QBank question stem:
"...The patient denies any family history of breast cancer and does not remember any recent trauma to the breast..."

answer explanation:
"...Frequently, this develops as a result of trauma, which the patient may have forgotten..."


Excellent. Apparently House MD's mantra of "everybody lies" even applies to theoretical patients created by Kaplan for the purpose of teaching second year medical students basic science principles.

If you have way a ton of time to waste, try this H&M Model Maker to 'try on' clothes.

I found this because I thought of what I wanted to write earlier. I was just going to complain that my cute little gold ballet slippers from H&M make one of my toes go numb the day after wearing them! The feeling comes back after a few days... so now that I know it's not permanent, I'm still wearing them :-/ It's pretty stupid, but they're so cute! There were only $12.90 so maybe I shouldn't be surprised.

So I want to figure out where I'm impinging the nerve so maybe I can pad them or something, so if anyone is up to anatomy studying and can tell me what nerve supplies sensation to the medial side of the pinky toe and where it runs, I'll give you a prize.
"No need to respond; simply enjoy the concept."

Sorry, I hate myself for saying that, but I couldn't help it. And, please, do respond! And don't enjoy the concept!

Yay! Second place in quizzo last night! And we didn't cheat and we had a normal number of people on our team. I'm very proud of us. We got a $15 gift certificate that we convinced our waitress to let us use that night (you're supposed to come back and use them a different day, but we don't know when we will all be there together again). We're throwing around the idea of going back to quizzo next week, but it always sounds like a good idea ahead of time.

I thought there was something else to add, but I'm sure it will come back to me. It's supposed to be warm and sunny so maybe we'll head out to the park after lunch. I need to work on my tan ;-)

High School Student Whines His Way To 4.0 GPA

JAMESTOWN, VA—Jamestown High School senior and National Merit Scholar Jason Wagner successfully whined his way to a 4.0 GPA for the fourth...

I've discovered that Warmdaddy's used to be on Front St. just south of Market, and they just recently moved to South Philly.

I was just reading about a behavior modification tool called the "Token Economy" -- when "a desired behavior is 'paid for' with a token reward (i.e. a positive reinforcer)." It reminded me of I guess the season finale of The Office when Dwight tries to get everyone to earn and use "Schrute Bucks." Then the textbook goes on to say that such a system is "used in mental hospitals and in working with the mentally retarded, tokens are later exchanged for desired objects (e.g. candy, movies)." That just made the episode so much funnier.

Also I'd like to add that I'm sitting here eating halved cashews with a spoon -- I don't want to keep getting my fingers greasy and salty when I'm trying to turn pages and look things up on my laptop. (Actually it's a trail mix I made of cashews and craisins -- mmm, try it.) The spoon seemed like the most practical solution, but I kind of laugh every time I take a spoonful because it's so silly.

And, no we didn't sneak into the second movie. We're not that cool :(

Back from my break day. It was pretty much filled with errands that had piled up. I did get to call my mom but I didn't get to take a nap or get a pedicure as planned. I painted my fingernails in the morning though, so I think I did OK.

Then at night we went and saw both Pirates of the Caribbean and Spiderman 3. They were both good ends to trilogies. I ate so much junk food it's disgusting.

We usually drive down to the theater on Columbus Blvd and it used to be surrounded by these abandoned storefronts... it looked kind of creepy. This time, one of them had turned into a pizza place and the other into a Jazz club / New Orleans cuisine restaurant, and it was packed! I guess now you could really go have a nice dinner and a movie, but other than that it seems like such a weird place to have a restaurant. I couldn't remember what it was called at first, but I finally found the website: WarmDaddy's. I want to go try it some time.

Totally slept through the alarm this morning, and we're trying to schedule in quizzo for tonight, so I really should go read something, anything.

Hahahaha
Yesterday those stupid lacrosse announcers kept talking about how even though Duke suspended the accused players and their season was canceled, they all stayed loyal to their school and their team. They had made a commitment to their team and they were staying true to that, and that really is the essence of sportsmanship... blah blah blah.

