I recently received this lovely little award from Alicia. That combined with the fact that I actually finished an object for the first time in...a really long time has prompted me to post.

In order to accept this award I have to answer the following questions with only 1 word answers…

1. Where is your cell phone? Floor
2.Your hair? Brown
3. Your mother? Home
4. Your father? *love*
5. Your favorite food? Peanut Butter
6. Your dream last night? Interview
7. Your favorite drink? Grape
8. Your dream/goal? Surgeon!
9. What room are you in? Office
10. Your hobby? Knitting
11. Your fear? Scrambling
12. Where do you want to be in 6 years? Fellow
13. Where were you last night? Home
14. Something you aren’t? MD (yet)
15. Muffins? fattening
16. Wish list item? iPodTouch (I almost said iTouch but that just sounds dirty)
17. Where did you grow up? Massachusetts
18. Last thing you did? Study
19. What are you wearing? Jeans
20. Your TV? on
21. Your pets? none
22. Your friends? Rock
23. Your life? Crazzy
24. Your mood? Prickly
25. Missing someone? Yes
26. Vehicle? Wagon
27. Something you’re not wearing? Glasses
28. Your favorite store? Payless (Shoes of course)
29. Your favorite color? Eeyore (the blue part of him)
30. When was the last time you laughed? Today
31. Last time you cried? Thursday (pre-interview drama)
32. Your best friend? AEES (combos rock)
33. One place that I go over and over? Hospital
34. One person who emails me regularly? Nobody (I'm a crappy correspondent)
35. Favorite place to eat? Conrad's

I will not tag people due to a lack of motivation...consider yourself tagged if you want to do the meme.

Knitting:

So, I finally finished my Dark Cowl. I started it at the end of May for some mindless knitting while studying...and now many months later I have finally finished it.

I initially planned to knit until I ran out of yarn...but I decided that it was already getting awful tall and thought better of it. I haven't decided if this means that I'm going to cast on for another project or whether I'm going to just work on my WIPs for a while. I'm leaning toward WIPs but I'll be checking out the Ravelry Queue.

Med School:

I have just started the interview process for residency. I'm applying for General Surgery with the plan to do a fellowship in something at the other end. One interview down...14 more to go! The knitting should be allowed to pick up again soon...I have another big test (Step 2) on 12/31 and then after that I should be home free! This is going to be a long year...but totally worth it. Which reminds me...I'm gonna have to change the name of the blog soon :P

Cute:

This was just too cute not to share with all of you...my mom picked it up at Hallmark a while ago. Perfect for when my hands are freezing...which is pretty much all the time :P

On a happier note...

I got an award! The lovely Dorothy gave me this:


RULES you must resend this to 5 bloggers and you must tell 5 things about your crafts you like the most...what inspires you to make home made gifts...

What inspires me?

1) I take great joy in finding gifts that are well-matched to a person. Making gifts for people gives me so many more ways to accomplish that. I have been known to see something that is *perfect* for someone in March and pick it up for them for Christmas because I know that they'll love it.

2) Knitting is soothing. If I'm too jittery to sit still or have too many things going on in my head, a little bit of knitting goes a long way to making me feel better.

3) Making beautiful things makes me feel proud of myself. Sadly med school is generally not conducive to pride/confidence...it's just the nature of the beast.

4) Knitting is productive. I start with a pile of string and I end up with something that will keep someone warm...pretty awesome if you ask me.

5) Knitters are awesome. The people I have met through knitting are some of the kindest, most generous people I have ever met.

I nominate:
1) Alicia
2) Bea
3) Cosmicpluto
4) Anne
5) Wendy

PS: I'm feeling much better now that I got all that off my chest earlier.

Close...

But not quite...

I'm a little bit farther on the sleeve now...but that's how far I had gotten as of midnight 11-30-08. Good effort I say. Not having the crazy Psych attending who kept me in the hospital until all hours would have been helpful but I learned a lot and that's what really matters.

I also bought yarn...some of it for Christmas presents...but mostly because it was pretty and I needed something to make me feel better after my three weeks from heck on Consult Psych...little did I know that Inpatient was going to be a whole new kind of painful. My attending has a very hands-off approach...which makes me feel totally useless and unwanted. I wander up and down the hallway of the locked ward talking to the 66 year-old guy with the teddy bear and the bajillion suicidal people and then go eat lunch for a couple hours go walk up and down the hallway some more and leave way too early for conference because I just can't stand it anymore. Innywho...here's the yarn: Lots of Happy Feet from Plymouth Yarn Co...courtesy of Webs.

