I shadowed a doctor the other day and found it to be very encouraging. He was a senior medical staffer at a local hospital and seemed genuinely interested in my efforts to go into medicine, including telling me that I should make another appointment with him to learn more about the hospital and the kind of medicine they do. It's events like this that happen occasionally that help encourage me. I have days where I am thinking, "I must be insane!" to "Yeah, I can do this." I am told this is 'normal' for aspiring drs.

The semester has also gotten off pretty well and I feel a lot better about being able to deal with the material. I am on the verge of starting labs for gen chem 2 though. Labs... there's something about labs that makes everyone sort of cringe, me included. It's not that they are not interesting, they are... it's just they generally take a long time and, egad, you actually have to work woth other people in your class... egad! ;)

Well after reading this I feel much better about phones getting tapped all willy-nilly here in the US, etc. You see, I was sort of kicking myself for being so complacent about such things but now that I know there is a long and distinguished history of it yet even right here in the US of A, I feel so much better... yep-er... uh huh...

The job market in Rochester seems to have only gotten worse since I last lived here. Nonetheless I am undaunted in trying to contribute to the GNP this semester; I will visit the Med Center employment office tomorrow and see if I can get any kind of week-end work.

Classes have resumed. After last semester it almost seems to be a let-down really-- I guess the excitement of diving in is now absent. However I do have a shadowing appointment set up for next week (ie, shadowing a doctor) so I am looking forward to that. I am also steeling myself for the inevitable "Don't do it, lad... don't do it..." part of things.

As they say, you are not serious about becoming a dr. unless at least three of them have tried to talk you out of it!

This winter break has among other things given me time to watch standard-fare network TV. I must say it's gotten even worse than 10 years ago. The mainstream shows are pretty awful. There are however a couple sit-coms that can pass, but alas it is not a good harbinger that the producers of these are all on the other side of 60 and in the definite minority in terms of producing palatable stuff.

But lest you think that ALL my days in limbo here are spent watching tube and sleeping until 1:00 PM, etc. (and indeed a good many are), at least I am not blowing all my pocket money on such pursuits as drinking, fisticuffs, and whoring but mostly enjoying the kitties, web-surfing and of course, sleeping at odd times and for various lengths of time. [I have also hired a couple contractors to work on my basement. They have been as considerate as they can be, but sometimes they have had to use loud electrical tools as early as... as.... 11 AM... egad, the pains I must suffer! >)]. But I have taken on a pet project, the championing of the use of full-spectrum lights at my school. Rochester, as everyone who lives here knows, is drab, dreary, and downright depressing during the winter, and this is largely due to sunlight deprivation. One way people can survive this 6-month (or more) period of upstate-NY-darkness is to use full-spectrum lights around their home and offices. So I went to talk to the asst. to the provost today about the matter and she seemed genuinely interested in the idea. They are as cheap if not cheaper than ordinary lights, use less energy and most importantly would help keep students from falling asleep all the time during those looonnnggg lectures in cool, dark auditoriums that do little to energize the brain much less the body. I have mentioned this to professors, students, and staff and they all seem very into the idea.

Who knows, maybe one day it will come to pass that simply because of a change in lighting, students will no longer view classes in the main auditoriums as simply another opportunity to catch up on their sleep.

Happy New Year, my frisky ponies!

This is a nice story. It's a CNN video, so you need to use IE and have RealPlayer installed, and of course take the chance that the feed will crash your computer. But hey, it didn't do so to mine so I feel OK recommending it. It's a really nice story of a cat who speed-dialed 911 when his 'owner' was incapacitated.

Now let's see if I can do something like that, maybe get my cats to to feed themselves... wait, that's not really a good idea. Maybe clean their own litterboxes, but feeding? Then I'd have five realllllyy fat cats after doing that!