After another cathartic Friday night involving Pootie Tang, late night volleyball at Tucker's, duct tape, and 5am calls from SF, Karen and I still managed to get up at a reasonable hour to drive up north to visit Amelia on her farm and celebrate her sister's twenty-first birthday.

It was a straight shot across the Causeway (only the longest bridge in the world) and following the highway for 60 miles, but well worth the drive.  Amelia's mom served up my first real taste of jambalaya, plus red beans and rice.  Apparently the trick to making everything good is to add a little bit of Tony's seasoning to it.

Kittens!  Three litters, ten kittens, and one pregnant calico.  We wanted to take one home (the yellow bobtail at the top of the photo) but I have no idea what to do with a cat and Dustyn is allergic.

We might have to go back to get our pet fix - there were at least four dogs running around at any given time, including one giant farm mutt that weighed more than me, two toy poodles, a miniature schnauzer.

While we were waiting for others to show up for food, Amelia took us out in her new 3/4-ton pickup for a tour of the farm and around their timber lot.  ("Lot" is really a misnomer; this place is so big you have to drive to get anywhere.)  There's a quite a bit of wreckage and fallen trees leftover from the hurricane.  It's interesting, as Amelia points out, that man-made infrastructure is blamed for damage in the city while further north, everyone just takes it in stride since there's no one to blame for the wind damage.

We jumped on a few giant hay bales before heading back to the house to go eat.  Afterwards, we hopped into Dwight (Amelia's old F-250 we used to ride around in up in Boston) and drove to up to see the cows.  Evidently the cows thought it was feeding time because they went a little nuts chasing the truck (with Karen and I, plus Toby the giant dog and Mick the schnauzer, in the truck bed).

In the last 36 hours, I've heard no less than four times that I need to keep an eye on the weather forecast in case a hurricane is headed in my direction.    Evidently the worst part of hurricane season starts up soon and students aren't allowed to stay if we're told to evacuate.
My newest bookmarked site: National Weather Service National Hurricane Center.

After class today, Karen and I went out down the school gym and met up with 30 other kids in our class for a game of soccer.  I"ve never played before (probably should have mentioned that to our team, but oh well.)  It was ridiculously hot out today and sunny.  I'm not used to running around in the humidity, so that was kind of difficult for awhile.  Then it was sprinkling a bit and sunny.  And then there was a huge downpour until I left, which made the game suddenly a lot more fun since everyone was slowing down because of the heat.  The only downside is that water on astroturf is super slippery and I did a fun little backwards somersault after colliding with Tim as we were both going for the ball.  Shoulder hurts a bit.

I went to home to shower and get the formaldehyde smell out of my hair (anatomy lab today was removing vertebrae T6 through T12 from Horace using a chisel).  My anatomy group made dinner plans to bond over something other than body parts at Superior Grill, some Tex-Mex-ish restaurant in a pretty central location.

Found the limited edition Absolut New Orleans I've been looking for (100% of profits go to Gulf Coast charities) - I'm kind of afraid to try it because it's mango + black pepper flavored and that sounds kind of weird to me.  But the bottle is pretty, and that might be all that matters.

Your teachers joke about your stress with references to the sphincter.

This is what I'm learning about in class today.  (Physician suicide, if that's hard to see.)

So on day 6 of medical school, my email finally works.  I've never been so excited to get redundant emails about who wants to go listen to jazz in the French quarter Thursday evening.

I bought a whiteboard for drawing diagrams and studying and such.  I haven't hung it up yet - it's actually thin plastic that can be rolled up and moved so I can use double sided to tape to tack it on the wall of the dining room.  The other fun purchase was the scented whiteboard markers - here's the DNA replication discussion we had (around Karen's picture of a palm tree).

still empty and pretty much no action, except for a few guys moving some stuff off of the loading dock yesterday...kind of sketch.

We're down to the deep back muscles in anatomy now.  I'm getting mostly used to looking at dead naked people and the smell of formaldehyde, although I have to keep my hands away from my face for the entire day after a dissection.  I'm still trying to figure out what my ideal daily schedule is - I didn't do so well and had to go down for a nap at 4 pm today.  So far I've figured out my morning routine, which is basically to remember to start boiling water for coffee before I do anything else.