The very next day one of the three players comes out and says he's actually transferring to Brown.

Another player is still undecided.

Sorry folks, you can't force "storybook endings" just to get your ratings up.

It's still break day!
I just got up.
This is great.

BREAK DAY!

Only 3 more chapters of BRS Pathology left. I think I can make it.
And then tomorrow is break day!!!

That's me taking a break with my cousin Erin.

YEAH!!!

We beat "America's Team" 12-11. Sorry, America.

We so earned that. We trounced Duke during the first half (10-4 at halftime) and I guess that wasn't how the game was 'supposed' to go because when we came back for the second half, the penalties the refs were calling were ridiculous! The announcers were so biased that it was hard to listen to. We played a good chunk of that game with a guy sitting out, and a lot of time with a two player deficit from those stupid calls. But we never let Duke take a the lead.

Awesome. That was fun, if stressful.
Back to the books.

WOOHOOOO!

We rescheduled our day so we could watch the Hopkins/Duke Lacrosse game during lunch :)

I am seriously worried about head coach Dave Pietramala. He is going to have an aneurysm. You should see his jugulars. And he always looks furious...

We scored 12 seconds in!!!!

I know every one's rooting for Duke after the whole rape debacle last season when their whole season got canceled and their caoch had to resign for nothing. And even two seasons ago when we played them in the championship (it was Duke's first trip there while we hold the record for championship appearances) and we only beat them by a point in overtime after trailing all game, every one thought that Duke had really deserved to win.
But too bad suckas. This is our only sport and we have to kick butt at it.

It's funny because when we were in school we were kind of pissed that Hopkins recruits for lacrosse. It brings down all our school stats and consequentially makes our diplomas worth a little less. And all of the money that's spent! We knew that the whole program was powered by the alumni (my Grandpa has a similar rant about Notre Dame football) -- that the school could never stop recruiting and giving scholarships because there would be an uproar.
And, now that we're alumni we wouldn't have it any other way!

2-0 Hopkins!

Nope, the alarm clock is not broken.

So hot and humid in our apartment... I'm sure putting a pizza in the oven last night while I was running the clothes dryer didn't help. :)

Happy Memorial Day to every one.

Back to the books...

Today started my second week of posting -- I'm kind of excited to have two categories in the archive now, I look much more official ;-)
Really, I didn't know if this was going to stick, but it's fun. I usually like to produce stuff... baking, making jewelry, making cards... and I've had to give all that up for these 5 weeks. But, I think I need some type of output to balance all of this input (reading).

Our day off is only one more study day away and I'm so excited. I'm going to get a pedicure and call my mom and take a nap someplace.

Every time I've tried to type out the word 'excited' I've written 'exciting' instead and had to go back and change it -- I hope I caught them all. "I'm kind of exciting," "I'm so exciting"... I must subconsciously think I'm a rock star.

This rock star is headed downstairs to fold three loads of laundry before I can go to bed. Good night!

I have "More Than A Feeling" stuck in my head... partially from Guitar Hero, but mostly from Scrubs:

I had totally forgotten it's Memorial Day Weekend. That explains why there were so many tourists in Washington Square yesterday, and paying especially close attention to the tomb of the unknown soldier. And why our upstairs neighbors have all been gone for a couple of days. And why my doctor is on vacation. I guess that means that all of that mailing I was going to do tomorrow isn't going to happen... (what a difference a day makes... [if not our first dance song, I want it played some time at our wedding]).

Nesting parentheses -- more evidence that my mother is a math teacher. Last week I had to explain that to Selene after I repeatedly used 'X' to stand for an unknown/variable in a hypothetical situation I was talking about. And yesterday in the park I read that 10% of African Americans have the X-linked disorder Glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency, so I spent fifteen minutes seeing if I could calculate the carrier rate among women (28%!).

