Reunion Pictures

While I'm percolating a post in my noggin (which will mainly deal with the fact that I'm taking this rotation off to whip my pancreas into shape) I thought I'd post some pictures from my 10-year class reunion in July (eeeep! I'm old.) Because I don't think I've showed y'all yet. We had dinner at Marshall's Hall of Fame Cafe, and then a picnic the next day at a local elementary school's shelter, with kids and the whole she-bang. Behold the pictures, and try to ignore my super-gigantic sausage arms. If you want to see my sausage arms in all their flubbery glory (i.e., a larger version of the picture) just click on it. (If some of them aren't clickable, it means I didn't make a larger version. Too bad for you.)

This is everybody and their significant others. I'm on the second lap from the right, and the lap belongs to Scott.

This is, left to right - Scott, me, Jeremy (who I had a ridiculous crush on throughout high school and who is now married to one of my best friends), Wendy (the aforementioned best friend), Amanda, and Tanner.

Wendy, Amanda, me.

These are three of my best guy friends from high school - Tanner, Jonah, and Lee. Lee and I have a picture from our 7th grade prom where my hair defies gravity. Maybe I'll post it one day - when you LEAST EXPECT IT. Mwahaha.

These are three of my best girlfriends from high school - Wendy, Kelli, and Amanda. And the other one's me.

I has submitted an lolcat ...

... to I Can Has Cheezburger. And although I am partial to my own kittehs, Ollie & Sassy:

This one is the best lolcat I've seen in awhile:

What medical school exam blocks look like - in pictures

I was reading an article in Popular Photography some time ago (it must have been around Christmas, because I don't think I've had a chance to read one since then) that issued a challenge - on a particular date in January, I think - to photograph your day. One picture every 5 minutes. Well, I didn't think I could do THAT (flashing 10 times per lecture would not be cool) but I did want to do a sort of "day in the life" photo blog. And I picked one of the worst days ever - the first day of block exams. So on this day (which was March 12th) I had a patient care exam and then a pathology exam, and then I had to go to the apartment and study for pharmacology and genetics, which was given the next day. Here's what the day looked like:

8:11 A.M. - May not SEEM early to you, but it sure felt early to me. Note my trusty Propel by the bed. And a backup Aquafina.

8:11 A.M. - Particularly when I cram late at night (okay, that's ALWAYS) I fear that either 1) my brain will tag the information I've just stuffed in as useless and delete it while I sleep, or 2) it will leak out onto my pillow. So here's my pillow. It appears to be covered with flowers, not pathological central nervous systems, so we're okay. (By the way, don't you love those sheets? They're Toscano from Pottery Barn.)

8:12 A.M. - I wake up in a panic attack every single morning of my life. Very exhausting way to wake up, actually, with your body thinking it's being attacked by a cheetah or something. So I reach for my lorazepam (Ativan) first thing, to calm the racing heart and the shaking so I'll feel like a normal person again.

8:12 A.M. - In the morning I look like a greasy troll. You don't get to see that, so here - here's my eyeball. And Scott's camera, which he let me borrow for my project. It was much easier to tote around for the whole day than my suitcase of a camera bag that carries my baby Canon 30D.

8:13 A.M. - I always sleep with my TV on all night. Somehow it is an anxiety soother for me and always has been - having a TV on somewhere keeps my brain from focusing on scary things. A psychologist told me once that a lot of anxiety sufferers do the same thing. Speaking of scary things - look at that hair. Ack.

8:14 A.M. - Oliver helps me put in my contacts every morning. And by "helps", I mean "makes it take twice as long". He LOVES to drink the saline solution as it goes into the sink. Does anyone else have a cat that drinks contact stuff? If I try to shut him out of the bathroom, he can still hear the sound of the saline being turned upside down, and he sits outside the door and HOWLS until I let him in. A little fuzzy weirdo.

8:18 A.M. - Email check. Is the school still standing? Do I have to take my exams? Yes on both accounts. Drat. (Not that I'm going to destroy the school - stop looking at me, campus police!)

8:54 A.M. - I ::heart:: my Bare Minerals. They take away at least some of the troll-ness (see above).

8:59 A.M. - Slim-Fast - the breakfast of champions. Or fat people. Or fat champions.

9:18 A.M. - I clean up all right, I guess. (If it weren't for those pesky 60 pounds.) And then take blurry self-portraits.

9:43 A.M. - School sweet school.

9:43 A.M. - And look, I'm early for my 10AM exam. That probably means that I'll still have to sit in one of those miniscule desks that I think they stole from an old kindergarten class. They bring in these wee desks (most of them left-handed, even) on test days and put them in the aisles, because they make us sit every other seat, lest our academic integrity be challenged or some such crap. I hate those mini leprechaun desks, though.

9:58 A.M. - Two minutes 'till - and I actually got a real seat. Yay!