Now I'm thinking about assembling my vascular anatomy notes, but my roommate and a few classmates are watching Survivorman (apparently more real than Man vs. Wild) and Survivorman is eating lizards.  Gross.

I think I'm going to need to start replicating today's pattern for maximum productivity every day...

Class
Study
Beignets
Study
Run
Study
Eat
Study
Beer
J.tv

...that our windows are all fogged up outside
...chocolate melts in my room
...water coming out of the cold water tap is actually warm enough to shower with

Seriously.  I thought it got pretty hot back home, but I don't recall excessive heat advisories.  Here we have a heat index all weekend up to 117 degrees.  I'm a little scared to see our electric bill this month since the air conditioning is just running 24/7.

Yesterday was our first day of anatomy lab - everyone shows up in scrubs so their clothes don't smell like formaldehyde at the end of the morning.  Unfortunately, the truth is, everything that goes into the lab will smell like formaldehyde for a day.  Kind of gross, particularly since I don't like bad smells.  I also still get a little weirded out by naked people.  I might need to get over that soon.  Our cadaver is an old guy that my group has christened Horace.  I lucked out with my group, everyone is pretty easy going and gung ho about dissection without being overbearing.

Last night was the LSU mixer downtown at Tucker's.  It looks like a pretty standard-sized bar when you go in, but then it actually winds around back where there is another dance floor plus an outdoor deck and sand pit for volleyball.  I was DD, so I wasn't so up for dancing, and ended up playing a game with my classmates vs. a few LSU med students (in a skirt, no less).  I've busted all the capillaries in my forearms, but it was a good time.

More rolling out of bed at 7am so that we could make it to class early.  Dustyn brought this giant retractable orange extension cord so we could sit in the middle of the room and power up our computer in the auditorium.

Classes were shorter than expected today, so I'm not feeling too stressed or overloaded with material yet.  My email is still busted though, despite another half hour on the phone with the helpdesk.  Someone else is definitely getting my emails, including some inappropriate test emails Dustyn sent me for kicks.

Among our basic science classes today was the one doctoring - where we have standardized patients, write about our visits with the local docs, and learn more about ourselves.  The professor was put a lot of emphasis on that last one...in her shpiel about how to maintain our own wellness, she had a list of the ten things to do.  Family Feud style, we found that her list included the requisites of nutrition, exercise, sleep, but also good sex and daily bowel movements.  No joke.

There was some severe weather alert today - I didn't really get it until I stood out in the sun waiting for the ATM machine for 5 minutes.  That's some serious heat.  Our house was 85 degrees even though the thermostat was set for 75 while we were away.  Not sure what to do about that since it didn't cool down for awhile.  We had six people over to study anatomy this evening and it was little warm for awhile. 

Hopefully tomorrow will be better, although I won't notice because we'll be in anatomy lab removing skin from a cadaver's back.  It's SUPER cold in there.

Everyone packed their bags and went to bed early last night to be ready for 8am class this morning.  It only took us about 10 minutes to get to campus and park so we were a little early and settled in trying to get WiFi in the auditorium where all of our classes (except anatomy lab, duh) are held.

Surprisingly or not so surprisingly (could be a disaster during a flood) there were no floor outlets for us to plug in our computers.  There were a couple on the wall, but it was better to sit in the middle of the auditorium, so I had to recharge during lunch. 

I've discovered a pretty simple way to type text onto pdf files in Preview, so that made note taking a lot easier.  I think I might get Acrobat because it has a lot more functionality.  Professors put all the PowerPoints into pdf so they can't be copied, so it helps to be typing on my notes rather than scribbling the slide contents plus lecture like 95% of the class was doing today.

My school email's busted and it's only the first day of class.  When I log in, my inbox is empty (everyone else has 30 emails) and I don't receive emails I send myself.  I tried sending from the school email to myself, but the sender is an email address that is similar, but not exactly the same as mine.  And when I reply, it bounces back because that one doesn't actually exist.  The helpdesk hotline couldn't help (the irony), so I'm waiting for someone to call me back and tell me what the problem is.

Now I'm back at the house and it looks like a thunderstorm is coming in.  We're overdue for one...it's been almost a week since the last time we had one.