Bloggers Block

I realize that there has been a dearth of meaty content lately on the blog. Mostly photos of my surroundings and anecdotes showcasing me losing my grip on rational thought.

I have to say though that lately all I feel like writing about is how bogged down I feel with school and how completely overwhelmed I feel most days.

So I start to write. Then read it. Stop. Throw it into the trash.

*She drums fingertips on keyboard.*

Things that are currently annoying me:

-mouth ulcer (the inevitable red flag of rising stress levels)

-the fact that the International office ticked the wrong box and said that I was in a "correspondance program" on my loan application for Canada, thus resulting in me not qualifying for the $15000 loan I received last year...a fact that only came to my attention when I noticed that it was about the time when my disbursement notice should be showing up (6 weeks after submitting forms) and it still hadn't arrived. I called the loans people in Canada to find this out: cue more paperwork, more waiting, re-processing, re-mailing, re-faxing. Hopefully I will still a) qualify for the loan and b) receive said loan before Spring....Inshallah

-neuro knowledge from last year is apparently no longer in lodged in my CNS

-zero motivation for weights/gym x1 week, not aided by the fact that my shuffle ear-buds died resulting in me having to listen to a smattering of Glenn Gould, David Grey, Brian Eno, Bill Frisell, and the Baraka soundtrack during my last workout. Granted, all brilliant songs/artists/albums, but not so brilliant when you are trying to crank a hill on a treadmill!!!

-boyfriend? Who is that? You mean the person I never get to spend any time with that lives in my home with me?

Things that are currently pleasing me:

-my squirrel-like behaviour last week resulted in many frozen meals ranging from beef and Guinness stew, to seafood paella à la-student-who-is-missing-most-vital-ingredients-including-saffron-and-rabbit, to red lentil curry. This means easy-happy-healthy meals all around. Yay for procrastination cooking!

-the school is paying for 2 of our consultant lecturers to teach a kaplan USMLE prep course. It starts in November and will be one three hour session every week, as well as free access to the q-banks, two full length mock exams, videos, prep books, a diagnostic exam, etc. This pleases me greatly as I was just about to invest in a bunch of study materials which I will now get FREEEEEEEE. Well, possibly "included" in my 38500 Euro/year tuition. Ahem.

look into my eyes...you WILL learn
about ligand-gated channels

-which brings me to this guy...Dr. Conrad Fisher. I've spent the last few days watching the kaplan videos for physiology and he's the instructor. Ok I will admit he is completely over the top but HEY! he's the first person to make action potentials make sense in my pea-brain...and he quotes poets like Walt Whitman and Rumi randomly throughout the lectures. You can't fault a guy who fits in poetry between shouting about calcium channels, you just can't.

-Tobie and I celebrated our anniversary on Saturday. We met on Thanksgiving (CDN) last year, but our first big official date was on the Saturday after. Our first date was epic and grand in every way. He picked me up at 10am and we spent the day in town, checking out the bookstore, some shoe shops, Irish pub...then we went to a great Indian restaurant which we closed down around 2300h, and tea at my house after.

All told, it was a 14h first date of loveliness. So naturally we decided to retrace some of our steps for the one year later version. This year Tobie actually walked about 4kms to the nearest florist to bring me a bouquet of white flowers. Lovely, and cute that he dressed up to give them to me when I got home from school Friday afternoon.

Greens and herbs from "the Herbman" as we like to call him.
I know, not overly original or lacking in euphemistic overtones.

Saturday afternoon was the usual farmers market adventure. 

Sigh. The farmers market. Really, the best part of my week, every week. 

We returned to the scene of the original date and had a most delightful meal--our first night out in fact since I returned to Ireland in August! (Is that pathetic or admirable, can't tell). 

-This weekend I am doing a shadowing shift with the EMS crew out of the big hospital in the Mid-West. I am going back and forth between being intrigued about how the night might unfold and being annoyed that I signed up. I am doing it more for archeological/sociological purposes than medical ones really. 

I just pray to the emergency medicine gods that it is not a slow night otherwise it is going to be a hella long 12h shift with two Irish dudes I've never met before.