Time keeps on slippin'...

No, there is nothing wrong with your eyes. This is actually a new post! (although i'm guessing i have reused the title ... not bothering to double-check yet)

Things have been quite busy for me. Thanks to those who have been checking in periodically and sending well-wishes, etc. Things were pretty bleak when I was unemployed (although then I had lots of time for blogging!). Got a temporary gig in Chicago in July, and just as I started settling into that a full-time position opened up in Springfield. Interviewed in August, relocated in September (about two days before starting work!), and the rest has been a whirlwind. Blogging (and keeping up on reading blogs) has had to take a seat in my standing-room-only world of work and other excitements like paying bills.

We're finally unpacked and settled into the new place, and trying to restart healthy routines like exercising and getting some minimum amounts of sleep. Keeping up on world events and venting a bit on this blog are also in the works. I did update the "about me" and the "music" tabs under the header. This spurt of false "productivity" will probably last me through next June. :-)

In the meantime, I will be trying to catch up on all those blogs I used to read, in addition to studying for my Surgery in-training exam in January and keeping up with my other duties. And slowly getting rid of all the junk in the extra boxes I've been hauling around during my last three moves.

Bonzo bits

(gonna pilot this one here - a section for little anecdotes and observations)

Text message spell-check is pretty square

My wife was heading to her "Bloody Mary Mafia" meet-up (that's a topic for another blog) this morning before I had finished up at work, so she sent me a quick text to update me. "Walking to the car now" is what I received - which is weird 'cause I had the car at work. Apparently she uses the "auto-complete" feature, and her phone didn't suspect that "bar" would be the intended word choice at 11:17 am on a Saturday. Go figure.

C.R.A.P.py wednesday

Catch-up Rants And Platitudes - #9

yesterday,
this "kitty flu" seemed so far awa-ay-ay,
now it looks as if it's here to stay,
o-o-oh, how i wish i could shake it today...

Sorry, I don't like to whine about my health here - especially two posts in a row, but this really hit me outta nowhere and finally seemed to be nearly gone yesterday. Then I start again with the sneezing, coughing - it's moved into my airway and is hanging tight. Oh, well - breathing is over-rated anyway.

The job hunt

Ups, downs, and crevasses so deep that light cannot penetrate. It's amazing how varied places are about whether or not they even reply to inquiries. And how. Some take weeks before they respond and then give you a name to retry with, others forward your materials and send you info back by the next day. I expected research positions to be available at a dime a dozen, but these are as difficult to scare up as residency spots. I have broken out of my box and started applying for other related positions as well. I can't believe that I cannot scare up a "training position," but I have a solid bite on a "medical director" position DESPITE my repeated emphasis on my lack of experience. That will be an interesting pursuit....

All the proper "official" training programs seem to be sopped up for now - although last-minute cancellations could swing something in my favor. In the meantime the most promising lead (which I still don't have enough info on yet) is a somewhat-equivalent training position to what I have been seeking, but for only 1 year, at an un-accredited program in a hospital that will be hell to work at (but a good educational experience).

The rest of my life

Just as I am ready to step back and see what spins from the job hunt, another set of hoops presents itself. I feel so back-logged in my other endeavors. I actually took a full week off from my volunteering activities but I'm still just treading water. Part of the whole frustration is about finding a new place to live, but since I could just as easily be moving to Ohio or Colorado vs. staying right here in Chicago, it's hard to get serious about packing and choosing some new digs. But I desperately need to do so - this place is bleeding me nearly double what I should be spending.

That "pack rat" gene isn't helping either - still have TONS of crap to go through and toss (or sell - dumped several boxes of old books, and made about $50 on the deal too!), nevermind the reading I should be doing to stay current. Exercise and keeping up on news keep getting shifted to the back-burner as well.

Politics

Again, have been on hiatus about serious topics, but hoping to get back into it soon. Was as amused as ever to see the opposite reactions to Obama's Middle East speech - with the neocons and right-wingers calling it an apology tour, and the rational Americans applauding his moves toward building unity on the national stage. Would be nice to see some positive changes over there, and I think we have a real chance... if other people and events don't screw things up. These reporters held prisoner in North Korea - hopefully the "leverage" that situation is creating can be resolved in a peaceful manner.

Glad to see that the gay marriage issue is slowly swinging the right direction - what are we at now, 6 states that have legalized it? When is "Don't ask, don't tell" gonna get the ax then? I know there are other priorities out there, but this is causing problems with availability of translators in the military, and should be a welcomed relief for our already-overused service people to get more personnel over there.

Movies

Have yet to get out to see Star Trek, but hopefully I can make that happen next week. In the meantime, have managed to sneak in some views of newer DVD releases, so I'll try to get some reviews up soon. Rotten Tomatoes seems to have overhauled the site nicely - I'll have to update my sidebar links, and will point you in that direction when I've got something to show there.

In the meantime, back to my unscheduled grind - hope to have some good news soon!

Feline influenza

So yesterday I was hanging around the apartment, and decided to nuzzle the kitty 'cause she looked so cute curled up on the back of the couch. As I brought my face down to her level, almost on cue, she sneezed right in my face. I was momentarily disturbed by that fact, and it gave my wife a good laugh, but otherwise I didn't give it a second thought. Later, poor kitty had some gastronomic upset(*) outta both ends - again, not something all that rare, so I didn't linger on that fact much.