We're headed back to the park, and I'm glad we bought these plastic lined picnic blankets at CVS because I'm sure the ground is soaked from last night's storm. Maybe we'll have the park to ourselves :) It's supposed to rain again today, earlier this time, so I hope we make it home without getting (our books) drenched. I dry off well, my review books not so much. I think the reason that Pathology is so much harder than I expected is because what we called Path in our FCM class was just strictly what a pathologist does -- looks at biopsies, slides, whole organs and makes a diagnosis. In boards studying, pathology means disease, anything that can go wrong with the body. It's all of FCM, all 5 months, that we're supposed to review in 4 days. I think I was just in gear to be looking at pictures and describing cellular changes, not learning all of the meat of the boards. It's gonna be OK, especially when we take a break on Tuesday and then I study Behavioral Science next week :-D

Lastly, woohoo Blue Jays! Hopkins crushed Delaware in the semi-finals in front of a record crowd of 52,000 at Baltimore's own M&T stadium yesterday and now they'll play Duke in the Lacrosse championship game tomorrow. It should be a really good game -- ESPN, 1pm... I wish we could watch!

I really thought I woke up when the alarm went off this morning (at 7:30) but when I got up to snooze it (it's all the way across the room so you can't just roll over in your sleep to keep snoozing it) it was 8:13 or something like that. I would like to believe that there's something wrong with our alarm clock, as the exact thing happened like two days ago and it would give me a great excuse for why I haven't woken up on time since the first day we started this schedule. However, I know it's much more likely that I'm just sleeping through the beeping for 40 minutes before my brain allows me to wake up.

I made some more pharm flash cards last night, and I have a new plan. I think I am going to start taping them to the walls... the wall in front of my desk, refridgerator door, all over the bathroom...
I heard what I guess I should call an urban legand at the beginning of first year that someone in our class had covered the walls of their bathroom with anatomy flash cards -- and there was a laminated study poster hanging on the wall inside her shower.
If you've ever been in our bathroom you know our shower doesn't have any walls, but I'm sure we can rig something up.

a view from the Staten Island Ferry, early 2000.

Oh my God I am so sick of BRS Pathology. I'm supposed to finish the book in the next two days... maybe I should rearrange so I don't go insane.
We have our first break on Tuesday, but I feel like I'm going to be so behind in Pathology so I'll be freaking out all day. Yesterday I was going through the book so well I decided to stay with my original plan and not switch to the Goljan lectures... now I'm regretting it. Maybe I can listen to the lectures that cover my remaining chapters.
blehhhhhhh

ooooh first real thunderstorm of the summer :)

our satallite tv is out, of course, but for some reason our verizon dsl keeps going in and out too... maybe i will stay more focused on what i should be doing....

Let's Go Hopkins Lacrosse!

Ice Ice Baby

Last night I jumped in the shower and I wanted to shave my legs because their hairiness was attracting woodland creatures over to our blanket in the park. I was using a new razor and somehow it's always so surprising how sharp they are when you switch from an old one. So I got water in my nose or something and I quickly brought my hands up to my face. Unfortunately, the razer was pointing just the right way that it tapped (just tapped!) my eye brow, and now I have half a Vanilla Ice eyebrow.

(his is on the left away from the camera... he apparently always faces it away from the camera! I couldn't find a better picture. I guess just imagine his sideburn on his eyebrow if somehow you don't know what I'm talking about)

Now I'm actually glad I'm probably not going to see any one I know for days.

Also, regarding my last post, Glen told me it was actually a little girl and her name was Margo. This makes it funnier to me because it means what I was doing was even more ridiculous!

Man, I spent way too long looking for that Vanilla Ice picture. Back to the books.

We went back to Washington Square to study today, and in the late afternoon a guy started walking from the center fountain yelling, "MARCO!"

So I yelled, "POLO!"

What else was I supposed to do?
He came closer to us still yelling, "Marco!"
I yelled, "Polo!" a second time, but by now Glen was trying to get me to shut up because it had become obvious that the guy was actually chasing his 3-year-old son, Marco, who was quickly peddling away on a tricycle.
I was cracking up.

