Happy Halloween

I don't see how anybody can grow out of halloween. Like mom and dad, all they do these days is pull out a plug-in pumpkin every year now. Old farts. And same goes for their slacking on Christmas lights at Christmas. Shoo, I plan on decorating and liking arts and crafts my whole life.


Pumpkins: All of them are mine except for the cyclops looking one. I did the girl for REACH at school, but I'm kind of disappointed because I don't think I managed to make a place in a contest- I apparently lost to a pirate pumpkin, a ninja pumpkin, and some other pumpkin. Oh well, she turned out better than I imagined she would. Skully turned out OK, and the Mr. potato head one has been popular. Jeff did the cyclops looking one. He did not used to be a cyclops- we seem to have had a mysterious animal the past few years who likes to gnaw on the pumpkins after we carve them. Hm. It was either rats or opposums (gross).

Note that in the single of me, the Phillies fan skull in the background. Yay Phillies.

Looking forward to seeing Sarah Palin and her husband. We had maybe 30 trick -or-treaters (about what I expected for our street), and everybody liked my costume. =) Jeff and I got the idea from a Subway worker at UofL who asked what we were having and was like "Yep, you've definitely got yourself a basketball there." Which apparently basketball = boy.

It's ma Birthday!

So I started this blog then of course didn't actually have time to make it, but I pretty much just planned to put up some pictures from the past few months (on the request of Jen). If you'd like to see even more pictures from lots of random times, visit my fb page. I think Jen just wants to see my belly (even though I'll be seeing her later today), so fine, I'll put some huge belly pics up. *boohoo*. I've gotten to the I'm feeling too big stage. Don't mind Jeff's hairy-chested, blue-boxered cuteness.

I also want to put up pictures of my new fish- which I also planned to spotlight on FB. Right now I've still got only 3, but I was expecting to get half a dozen or so for my bday but haven't yet and probably won't until next week unless Jeff gets them while I'm gone this weekend. If you hadn't already heard, we are making the fish tank into "the office." We have two Toby's, a Stanley, and have already had and lost our first Phyllis. Toby is a type of starter fish I forget the name of, Phyllis was a rainbow guami (?) we think died from stress bacteria, and Stanley is a black shark. We plan on getting a loach for Creed for sure, than the other ones won't be too hard to pick out. Is 15 too many fish for a 20 gallon tank? We also plan on gradually changing the scenery of the tank. Thus far, we have a plastic miniature fish tank for our fish. We want to find miniature plastic computers and desks, a plstic conference table, perhaps redo the rocks with blue to make for carpet. And then our backdrop? We'll probably have to makeshift one.

Well anyways... It's a Boy!

Not that I've known for like 3-4 weeks or anything! Haha. It's still up to Jeff to pick a name and I can't say we've made much progress on that since my last post. I personally am getting used to the Jimmy name the more I hear it from Mom and Dad, and Jeff says he likes Dad's middle name, Matthew. Oh who knows. If we look at a baby name list maybe Jeff will see something completely different that he likes. I finished painting the baby room/dining room early this week- it's a very nice, calming pastel yellow. I've set up Jenn's fish tank she let me have in it- but still need to scrub it down a bit, and fill it with water and fish... I also found a fantastic white shag rug for the room, thats so soft. I can't decide when to open it- I don't want the cats to claim it as their own so soon. Well, to keep the post about the baby, I thought I'd go ahead and put up pictures of all the ultrasounds.


April 21; 5 weeks gestational- see spot ! This really freaked me out at the time!


May 8; almost 8 weeks- His heart was beating- that freaked me out too at the time!


June 19; almost 14 weeks - Finally past the freaking out stage- he was moving incredibly a lot already! Bending his neck, waving his arms, kicking- And looking so cute already!

face


footprint

July 28 ; about 18 weeks - I could feel him moving a little by this point and of course the ultrasound once again showed he was moving all over the place! We meant to make this trip our first baby video, but alas, we forgot and won't be getting any more free ultrasounds... But Hey, It's a Boy! We wanted a boy. Or Jeff did- I liked the sound of either! But whatever, "boys are easier," right...?
He's a thumb sucker already.


face
a thinker
BOY

My next appointment is actually Monday. I don't think I'll be doing anymore ultrasounds, so I'm not sure what I'm doing other than being weighed and checked for blood pressure....