And now a meme:
Things I've Done (In Bold)

1. Started my own blog
2. Slept under the stars
3. Played in a band
4. Visited Hawaii
5. Watched a meteor shower
6. Given more than I can afford to charity (This has more to do with the fact that I'm dirt poor than my being particularly generous)
7. Been to Disneyland/world
8. Climbed a mountain
9. Held a praying mantis
10. Sung a solo (here...I'm the first one)
11. Bungee jumped (NEVER)
12. Visited Paris
13. Watched lightning at sea
14. Taught myself an art from scratch
15. Adopted a child
16. Had food poisoning
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty
18. Grown my own vegetables
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France
20. Slept on an overnight train (But I slept on the commuter train at least once daily for the last two years!)
21. Had a pillow fight
22. Hitchhiked
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill
24. Built a snow fort
25. Held a lamb
26. Gone skinny dipping
27. Run a marathon
28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice
29. Seen a total eclipse
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset
31. Hit a home run
32. Been on a cruise
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person
34. Visited the birthplace of my ancestors
35. Seen an Amish community
36. Taught myself a new language
37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied (But I have a small mortgage's worth of debt! YAY Med School!)
38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person
39. Gone rock climbing
40. Seen Michelangelo’s David
41. Sung karaoke
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt
43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant
44. Visited Africa
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight
46. Been transported in an ambulance
47. Had my portrait painted
48. Gone deep sea fishing
49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling
52. Kissed in the rain
53. Played in the mud
54. Gone to a drive-in theater
55. Been in a movie
56. Visited the Great Wall of China
57. Started a business
58. Taken a martial arts class
59. Visited Russia
60. Served at a soup kitchen
61. Sold Girl Scout Cookies
62. Gone whale watching
63. Got flowers for no reason
64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma
65. Gone sky diving
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp
67. Bounced a check
68. Flown in a helicopter
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial
71. Eaten caviar
72. Pieced a quilt
73. Stood in Times Square
74. Toured the Everglades
75. Been fired from a job
76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London
77. Broken a bone
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
80. Published a book
81. Visited the Vatican
82. Bought a brand new car
83. Walked in Jerusalem
84. Had my picture in the newspaper
85. Read the entire Bible
86. Visited the White House
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
88. Had chickenpox
89. Saved someone’s life (Give it time folks...I've only been on the wards for 6 months)
90. Sat on a jury
91. Met someone famous
92. Joined a book club
93. Lost a loved one
94. Had a baby
95. Seen the Alamo in person
96. Swam in the Great Salt Lake
97. Been involved in a lawsuit
98. Owned a cell phone
99. Been stung by a bee
100. Rode an elephant

Random Intermittant Post

I saw this on I'd Rather Be Knitting and felt compelled it use it as a procrastination tool...

The Big Read is an National Endowment for the Arts program designed to encourage community reading initiatives and of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six.)

*Look at the list and bold those we have read.
*Italicize those we intend to read.
*Underline the books we LOVE. (I don't know how to underline...so I am going to color blue the books I love...

Share this list in your blog, too, if you like.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas in French
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery in French
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Ronald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo in French

I've read 41 books...almost all of them in high school in college I'm sure...since it's not like I have time to read anything that isn't a textbook anymore.

Too neat for my own good

63 As a 1930s wife, I am Superior Take the test!

I saw this on Lick My Sticks and Ponyknit and was way to entertained to ignore it. I am apparently way too neat for my own good since that's the only way I figure I got a score that high. They didn't have a box for "is a doctor"...I'm sure that would have been about -100 right there. Almost done knitting The Afghan...pictures coming soon!!

So much news!!

First, Alicia tagged me for a little meme that's running around:

1) Link to the person who tagged you.
2) Post the rules.
3) Share six non-important things / habits / quirks about yourself.
4) Tag at least three people.
5) Be sure the people you tagged KNOW you tagged them by commenting what you did.