Also, I finally found out how to change my time zone settings to Eastern Daylight, and it retroactively adjusted all my old posts. I kind of liked Pacific time though, because it made me look like I was doing everything three hours earlier... up and at my computer by 6:30am, heading to bed by 9:30pm... I was the most industrious board studier ever!
Oh well. Luckily I opened this editing window before midnight so it will still be included with today's posts and not make me look like a total slacker, posting in the wee hours of Saturday morning.

Goodnight folks :)

http://www.wikitestprep.org/

200 questions available so far, but apparently very high yield ones and FREE.

courtesy of Faraaz :)

by the way, i changed the comments settings. i found out that before you had to be registered to the site to comment; and then the comments got sent to me for approval before they were posted so it seemed like it wasnt working. now anyone can say whatever they want. go crazy!

From Discovery News:

May 25, 2007 — Researcher Matt Mossbrucker believes four small dinosaur tracks found within sight of the skyscrapers of downtown Denver were made by two stegosaur babies, a find he says would be "incredibly rare."


I don't know why they're so surprised. It's just Denver! The last dinosaur! He's your friend and a whole lot more!

I didn't write much today because yesterday's pharmacology cards debacle kind of put me into panic mode and made me actually productive. We went and studied in Washington Square this afternoon, so I was also physically away from my computer, which is always helpful.

It was so good to be outside. The puppies, squirrels, and kids are amusing. We also got to see how different boys and girls are -- these two boys, maybe 4 and 5 were playing around a tree and in the process they accidentally (I believe) broke off the lowest branch, which was still much bigger than either of them. They kept saying, "wow!! did you see that?!" Their moms were sitting on a bench and couldn't see them, but then even when the boys brought the huge branch over, it didn't seem like the moms were too upset. The boys came back with the branch and were trying to figure out how they could break another one off so they could both have one. Finally two old ladies walked by with their little dogs and scolded the two boys and told them they shouldn't break the trees. So they stopped trying, but kept playing with their branch.
Then like a half hour later, a little 4-year-old girl came and saw the broken branch. She wanted to find the tree that it broke off of, and then had her dad try to stick it back on! When that didn't work, she brought it over to the fountain in the center of Washington Square and stood it up in there, I guess to help it grow? I don't know, it was really cute. Only when her dad told her that wasn't going to work either did she start to play with the branch a little bit.
All this time, a new little boy was watching. Just like the boys before, he started talking about breaking a branch off so he would have one too!
....Obviously, I wasn't studying the whole time we were there.

To give you a taste of what Lost geeks Glen and I really are, during lunch we listened to the producers' podcast about the last two episodes. A few months back, a taxi cab drove by us and we thought we heard the smoke monster from Lost. It was the noise of the cab printing out its receipt. After a few more episodes and a few more cabs, we were convinced that it was the same noise. But, everytime we told someone this in a conversation about Lost (that the noise the smoke monster makes is the sound of a taxi printing a receipt) it sounded like the dumbest idea ever. On this podcast, however, the producers read a fan question making the same claim and they confirmed that yes, they did actually get in a taxi cab and record that exact noise to be the sound of the monster!!!!!!! We were so proud of ourselves.

No, we did not submit the fan question. We're not that bad.
(But now I so wish I had!!!)

Finally, we just made reservations to go to Florida!!! I'm so excited. We're both taking our boards June 20th, so that on June 21st, one year before our wedding we can relax and be happy. And, I want to walk around Old City and see where the best photo ops will be around that time of the year to decide where to take our formal portraits and all that fun stuff. Then the next morning we'll be on a plane!! We're going back to the same hotel and beach where we got engaged in August :-) I feel a little silly going back to the same place when there are so many places I want to travel to, but this vacation is all about total relaxation, and not only is Sanibel perfect for that, but it will be nice to be comfortable and already know our way around. We're staying 5 nights and will be back on the 27th. YAY.
Oh, and USA3000.com is amazing! $74 for the flight down and $59 for the flight back. awesome.

Time to do some path even though it's gotten so late already.

Who would have thought that "retching" would be the proper medical terminology?

