No-Sew Bedskirt

Looking back at this blog's archives, I've realized that I have a tendency to mention something cool I've made or done, promise to write another post about it, and then totally forget about to do it. This is me actually remembering to put up some pictures for one of my crafts!

We just moved into a new apartment a few weeks ago, and the way the furniture is set up in our new bedroom, it was really noticeable that we lacked a bedskirt (also that we stuffed a ton of random junk under our bed). I don't have a sewing machine, so I found a quick tutorial for a no-sew bedskirt and forged ahead.

It was actually very, very easy to make. The trick is getting a canvas dropcloth from the hardware store. It's a nice, neutral color, it comes with pre-hemmed edges, and it was only ten bucks for the size I needed! Then, all you have to do is cut out three rectangles along the edges of the dropcloth, for each side and for the end of the bed. I ironed everything to get it nice and smooth, then just pinned the canvas to the fabric of the boxspring with some T pins. All told, it took about half an hour to make the whole thing and most of that was probably ironing.

Before:

After:

It really makes the bed look a lot more finished. And for $12 (for the dropcloth and the T pins), it turned out to be a much better deal than even the cheapest bedskirts I found for sale online. Not to mention that mine is perfectly customized to fit the height of our bed exactly.

P.S. This is just for a better view of the Celtic knot pillow I made with my mom a few months ago (yet another craft I never mentioned...). It's basically just two long, stuffed tubes of fabric tied into a Celtic knot, and it makes a pretty funky pillow.

Pictures I Lost When My Memory Card Randomly Died Earlier This Year

• Christmas with Michael's family
• Cute cloud dessert I made for my friend's baby shower
• A bunch of awesome stuff I crocheted (and since most of it was gifted away, I can't just take another picture)
• Conversation heart mini-cheesecakes I made for Valentine's day
• Michael's birthday
• Spring break with Megan and Rachel. There were pictures of us with cows and goats and also eating legit North Carolina barbecue and these pictures are gone forever. 
• Easter
• Capon Springs

I don't know, probably more stuff but that's all I can remember. The moral of the story is that SD cards can spontaneously corrupt themselves, so you need to back up your pictures more than once every six months. :(

Things Which We Have Been Repeatedly Instructed To Never, Ever, Ever Do When We Become Doctors*

*All of which I saw one single attending do today

• Stare at the computer screen typing notes instead of making eye contact with your patients
• Enter or exit a patient's room without washing your hands (alcohol sanitizer counts for this, but she wasn't doing that either)
• Order expensive tests that don't change your treatment plans (in this case, loooots of MRIs for people who might maybe have vascular dementia but are already on aggressive lipid and BP meds so whether you see tiny strokes on the MRI isn't really going to change their treatment)
• Never look at the expensive images you ordered; instead only read the radiologist's report (not that you should ignore the radiologist's findings, but you're ALWAYS supposed to actually look at your own images. EVERYONE says that!)
• Document that you checked certain things in the physical exam when you did not actually check them (for instance, I could see in her notes that she always documented that reflexes were intact when I could see from six feet away that she was just randomly hitting the patient in the arm with the reflex hammer a couple times, several inches away from the anatomic locations where you can actually get a reflex response!)

I was pretty mad at what a waste of educational time today was (did I mention that I wasn't allowed to interview or examine a single patient the entire day??? Although I apparently seemed capable of making copies for the stupid attending and relaying messages to her stupid assistant), but at least I accumulated a big list of things that I hope I will NEVER do in my career.

*Generally, third year has been exciting and educational thus far, but this one day was so absurdly bad that I thought it deserved a post.

-itis

I really like the way they pluralize conditions that end with -itis. Example: when you're talking about all the different forms of vasculitis, you say "the vasculitides" (vas-cu-LID-id-ees). It is super fun to say fast. I think my favorite is hepatitis, which becomes hepatitides (hep-uh-TID-id-ees).

Those two, nephritis, and meningitis are the only -itises (-itides???) that I've really heard people do the weird pluralization for. The thing is, you only pluralize -itis to indicate that you're talking about a group of multiple distinct syndromes, not to indicate multiple occurrences of a single disease. Like, it wouldn't work to say, "There sure are a lot of rhinitides going around these days" because that makes it sound like there's a whole bunch of different causes and different rhinitic syndromes when really, everyone just has a stuffy nose and it's probably mostly from the same virus. Most other inflammatory conditions besides the ones I mentioned don't really come as groups of distinct syndromes with different causes, so there's generally no need to pluralize. And that makes me kind of sad, because I really like weird Latin pluralizations.