Dear and faithful readers, it falls to me to thank you for you patience during the past week or howeversolong it’s been since my last update. Poor Samwise, my faithful and long-suffering lappy-top precipitously gave up the gost one quiet afternoon. For those of you wondering about such, no, it did not in the end have anything to do with a previous encounter the poor laptop had with a reckless young bottle of St Peter’s English Ale. (Which good Cephas has wisely seen fit to remove from the marketplace.) Unprovoked and without the least malice on the part of dear Samwise, the ruffian beverage laid itself out on the poor computer, fouling the keyboard and screen. Amazingly enough, the prolem at hand had nothing to do with said assault. Instead, it was your typical day-to-day “Oh, God, I can’t take it anymore” hard drive failure. So, while fixing the hard drive issue, the good people at Apple made so bold as to fix everyting else (for a not-small donation to their cause on my part). So, here we are, fresh of screen, newborn of hard drive, and almost entirely lacking in any sense of how properly to behave as a laptop. I mean really. The amount of instruction you have to give computers these days in how to look and what to do is shameful. Hence the lag-time in w’blog entries. I’ve had to entirely retrain the pitiful creature in what software to run. So sad…

In any case, here we are. Refreshed, renewed, and ready for adventures.

Since we last spoke, a fair bit has gone on in the life of this sojourner in the land of Beer Distiribution Centers and the Amish.

Last saturday I had my first overnight in the hospital. The shift starts at 4:45pm and goes til 7:45 the next morning. With any luck, a good bit of that time is spent sleeping in the on-call room. In my case, “a good bit” has a rough value of “four and a half hours.” Nothing else of not having happened until then, at 2:30 in the morning I got a page to the Emergency Department (so much more than an ER). It turns out that a poor man had been mugged, and so I spent hte rest of the morning with his wife while we waited to find out how he was doing. All things considered, it was a good night. It was good to be able to be there for someone in such a hard time.

Other than that, CPE has been remarkably without incident. I’m still getting to be more comfortable with walking into strangers’ rooms to say “hi.” It’s not that complicated a procedure, and generally speaking they’re ahppy to see us, but nonetheless, all the intorverts out there can probably agree with me on the existential terror involved in such a project. It’s been nice to establish relationships with a few of my patients. For the most part my people seem to come and go, but there are a few who are sticking around. Likewise, I’m getting to know the nursing staff on my floors, which is good, since even if the patients come and go, the nurses remain. The other day I gave my opinion on a birdesmaid’s dress one of them was looking at on the interwebs that she was going to have to wear at a wedding (of all places!). It was actually decent, not one of these “make the bridesmaids look ugly so that the bride looks better” deals. In any event, it’s good to remember that nurses are just people, too, right?

For those keeping track at home, I’ve finished A Monstrous Regiment of Women and moved on to Ursula K. Le Guin’s new book Lavinia, which is about the wife of Aeneas, the hero of Virgil’s Aeneid. The jury is still out on this one, but I’m afraid my dedication to Le Guin will probably win out over my actual thoughts on the book. We’ll see…