June. And bread.

And here I thought I'd post more during rotations because I'd have more time.

While I didn't have much in the way of at-home work on that first rotation, the ten hour+ days were sort of killer. And then I got sick, which has carried through to now.

I finished my hospital rotation with massive increases in both knowledge and self-doubt. There's no way I know enough to be a pharmacist at this point. My God, I'm going to be in charge of sick people and making clinical decisions without anyone to point out when I've done something stupid. Luckily I have almost a year left to cram in as much information and experience as I can.

The hospital rotation ended up being fairly awesome - I got to see an open heart surgery, make new IVs, was allowed to evaluate patients and make decisions (thankfully nothing I proposed doing would have directly led to anyone dying!). I'm now a week into infectious disease, which is shaping up to be a lot more work. It's great, though. This is the kind of work I want to be doing as a pharmacist.

The preceptor has me going on rounds right now though, which is utterly terrifying and makes me feel completely stupid on a daily basis. I'm taking the stance that this is good for me. Because this is only the first week, I still don't really know what I'm doing. So when the ID specialist turns to me and asks a question, pretty much all I can do is make fish faces while my brain short circuits. I'm hoping this will improve.

Not much else has been happening. I go to the hospital, run around all day, come back, study whatever it is I'm doing the next day, and then pass out. This weekend is another glorious three dayer, thanks to the 4th. I had hoped to make it up to Tahoe, but the traffic was pretty crazy and I didn't have anyone to go with. No, parents, I'm not going hiking alone, so I won't be eaten by bears/mountain lions/crazy mountain men. I listen to you sometimes.

This weekend has been more eventful than most, though. I went on a library adventure and ended up with a slightly ridiculous amount of books. I also went to the most awkward baseball game ever last night. Details another day, I'm still recovering from the social doom.

I also made bread today. I love everything about making bread - the smell, the feel of the dough, punching the crap out of it after the first rise . . . The only problem is with the crust. For some reason, every time I make bread in this oven, the crust is incredibly hard. I have no idea how to fix this. All of my ideas for making it softer were shot down by Cody, the more experienced bread maker, because they apparently would only backfire in the worst way possible. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I know I've said this many, many times before, but I really am going to try harder to post more. And maybe there will be an accordion post soon, as my roommate is on her off rotation and thus not around to be driven to insanity by my playing.

Time

Or, what I do when I actually have some.

The last three years of my life have been spent either sitting in class, going to work, or studying. I have had precious little in the way of free time - or, rather, time not spent feeling guilty about not studying. Now that I'm working four ten-hour shifts, I get three day weekends. Glorious three day weekends. Three days of NOT HAVING TO STUDY ANYTHING.

This was going to be a long-overdue accordion post, but my roommate got home early and I didn't want to subject her to the horrors of accordion practice. We've only lived together for three weeks. I'd rather wait a bit longer before she loathes my very existence.

That said, I spent this weekend in a cooking fervor because it was snowing and I was too much of a wuss to go hike. Yes, snowing. I feel like I never left Idaho.



First, I made mushroom soup. I probably should have gotten more than one type of mushroom, but it was still pretty tasty. This recipe could use some tweaking though, so I'll be experimenting with this again. I might post the instructions once I'm satisfied.


Then I was hunting through my cookbooks and found a recipe for caramel pecan rolls. Note the total lack of pecans in the picture - this is because pecans are insanely expensive and I am poor. Someday, when I am a pharmacist and won't balk at paying $4 for a tiny bag of pecans, these rolls will be covered. Even without gold-encrusted nuts, these were pretty tasty.

-- slight interruption due to cooking disaster followed by airing out of the apartment --

I just attempted to make lemon chicken for a salad. I followed the recipe exactly but halfway through something went terribly, terribly wrong.

Our smoke detector is quite loud, in case you were wondering. And it seems that evil bastard citrus is still determined to be my cooking kryptonite. This is where I fall to my knees and scream "LEMOOOOON" at the sky a la William Shatner.

At least there wasn't any fire.

The Doom Sweater

This is the doom sweater.


It's also known as Darcy, designed by Kim Hargreaves, and out of the book Heartfelt: The Dark House Collection. While it looks lovely and stylish, and early inspection leads one to believe it will be a fairly quick project, I cannot emphasis enough how insane this sweater has been for me. It's done in moss stitch, otherwise known as knit one purl one. Which takes an eternity.


I started this sweater last summer. I'm now on the sleeves. I feel like Sisyphus, people. This sweater will never end. I'm going to be 95, blind, deaf, and I will still not have finished this sweater.


Today, while I was diligently knitting and purling, the doom sweater proved to be too much for my poor bamboo needle. It wasn't happy with my soul, sanity, or manual dexterity - the cursed thing had to take down my knitting needle, too. Luckily, I had some electrical tape handy so I could perform triage.

This sweater is actively trying to prevent itself from being finished.


This? This is a cedar chest full of yarn for projects that I will never get to work on. Because the rest of my life is going to spent on this sweater that doesn't even want to be finished.