Where Have I been

Where did October go? I'm not sure either. Though I do have some photo evidence of its existence...

I'm sitting in the Sam Adams Pub in the Manchester, NH planestation waiting to board a flight to Austin, TX via Detroit, MI. I'm drinking an insanely fresh Boston Lager, thinking about all the things I should be doing besides reading The Onion but not hard enough to do anything about it. So what's gone on in the past month? Exams for the beginning of October, a few trips to NYC to see Nikki, I met my first Nobel Laureate. Dr. Joe Murray came to visit Hanover from Boston for the Tanzer Conference the plastic surgery dept. holds every 2 years. He won the Medicine prize in 1990 for performing the first successful kidney transplant in 1954.



Anyway, this Texas trip is to check out Harrison's new digs and hoped for future restaurant location. He tells me the daily low temperature is somewhere in the 60's so it will be a nice last dodge from the winter before the snow comes and stays and stays and stays. This should be a fully immersive TEXAS experience, featuring cowboy hats, spurs, football, beer, and and ever so slight undercurrent of racial tension just to keep things interesting. Speaking of Texas and interesting and Chuck Norris

http://townhall.com/columnists/ChuckNorris/2009/03/10/i_may_run_for_president_of_texas?page=full

I plan to fully endorse Texas's right to secede and perhaps contribute to its eventual departure from the rest of the Union, this very weekend. Wish me luck

Before I forget

This is the link to the Norwich Oven google calendar that I keep losing. I'm sticking it here so that I can find it.



I'm baking my first solo load today and dropping the results at The Haven this evening if all goes well. Should be something like 8 loaves of Daily Bread, and 5 of a beer bread made with spent barley grains from the brew session earlier this week. Assuming these loaves aren't as suicidal as the last...

http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=rbklf3nmsl3uf91rh4s91flq0c%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America/New_York

the Magical Fruit

Just harvested my first handful of ripe hops from the vines. After a night in the dehydrator they will be ready for a class in beer brewing later this week. Now that I have a camera again, more photo-documentation of all the tall-tales in the making. MOre later.

Medical School: Where Hi-Liters and Cups of Coffee Go to Die

I'm sitting in a cardio-pathophysiology lecture (half) listening to a most excellent lecturer, a pathologist with a bushy white mustache and mild Austrian accent. Second year is exponentially better than the first. The classes actually discuss things that happen to human beings and not abstruse diagrams or fruit flies. Lots of fun things happening now that I won't get into at the moment. I just wanted to post an update and hopefully get myself into the habit, even if it's at the expense of paying attention.

As the Crow Flies

Thetford, VT to North Brunswick, NJ: 259
NB to Newark: 25
Newark to Dublin: 3188
Dublin to Cosenza, Calabria: 1436
Calabria to Dublin: 1436
Dublin to Newark: 3188
Newark to North Brunswick: 25
North Brunswick to Nashville, TN: 730
Nashville to Mobile, AL: 385
Mobile to Atlanta, GA: 307
Atlanta to Nashville: 212
Nashville to North Brunswick: 730
North Brunswick to Thetford: 259

Total: 12,180 miles
Approx circumference of the earth at the equator: 25000 miles.

Stromboli

Nikki and I have just returned from a day trip to the Aeolian Islands, not quite the home of the winds, but to a couple of cartoonishly volcanic volcanos. We swam in the clearest water I have ever seen, that from bottles included, and lounged on black sand under the cliffs and sulphur clouds of the smoldering Stromboli. We are both a bit "cotto", (cooked) but will live. Tomorrow we spend our morning searching the little cemetaries of the hill towns for Nikki's relatives' friends' graves, and then say good bye to her remaining family before setting off for Naples the next morning. I promise to upload some of the 1000 plus photos nikki's taken, tomorrow.
ciao

The Best

Nikki and I have just stepped off of the 6th of what will be 7 trains connecting the distant places of Poperinge Belgium, a small hop-growing town and WW1 battle front in West Flanders, and Pescara Italy on the coast of the Adriatic sea. After a pilgramage to the secluded Trappist monastery of Westvleteren for what is widely called the best beer in the world, Nikki and I returned to Brusells for the afternoon to await our overnight train to Milano. Our route required a change of trains in Frankfurt Germany at midnight, and due to a mistranslation somewhere, we missed our train. We were then booked on a train through the swiss alps to Basel, where we were promptly charged 75$ a piece for not having the right papers or tickets despite the assurances of our angry german train person that we would be fine. After sleeping that off, we stepped into the velveteen air of the ungodly milan train station filled with sweating, smoking people, standing in lines longer than the trains they were waiting on, under the shade of the fascism saturated neo-classical/modern train station, sans- airconditioning. Half of the ticket machines were out of order, and one supposedly worked although it did not accept any form of currency or card. Luckily we found a machine that did, bought tickets for the first train to Bologna, where I am now at an internet cafe drinking cold fizzy water in the blasting cooled air. In a few hours Nikki and I will take our final train for the day to Pescara, after sampling some of the legendary cuisine of Bologna. Ciao.