School starts Monday too. I've got most of what I needed to do done, of course, except finish my applications for med school. I finished 4 out of 8. I've got to finish them this weekend or they'll never get done. UK called and begged me to finish theirs (haha). Obviously not really begged but Oh they want me.

Jeff and I decided to keep the 75/100 number for our rewedding thing next summer. We need to book ourselves a honeymoon. Someone please give us advice on where to go in early July.

Adrianne/Aprille or Greg/Jeff Jr?

So I'm sitting around waiting for Jeff to get home so we can go to my ultrasound appointment.... =D. And in the meantime I'm making myself an 80s playlist. I can't figure out a way to embed so I'm just giving the link and I'll embed one song. And he might take a little while so I think I'll work on some of my easy-to-complete applications to pass the time.

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=12989A3CA706B5CB






I'll be letting everyone know by phone after the appointment. I haven't been this excited about something ...I don't know since I was a little kid at Christmas. What do I want? Goodness, I can't decide. Both =D

Yes I know The police was late 70s but whatever its close enough

My pre-law fling gone bad

This is an old and out of date story but since I haven't posted in a while I'll go ahead and tell it. So to summarize, I got a citation and was towed back in January for 'parking in a crosswalk', and spent $135 on impounding and citation feeds. I appealed and after my hearing I got a letter in the mail of denial.

I appealed because when I parked there, I felt uneasy about how close I was to the intersection, but took specific note that I was not blocking the cross walk (I knew I needed to do that much). When I came back out that afternoon, my car was gone and I walked home. I was upset and flustered and rather clueless for what offense I had occured to get towed, so I spent an hour studying the parking regulation laws here: http://www.louisvilleky.gov/PARC/Parking+Regulations.htm

Eventually, I found the law that I was suspecting may have been a problem: I violated

http://www.louisvilleky.gov/PARC/parkinggenerally.htm#72.035

72.035N, "No parking within 30 feet of an intersection." But boo! Everyone parks within 10-15 feet of an intersection. It was stupid but I had definitely broken that law. It was still interesting looking up all of this because I learned about many ambiguous parking laws that not only are unheard of but unenforced as well.

When I went to go get my car, I found out that I'd gotten a citation for parking in a cross walk, violation of ordinance 72.035F. Dad came out with me to the impound lot and I told him my story of innocence and he supported me in an attempt to appeal. When I got home, I drove back to the spot where I was towed and alas, it was still there (which is strange but perhaps they towed more than one car from that spot that day). I parked my car and got out to take photos for my hearing.
















I also printed out the list of ordinances that included my real offense and the tried offense. If I would have gotten a ticket for the 30 ft law, I wouldn't have gotten towed. That was a lot of the motive, getting back at least $120 in a time where I was already pretty broke being after Christmas and all.

At the hearing, I only needed to talk to one person, and the officer who wrote the ticket was not present. We compared my pictures to the pictures taken by the officer (which were angled very poorly almost to make a perspective illusion that I may have been in the cross walk). Sure, the officer would have to take my word that my reproduction of my parking job was legit, but she didn't say anything about that. My main argument was that I felt I deserved a reimbursement mostly for the sake that I got written a false citation. She tried to argue with me a bit but ended the hearing at one of my comments saying, "well, remember in the future not to park so close." I thought I had won, I felt like my argument was legit, and sure I don't know if I put it forth as organized as I should have, but she gave me the impression that I had done the job.

Dad called me a few days later to let me know I'd received a letter of my denied appeal. He says that the government just doesn't make financial room for reimbursing citations after appeals, or something. It was too bad. I thought it was fun looking up all the ordinances and feeling like I was some pre-law type trying to get a go at fighting a case. Whatever I guess. As for me and political sciences, I'll be taking the closest thing I'll get to it next semester in an honors seminar called Environmental Law. Ooh.

Updates updates

Well it has been a while since my last post and I actually have plenty to talk about. But since I don't need to go on too long about everything and I actually need to watch 2 movies before I go to bed tonight I will try to keep my comments short.