Lost finale.... interesting. I don't like to spoil details for ppl who haven't gotten to see it. Or totally bore people with how much of Lost geeks Glen and I am. I have to admit I wasn't quite as wow'ed as the last two season finales, but I think it was just because I suspected that 'revelation' at the end through the whole episode, and I was waiting to get proven wrong with that wow moment... but then I was just right. Also, at very end of the last two season finales, there was one more scene just out of no where that was jaw dropping, and we didn't get one of those... unless Glen and I just turned our TV off too soon! (just kidding, we got our dose of "Bad Robot!")

If you haven't heard, they are officially ending after three more (16-episode) seasons. They're going to do a '24' type thing and run them all in a row in the springs... so there isn't going to be a new episode until January! I guess that gives all you non-watching heathens time to buy the seasons on DVD and catch up. ;)

Lastly, I put up that header photo because that's my happy place, in Sanibel... nothing to do with Lost.

I've got to go to bed so I don't keep sleeping through what I've scheduled for the mornings. Those pharm cards didn't get very far... but there's no salvaging that situation tonight.
Gnite!

The dappled sunlight coming through the tree in front of our apartment just shone on me at my desk upstairs for the first time this year. I realized our apartment faces the same direction as my house back home, because there as it got closer to summer the sun would start to set on the right side of the Boyds' house across the street instead of the left. Here, it's setting to the right enough to be shining in through our front windows. Isn't it interesting how if the light is filtering through a lot of leaves, when it finally hits a surface (the floor of my apartment in this case) it's all of these perfect circles overlapping each other? You might not be able to envision that but you'd know what I'm talking about when you saw it.
Man, sometimes I just get so homesick... summers back on Oakland Avenue, maybe like 10 years ago when we were young enough to have water fights and play Man Hunt but old enough to stay outside late. I had one of those blocks with 20 kids on it. And the sun setting later and later now just brings me back :)
I guess it's not hard to get homesick for a different time and place when you're glued to a desk copying things like, "PABA antimetabolites inhibit dihydropteroate synthase."


(that's the mechanism of sulfonamides, in case you felt like quizzing yourself).

Today I've been productive while I'm working... but I keep getting started like 90 minutes later than scheduled. It's only day..... 4 I guess? So hopefully I will get fully into the swing of my schedule by the end of the week.

At lunchtime I put on mascara just to the go the grocery store. And real pants. So I sort of feel like an actual person today. Except I keep rubbing my eyes so I'm sure I look like an actual raccoon.

Our class got an email about mandatory criminal background checks today, which I thought was funny after finding that RedHeadMed student doctor post (linked below). And, surprise! We each have the pay the $77 fee. But, don't worry, financial aid considered that when they made up our aid package back in August, so we should all be covered. Yeah I sure noticed that extra $77 in my $60,000 worth of loans I took out this year, I was wondering what that was for. Good thing I tucked it away in my savings account and haven't spent it. UGH. And the stupid site wouldn't take my American Express card so I did have to take it out of my checking account. Towards the end of the semester, spending money gets tight around here.

And everyone should be aware that we don't get our next disbursement until the official first day of class, July 9th. So if your July rent is due on the 1st like ours, I hope you have that money saved away. You can actually get an "emergency loan" from the financial aid office before then, and later they will make your refund check out for that much less. I know this because, with the MBA we're doing, the refund check Glen and I each get on July 9th is actually made out to Widener University. We can give it to Widener any time we want, but they won't be able to make the refund checks out to us until our classes start there in the middle of September. Our financial aid lady was like, so do you think you have enough money to make it to then? Like oh yeah, I have extra cash lying around to cover 3 months worth of rent, bills, and food. I just like borrowing from the federal government for the fun of it. So that's how we found out about the emergency loans... yeah there's a lot of sarcasm going on here. I shouldn't blog about money.

One part of the background check that was funny was that we had to sign our name with our mouse. Here's mine:



not bad, but that was my second or third try :-/


I'm trying to make my own pharm flash cards from First Aid and I'm discovering it's very slow work. I'll try it for another couple of hours and see if it's going to work out with my schedule... if not, I might have to rework my whole strategy. I don't want to do that.

