short

The constellation Orion is on my chest. His belt, anyway. Kind of freaky.

looking ahead

This morning, I had to reschedule my dentist appointment from next Monday to sometime later. Shingles and lying in a dentist's chair and being all contagious just don't go well together, and probably it hurts, too. And I bet the hygienist wouldn't be so thrilled. So I rescheduled for Monday, Nov. 3. And now I am worried - what if something happens to me in the dentist's chair or while I am en route to or from the dentist, and I can't vote the following day? Scary thought. Calming thought: Kitsap County does vote-by-mail for everyone. Given the number of political signs out for some local person today, I figured the ballots were coming today. Nope, but it should come before the 3rd, so I have a chance. In the meantime, I'm dealing with my second bout of shingles in 25 years, and I am really too young to be able to say that. The upside is that I am no longer worrying about possible scopolamine toxicity. And I am allowing myself to eat ice cream and Wheat Thins. I'm the only person I know who gains weight when sick.

Added Saturday morning: It turns out that my ballot really did arrive yesterday, as I suspected. I just hadn't looked at my mail carefully. The ridiculously easy geo-quiz questions on the National Geographic that arrived yesterday put all thoughts of the rest of the mail out of my head. So did the itchiness and tickliness of my torso. gaaaaaaaaaah! I ate all the ice cream ... yesterday. oops.

15 seconds

My choir is on YouTube! You can finally hear what we sound like. Someone posted a video of parts of our performance of Gabriel Faure's Requiem from last Sunday. The sound quality is better than the visuals, I promise. I am up there on the stage, somewhere in the middle of the first row. Go listen!

update

Sorry for the long silence. I have been silent because I have felt especially boring lately - nothing to report. I have been obsessing over a mystery series (by Julia Spencer-Fleming). That type of obsessing is always a little embarrassing, so I try not to obsess directly to other people or, say, here. So I won't. Instead, I just admit to the obsessing without going into details.

Mom and Dad were here for a couple of days, dropping off lots of boxes of My Stuff From Their House. In the unlikely event that they brought it all, I am now officially out of their house, all grown up. It only took 35 years. I haven't yet opened any of the boxes, since I have no place to put any of the stuff, but I now have all the books and mementos of my childhood that I am ever likely to have, along with some dishes and glassware from my ancestors. Not sure which ancestors. Great-aunts, mostly. So not really ancestors. Anyway, I have no place to put them.

Mom and Dad drove out from Maryland with all these boxes, and were here for less than 2 days. As Mom said, it's the journey that's important, not the destination. I'm the destination. Now they are on their way to Oregon to see Mom's sister, and then will start back east. They have had a nice trip, and we had a good time yesterday. My choir performed at the big fancy concert hall (Benaroya) in Seattle, as part of the Day of Music and Art, in honor of the10th anniversary of the hall. Everything was free (mostly), and we sang in the middle of it. Faure's Requiem, which we performed in May as well. It was very nice. Mom (or maybe Dad) said that when the singers (that was us) opened our folders, the lights on the stage reflected off our music and up onto our faces. We all glowed. How nice. After the concert, we had a big lunch at Elliot's, the seafood restaurant by the water, and then braved Pike Place Market in search of croissants (mmm, the French bakery). Then we braved the even scarier ferry terminal, which was filled with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of sad Seahawks fans. The Seattle Seahawks had just lost their second game of the season (football). The ferry terminal was full of depressed blue-clad people, with a couple of sedate (but secretly ecstatic) 49-er fans. Once we got on the ferry, it was very nice. We sat up top in the wind and the sun, and breathed in the exhaust from the engine house. How lovely.

Now Mom and Dad are gone, and I have called in sick to work. I was planning on calling in sick anyway, but I actually have a sore throat and was achey last night, and am generally pooped, so I feel somewhat justified. And I'm a little blue, as expected. It is loud here - my apartment building is getting new siding and new windows on the back, both good things and loud. It is a beautiful day - a nice day to work outside and put on new siding, I would think. Perhaps I should go move plants away from the wall on my deck. Yes, I should.

another book review

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is a great book. From it's title, I thought it was about how doctors figure out how to make their patients better. But instead, it is about how the medical profession makes itself and its performance better. Gawande classifies the methods he sees in several ways. First, there is diligence, doing right, and ingenuity. He explores these ideals while discussing the campaign to get doctors and nurses to wash their hands in hospitals, improving the field of obstetrics, saving the lives of more and more wounded soldiers, and improving life expectancy for people with cystic fibrosis. He emphasizes that improvement is possible, even with the tools and techniques we already have. We have to use them diligently, every day. It's not easy. At the end of the book, he has 5 suggestions for improving performance and generally making a difference in one's career. His audience is typically medical students, but these suggestions work for everyone:



1. Ask an unscripted question. In other words, get to know the people you are working with. They will mean more to you, and you will work with them better. It's just good for society, too.



2. Don't complain. Complaining drags us all down. I love to complain, so this is a hard one for me. But I also know that negative energy is infectious, and kill energy and creativity. But positive energy is also infectious. Neither he nor I am encouraging people to be chipper and annoying - just don't drag everybody down. Change the subject if necessary.



3. Count something. That I can do! Gawande's point is, find a question that interests you in your profession, and observe it. In order to improve performance, you need information on current performance, and also information on why current performance is what it is. So count something. Then give me the data and I will analyze it for you.



4. Write something. Gawande says you should show your writing to other people, write for an audience. I think that you can learn a lot about yourself and your profession through writing, even if no one else sees it. It helps to clarify thoughts.



5. Change. Don't be afraid to make changes when they are necessary.



Here is a quote that I like from the book, the essence of the book in one paragraph:



"Arriving at meaningful solutions is an inevitably slow and difficult process. Nonetheless, what I saw was: better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try."



Gawande is a good writer, and his essays are interesting individually. Despite what I might have indicated here, he does not preach. He provides examples and offers up the lessons he learned from them. And he writes about really interesting topics. In addition to the ones mentioned above, he writes about doctors who participate in executions, trying to innoculate 4.2 million children in 3 days in India with a polio vaccine, the difficult question of patients' dress (or lack thereof) during medical examinations, doctors' income, and the extreme and pedestrian steps that some surgeons must take every day to treat patients in public medical clinics in India. Interesting stuff, well-written, reads quickly.


View all my reviews.

Happy Birthday, Em!

Here is a big happy belated birthday to Emily! Hippo birdie 2 ewes, Em! I hope you had a good one! :-) I miss you.

The Matt Video

Others have blogged about this video, and now that I have watched it, I must blog about it, too. You should watch it. It made me laugh, and then smile, and then cry (in a good way). It's hokey and sweet, and it makes the point that the most serious place on earth really is the Demilitarized Zone in Korea. And that you don't have to dance well - you just have to dance.

Ooh, was that lightening??! Be still, my beating heart! Something to write home about. Hmm. Guess not.