Stop the world, I want to get off!

Aiee! Work, parenting, dirty house, work, work....where's the knitting?

So anyway, I was SICK for 2 weeks, including over my board exam and vacation. Miss Maddy was sick for 2 days (during which I got next to no studying done) and then I cam down with the Dreaded Cold and coughed my guts out for 2 weeks. Couldn't sleep due to cold medicine overload or coughing, take my pick. Great timing. Bleah.

Spring seems to finally have arrived in La Crosse. Damned snowstorm on April 28th. Now, to yard work! Another time suck, thanks.

Started knitting Rainbow Socks (check 'em on ) with Austermann Step (ooh, jojoba oil and aloe, yum).

Pics to follow.

Went to a patient's funeral yesterday...yep, that means a baby. Two actually, but I can't say more. I'm glad I don't have to do that very often. I really liked these parents, and I hope they stick together. I really hate funerals though, because I find all the religious pablum mouthed by the clergy to be horrible. Didn't help that the stupid priest got the babies' father's name wrong. Came home and hugged the heck out of Miss Maddy.

Countdown to The Boards

Yikes! The Neonatal Boards are Monday! And 1000 miles away! And Monday!!

I'm not nervous. Nope. It's only my perceived competence on the line. Never mind that the people I work with and for seem to think I do just fine.

And we don't get the results until July, despite the fact that we fill in all those stinkin' dots with stinkin' pencils so a REALLY FAST COMPUTER can read our answers and calculate who passes and who goes down in flames in an instant.

Maybe the people who feed the papers into the machine are r-e-a-l-l-y s-l-o-w, like someone put a molasses hex on them.

I don't know that any more studying will help at this point. I'll keep reciting formulae I need to know like a mantra...sensitivity and specificity, PPV and NPV, A-a gradient, OI, GIR, MAP, physiologic dead space, volume of distribution...and if you know what all those are, you're probably a neonatologist. It's the metabolic disorders that are eating me alive - there's no rhyme or reason to their names, so it's very hard to get a handle on them. I mean, some are named after people (Hurler syndrome), others after the missing enzyme (ornithine transcarbamoylase deficiency), and still others for the effect or symptom (maple syrup urine disease - and no, you don't piss maple syrup; it just smells like you do). Dagnabbit, can't we standardize these puppies?!?!

I'm going to bed.

Religious idiots let daughter die...in Wisconsin!

Wowsers - Wisconsin has this crazy, archaic law. So if you're deluded enough to think that the imaginary magic man in the sky will help your children through direct "divine" intervention, you can let them slowly die horribly...and that's okay.

I thought this was 2008. I thought we, as a society, had agreed to protect our children.

I have ranted about this elsewhere, and I think I'm just sad and burnt out now. Just....damn. If I believed in hell, I sure know who'd be going.

6 - 8" of spring

Blargh! Snow again! I suppose all the Easter eggs need to stay white so we can hide them in the snow. It's so nice to have an extra hour of daylight so we can stare at the snow longer.

Can you tell that I am sick of winter?

I'm also sick of studying and anticipating the neonatal boards...everything else is piling up on my desk. The review book puts me instantly to sleep (good to remember if I ever have insomnia again). And of course, stuff keeps cropping up that simple must be done right now.

Thank goodness this is my last on-call weekend before the boards: I've had 6 admissions. Sometimes the NICU feels like a Roach Motel: they check in, and they don't check out. Since your average 34-weeker stays a week or so, 6 admissions can really fill the place up for a while! I did discharge one today, but I'm still up 5! Tomorrow I get to hand it all off. Ahhhhh.

Ravelry as enabler (no, really?!?)

Blackberry hills, originally uploaded by iron knitter.

Getting all (ha!) my stash into Ravelry has enabled me to wallow in my yarn, revel in it, and find stuff I forgot I had! Ican do this for hours and hours....I've got my the preschooler fetching me yarn. She counts, she practices her colors: it's educational, right?

Speaking of education, there's a referendum here in La Crosse about whether to spend more money on the schools. The school buildings themselves, mind you. Like the one with the 69-year-old boiler. I can't believe there are those out there who would begrudge a small (about $55 per $100,000 house value) tax increase to make safety updates on the schools. It's more involved that that, but essentially the opposition comes across as saying something on the order of, "I want good schools but I don't want to pay for it." DUH. End rant.

On another front, I tried to slice off the tip of my left thumb while cooking dinner Saturday evening. I have a nasty flap thing going on, and tomorrow morning's scrubbing in the NICU is going to be interesting to say the least. I'm thinking Steri-strips and a Tegederm. Right now I am making do with knuckle BandAids (because all the fingertip ones were already gone, I wonder why?).

Might buy a fishtank, been kicking it around. Photos later if so.

Ouch! This learning thing hurts!

Ow ow owie ow ow!

I'm at Neonatal Board Review at the Holiday Inn Mart Plaza in Chicago.

Literally 9 - 10 hours per day of lectures on neonatal topics, meant to prepare me (and my fellow neos) for The Boards, which will be on April 7th. We ought to know this stuff - it's review. I think of it as a wake up call and refresher.

I don't feel very refreshed though, after SITTING for 9 hours straight.

I have been getting a lot of knitting done though. But my back hurts!

Two and half more days, then a nice 5-hour train ride back home again! Ow!

I think this hotel should lend their chairs to the CIA as a torture device.

Well golly gee, Ravelry is the best!

A-ha! After my no-help Berroco answer (see previous post), I checked out the sweater on Ravelry. And, lo and behold, someone made Sanpoku in Comfort, just like me!

Turn out I sewed the fronts on 90 degrees wrong. Thus the curling problem. Oh, the edges will still curl, but different edges. :-)

I wonder when I will finally feel like picking out the seams and resewing it the right way.