New Orleans trip: For those of you who didn't know I went to New Orleans on Thursday the 7th until the 10th for the Phi Delta Epsilon convention. It was a great weekend. I went to the convention last year with other PhiDE people and it ended up being very similar except for the fact that I went by myself this time as the delegate. As the delegate, my trip there has been completely covered, transportation, food, hotel and everything, so it was kind of like my idea of a preview of the conferences that doctors normally attend that are all about freebies (can't wait). I might've had to pay for free time activities, but since I was on my own I was able to take the opportunity to tag along with other chapters and with doctors attending the convention. Since I was usually with at least one doctor, all the tabs were covered (awesome).

I actually spent the entire flight to NO with Dr. Katz, a Louisville surgeon who comes to our chapters events usually once or twice a semester. He happens to be on the UofL admissions committee, and the time talking with him was incredibly valuable... In general when it came to socializing with the doctors, I got an extremely high amount of regard from almost every doctor I talked to. I guess the fact that I felt incredibly friendly all weekend really helped that, so I got great positive feedback.

Last year I was uncomfortable with the aspect of the hierarchy of power in the medical community, this year I just accepted the hierarchy, relaxed and did what was expected of me to fit right in. The convention gave quite a bit of opportunity for social interaction and I got a chance to see a lot of the must-sees of NO, mostly restaurant wise. Regarding what I got out of it PhiDE-related, I benefited from the convention with a huge list of ideas and ambitions for the rest of the 07-08 school year along with the 08-09 school year, which I have been elected as of Tuesday as President. So yeah, lots of good things came out of that weekend. Here are some of the better pictures I have, all taken with my camera phone because I ignorantly forgot a real camera...

The top photo is of dried catfish hanging in a grocery store that serves a famous sandwich like thing. I really should remember of the names because it was one of those must-go-to places, but I don't remember...

The next photo is of some buildings surrounding the French quarter adjacent to the famous cathedral which was behind me.

The third photo is taken outside of the Cafe DuMonde which is famous for its coffee and donuts. The donuts were pretty much the same thing as funnel cake, as seen from the powdered sugar all over the side walk in this photo. NO weather was awesome, 70s, short sleeves, nice warm breeze, sun, palm trees, ...awesome

The last picture is just one example of the bead pollution that still reeks in NO within a week after mardi gras. This wasn't on bourbon st. or the main avenue but it looked just like those places.

Politics: I read Tony's blog about the election and the ignorance of the voting process and felt pretty moved by his points. As of right now, I still lean towards the democrats but feel reluctant to pick Obama or Clinton. So maybe most of this is just because I took some issues compatibility quiz and got matched up with Kucinich, but its also just because I know I don't know enough about either Obama or Clinton to be able to legitimately try to support one of them...

Politics has been on the minds of myself and the college students amongst me more than I can recall ever before in the past. Perhaps this should be predictable for an election year, but even more so than that are the current issues that are prominent at UofL. There have been two major issues on campus in the past few weeks: (1) crime that is serious enough to require a student-body email has been very persistent this semester (usually in the form of muggings and robbery and the most serious occasion one involving a kidnapping at gunpoint) and (2) state budget cuts are promising many issues at the University in the near future, most notably the increase in tuition by 'double-digit' figures and a decrease in KEES scholarships. There has been general discontent in the form of communication between students on campus and on facebook and the morale at UofL is in general feeling very poor lately. There was a 'march on the capitol' event Wednesday where students of the state could try to speak against the state-wide higher education budget cuts, but I didn't consider going. Many groups and emails are prompting students to write the legislators. I care but haven't been motivated enough to act myself...

Big East Championship: Jeff, Jason, and I got six tickets for the Big East championship games from March 12th to 15th yesterday. We are stoked. NYC here we come on Spring Break! Go L'VILLE! It's going to be a fun time. Hopefully we will make a good chunk of money back from the $350 package price by selling a few games online. We need to figure out the legal aspect of that first though, probably...