10:50 A.M. - One test down, one to go. This is the "between tests" period when everyone is cramming for the next one. Look at that poor girl, her face has become permanently melded to a Pathology grid book. Shame.

11:03 A.M. - More cramming. One of the best things about medical school is the other people who are going through the exact same thing you are. Puts a soft spot in my heart for them. Awwww.

12:59 P.M. - Patient Care and Path are a distant memory, and Christy and I are going to lunch it up at Taco Bell. Look at the sad amount of money that I fished out of my purse.

2:31 P.M. - Christy and I get into some anti-fungal pharmacology at my apartment. Great fun.

3:26 P.M. - Christy studies reads InStyle while I try to end it all by flinging myself off of the couch backwards. It didn't work.

3:53 P.M. - We hit a snag during our anti-viral review. Christy was following a printout of the powerpoint lecture, and I was reading the lecture handout. When we came to the drug "Foscarnet", we were trying to figure out a way to remember that it causes electrolyte imbalance. So I said, "When electrolytes are imbalanced, they need a NET under them - hardy har har." (Go ahead and make fun of me, but you'll remember that now.) And she was like, "Well - that's kind of a stretch - but whatever." Then we found out that there was a typo on her powerpoint - heh. I wondered why she was being all cool and pronouncing it "fahs-CAR-nay" - you know, with the silent "t". Whatever. It was hilarious at the time, while we suffered from delirium.

5:20 P.M. - Sophie and Ollie have grown bored with us and gone to sleep in their matching boxes. I'm jealous.

7:16 P.M. - More studying. That's Christy. That's my feet. That's also my Diet Coke.

7:22 P.M. - It's nice out, it's Daylight Savings Time, and people get to be in the park instead of trapped in an apartment surrounded by a mountain of notes. I'm jealous of them, too. Fie on them - fie on them all!

9:22 P.M. - Christy is gone and I'm skidding back into troll-land. I need a shower.

9:52 P.M. - I still haven't cracked open my genetics stuff. That's not so good, y'all. And that little card in the frame - I have to be reminded of that several times daily. When I try to handle stuff myself, I mess that mess up.

9:54 P.M. - Still on cancer chemotherapy - haven't touched immunopharmacology or vaccines yet, haven't started genetics. Yikes.

10:27 P.M. - A desperate phone call to Christy. She reassures me that I'm not going to fail. Too bad she's a pathological liar. (Just kidding.)

11:02 P.M. - I STILL haven't started genetics. I think I'll just take a hit on that one.

11:40 P.M. - Goodnight Scott. :-)

11:54 P.M. - Sophie could not care less.

11:56 P.M. - You know what? Me neither.

That is all. Hope you enjoyed it - should I do another day?

Maybe Basil's readers will find this interesting ...

Randomness

Well, this set of blocks went reasonably well. I got an A in path, a B in pharm, and an unmentionable grade in genetics (which was okay, considering I only read half of the genetics notes (once!) and only went to about half of the lectures. I put it on the back burner this time. You almost have to do that when you're juggling ~23 credit hours' worth of exams.)

Thanks be unto the Lord for all of THAT.

I had a humorous voicemail the other day at the apartment - I had been home for the weekend and was checking my messages on my way back on Sunday, and had three new messages. They were as follows: Christy, Christy, and some woman who was all, "YEAH. So I just wanted to let you KNOW, that I'm having an affair with your HUSBAND, and he can *bleep* so good, and he's mine, so *bleep* you, *BLEEP*!"

Eeek. The problem with that, of course, is that she's talking about my non-existent husband. I felt bad for her, you know, that she mustered up the courage (or maybe drank the courage) to make this confession, and then it gets delivered to the wrong number. That's just too bad. I felt so bad for her that I was going to get her number on my caller ID and call her back to tell her that the joke's on her, I have genital herpes! (KIDDING - I do not have herpes and I wasn't going to tell her that, either.) I was going to tell her that she must be looking for the other Kimberly [insert last name here].

Mom went to Kroger today, and went through this cashier's line who always feels the need to keep up a running commentary on what you're buying. She was buying a baby bottle brush for cleaning hummingbird feeders, and he asked her if she had a daycare. She said no, because - you know, she doesn't have a daycare. He proceeded to tell her that she should volunteer at Kroger's daycare, because they have "grannies" that come in to read to the kids. Poor Mom. Even if she had stark-white hair, a face like Keith Richards and was hobbling on a cane, you STILL don't call a stranger a "grannie". Sheesh.

Coming up next - American Idol Top 12 performance video clips (I'm just about to outsmart my Windows Media Center - but I only half outsmarted it this week - sorry, People Who Performed In The First Half fans) and A Day In My Life, this time with pictures. Wheee!

Before Samuel graduates from college ...

... I should probably post this, because it amused me.

