I need my fix.

I woke up this morning to find that we were out of coffee. Oh, the horror. Plus, I was going to be at home studying for a few hours. And, it was quite chilly out so I didn't want to walk down to the coffee shop (almost a quarter mile!).

So, I sat on the couch for an hour, pining away for a cup of coffee.

But then, I spied a cup sitting next to me on the side table, with a half of a cup of coffee from the previous day that I had left out. So, I warmed it up in the microwave and drank it.

Warmed up, day old coffee with milk and sugar is not the greatest. This gray coffee-colored skin of milk formed and I would get clumps of it in my mouth.

But, desperate times call for desperate measures. Katherine is unbelievably disgusted by this and says that I am a junkie.

That may be. I won't tell her about my past experiences that involved eating food that I took out of the garbage.

Anyway, it's just coffee.

Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah!

I feel like singing... in fact, I am singing... imagine the Hallelujah chorus from Handel's Messiah... that is me right now. It feels so good to be finished with Pediatrics. My schedule starting in February will be quite lovely.

Speaking of Handel's Messiah.... Katherine and I have gone to see the Messiah in Chicago the past few years... we didn't get to go this year because I was out of town, however. Anyway, there is that part in Handel's Messiah that says.... "For we, like sheep,.... have gone astray." Well, I always hear... "Oh we like sheep." And I forget about the rest of the line. And it makes me chuckle. It is practically my favorite part of the Messiah besides the Hallelujah chorus.

Oh we like sheep.

What a Christmas present.

Today is my last day of clinical duties until February. Our three weeks of winter break start on Friday, and I am taking 4 vacation weeks immediately following that to take my Boards and finish up interviewing.
Oh bliss. It really does feel like there is a light at the end of the tunnel to this 8 year long process.

On the first day of Christmas...

... my true love gave to me

a pre-prepped pot of coffee.

Last night, Kath asked me if I wanted her to set up the coffeepot so that all I had to do when waking up this morning was flip the switch. What bliss! (We don't have a programmable coffeepot.)

In turn, I shut the door to the bedroom this morning when I hopped out of bed at 5:30 am, giving Katherine an uninterrupted hour of sleep without being bothered by hungry kitties or local news noise.

Katherine gets me one of those "bodice-ripper" romance novels every year in my Christmas stocking. You know... Estella deLovely is captivated by the dark masculinity of Lord Blake McHunky even as she is furious with him for taking over her family's land... always entertaining reads. I just think those books would be so much more realistic if Blake McHunky won Estella's heart by doing the dishes for a week or making her coffee every morning. True love isn't about grand sweeping gestures. It's about the little things that we do every day.

Little things like making a pot of coffee. That's my idea of true love.

Aufwiedersehen, good bye...

We went out to dinner tonight with a former coworker from my lab who is moving to North Carolina in December. I will miss Michelle, as she and I have had many conversations in the lab about anything and everything. She's one of those people, like me, who's a sharer... happy to talk about EVERYTHING. And, I've gotten lots of information on pregnancy, labor, and childrearing as she had her two daughters in the time that I've known her. She also was my mentor in the scientific sense when I started in the lab back in the beginning of graduate school. So, I'm sad to see her leave. Her departure emphasizes that life will be changing for us very soon as well. It's exciting, but it also gives me some trepidation...

Tonight was fun, though. The best story was hearing about Michelle's 5-year-old daughter asking her, "Mommy, how does Daddy fertilize your egg?"

It's Christmastime in the city

I've been listening to the same Christmas tape in the car over and over on my 30 minute drive to work and back for the past two days. I could now sing Christmas songs sung by drunk Irishmen in my sleep. It never quite feels like Christmas until I've heard "... and Mary plucked cherries while Joseph stood around..." at least 10 times. I always wonder about poor Joseph just standing around... I guess Joseph had just spoken in anger to Mary that the father of her baby could pick cherries for her... and then he had heard baby Jesus speak up from the womb that "Mary shall have cherries and Joseph shall have none." Ouch. Getting berated by your unborn son. That would be tough. Especially when you know he's not your son.

The importance of high school physics

There are many times that I think back to high school and wonder when I will put to use all of that important information that I so diligently learned. Well, that is, besides the time when we were in Rome standing on the ruins of the Forum, and Lib and I recited the lines from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar that we had memorized for 10th grade English... "Oh pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, that I am meek and gentle with these butchers.."
But this morning, the importance of knowing about waves was emphasized in a most unfortunate way. Poor Katherine was holding my coffee mug as I drove her in to school... we were about 5 minutes from home, when she looked down and saw that coffee had spilled all over her lap. My mug wasn't THAT full. Nope, it was resonance. A huge wave of coffee must have developed and overflowed onto her lap. So, we turned around so she could change. She did think that it would be a useful story to talk about in class today, as they were talking about waves.

However, despite the serendipitous reminder of the morning, Katherine did wonder why I felt the need to bring my coffee with me for a 10 minute drive... I just don't understand THAT question. :)