, i thought, proof that my patients are more verbose!  but then i had to acknowledge that i myself am female... and that was the second aha.

need a little inspiration?

it still amazes me and somehow inspires me to know that we have single cells in our bodies that stretch all the way from our lower spines to the tips of our toes.  what fearless little cells they are, traveling all that way.  so intent and committed to their purpose!

bad idea, or how not to do your bowel prep

just a bit of unsolicited advice based on the regretful experience of someone i know who shall remain unnamed --  it is not a good idea to schedule your colonoscopy so that you must do your bowel prep when one of your two bathrooms is under construction and you have house guests...

missing: one sense of humor

has anyone seen my sense of humor?  i think it's burried somewhere beneath my new EHR...