My Wife the Organist

I'm so proud that my wife and her new calling which brings music into the church every Sunday. I don't know if she's made this clear, but she's secretly wanted this calling ever since we moved into our Ward last Summer. She already had a great talent in playing the piano and wanted a chance to develop her skill playing the organ. I like her having this calling because they let me sit next to her so I don't have to sit alone in the congregation (at least until we have little munchkins of our own running around). Why would I want to sit on the stand? Well, for one thing we always have a place to sit, the chairs are more comfy, and I sit right behind the organ so no one can see me in case I ever nod off during sacrament meeting.

The calling is also a little hard on Melyn because it means she has to be to church extra early every Sunday. Every other week she works the Saturday night shift, so often she won't come home until after midnight. This gives her less than 7 hours to sleep (like today, for example). On top of that, she has only a couple hours after church until she has to go back to work again for her Sunday shift. But miracles sometimes happen like today when the power suddenly went off near the end of sacrament meeting. It never came back on, so the Bishop excused everyone to go home early. This meant Melyn would have time to take a nap before work. Melyn felt guilty about being happy about church ending early, but I told her that Heavenly Father had blessed her since she was so faithful in fulfilling her calling. Normally she would have to stay to the very end regardless because she also plays the piano for Relief Society. I didn't mind having time to take a nap either.

Preceptorship

As part of my medical school education I get to work along real live doctors during my first year. They call this a "preceptorship". I was assigned to work with a pediatrician in a clinic a couple miles from downtown. What this preceptorship entails is that once every other week during the Spring I go to the clinic for the afternoon and see patients and write up what they are there to see the doctor for. I ask the basic questions like "where does it hurt?" and "how long have you noticed it?". I also do basic physical examination stuff like listening to the lungs and heart, taking blood pressure, and checking eyes, ears and mouth.

What's a little unique about my preceptorship is that it's in a clinic where 90% of the patients are hispanic. This means that a lot of the parents bringing their children in to see the doctor speak only a little English and not very well. This is great because I speak only a little Spanish and not very well. Time to start brushing up on the espanol! Because I served my mission in Brazil, I have a lot of experience speaking Portuguese, which is closely related to Spanish. I also took 3 years of Spanish during high school, though most of it went in one ear and out the other. So now I have a real opportunity to build up my conversational Spanish skills. As extra practice, I signed up for a medical spanish elective at school that meets once for week for about 6 weeks. I need to get my Spanish going real fast though, because until I'm fairly fluent I won't be much use to the doctor.

In fact in my first two visits I mostly followed the doctor around. I can understand a good 90% of what people say, but speaking back is harder. I do see whatever English-speaking patients he has on my own (one so far) and that was a cool experience to do actual doctorly things with real people. So far it's been a lot of check-ups, runny noses, coughing and vomiting (not in the clinic on that last one, thankfully).

The doctor I'm working with is very experienced, in fact, he's set to retire this Summer. He did a summer internship at Primary Children's way back when he was in med school, so he already knew quite a bit about Utah even though he went to school in Arizona.

Hopefully in the coming weeks I'll be able to talk about more about this experience as it develops.

Chorale Performance

Full story is detailed in Melyn's post below. Melyn is in the lower right corner of the choir (though you can't really see her because of the video quality). Note: It starts out very quiet then gets very loud.

I thought this was a fantastic performance. The choir represented itself very well amongst all the other churches. I think more people stood up to applaud for their performance than any other.

What an awesome weekend.

It seriously was so great. I made a vow to not talk about work or anything that would make me unhappy the whole weekend and it made things so much better! On saturday we went up the the DC temple together. It's the first time we've been able to go to the temple together since we've moved, and it was a wonderful experience. The DC temple is so beautiful. We listened to the radio on "scan" almost the whole 2 hours up there because we couldn't find a good station to play more than one good song in a row. We finally found one about 20 minutes before we arrived :) I had been to the DC temple once with my friend Lyanna and there were about 5 other cars in the parking lot. I thought for sure it would be the same on Saturday...not so! The ENTIRE parking lot was full (about 200 cars), plus the church parking lot right next to the temple was full. It was absolutely insane - a madhouse! I couldn't believe how many people were there. It was a wonderful session though and much needed.

After the temple we decided to go to Cheesecake Factory in Arlington, Virginia. The drive through downtown DC and the suburb of Arlington was so crazy! The lanes were so narrow and people were driving like mad. We finally made it though and walked through the 15 degree weather to Cheesecake.

Sunday was awesome too. I got another calling (I know, I know!) as ward organist. I'm really excited for this calling because it will help me accomplish my goal to learn new organ pieces every 2 months. It went very well during sacrament meeting.