Filling in the Gaps

So the last few days has been more eventful than I anthologized. After our blitzkrieg tour of Dublin, featuring an appearance by the 9th Century Book of Kells, and exhaustion-repelling Guinness.


After a visit to the world's most well-stocked pub for shockingly fresh belgian beer, we collapsed in our hotel room for our first night of sleep in 2 days. The next morning we took a meandering bus ride between windmills, serenaded by the what I'm sure was profanity, coming from the mouth of our eccentric Dutch bus driver. We've had a relaxing past few days riding a boat on the canals, touring a ducth micro-brewery run by the mentally ill, and visiting museums. Tomorrow we board a noon bus bound for Anwerp to visit some of Nikki's native friends.

Live from Amsterdam

Nikki and I, after a sleepless morning jaunt through Dublin, a nap in Brussels, and a busride through the windmills conducted by an eccentric Dutchman, have arrive in beautiful Amsterdam. Nothing really to report, just that we are alive and somehow still really enjoying each other's company after 72 consecutive hours together.

Last minute browsing

Don't let me forget about "Sagra of Ham and Melon Around 19 July, Mozzagrogna (Chieti)." which will apparently be going on when we arrive in Nikki's Mom's region. http://www.deliciousitaly.com/prodotto.php?id=185®ione_id=1

Nikki's Blog

I am laying on the carpet in Nikki's house in North Brunswick, NJ planning to the hour our Grand Tour, which starts tomorrow evening. The itinerary is contained in the google map below, and in graphical form on Nikki's blog here:http://careeningthroughtheuniverse.blogspot.com/

With some luck we should be in Dublin in about 36 hours from now.

To Be Continued......now

View Nute [deleted scenes] in a larger map

2 weeks to the end of the beginning

a bit busy in this finest weather.
road tripped with nikki to cambridge, ma for dinner with some characters including transplant surgeons, AI founders, and Joe Rosen. Stayed in a little B&B that sounded like it would collapse if you walked on the period wooden floors without stepping from persian rug to rug. Earlier that day we brewed some beer. Yesterday I baked pizza with classmates, laid in the sun and read sleepily with a cold bitter beer. I'm told that final exams begin in the next 2 weeks so I've started carrying my books around with me but not yet opening them, maybe today is the day.

Back In-YC

As I type this Nikki is finishing her last class of this school year somewhere uptown. I am holding down a bench at some hipster coffee shop in the Lower East side of new york, putting off studying by sending emails and wasting time in general caught in the internet. The last few days have been eventful. Mike and I held a pizza bake at the Norwich Bread Oven on Wednesday with members of our class. The local newspaper stopped by and plastered a dough photo on the front page. Shortly thereafter King Arthur Flour agreed to donate a quarter ton of flour to our project over the next year...

I have also just received word that I'll be awarded some sort of funding for the bit of research I'm helping with in the Plastics Department. PLus, the weather is beautiful and I have no right to complain about anything. So....

Studying

It really isn't that bad. With the test-every-third-week schedule, I get what amounts to a weeklong vacation after each round. So 2 days in the library is worth the next 7 in the spring sun. What am I learning about? Starting to get interesting, let's see:
dozens of bacteria, wound healing, the thalamus, eh never mind, interesting is a relative term. Last trimester I was still stuffing biochemical acronyms into my head.

10 weeks to go

I'm sitting in Bryant Park in midtown Manhattan looking at the slammer (medal, coin, thingy) that C. Everett Koop gave me. I and some classmates had lunch (quiche) with the 92 year old former surgeon general in a little house on the college campus. Nothing too eventful to report but the event itself was pretty memorable. The gist of the experience was "I'm C. Everett Koop; I'm awesome." He didn't actually say that, but he easily could have and no one would have protested.

Nothing too exciting happening right now. I'm typing this up 1) as a way of keeping up with the past month and 2) because I feel guilt for not posting. Right now I'm visiting Nikki before she digs in for final exams. I have another set of tests myself one week from today. I view these with mixed feelings now, a lot like how I used to anticipate having to run the mile in elementary school gym class. It never became fun but it got easier and the satisfaction at having it over with made it almost, but not quite, worth doing.

