Books Read This Summer

1. My Father's Tears by John Updike
2. Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett
3. Perfect Light Desserts by Nick Malgieri
4. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
5. Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett
6. Mirror Mirror by Gregory Maguire (weeird)
7. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
8. The Chosen by Chaim Potok
9. The Wild Life of Our Bodies by Rob Dunn
10. Snuff by Terry Pratchett
11. Every Living Creature by James Herriott

I'm reasonably pleased by that list, especially considering that my summer was only nine weeks long and most of it wasn't a true break from school and work anyway (but it was a very excellent ~60% break).

Fitness test

I just did a fitness test at OSU, and I was very pleased to find that my VO2max (measure of aerobic fitness) is in the 80th percentile for my age and gender. Not bad!

I was also very amused at my results of the strength tests: I scored well above the 90th percentile for lower body strength (woohoo!), but for upper body strength, I didn't even crack the 10th percentile. Talk about lopsided. Clearly, I am a circus freak.

Gingerbread House

We just barely found a gingerbread house kit that one of us had gotten for Christmas...

We didn't really feel like leaving a gingerbread house on display for weeks in the middle of summer but we also didn't want to lose out on the fun of making it by eating everything straight out of the box, so we decided to make it as fast as we could and then immediately devour it. Isn't it beautiful? I'm sure you can tell that in the front yard, there's a scared ghost and a very well-decorated Christmas tree. Also, there were supposed to be gumdrops but I just ate them all. Also, the manufacturers were lazy about the nutrition facts, and instead of listing it for the different elements separately, they just listed the nutrition for 1/36 of the whole box. Silly.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

Strawberries

Last week Michael and I went strawberry picking. I've always wanted to go—I've enjoyed the fresh-picked bounties of side-of-the-road farm stands many times, but I've never actually picked my own. Farm strawberries are always amazing: tender, bright red all the way through, gently warmed by the sun, bursting with juiciness and true strawberry flavor, and sweet sweet sweet. Basically all the things that grocery store strawberries are not. I can't get enough of them.

Such a wholesome view, right? When we arrived, an old lady greeted us, gave us some collecting baskets, and told us, "Make sure you try plenty! Gotta make sure they're delicious!" There was also a sign hanging up that said "Please eat as you go!" Fine by me! I was of course going to eat one or two before we weighed our baskets, but since you pay for what you harvest by the pound, I would have felt too guilty about more than that. Fortunately for us, we apparently got free rein to eat as many as we wanted.

And once we actually walked out to the rows of strawberry plants, the aroma was suddenly incredibly strong. It was sweet and fruity and oh-so-strawberry. It was seriously making me giddy before I picked a single berry. Have I mentioned how much I love farm strawberries?

Beautiful!

And then we just picked a bunch of berries, each of us on one side of the row of plants. I think pleasant is the best word for the morning. Really, really pleasant. It was sunny and in the low seventies, the smell was amazing, plus we were pretty much alone in our little sector of the field, so it was really fun to just chat and enjoy each other's company in the warm, strawberry-scented air, snacking as we went. We forgot to have someone take a picture of both of us with our loot, so...here's a picture of just Michael!

He would make a cute migrant worker.

Anyway, we ended up with five quarts of fresh strawberries for twelve bucks, which is an awesome deal compared to roadside stand/farmer's market prices but a pretty bad deal when you consider that we were basically migrant workers for an hour. It's an important part of the strawberry picking experience, though!

Yum. We probably ate about half of the berries out of hand over the next week (which is absolutely the best way to enjoy fresh berries), and then I made strawberry vanilla jam with one of the last quarts. It was my first experience with making jam or canning anything, so it was an adventure in and of itself. But the jars all sealed properly and there was enough left over after filling the prepared jars to keep a little half-full jar in the fridge...which meant that we got to try some right away, hooray! The flavor was awesome. Steeping the berries with sugar and vanilla beans before cooking them was absolutely inspired. The only thing that turned out funky was the texture (and this was probably a result of my own inexperience). Instead of being a homogenous, spreadable jam, it turned out more like a bunch of sliced strawberries in some delicious syrup. Oh well. It was still the bomb on toast.

 It'll be hard not to bust these open before the winter...

And then yesterday, when the remaining berries were on their last legs, I made a quick flummery, which I usually use as an ice cream topping (it was half strawberries and half blueberries, which is why it looks so purple). It was a great way to say goodbye to those amazing strawberries.

See you next year, strawberries!

Call Me Maybe

I just realized that I've been mixing up Carly Rae Jepsen (singer of the infamous "Call Me Maybe") with Christy Carlson Romano (former Disney Channel star). Sooo...every time I've ever heard that song (up until now), I've been envisioning the girl from Even Stevens singing it. In my defense, it wouldn't be that surprising if it was from Ren Stevens, considering it really does sound like those cheeseball wrote-it-in-five-minutes pop songs that got played on the Disney Channel during commercial breaks (you know, the ones sung by actors who were trying to make it really big by "crossing genres").

Medical Student Syndrome

My months of medical school hypochondriasis have finally paid off—at various points in this year's curriculum,  I had convinced myself (with varying degrees of certainty) that I might have tongue cancer, a MRSA infection on my arm, meningitis, a subarachnoid hemorrhage, and I can't even remember what else, but fortunately, I've been very wrong each time. But today I was going over a lecture about sleep disorders and realized that for the first time, I actually meet the all diagnostic criteria for something real! Apparently I have restless leg syndrome! Um, I do not plan on seeking treatment, considering it's never actually bothered me; I never even knew it was weird until I got married and Michael started making fun of the way I have to kick my legs sometimes at night, . I'm very pleased to find that even the paranoid, diagnostically blind medical student sometimes finds a nut!

Med School

Ok, I just wanted to say how happy I am to be in med school. I can't believe the stuff we're learning. We spent a few days last week learning how vision works and how an incredibly complex system of neurons manages to translate photons into meaning. It is just incredible how complex we are. And today I was watching a lecture (every lecture is podcasted, woohoo!), and some of the stains of cerebellar neurons were just breathtakingly beautiful. Like, I almost got a little choked up looking at the pictures and thinking about what they mean. And you guys, I don't even really like neuro that much. But I just feel really grateful (a) that we as a human race get to know all this freaking awesome stuff and (b) that I get to dip my toes in the fountain of knowledge. So, so cool. And next week when I'm starting to freak out about our test and how unprepared I feel (side note: I ALWAYS feel woefully underprepared and full of doom and gloom the week before exams, and I'm pretty much always wrong. The last exam, I was seriously crying my eyes out the day before because I didn't know how I could pass the test, and I ended up pulling a 97. ANYWAY), I can look back at this post and remember how happy learning makes me. Also, this is one of the pictures that I thought was amazing:

Isn't that beautiful?

P.S. I was telling Michael about some of the stuff I'm learning, and I mentioned the word glutamatergic.
His response: "That's an awesome word. Is that like a liturgy about glutes? A butt sermon?"