After church, I got ready for a Richmond Mormon Chorale performance downtown. We were singing as part of an interfaith concert celebrating the efforts of Martin Luther King, Jr., and commemorating the lives of those who fell on September 11. It was held at a Jewish synagogue, Beth Ahaba and was sponsored by Living the Dream. The concert was called "Sing out for Freedom, Pray for Peace". Eleven choirs sang: Episcopalians, Gospel choirs, Jews, Christians, Presbyterians, Mormons, and Unitarians. It was great! We had an amazing time, and I may be a little biased, but our chorale was the best there :)

Death

I really don't know what to title this post. It's been a rough couple of days in my career. For those of you that don't like reading medical/sad things, don't read this.

One of my favorite patients at work has been hanging onto life these past few days. She had been on hospice for about a month. Cancer - cancer is what did this to her. It ate away at her body and whittled her already emaciated body down to that of a skeleton. She was in excruciating pain. Even the morphine that we as nurses administered to her didn't help at times.

When she was first admitted to my wing, she was FULL OF LIFE. Absolutely. She was up and walking around, talkative, so funny, and annoying at times. She always wanted to get up to go to the bathroom. She would always pat my arm after giving her the medication and say, "You are always so caring for me!" She didn't know who I was every day I worked with her, but she would always thank me, up until she stopped talking last week.

I just couldn't believe at how awful she looked at the end. Her feet and hands were bluish/purple. Mouth dry. Eyes closed. Skin so fragile, it would almost break if you touched it. She could barely even get a moan out. I went in to give her some morphine and other medications at 5:00. She took the morphine, but couldn't swallow the other medications, even though I had crushed them and put them in applesauce. She couldn't even swallow water. I left the room and not even five minutes later, the roommates visitor came and got me.

"I think she just passed away. She hasn't been breathing for a minute."

"Oh my gosh. Crap."

I rushed into the room. Tried to feel for a carotid pulse. Nothing. Got my stethoscope and tried to hear for a heartbeat or breath sounds. Nothing. She was gone. Slipped away. I kept thinking that the last thing I did for her was get rid of her pain. I got the other nurse I was working with to listen for any heartbeat and she said she was gone also. Since I'm an RN, I can declare death. I had no idea I held that power - to declare that someone's life had just ended. It ended at 5:17 PM. Call the family. Call the hospice. Call the doctor. Call the mortician. Perform post-mortem care. Those CNA's that did that did a wonderful job. She looked like she was sleeping after they took care of her.

Her poor daughter. Oh man - she had just asked me the other day how her death would be. I hoped for her sake that it would be quiet. It was. I thought it was fitting that she passed away on a Sunday - the day of rest. The day when her body and soul are finally put at rest and she goes to be with her Lord.

It made me think about how I want to die in the future. I don't want anything bad to happen. No heart attacks, no violent death, no pain. I just want to slip peacefully away like this sweet lady. It really makes you think about your own life. How are you living? What are you doing with your time on this earth? Are you really doing the things that are important? Are you taking the time to demonstrate your love and caring for the people around you? Life is short. Live it to the fullest.

I Have a Hobby

My life is so interesting, I know. I study during the day (and at night) and on the weekends, too. But I also get to spend precious moments with my wife. I've since been looking for new things to fill up my time, especially now that Melyn spends most nights working. Rather than just "fill" my time, I've been wanting a project I could continue throughout the year. The problem is, fun and interesting projects cost money, like restoring cars or flying airplanes. Those don't come cheap. So I've been wanting a cheap-er project that would also be useful for my education. Like building a computer.

I've been wanting a new computer for a while. My family seems to think I'm always wanting a new computer, and in some ways that's true. One of the downsides of buying a computer at a store is that they can never make it exactly the way I want it. Plus, store-bought computers are generally hard to upgrade, so they have a habit of staying "old". That's where building a computer comes in. The problem is I've never built a computer nor do I have any formal computer training. And I come from a family of Mac users, so they're probably wondering why on Earth I want a PC anyways. But I've learned that building a computer isn't incredibly difficult, it's sort of like putting together a Lego set. Sort of.

Melyn has posted a bunch of recipes, and I'm going to post my own: How to build a computer.

A CPU (This is the processor, or rather, the part that does all the thinking)

A few RAM modules (this is the memory, it stores the programs that you are running)

A Video Card ( this is what translates everything into an image on your computer screen)

A Hard Drive (this is long term storage for your documents, files, and programs)

A DVD/CD drive

A Power supply (as its name implies, it supplies power to your PC.)

A Motherboard (very important, this is where all the different components above plug into)

A Case to fit everything inside

Lastly, the Operating System (Windows) to run all your programs

And a few other odds and ends, like a internal fan to keep things from over-heating.

