Since the humidity and heat decided to die down for a day, it has been feeling downright cool outside — 70° with a pleasant breeze. Things smell different — there’s a crispness that isn’t fall but isn’t the oppressive July heat, either.
Halfway through yet another rotation (pediatric dentistry), I’m beginning to realize that there is a point in my life when I’ll be done with dental school. At that point, I’ll have a world of options in front of me. Like a river delta opening into the ocean, my life will have 1000 directions where there once was one. Invigorating, right? Well, I suppose. More on that in a minute. Here’s something I wrote almost four years ago, on the private changelog for my software that powers tumbledry:
23 Jan 2008
Dental school begins in 7 months. If tumbledry is to survive four years of
dental school and beyond, I must now take steps to make it ultra robust
and easily maintainable.
I remember thinking at that time how long four years seemed. I mean, I was going to be hard at it for four years! (Not entirely true: I did a redesign this spring I’d never have thought possible in 2008). Despite that, I’m happy I took the steps I did, because I’m realizing that the “ultra robust” (ha!) code I worked on needs to work for MUCH longer than dental school. It’s all just beginning.
Now, about those 1000 choices. Happiness studies have produced interesting results: show a person 3 paintings and tell them they get 1 for free, no exchanges or substitutions. Now, show another person those same 3 paintings and tell them they get 1 for free and that they can exchange it for another in a week, and they’ll never be as happy as the first person. Living with limitations on our choices helps us find happiness. You lose the burden of imagining greener grass on the other side when you know you can’t go to the other side. Case in point: I LOVE where we live. The lack of air conditioning, old bathroom, ancient windows… I don’t mind them. I know, with only 1 car and me biking to school, we can’t move. Until school is over.
Then what? Suddenly, we can live wherever we want. How can you be happy in a job when you’re always imagining how you could change jobs? Same with a house. It’s a little scary. You have to put your own limitations on your choices, I guess. Bit of a challenge.
Ok, it’s set. I take my third set of boards (NBDE written, Part II) on October 10 and 11. By my count, that’s just over 2 months from now. I have a large box of “decks” — 1440 flashcards made by some very smart (rich) company and distributed by the Minnesota Dental Association. They have some errors in them — let’s hope I don’t memorize any of the errors.
I’ve been doing 50 of them per day, and hoo boy do they take a while to get through. It doesn’t take long to answer the question and flip the card (“yay, I got it” or “crrrap, I missed it”). It does, however, take a while to get through all the extra information on the back of the cards. In the meantime, I wish I could see more of my wife.
I can’t stress enough how important it is to write bad
songs. There’s a lot of people who don’t want to finish
songs because they don’t think they’re any good. Well
they’re not good enough. Write it! I want you to write
me the worst songs you could possible write me because
you won’t write bad songs. You’re thinking they’re bad so
you don’t have to finish it. That’s what I really think
it is. Well it’s all right. Well, how do you know? It’s
not done!
Yesterday at 5pm, our power went out. A fierce storm pushed a power pole over Franklin Avenue and onto a tree. The whole contraption was emitting smoke and sparks when I passed it on my bike. Not big arcs of movie sparks and smoke. Just lazy tendrils of smoke and the occasional ominous sparking sound. It reminded me a steam engine that had run out of steam.
Mykala and I didn’t realize the power had gone out until we returned home at 9pm. It turns out that the power was uninterrupted until repair work began; before that (when the whole contraption was draped over the street), electricity was still flowing just fine. Here’s the thing about losing power in the summer — it’s hot. Really, really hot. Humid. Still. Dark. Sticky. Mykala lit a candle, causing me to launch a 10 minute campaign convincing her to extinguish it. We then sat there in the dark for 5 minutes, letting our eyes adjust until we could see that the drapes were completely still, despite our attempts to catch a breeze. “Let’s go to bed,” Mykala said. It wasn’t even 10pm.
We opened the one window in our bedroom that wasn’t stuck shut or taken over by a air conditioner, and Mykala began reading by book light. We both started sweating. And sweating. And sweating. I went to bed clean, and had to take a shower this morning before I went into clinic. By the time lunch rolled around, I was starving. Had I even been able to bike home in time for lunch, I would’ve found the power still out.
Apparently, at about 2:15pm, after 21 hours of outage-ness, the power returned to our duplex. It took quite a while to get all the spoiled food out of the fridge, and to launder the really sweaty sheets. Tonight, I’m going up to bed to a dark, quiet, 70°F air-conditioned bedroom. I’m going to climb into clean sheets and sleep. Sleep uninterrupted by sweating, extremely loud birds, thunderstorms forcing the closure of the only open window, weird dreams about spoiling food, or any number of things. Just really nice sleep.
Mykala found this great REI tent, and this was our first trip out with it. Very cozy for 2 people. When we left for breakfast in the morning, we didn’t quite get the rainfly properly closed, and then it began raining. Things dried out easily in the low humidity and bright sun later in the day. We learned our rainfly lesson.
Anyhow, a very nice tent, and very waterproof when you close it up right.
The rock faces at Banning State Park still bear the scars from the black powder blasting that workers did in the 1890s to harvest stone from the living rock. We went on a 1.8 mile (self) guided hiking tour to learn about the quarry. The town of Banning sprang up and then died with the quarry.