Then about the time I finally got around to cleaning up her messes, it finally struck me why the day seemed to be progressing in slow-motion. I was getting sick! Headache, sore throat ... maybe I caught something from the little petri dishes (**) I came into contact with recently. Overnight I rapidly advanced to chills, full-body aching, and nearer the morning I started burning up. This was no mere "bug" I had caught - this was a new breed of microbe I cooked up thanks to my cat and attempting to be "cultured" by visiting a museum. Now they'll have to take cultures of ME, patient zero. Will "kitty flu" be the new pandemic?!?

The good news I am feeling a little better already today - the sore throat is receding some instead of getting worse, and I don't believe there was any sign of fever this morning. Now if I could just burn off this brain-fog, shake the headache, and lose the body aches....


In the meantime, both kitty and I are taking it easy today. And the wife wisely escaped for a while.


* dunno why i'm feeling so euphemistic, but go with it and be glad i'm sparing you the details.

** on Thursday I finally got to meet a buddy's kids - one about 4 years old, one about 6 months. I'm always surprised at just how much drool these little ones can produce. Then on Friday we took advantage of a "free day" at the Museum of Science and Industry, which was teeming with screaming rugrats and only a fraction of the interesting exhibits I was expecting / remembering. Translation - skip it unless you are bringing your own kids and are VERY PATIENT.

I want a new drug....

I never really thought of myself as a junkie, but with re-runs of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert this week, I've been letting the TV drift to MSNBC and watching some of their hosts. My wife can't stand Chris Matthews, and personally I find all the yelling and talking-over-each-other very disagreeable as well. Keith Olbermann is somewhat more tolerable, but his mocking voices and bits like "worse, worser, worst" (anyone else wanna bitch slap him back to grammar school, unless he agrees to revise that to "bad, worse, worst"?) get kinda old - even if the material is topical and poignant.

Rachel Maddow is the most tolerable of the bunch, and when I first stumbled across her I was very much a fan. Lately I find her a bit too repetitive - the first half of her bit tonight about the bashing of the new supreme court nominee Sonia Sotomayor was mostly rehashing her material from yesterday (or recently) - for a while I thought I was watching a rerun.

More disturbing, however, is how this "news network" is turning more and more into an attempted mix between a formal news broadcast and comedy central. Stewart pointed it out himself, talking about their coverage of the "tea baggging" on tax day - how the MSNBC hosts were playing up to the *sexual* connotation of that term (if you still aren't all awares about that, do yourself a favor and "google" it, "wiki" it, or at least check it out at the "urban dictionary") and the obliviousness of the republican organizers, and apparently most participants and many correspondents as well.

They have really crossed the line - or jumped the shark, as it were - with segments like Keith's "WTF? moment." We all know what it stands for (or - again, look it up!), but do we really need a professional news show host to be repeatedly dumbing-down their shows and going for shock value? They have already adopted the worst aspects of network news, giving mini-teasers before commercial breaks and throughout the show, hoping to get you to stay for the end. Sometimes you hear the same lead-in / promo for whatever "story" 5-6 times before they actually get to it, and they spend less time discussing the story than they do promoting it. I guess it's tough to fill their hour-long slots. Is that why Rachel talked to a friggin' spelling bee winner for a huge segment of her show tonight?!? Ugh!!

Something I did find interesting was her reaction to all the bashing of Sonia Sotomayor. I do agree that it sounds very negative and one-sided, and I applaud the effort to bring out the true and full details of this reverse-discrimination case that is up before the current supreme court now. But along with her call to keep discussion of Sotomayor's nomination civil, she also seemed to be calling for a silencing of Sotomayor's critics. They do need to be making fact-based arguments and should be encouraged - hell, bound by their "position in society" - to be civil and respectable about things, but any reference to "silencing" the dissent or debate would be counter to our principles as a nation.

The other interesting item on her show was all this hubbub about Dick Cheney and his persistent defense of torture. Now he's got his daughter Liz Cheney hitting the trail for him as well, talking about these mysterious classified memos that demonstrate the "effectiveness" of torture. I understand she is a lawyer, but what precisely is her expertise with respect to these classified memos? Has she seen them? I don't believe she is involved highly enough to have that clearance (although I could be wrong - anyone know? I didn't see much in my initial search on-line), so unless daddy breached security and showed them to her, she really shouldn't be talking them up. As opposed to Carl Levin, who has seen the memos and is finally speaking AGAINST Cheney's claims. But just like Meghan McCain, Liz Cheney is a hot blonde republican. This is probably more related to attempting to change the image of the republican party, "rebranding" it with new faces (even if what they are spewing is old hat). If the party keeps moving in this direction, they may finally decrease their dependence on Viagra!

Meanwhile, even General Petraeus is admitting that the Bush administration violated the Geneva Convention .... I look forward to further developments on a thorough investigation and some holding of appropriate people accountable, to the U.S. as well as the people of the world that we claim to be role models for.

Ah... it feels good to rant again. More to come!

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All photos lifted from google image searches.