Living the dream

So I’m a week into my “summer vacation.” What have I been up to?

Well most importantly, I invented a new sandwich yesterday. A friend gave me some avocadoes in exchange for watching his tomato plants while he’s away on a real vacation. After a quesadilla, a burrito and a tasty scrambled egg/avocado combo I was out of ideas and had a couple left. So I decided I’d use the avocado as a base for a sandwich, much like peanut butter. I vetoed avocado and jelly sandwiches and instead tried avocado and honey. I decided this would be a bit too bland so added a fair amount of cinnamon to the mix and my new sandwich was born. It’s fantastic. Unfortunately now all my avocadoes are gone so I’ll have to wait for him to go on vacation again.

In non-avocado news, classes are over. I had my last test a little over a week ago. It was a little anticlimactic in that it wasn’t a final or anything; just the latest in a series of tests. But the last couple months have been relatively relaxed, so it wasn’t really a pressure drop. We’ve been doing our neurology/psychiatry unit, which I’m relatively informed about. So where many of my classmates had a bunch of microbio or embryo or immuno experience in previous units, I actually have had classes on these topics before. My prior experience didn’t really translate into higher test scores, just less stress for me since I could usually reason my way through problems I didn’t have immediate knowledge about. When we return to class in August we’ll have one final blessed unit of neuron before heading back into uncharted territory.

For the summer I’m doing schizophrenia research. Well, hopefully. I was accepted into a program to do said research, and they’ve paid me for 8 weeks of work on it, but the work has yet to materialize. My PI (Principal Investigator ie boss) is taking a month off in Scotland, so I’m a bit lost as to what I should be doing. The 2nd in command just took a job at another hospital, so I’m even more confused. Because of these two events they haven’t been interviewing patients for over a month, so my hopes of just jumping into an existing project aren’t going to work out. So while I wait for approval to work with actual patients (hopefully that paperwork goes through this week) I’ve been more or less filling the time at work. I’ve organized my office a bit. I’ve made a lot of copies to get packets ready for patients. I’ve attended optional seminars for the psychiatry department (it was comforting to be able to hear a lecture aimed at practicing psychiatrists and to be lost only a small portion of the time.) The closest thing to real work that I’ve been doing is getting trained by our resident psychologists in their psychometric studies so I can do them with patients if/when my approval goes through. I guess I can count myself fortunate that the time I spend waiting for something worthwhile to do makes my vacation seem longer.