OK, I'm out.

UPDATE: that iced coffee experiment yielded a great buzz but the crash and associated sleep I was hoping for didn't come until after 3am. Maybe I ought to stick to plain sugar instead of spiking my sugar with high doses of caffeine.

Also, it's really hard to pick out an outfit that you want to sit and read in for 16 hours. It usually comes down to straight out pajamas, but I feel like such a slouch. I need some trendy cropped sweats or something... but who wants to spend their study breaks shopping for study gear?

I promised someone not in med school that I would shift to a little more wedding gab and attempt to tone down my nerdiness just a tad ;-)

I just found these really cool wedding invitations -- they have wildflower seeds imbedded in the hand-made paper so your guests can plant the whole card. It's part of the big "Green Wedding" movement going on right now -- making your wedding as eco-friendly as possible. But they're also really pretty!

I was wondering what to do with the 100 seed-embedded reply cards I would get back in the mail, but now I'm thinking I could tuck them away until we finally have our own house and plant a whole section of my garden with memories.

All of the new energy bars are all about eliminating the sugar high and subsequent crash you get from most snacks. They want to give you prolonged energy.
However, it's after 9:30pm and I'm falling asleep reading... I would love to somehow harness this high and crash... have a burst of energy for the next two hours and then crash and be able to immediately fall asleep.
I'm going to start experimenting. Tonight it's a caramel iced coffee at 9:30pm. My cardiologist would yell at me, but really, it's in the name of science; for the good of Boards studiers everywhere.

P.S. it is after 9:30pm in Philadelphia, but apparently my blog lives on the west coast... Vegas perhaps. (vagus? heh.)

I heart the Onion.

Study: 38 Percent Of People Not Actually Entitled To Their Opinion

CHICAGO—In a surprising refutation of the conventional wisdom on opinion entitlement, a study conducted by the University of Chicago's...

The article concludes by adding that there are such things as stupid questions.
it's weird to think i may never again be in a classroom with the Question Girls... not sad or disappointing in the least, just weird.

I thought RedHeadMed was such a fun name because... well, it rhymes. I just found out that there's a RedHeadMed on myspace and studentdoctor. I'm not as original as I thought! ...at least I'm not a convict.

Oh man, the season finale of Heroes was so disappointing! I don't want to go into details because I'm guessing a lot of people taped it instead of watching it live... but maybe it's better to know ahead of time not to expect the quality of the two previous episodes. They should have just squeezed the three good parts of this one onto the end of the most recent episode and it would have been excellent. As a huge Lost fan, I thought Heroes has been pretty good. But at the end of Lost season finales your jaw drops open and you stare at the person next to you (and I hope to be doing just that on Wednesday -- the finale starts at 9p this week, not 10p). As the end of this finale, we just 'eh.'

We only watched because we had to make up for the disappointment of missing tonight's quizzo at Doc Watson's as hosted by Dr. Bill "Bifringence" Kocher. How awesome would that have been? I already thought of several quizzo team names... you just have think of what you would like to hear Dr. Kocher say aloud. The possibilities are endless! Stupid boards.. I wish we had heard about this thing like a week ago so we all could have fit it into our schedules. Maybe they apreso'ed it......

There has been talk about getting out to one quizzo over the next few weeks, if the original pre-studying plan of every week now seems impossible. Maybe next Wednesday the 30th? Start getting ahead on your studying.



Haha - "getting ahead" on board studying. I make myself laugh.

Living in Center City has made me so lazy! I just walked over to CVS to pick up a prescription (stress is tearing my body to pieces, even though I'm put together mentally... for the time being) and the doctor hadn't called it in yet (damn doctors!). So now I'm groaning about having to walk all the way back to CVS tonight. CVS is one block down and two blocks over, and I take a short cut through a playground (I like to watch the babies... they have funny squeaky things in their shoes that make noise when they walk... I think their parents might think I'm a crazy person). It is certainly no more than a 10 minute walk, and after sitting in one chair for 8 hours it's probably all that's keeping me from a DVT. But still I'm making sure I call before I go this time. Just a few years ago I would travel an hour and 30 or 45 minutes into Manhattan to get to high school and later, to work. The 3 hour trek to Queens was often prohibitively far -- Mindy and I have never been to each other's houses back in NY; now we live fewer than 6 blocks apart and we're so lazy we meet in the middle!