My cousin Jonathan and his wife Becky had a beautiful baby boy earlier this month, Samuel Lucas [last name], and for the first day or so of his life, he decided to only open one eye. Observe:

When Gabriel came to see him in the hospital, he said, "He's a pirate baby!" Hee.

Gabe, meanwhile, is plenty cute himself - in his kids' scrubs and lab coat that I bought him:

Check out that stethoscope. He and I were playing with his little "visible organs guy", and I was pointing out the spleen and eeeeevil pancreas and such, and told him that I'd like to have my own little anatomy model guy. He knows I'm in school to be a "real doctor", and he told me, "Doctors don't get to have toys." Ha. Actually they do, Gabe, they're just very expensive toys. :-)

By the way, I have two exams on Monday and one on Tuesday, and that's why I've been MIA for a few days. Pharmacology is scaaaary, yo. The more I study it, the less I feel like I know. Anyone out there know what I mean by that? (If someone does, I'd feel better. Especially if it's someone in my class.) More importantly, can anyone HELP?

If you're a photog, I need you! And if you have a computer and the Internet (hardy har) I need you too!

I've had a Canon 30D for about 6 months, and I loooooove it except for one thing - almost ALL of my indoor pictures show up fine on my LCD, but when I load them into Photoshop or into a folder on my computer, they are underexposed. I can fix it with Levels or Curves in Photoshop, but it's annoying (and time consuming) to have to do that with every single indoor picture I take.

Does anybody have a clue what's going on here? I can't find any help in my manual. Is there a setting that I'm not using correctly, or what? I'm letting it do everything automatically (AWB, etc.) except sometimes I manually speed up the shutter speed for action or slow it down for something like birthday candles.

Attached to the 30D is a Canon 580 Speedlite. Direct flash is almost always too harsh, so I usually use the little white bounce card that is built-in to the flash or I bounce the flash off of the ceiling.

Over the summer, before I had the 30D, I used a friend's 20D (with the same flash) for a wedding, and had the same kind of problem. So I don't think the camera is defective or anything.

Any help is appreciated! I'm beating my head against a wall over this issue.

Another thing - have you voted in the last 24 hours in the weblog awards? I think first place may be out of reach (darn you, File It Under, for being more well-known than me and therefore getting endorsements which = votes!) but I may be able to pass Sean Gleeson and Gina Cobb if people will VOTE for me, once per computer (if you have a work computer and home computer, that's two votes - knock yourself out) every 24 hours, until December 15th. Y'all know I love you already, but I'll love you even more if you help me have a decent showing in this thing. :-) Thanks.

The one where I post lots of non-airbrushed pictures

Since I was accused by commenters at Kevin MD and now at the RateMDs forums of being deceitful by using my "excessively airbrushed senior picture as a "before" picture in my "victim of malpractice" story, I thought I'd post some pre-burn snapshots. You know, so you can see what a freakazoid I REALLY am, and that I look absolutely nothing like the senior picture I posted earlier. Except not. The debated senior picture is included at the end, so you can compare. Here's what you're supposed to notice in the "before" pictures - that both sides of my upper lip used to be EVEN.

Oh, and the fact that I have pancreatitis has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I was horribly burned and scarred. Yes, that was really suggested. Idiots.

Finally, I have a brilliant cousin who is an attorney specializing in healthcare (his firm represents doctors in cases like these, not patients) and he told me that this is 100% malpractice and that I would have won a suit hands down. Anyway, behold the pictures:

Summer 1997 ; Fall 1995

Spring 1997 ; Summer 1997

Spring 1997 ; Winter 1996

Both Spring 1997

Spring 1997

August 1997

Told you that the senior picture really looked like me. And the reason I'm not wearing makeup in the pictures featuring the burn is that I was told not to - for risk of infection. I did have a big gaping wound, you know. The reason that you don't see any "before" pictures without makeup is that I typically am not photographed makeup-less (is any girl? Really?)

Such a cutie

Every year since he was born, I've done a "photo shoot" with Gabriel for Susan's Christmas card picture. The first year was easy - he was two months old, he had about 2 1/2 facial expressions and the neurons in his legs were not yet myelinated. We put a Christmas blanket on his bouncy chair, put him in the chair, put the chair by the tree, and voila. Not much he could do about it.

The next year, he was mobile and it was a whole other thing. I basically chased him around the living room for an hour and half (sometimes with puppets) and a few rolls of film later, we both collapsed, exhausted. Actually, I don't think he so much collapsed as tripped over his pants for the final time. The next two years, when he could communicate fairly well and understood what we were doing, it was pretty easy. This year was too (despite digressing into a little "I'm the Ghost of Christmas Past!" episode with a blanket) - one hour later, we were done. Here are a few of my favorites - I especially love the lighting on the 2nd one down. Critique if you like: