Homeowners!

Ballard is a nice place – and I think it’s even nicer now that I live there. ๐Ÿ™‚

รƒโ€šร‚ย A.J. and I bought a townhome in Ballard and we moved (a lot of) our things in last weekend.รƒโ€šร‚ย  We’ve spent all our free time since then moving things, unpacking, organizing, and of course doing lots and lots of laundry.รƒโ€šร‚ย  We donated a truckload of clothes/kitchen stuff/random items to Goodwill the other day (which felt great) and we’re getting cloer to be all moved in.

It is so exciting, and our place is great!รƒโ€šร‚ย  It’s brand new (just finished being built by Columbia Rim – the business A.J. and his dad are running) and I just love it.รƒโ€šร‚ย  We have a dishwasher, and clothes washer/dryer.รƒโ€šร‚ย  We have different floors with stairs in between. We have more thanรƒโ€šร‚ย double the number of rooms that we were previously living in!

We’d love to have you over for dinner / moviesรƒโ€šร‚ย / snacks / visiting.รƒโ€šร‚ย  If we don’t call you soon, then call us.รƒโ€šร‚ย  ๐Ÿ™‚

P.S. I promise we’ll get pictures soon. I’m working in the ER right now and don’t have any access to them. But soon…

I-90 Pile-up

We had another snowstorm in our area recently and ended up with a HUGE pile-up on I-90, as you can see in these pictures:

i90-crash2.jpg

i90-crash.jpg

I’ve never seen a crash like this before that I can remember. I can’t even imagine how it must have been to be one of the drivers… especially one in a little car with a semi jack-knifed and skidding toward you!

Love is in the Air

Washington Mutual Center engineers spent more than five hours yesterday afternoon to carefully close window blinds in various parts of the west side of the building to form a giant heart in the downtown Seattle skyline. The 180-foot Valentine was completed shortly after 5pm. The engineers estimated it took more than 1,500 adjustments to the blinds to create the heart.

I was a Snowbunny

SnowBunny

This past weekend I re-discovered the joys and excitement of snowboarding, and I can’t wait to hit the slopes again soon!รƒโ€šร‚ย  I was quite nervous strapping into my bindings and standing in line for the lift… I hadn’t been to the mountain for a couple of years and I wasn’t sure that I’d remember how to do much of anything – not the least of which was remembering how to get off the lift at the top of the mountain.รƒโ€šร‚ย  That’s always been the worst part for me.รƒโ€šร‚ย  But after one fairly successful dismount and an almost-fall-free journey down the hill I was hooked again.รƒโ€šร‚ย  Four trips later my legs were ready for a break, so I sat in the lodge and enjoyed a 50-cent-off decaf mocha (because I answered the trivia question: What did Al Capone’s business card say he did? Answer: Used furniture salesman) while the boys took one more run down the hill.

What a great day!

America’s Top 50 Salaries

I saw this article on MSN.com today and I found it interesting that my job (well, future job, once I’m done with residency) is #11 on this list of top salaries.  After all the moaning and groaning of non-pediatricians telling me I won’t make enough money, here’s some proof that I think I’ll be able to get by.  Not that I did this for the money anyway – everyone already knows that… ๐Ÿ™‚

And in case you’re interested, here’s the list of America’s Top 50 Salaries, as reported by careerbuilder.com, who claims to have gotten their information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

1. Surgeons — $177,690

2. Anesthesiologists — $174,240

3. Obstetricians and Gynecologists — $171,810

4. Orthodontists — $163,410

5. Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons — $160,660

6. Internists, General — $156,550

7. Psychiatrists — $146,150

8. Prosthodontists — $146,080

9. Family and General Practitioners — $140,370

10. Chief Executives — $139,810

11. Pediatricians, General — $139,230

12. Airline Pilots, Copilots, and Flight Engineers — $135,040

13. Dentists, General — $133,680

14. Podiatrists — $111,250

15. Lawyers — $110,520

16. Air Traffic Controllers — $105,820

17. Engineering Managers — $105,470

18. Computer and Information Systems Managers — $102,360

19. Marketing Managers — $101,990

20. Astronomers — $101,360

21. Natural Sciences Managers — $99,140

22. Sales Managers — $98,510

23. Petroleum Engineers — $97,350

24. Financial Managers — $96,620

25. Law Teachers, Postsecondary — $95,570

26. Optometrists — $95,500

27. General and Operations Managers — $95,470

28. Computer and Information Scientists, Research — $94,030

29. Judges, Magistrate Judges, and Magistrates — $91,500

30. Physicists — $91,480

31. Actuaries — $90,760

32. Nuclear Engineers — $90,690

33. Industrial-Organizational Psychologists — $89,980

34. Human Resources Managers — $89,950

35. Pharmacists — $88,650

36. Securities, Commodities, and Financial Services Sales Agents — $87,990

37. Health Diagnosing and Treating Practitioners — $87,630

38. Computer Hardware Engineers — $87,170

39. Public Relations Managers — $85,820

40. Aerospace Engineers — $85,450

41. Political Scientists — $84,820

42. Physical Scientists — $84,380

43. Computer Software Engineers, Systems Software — $84,310

44. Personal Financial Advisors — $82,970

45. Health Specialties Teachers, Postsecondary — $82,450

46. Chiropractors — $82,060

47. Industrial Production Managers — $81,960

48. Construction Managers — $81,760

49. Purchasing Managers — $81,440

50. Advertising and Promotions Managers — $81,250

(P.S. I would have highlighted A.J.’s profession as well… but he falls into 5 or 6 of these categories so I didn’t know which to choose!)

Go Tips!

The Everett Silvertips, that is.

A.J. received some tickets to the Everett Silvertips vs. Portland Winterhawks ice hockey game for this past Sunday, and we had such a great time.  In my recent memory, I had only been to one hockey game before (St. Louis Blues) – and that arena was so big and we were so far away… and there was more fighting than playing… and it wasn’t the most engaging sporting event to watch.  But this game was right at my level – the new Everett Events Center was quite nice, the crowd was quite a bit smaller than in St. Louis (but for whatever reason they seemed about 5 times as loud!) and the teams were more focused on playing the game than stripping off their helmets and taking the other guys out.  Of course there was still plenty of checking up against the glass, which is interesting to watch, but the game went on. Overall a very fun time, though I did start to feel bad for the Portland team when Everett was up 4-0, then 5-0, then finally 6-0 at the end of the game.

Oh, and the mini donuts were great too!

Champagne Tap

I have attempted a few lumbar punctures (AKA "spinal taps") during my 6 months as a doctor, but none of them had been successful until just a few short weeks ago.  That was when I got my first champagne tap.

(Champagne Tap: Successfully performing a lumbar puncture so that cerebrospinal fluid is obtained and is not contaminated with blood, thus having the appearance of a champagne color.  Often reserved for a specimen that has zero red cells on microscopic exam, though sometimes used for anything less than 20 reds, so long as the gross appearance is not bloody.)

So I guess mine was pseudo-champagne, since there were 3 red cells on microscopic… but just the fact that it was not grossly bloody (like the previous 3 I had tried) was entirely satisfying.

Happy Birthday To Me!

My birthday was on Friday! ๐Ÿ™‚ And I’ve been having a very happy birthday week of celebrations with friends and family. I love this time of year… and I love my birthday… and I love that I still have so much fun with my birthday and that it makes me smile.

Koala Brothers Birthday

Double Porkchop

I bought some new pants at the Nordstrom Rack a few days ago.  They are kind of corduroy and good colors (maroon-ish, tan, and brown) and they were on sale for $19.97 each – a nice deal for some decent pants.  The brand on the tags was Be Bop.

When the cashier scanned the tags to ring them up, they came up on the screen as "Double Porkchop – $19.97"

Double Porkchop??

So, have a nice laugh when you think of me wearing my double porkchop pants to work tomorrow.  ๐Ÿ™‚

Louisville, KY – A Belated Post

This is a somewhat belated post about a weekend trip A.J. and I took a little while ago… I was procrastinating in adding some of the pictures, which really are important, so enjoy them even more now that you know they were the reason for the delay in this post!