In the next post-quiz lull I think I will build a smokehouse in the wood shop. In the last bit of time off I built a bookcase and a sculpture workbench. I finally got around to planting my 4 hop plants along the side of the barn. Before i forget, the order of the plots is: Spalt, Cascade, Goldings, and Sterling.

That's all for now, will probably disappear for the next week until the studying is done.

Spring (ish)

It's beautiful here in the days and hours between rainstorms and the snow is becoming mud, but spiked with green tufts and so not altogether depressing. I haven't worn a jacket in a few days, haven't built a fire in the furnace in over a month, and am beginning to consider the possibility of natural warmth once again.

And now in this new brown/green world new things are brewing, stirring, and being stirred while being brewed. I just tasted the first of my batch of Hoppy Red Ale and it is probably the best beer I've made yet. It tastes like english bitter with an inexplicable dash of lavender. I've also just ordered some Hop rhizomes on the internet and plan to have a garden dug in the next couple of weeks.

In baking news, I'm working on the Schweitzer fellowship and should be running the oven starting in late April. more details of the general program are here : http://www.schweitzerfellowship.org/

Other than that and school, and summer plans, and laundry, not much to mention at the moment.

1 down...2 down..

(dried squid over coals)

Just knocked off my Metabolism exam, have Virology/Immunology today followed by Anatomy and Physiology on Monday. Not feeling at all jet lagged at the moment and seem to be free of Ho Chi Minh's revenge, so far so good.


Dodged the big viro-immuno-exam-shaped bullet. Just a bit of studying this weekend and then I can relax by... starting new classes. Actually, that isn't so bad. This term is known as being relatively easier than the last, and the courses sound interesting: neuroanatomy, microbiology, biostatistics, and something else.

back to work and then back to play.

"The code was a quote on Armed Forces Radio: the comment that the temperature is rising, followed by eight bars of White Christmas"

Never come to asia without an exit strategy. Mine is Korea Air Flight 14-something to Seoul. If all goes well it will carry my 4 hours to South Korea where I will catch an even larger bird to Washington Dulles. Amazingly, and there are those who will say I am a liar, the flight only takes 50 minutes from Seoul to DC. I take off at 10:00am and arrive at 10:50am on the same day. The only reasonable explanation is that Korea is actually located somewhere in the vicinity of New Jersey...


During the 30 minute bus ride to the airport I was beginning to digest the experiences of this trip. I scrubbed in on my first case,
put in my first few stitches, saw a toe become a finger, a rib become an ear, ate a cobra, and met a guy who can claim 1/2000th of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. I discovered that I really enjoy working with children, especially when you get to put them to sleep if they start crying. I ate more beautiful soup in 10 days than I have in the past 10 years, the same goes for quail eggs, chicken feet, snails, river crab, cuttle fish, octopus, and snake penis vodka, and ant larva liquor. I ate the best croissants I've ever tasted, and drank dozens of tiny opaque black coffees with condensed milk. I expanded my Vietnamese vocabulary from 0 to about 15 words. i can say hello/goodbye, thank you, chicken, beef, good, bad, one, doctor, soup.... ok maybe that's 10 words but not bad for a tonal language. Probably most importantly, I have a renewed sense for why I am in medical school. I think this journey has created enough momentum to get me through the rest of the, what has been frankly boring, first year.

Projects on the Vermont horizon:

more beer classes (Belgians coming up), bottling my California red ale, a Schweitzer fellowship involving bread baking, some research, some sculpting, some more exams and then the last summer vacation i will have until i retire.

Gahhhhhh my brain is melting!!!

Studying is going well; I'm about 30 lectures and 10 vietnamese coffees in and still moving. I've been sitting in the same hyper-fluorescently lit room, listening to the the same 30 songs on repeat (no Pandora outside US!) for the past 25/30 hours. The info is actually returning quite quickly, but I'm starting to feel like I need to keep my head tilted back so that liquid brain won't drip onto my illegibly scrawled notebooks. As a quick break, here are more shots from Ha Long.

"the vague and vast suggestions of the briny world"

I have just returned from a 2 day study jaunt using the deck of a motorized Junk as a floating desk in the Ha Long bay. Easily the most beautiful setting in which I have ever memorized virology. Not much to report. Beauty of the scenery tempered by the missing of people and anxiety over upcoming examinations. Great place to reflect though. It was a last minute decision to go (sudden streak of sun weather) so I apologize for going AWOL. To make up for it I have been shopping vigorously for gifts, with some success I believe.