*Update (2/22): We got our tickets today, check out the section 404 seats. =)

Storm

Last night weatherbug had an alert about a severe thunderstorm until 9pm. Strangest storm you'd ever see, on the radar it was just a narrow strip of red surrounded by a little green stretching north to south and moving to the east. When I heard the wind announce it's arrival, I looked out the window and watched the wind grow stronger. I went to the back door and couldn't see well out the window, apparently all of the I-65 lights had gone out along with all of the buildings across the interstate, including UofL, Harley Davidson, Manual, etc. All I saw was some white flashing thing in the distance. The wind was nuts, then all of a sudden an even stronger gust came and it was like I saw all of the trees in the backyard lean themselves to the ground, then I saw a flash of light as a tree landed in the back of our yard. At this point, I could've swore I was going to see a tornado emerge from the direction of the wind, so I went to wake up Jeff. There must of been a lot of noise all at once but I was a little preoccupied with freaking out. What made it a freak storm is that we went outside less than 5 minutes later and it was hardly raining and the wind had died down back to how it had been before the weather came.


Our neighbors had an even bigger tree fall, they lost half of a garage, a boat, and an entire shed. The tree landed on half of our cars. Denise's old cavalier is crushed, my back window got smashed (funny how I've gotten two windows replaced in a month), and the tree is still resting on the hood of Jeff's for-sale uninsured Focus. It's very disappointing for him.

past due IM experience summary

long title: but before I find it months behind me I'm going to summarize some of the more prevalent things I learned the seven days I shadowed Dr. H at University. Her specialty was Internal Medicine (IM).

1. Women are better doctors than men. Dr. H was a very compassionate and sympathetic doctor. It's all about the bedside manner and daily attitude. Meeting someone like her reinforces my intentions for going into IM. I have to say it is still probably my favorite, making it my favorite specialty for 7 months now. I think its a record.

2. I'm just going to have to get used to meeting pre-meds, med students, and doctors who are there for the buck. Every time I have shadowed, I almost always spend most of my conversation time talking to the lower level residents or the medical students (simply, the people who are at least a little closer to my level). I talked to an intern at University named Zach, and he was a really nice guy, but he complained about the IM busy work a lot always seemed ready to leave the hospital. He wants to work in private practice with Anesthesiology.

3. It seems likely that it's true that there is an influx of suicide attempts around the holidays , I only saw a couple of people who came in for it though. Both were just people who had taken drug overdoses. The residents were joking about how if there going to do it they gotta do it the right way (slit their throat artery). Sounds insensitive but I mean they were kidding of course, even if it's true.

4. Pretty much the only people who go to University are patients with no insurance. They all still get treated, though there are limits to what can be done... In the seven days I was there, one of Dr. H's patients was put into Hospice and passed away a couple days later, and I stood there and watched her tell a man he had a 15% chance of being alive in 3 months. Yes, it's all very dramatic, and I might not be putting enough sympathy into telling the story of it. But the point I was working on was that the lady who died in Hospice was in her 40s and had sudden liver problems over the few weeks before she died. A liver transplant costs $300,000, but other than for not having insurance, she would not have been a candidate for 6 months, anyway... The man was also dieing of liver problems, but they were related to alcoholism.

5. Which brings me to my next point. Sure, you hear of alcoholism, but of course nobody seems to take anything seriously until they see it. I wish there was a way I could exemplify how serious it is to those who need to hear it. The man I mentioned was in his 40s and was in extreme denial all of the days I saw him, saying things like "15%, I can make that, then 6 months without alcohol? I can do that, too." He seemed like a good, just lonely, guy. But the thing is, even if he lived 3 months, he still couldn't have long to live. Sad times, which brings me to another point.

6. There are a lot of lonely patients in University hospital. Not to mention young, all of them were under 60, many in their 40s. So few of the patients I saw had guests coming in to see them. At least a few of the people I saw there were homeless, and they also seemed to be enjoying there stay, even if they were sick. The people who had the most companion support were those who had came in on overdose. Isn't that something, yeah? Relationships are important in health though, everyone can understand that connection.

7. Jeez HIV is sad. That doesn't need any explanation. My favorite patient was the youngest (27) and one of the sickest. He also probably had some of the best companionship in the hospital.

Well, I think that was a lot of it. I guess I remember most of what I had wanted say after all. I'd end on a more lighthearted note but I'm not sure what to say to do that.......lol

And Jenn, your poll's options are too extreme! Plus, I need to see more photos =)

Soul Calibur with Darth Vader and Yoda

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeV30-ri-yY

Jeff wants me to show this to you Jenn, you can just skip to 3:30 to get to the part he wants you to see.

I still plan on writing about some stuff but I'll get to it later