On Match Day (soon after finding out we woould be heading back to Seattle!) A.J. and I set out on a weekend trip to Louisville, KY.  "Why Louisville?" you might ask… well, there are many cities within a day’s drive of St. Louis and before moving here we had never been to any of them.  When we have long weekends, we like to pick a city and go exploring for a couple of days – we’ve done Atlanta-GA, Springfield-IL, New Orleans-LA, and one time we drove up to Nortre Dame (IN) for a day to see my sister’s last college soccer game.  Other cities still on the list – that we may or may not get to – include Memphis, Nashville, Indianaoplis, Cincinnati…

So anyway – we set out on our weekend adventure, which happened to start off kind of rough when I missed the east-bound on-ramp (since I’m so used to taking the freeway west-bound).  No worries, though, I’ll just head over to another on-ramp… which I had never used before and so took a wrong turn and missed it as well.  Okay, then, we’ll just head a bit over by school because I know there’s an on-ramp there (and A.J. thinks there is too)… except there’s not.  So fine, I’ll just head downtown where there HAS to be an on-ramp.  And I found one… and finally got on… heading east-bound….  And then it was a nice 5-hour jaunt directly east with a lot of singing with the radio and listening to a SUSPENSE audio story ("The Hitchhiker").  We found our hotel easily (with directions from our GPS Yoda), checked-in, and ordered California Pizza Kitchen for dinner.

We started off the next morning with breakfast at the hotel (included in the room price) where a very happy waitress named Irina took very good care of us.  Omlettes, juice, hot tea… and she even tried to get us Belgian waffles, but our full stomachs led us to defer to the next day.  We started our day heading into town to the Louisville Slugger Factory and Museum.

This is where they make a majority of all the general Louisville Slugger bats, and they make ALL their Major League bats here.  We took the factory tour, which was awesome!  They take you right out onto the factory floor where the only thing between you and the machines is a yellow line painted on the floor that they ask you really nicely not to reach over. ๐Ÿ™‚  We saw the complete process of bat-making from the tree-trunk to the imprinting of MLB players’ names and laquer finishing.  It was very cool and way better than I imagined that it would be.

After the tour, we explored the museum.  They had old bats and letters from pros (like Babe Ruth) and there was a room with an exhibit for Willie Mays 75th birthday.  The "entrance" to the museum is actually quite genius – you go into a classy theatre and watch a short movie about something to do with baseball, then when it’s over they have you head down to the front of the theatre where doors open and you exit into a hallway with a locker-room scene painted on the walls.  At the end of the hall is a stairway that you walk up and you emerge in a dugout in this big room with a replica baseball field in front of you (with mannequin players).  It was very well planned and I really like it.

Another fun part of the museum was the pitching demonstration.  There was a batting cage set up in the main hall of the museum with a control panel at the "batter’s" end.  You stood outside the cage and used the controls to choose an MLB pitcher.  Once you had chosen, a video would begin on the screen at the very far end of the cage.  It would show the pitcher warming up a little, then he would wind up and throw a pitch… and a ball would actually come out of the screen and straight at you.  There was a stuffed "catcher" set up at your end of the cage, and of course there was the cage to protect you, but seeing those balls whizzing at you at 90mph was still enough to make me jump!

We ended our visit with a stop in the gift shop and some picture-taking out by the giant 6-story bat.

Then we walked down to an area called "4th Street Live", which was not very "live" at the time.  I think it’s definitely much more of a night-time destination.

We explored a little as we walked back towards the parking garage (but it was quite chilly…) and then we headed back out by the hotel to have a meal at Olive Garden (with the many gift cards I had accumulated from doing on-line surveys!).

The next morning also started off with hotel breakfast, but Irina was very busy with a ton of little soccer players and their families.  We were still able to get personalized service though, and Irina made sure we had a made-to-order omlette (when no one else was able to get made-to-order anything!).  After checking out, we headed into town again, this time to the waterfront park (the "water" in question being the Ohio river).  There was a very fun playground there with rubber mats for the ground and lots of things to climb and slide and spin around on.  There was also a really neat stand-up teeter-totter!  We walked along the waterfront paths and took some pictures of the 2nd biggest clockface in world at the Colgate factory across the river (FYI – the first biggest is at another Colgate factory in New Jersey).  We also walked across the street, through a weird metal chicken art garden (I really have no idea…) to the Louisville Slugger Stadium, where we read that the "Louisville Bats" (a triple A affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds) apparently play.  It seemed to be pick-up day for season tickets, and we walked around in the lobby and looked out into the stadium.  It looked like a really fun play to watch baseball, I would have liked to have gone to a game there.

Our last stop before leaving Louisville was at Glassworks a glass blowing studio and museum/gift shop where we watched the glass blowing artists for about an hour.  It really is kind of mesmerizing – they are always keeping their project moving so the hot liquid-y glass doesn’t get drippy and mis-shapen.

Final Assessment: Louisville was definitely a fun place to visit and there are quite a few free/inexpensive things to do there.  At the time we went, I think 2 days was plenty enough time for our adventure.