Another nice thing about building a PC from scratch is that I could salvage all the parts from my old computer that still worked fine, like the hard drive and DVD drive. Another way to keep costs down. So, after doing a bunch of research, I ordered the rest of the parts I wanted and started puting things together.

After several hours of putting things together, I realized that one of the parts I ordered was wrong: The Power Supply didn't have all the connections I needed. I was very heartbroken. My only option was to ship it back and order a different one (and wait a few more days in the mean time). Unfortunately, most of these parts can really only be found online, not at your local Wal-Mart. Well, after a few more days of waiting, I got the last part connected and here was the result:

"What is that." The computer here looks unusual because I chose a clear acrylic case to put all the parts inside. I thought it looked cool, plus when I see all the mess of wires and junk inside I can say "I built that!". The last part was scary: Turning it on for the first time. When you spend this much time and money on a Lego set like this, you kind of want it to work. Well, i hit the power switch, and waited for something to appear on the computer monitor. Nothing did. I looked at the motherboard and it shows a flashing red light. Not a good sign. The red light indicates something is wrong, but it won't tell you what exactly is the problem. The next part was a lot of trial and error. To make a long story short, it turns out I hadn't jammed the RAM modules all the way into the right sockets. After I solved that problem the computer come online for the first time and I was able to install the software. And then I had a fully functional computer

But this isn't a one week project. There's still lots of fiddling around with the computer I can do, you know, to make it go faster and stuff. But that's the story so far. I spared you lots of the details.

FOOD!

For all my fellow foodies out there, we had two amazing things for dinner this past week. They are both from the "Favorites" cookbook for those of you that have them.

Chicken and Artichoke Cacciatore, page 178

4 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves

flour seasoned with salt and pepper for dredging

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 6-oz jar marinated artichoke hearts, undrained

1 16-oz can crushed tomatoes

2 garlic cloves, minced

1/2 teaspoon oregano

1/2 teaspoon basil

1/2 teaspoon pepper

8 oz sliced fresh mushrooms

1/4 cup sherry, optional

In a large frying pan, heat olive oil. Dredge chicken in seasoned flour and lightly brown over medium-high heat. Add artichoke hearts, crushed tomatoes, garlic, herbs, pepper, and mushrooms. Remove from heat. Pour into 8x8 pan, cover, and bake at 350 degrees for one hour. If adding sherry, pour over top and bake an additional 10 minutes. Serve over pasta or rice.

The BEST Classic Clam Chowder, page 64

3 (6 1/2 oz) cans minced clams, undrained

1 cup chopped celery

2 cups chopped potatoes

1 cup chopped onions

3/4 cup butter

3/4 cup flour

1 quart half and half

1/2 teaspoon pepper

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

1/2 teaspoon sugar

2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar

Drain clam juice into a large soup pot, saving clams until later. Put chopped celery, potatoes, and onions into the pot and add a little water, just enough to barely cover the veggies. Boil until vegetables are crispy tender, about 5 to 10 minutes.

In a separate pan, melt butter over medium heat. Stir in flour and cook about 2 minutes. Add half and half and cook, stirring constantly, for 3 more minutes. Add sauce to vegetables. Stir in clams and pepper, salt, sugar, and vinegar. Stir over medium heat until soup thickens and serve.

Notes: Even though it seems odd to add apple cider vinegar to clam chowder, trust me. That is what makes the soup so delicious!

Welcome 2011!

It's been a great year already! I've made my new year's resolutions and I'm excited. I love setting goals and seeing what it's possible to achieve. My inspiration for setting goals and making them are here and here and here!!

We've been going to Gold's Gym a lot - and I did the yoga class today and it was so good. I LOVE yoga! Jordan's been doing a lot of running, something he hasn't really been able to do since we moved because of the humidity and then the cold. I love going to the cardio cinema and watching a bit of some great movies.

I've set up a plan to learn new pieces in the piano AND to learn the organ. I plan on learning a new piece in each instrument every two months. I'm also going strong again in the Richmond Mormon Chorale, and we have a performance in three weeks!

That's just a couple of my goals. Jordan says he didn't make any new goals, but I know that he wants to get honors in his classes. He's begun embryology, physiology, and histology!

I'm going to start browsing for new jobs and applying only to jobs I REALLY want. Like psych or oncology jobs. So far, none are really available. There was this sweet promotion put on by Bon Secours that if you applied between January and March and got hired, you would get sent on a vacation of your dreams or given $3,000. I was so excited...and then found out that you have to have two years experience! Boo!

Oh, and I just finished reading "Life of Pi" by Yann Martel. It is SO good! I loved it - it's the same kind of genre as "Hatchet" by Gary Paulsen, one of my other favorites. So if you're looking for a good book, read it :) I'm now reading "Beloved" by Toni Morrison, an American classic.

That's all for now folks!