Or maybe my energies are just misdirected. For example, I just mapped out that path through NYC but I can't get through this Respiratory Physiology chapter......

Guitar Hero - buy this game. We played it last weekend at Chuck and Carol's house and we bought it online as soon as we got home. It's like karaoke without needing any natural talent. It's fun, it's silly, and it is the opposite of studying. We've been enjoying it because you only have to play one song at a time, like 3-5 minutes, so you're not committing to a huge break... not that we've ever stopped with one song, but still, we could...
The songs on the games range from the 70s-present, and so I've been listening to (and "playing") a lot of songs I never thought I'd really get into, and that's fun. And, it's totally understandable when they stuck in my head; you have to really actively listen and pay attention to the notes and all that.
What is NOT UNDERSTANDABLE is why Black Eyed Peas "Humps" was on repeat in my head last night. I heard it in the car two days ago. This morning, it has morphed into Fergi-licious. So right now I'm taking a study break to try to pump some other song into my head... scouring my iTunes for some song more annoying than Fergie, because apparently that's what it takes for a song to get stuck in my head. Right now I think Britney's "Toxic" might be the winner. Wish me luck.

I'm about 24 hours into seriously studying for the Boards, and amazingly my enthusiasm is still high. Sometimes I just want to get started with the hard part so the hard part can be over. I did my first practice questions today. They can be amusing: one of the answer sets was A) primary hyperparathyroidism, B) primary hypoparathyroidism, C) pseudohypoparathyroidism or D) pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism. Another one's explanation was that "the rule of thumb is that the levels [of drug] decrease by half every half-life" -- that's not a rule of thumb, that's the definition of a half-life. OK, obviously my standards for "amusing" have already plummeted, but you have to get your kicks somewhere. I also have to admit I got an MP21 question wrong!!! (behavioral science, practice of medicine, whatever you want to call it) I actually went too sappy for them. I didn't think that was possible, I just chose the sappiest answer available and assumed that was what they wanted. Apparently the Kaplan QBank questions weren't written by our professors.

At 6pm, I finally changed out of my PJs and left the house for the first time -- the original plan was to get into this whole scheduled exercise thing by taking a long walk. Instead, since we had run out of paper towels at lunch, I took a not-so-long walk around the corner to SuperFresh. (I bumped into Donna on the way there, so I really felt like I was out having normal human interactions; very refreshing!) When I got out of SuperFresh, it was sunny but pouring out! I had no umbrella but didn't know how long it would last to try to wait it out, so I just headed home and got soaked. I guess I should be happy that I wasn't out on that long walk after all. It was kind of a nice rain though, and once again I am glad that we have our own washer and dryer, because all of my sopping wet clothes got thrown right in.

Speaking of laundry, there's nothing like doing ten loads of laundry to make you realize how much the weather has changed lately... or maybe how long it's been since I saw the bottom of my laundry basket. No turtlenecks, it hasn't been quite that long, but still some much warmer clothing than I would want to be wearing now... during the 25 minutes I leave the house each day.

One last thing -- during this past week, it was 400 days until our wedding :-D I wish I had some wedding planning scheduled into my days, but maybe I can bring a copy of Brides down to the exercise bike and multi-task. We got the latest menus from the Down Town Club, and although it's way too soon to decide, it's fun to look at the possible combinations of all that delicious-sounding food. Another fun distraction is trying to pick out where we should go on our honeymoon. We're probably headed to the Caribbean because we both love to waste the days away lounging on the beach, but we can't decide which island. If anyone has any recommendations, please leave a comment!

OK, I'm late for my date with Linda S. Costanzo.