Ta-dah

 
 
 
 

that's kind of pretty much a miracle

a taste

 
 
 
 

Pretty feets and bloodsuckers

So i'm sitting on a computer in the suprisingly pleasant library of the national pediatrics hospital, avoiding a conference by the doctors on the trip. That's not to say that the presentations aren't interesting (slide 3: Chainsaw + face = bad), but i'm about to duck out to go eat snake with the team anesthesiologist.

the title of this post is a reference to the broken english introduction given to the conference audience about "giving children pretty faces, hands, and feets." Bloodsuckers is a nod to the leeches that we've been putting on the new finger of the boy operated on last night, to increase blood flow through the digit. Apparently in the US, all one needs to do to procure leeches is call 1-800-LEECHES (I'm not joking) and "medical grade" leeches will be overnighted to any hospital in the contiguous 48 states by a company called 'USA Leeches'. The vietnamese equivalent of this service is to draw a picture of a leech and tell the family of the patient to find a jar-full before their loved one's finger falls off. Sure enough 10 hours later a jar of wild pond parasites was sitting in the SICU.

follow-up:

Other news is that I ate 1/2 of a cobra, but the details will have to wait for tomorrow's update...

fill in the blanks

sorry about the sketchiness of the last post but the past few days have been a blur and the internet is a bit spotty. I spent last night in the hospital attending a brand new 'finger' that 17 hours before had been the 2nd toe of a kid with his 4 long fingers squished off by a big metal box years ago. The surgery ran from 9am to about 1 am and by the end of it both the US and Vietnamese teams were sitting on the OR floor giggling with exhaustion against a backdrop of anesthesia equipment blips and 80's love songs from an old boom box. The finger looks good but the outcome is still up in the air so, who knows.

many stories of oddities and niceties and some good food. the parents (and grandparents and great grandparents....) and patients are so so touching here. They sleep in the hospital on beds or bamboo mats next to the child's bed. Hospital care here is literally home care but with physician oversight. The families and staff are so attentive to their children and so appreciative to have help that it's incredibly refreshing to be here and the hospital doesn't really feel like a 'foreign' place.

I have several hundred pictures on the way and am writing down my days so I promise to get the stories from here to there but it will have to wait until I can relate them face to face as this typing is tiring and insufficient anyway. I miss many people right now, but not many things at this point. Still excited to be here.
more pics soon.

g

Bia Ha Noi

Things Eaten so far:

snails
big SNAILs
kidney
liver
pig's feet (pictured)
intestine
squid jerkey
charcoal grilled clams
mussels
quail eggs (some feathers)
tiny fried river crabs
octopus

things witnessed:

1 traffic accident
1 toe to hand transfer microsurgery
1 total ear reconstruction
10,000,000,000 motor bikes

Compadres:
2 nurses
1 resident
2 young folks
1 Colonel
1 madman
1 first US Hand transplant surgeon
Khan Vy etc.

my surroundings

just an update on how the world is in my vicinity. nothing too new happening school wise. Still words/numbers in words/numbers out. The vietnam trip is on the horizon and with it the end of my second of three terms of my first year of medicine school. Still have to face the Great Regurgitation of final exams in a few weeks. Extracurricular (actually supracurricular) activities have improved. Back to baking and soon to interview for fellowship that will pay me to bake and teach for the local food bank. My room smells like a brewery with 5 gallons of red ale bubbling away by my portable heater. My cooking intensity has picked up a bit. Last night I alchemied up a chipotle infused apricot chutney sweetened with vermont maple syrup, which partied surprisingly well with a smoke italian sausage and lentil stew. The photo is a roast turkey sandwich on fresh ciabatta with caramelized onions, goat cheese, spinach, and dill mustard.

here are some photos of my room for those who haven't had to navigate it in person. Cozily cluttered i think.

Etc.

I've been informed that I have a birthday approaching so I made a book list with a few ideas. It's on Amazon, but I'd prefer the used editions that are probably cheaper through Bookfinder4U.com



Other than that, just hacking away at school again.

bear tracks

saw them in the snow by my car a couple of days ago.


v. busy right now...

Here is a link to the Vietnam program:

http://engineering.dartmouth.edu/rice/

Other news:
Just submitted a proposal to bake 500 loaves of bread this year for the local food bank.

2000 nine.

might just be great. Just got wind that I will be in Hanoi, Vietnam in March for a medical conference of some sort. That's about all I know. Promise. promise I will update this slab sometimes this year.