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.