My things:
1) I cut my pasta. Whenever I get spaghetti or anything else that is long and floppy I cut my pasta (using a grid pattern because I'm that OCD) so that the pieces are smaller and I don't get sauce all over myself
2) I always carry a tuning fork in my white coat...I'm pretty sure I haven't ever used it on someone who isn't one of my classmates or a standardized patient
3) I have a lot of stuffed animals on my bed. I make my bed every morning and they go back on the bed the SAME WAY every single day...and it's a very symmetrical arrangement too
4) I color code my class notes by learning objective. This is part OCD, part studying tactic, and part three-year-old being easily entertained by my amazing technicolor syllabi
5) I died my hair black once. I thought it was awesome. My mother was horrified at how pale I looked; but this was probably due tot he fact that I was wearing a black shirt at the time and (unknowingly) mono
6) I eat the food on my dinner plate in the inverse order or how much I like it. For example: Broccoli, Mashed potatoes, chicken, stuffing. No matter what else is on the plate...stuffing always goes last.

I tag Dorothy, KnittingNurse, and LadyLungDoc.

Second: I won the lottery!! Sadly not the money kind but I did pretty awesome in the lottery for my third year rotations. I'm off to Lahey Clinic for Surgery and Medicine and Baystate Medical Center for Pediatrics, Psychiatry, and OB/Gyn. I also got the family medicine rotation I was most interested in...but I think I would rather do a Neurology rotation during that time. The only one open right now is Neurosurgery at Baystate...the irony is killing me...but I think my mother might try to kill me if I went to Baystate for that rotation too (Baystate is really nowhere near my house and I'd be living in glorified dorms across the street from the hospital)

Third: Knitting! I promised more pics of the Doctor's Bag...and I'll show you those shortly. But I also have two socks now...I am so proud of them! I started to make a pair of ankle socks with the remaining yarn, but I'm pretty sure I don't have enough to do it on US2s so I need to rip back and try with something a bit bigger...and fewer stitches. I also made a hat. Stephanie's Unoriginal Hat to be exact. The pattern say it's for a women's small head. Now I realize that I used slightly smaller needles because I live in the US and don't have much choice...but I didn't think my head was that big...apparently I was wrong. Now for the Doctor's Bag. Here is it with just about all my stuff in it (I usually keep my purse and a small textbook to study during downtime in there too). Just in case you don't realize how much stuff is in there...here it is all laid out on the coffee table. I also wanted to show you my general over-achiever-ness: the feet that I put on the bottom. I personally think they're pretty awesome and it just goes to show that deep down inside I really am a gunner (sorry for the profane language :P)And, or course, the arty button shot:

What's on the needles now? Well I've decided to make a concerted effort of crank out the squares for the Warm Up America Afghan. They're not exactly the most exciting knitting which means they aren't terribly great at keeping me awake during class but I need to finish that sucker like it's my job. And for a little bit more exciting knitting I've cast on for the Tiger Eyes Lace Scarf. I haven't even managed a full repeat of the lace pattern yet but I'm already loving the way this yarn is working up in the pattern...I can't wait for it to be done so I can wear it all the time for no good reason.

I've been tagged!

Dorothy was kind enough to tag me in her 7 Random Things Meme. First time I've been been tagged for anything so I'm stoked. Alright...here goes!

Here are the rules, and they must be posted to your blog.
Link to the person’s blog who tagged you (see above).
List seven random and/or weird facts about yourself.
Tag seven random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
Let each person know that they have been tagged by posting a comment on their blog and also so they can look at your blog and not tag the same people all over again!

My 7 Random Things:

1) I have a single fake tooth

2) I was born over a month early

3) I was 8.5 lbs and over 2 feet long at birth...I think I came early for a reason.

4) I am the youngest person in my medical school class

5) There is only one person younger than me in the class behind me

6) I have an uncanny ability to remember things that I don't even realize I know. This is coming in handy as I spend more time in hospitals and am getting "pimped" by physicians. On another note I will never quite understand why getting asked random questions on the spur of the moment is called getting "pimped."

7) I have a massive thing for Eeyore. There are 12 different Eeyores within sight of my computer...I don't want to think of how many stuffed animals I have in my bedroom upstairs.

I tag:

1) Alicia

2) Ann

3) Kniterella

4) Fiberjewel

5) KnittingNurse

6) LadyLungDoc

7) The Knitting Doctor

ETA: Go enter Miss Me's Blogoversary contest...and don't forget to say I sent you!