Six months to go!!!

Big Brother

I had been treating this blog as if it were mostly between friends -- I've only posted the link on my Google talk away message and only people whom I email personally can see that. But, I've always tried to write knowing that anyone could read it. It is public, and at the very least there's a "Next Blog" option at the top that takes you to a random blog. They're usually in another language, but I'm sure people have gotten taken to mine. So I thought it was close friends and random strangers, two parties you can say mostly anything in front of. Or even be completely boring in front of.

However, this week I discovered that if you google my name, my blog is the top hit. This is a new thing. It really bugs me out. We had a discussion at our staff retreat in September about how googling is now the most common way to find out about another person even in the business world... and we talked about how you should be aware of what comes up when someone googles you and how you can attempt to manage and manipulate what Google will rank highest.

I google my friends, family, coworkers all the time just out of curiosity. I figure their achievements are most likely to be posted on the web and I want to see what they're famous for, what got them published per se. But now, it's not that I was a National Merit Scholarship Finalist in 2001 when I graduated from high school that's the top hit anymore, it's this blog... my boring ramblings to my closest friends when I don't have time to contact them directly, or when I need to get something annoying out of my system or share an interesting or outrageous article. That is what is getting presented to all the world as the best match for me. Haha, kind of deep I guess.

(I'm actually not even sure how this is matched to my name because I don't have my last name in my profile and I try to hardly ever use my last name in my writing. I guess because Blogger is a Google feature and this account is registered under my gmail which is registered under my name. Google is scary. I wonder if I used a different blogging service if it would still come up...)

So now I have to go back and reconsider whether I've really been writing as if anyone might read it. Would I want one of my bosses reading this? I wrote a little bit about stuff at work and although I didn't use any names, if you worked in our office you would obviously know who I was referring to. I might take down the picture of myself in a bathing suit from my vacation to Florida in June. I feel embarrassed about all the whiny stuff I've written -- I don't think a potential employer would hire me based on these ramblings. This blog could be a professional liability.

We might be going offline for a while. I'll keep you posted. Probably not here.

AAHHH!!!

Less than 200 days until the weddding!!!!!!!!!!


An interesting tip from Brides.com:

Let perfume dry on its own after spritzing—rubbing it into the skin changes the scent.

Two of the three of my bridesmaids who I'm "friends" with on Pandora, have the same most-recently-added radio station -- Justin Timberlake Radio.

Just an observation. Bringing SexyBack, ladies?

Finals period + craziness at work means I have my full range of stress symptoms back:

heartburn
GI trouble
heart palpitations
shortness of breath
hiccups
hives

I feel like my old boards-studying-self again!

As soon as I re-develop dermatographic urticaria, then it will be like being back in my clinical rotation. Oh, memories...

Stand back - you don't want to catch my CV.

The way I wrote, "because of my CV" in the last entry makes it sounds like some sort of chronic illness.

I think CV might be used more in the sciences, I'm not sure, but it stands for curriculum vitae, in case you didn't know. It's a résumé.

Wikipedia just taught me that curriculum vitae is Latin for "course of life" and résumé is French for "summary."
That makes CV sound pretty deep.

A rose by any other variety of its name?

A coworker just called me "Al!" and then added "-yson" because he didn't know if he could call me that.
I introduced myself as Alyson at work because that's what everyone was calling me before I got here because of my CV.
When I started med school I decided just to introduce myself as Aly to everyone because a lot of people end up calling me that anyway and at least it would be homogeneous then.  But now Mindy's at Jeff and she calls me Alyson so that mixes everyone up, but it would be weird to me if she called me anything else.
I never introduce myself as Al, but it works.  My sister calls me that much of the time and Lisa called me that through most of high school.  I also had a friend in the 6th grade named Maxxzina (a teacher asked her if her parents were playing Scrabble when they named her) who called me Al out of the blue.
I think of myself as Alyson, I think because that's what my mom calls me (when she's not calling me Gee, Scooch, or any of a variety of other nonsense words).
So Glen starts work in the office tomorrow and it takes a lot of work for him to not refer to me as Aly, so we'll have to see how the distribution changes over the next few weeks.

Now that it's December, time for a some Christmas decor on the blog.

I also bought some Christmas lights at CVS for the apartment... 20 lights that were supposed to be over 7 feet long, actually only have 4 feet with lights on them -- there's another 3 feet of just cord. So those aren't enough to decorate around the fireplace; I might bring them to work and light up our window. It would be nice to have something there when I gets completely dark out at 4pm.