Estoy comiendo donas.

I'm heading West tomorrow.  Been awhile since I've seen the prairelands of the Midwest.  Long enough that the last time I drove home the trees looked as they do now.  The cold was as it is now.
Trying to tie up all the lose ends before I leave.  A little bit more planning than usual needed for this trip, a trip that has trips within it.  Did you know that the US postal service only holds mail for a maximum of 30 consecutive days? I hope nothing important arrives in my mail box over the rest of this week...cause it'll sit there for quite awhile if it does.  Going to be away from New York until January, and it's a little weird saying goodbye to people at work and neighbors, etc and wishing them a Happy Thanksgiving, a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year all in one breath. But this whole year has been on the surreal side anyways, so I guess I should be past the weirdness that life can throw at us.

Got a picture with my officemates, Juan and Alex, before leaving today. 

L to R: Alex, me, Juan.  And yes, they really are that much taller than me! :) Alex will be heading back to Spain in about a week, so was the only final farewell of all the goodbyes.  These guys have been a surprise blessing during my time at WMC. Working with them, learning from them, and being able to call them my friends.

The stereo has gone caput in my car just this last week.  At first I was worried about having a lack of soundtrack for my roadtrip. But then I decided to empty my mp3 player and resync it. Problem solved. Roadtrip soundtrack? check!!

Now if I could just get myself to do the whole packing thing I could maybe be good to go! ;)

Hasta!
 

Estoy empezando ya cansada.

New England took a turn for the bitter cold today.  Thankful Saturday was sunny and bright! Marcy B. and Amanda V. had driven from CT late Friday night.  And after catching a few winks we rose with the sun Saturday morning to make an early train into the city!

 So that's how the Rockfeller Tree gets decorated!

 Greenacre Park.  Sadly the waterfall was no longer running. But mysterious men disappearing into cement walls?????? I'd say still proved to be a stop well worth it!

After seeking for and finding Greenacre Park we caught the subway Downtown and went in search of the Wall Street Public Courtyard!

 We found it!  (If you care to, feel free to zoom in on my fabulous friends! ;)

 Brooklyn Bridge Walkway!  Marcy maintaining the center of the center! :)

 We struggled a bit trying to get a shot on the Brooklen Bridge without other people behind us, or where our heads weren't blocking the Downtown skyline.

A random lady offered to take a picture for us!

 

 Ummmmm, thank you?

Catching an early afternoon train back so we could get on the road and back to CT in time for a farewell dinner/singing. What can I say about this train ride? Selfies? wigs? rope? A mad dash for the exit, pushing each other up the aisle, diving for the train platform as the door is closing...literally....smacked elbow to prove it!  De-training at its most epicness!

Hasta!

Estoy limpiando la casa.

Pulling out of the parking lot at the hospital this evening, I turned the radio all the way up.  It was just one of those kind of evenings.  I wanted to drive fast.  Bad luck. Very bad luck. Construction on my route was supposed to end at 3pm....."supposed to end", because it definitely was still in progress, bottlenecking rush-hour traffic and backing it up for miles of stop-n-go.  Sigh.  I don't know who had the worse luck.  The construction workers, stuck on the job (for probably some really frustrating reason) hours past shut down time.  Or the rest of us trying to go North on 9A after work.  Finally making my way to the actual area of construction, I was struck by something rather funny.  And when I say 'struck' I mean 'slap in the face'. And when I say 'funny' I mean 'eye roll + snort'.  While all the workers were just standing around, there was one guy still working.  He was the sign holder.  He was there with the stop/slow sign motioning each car on through with a wave of his hand.  Really my friend?  After over an hour of going seemingly nowhere, I now need your okay to press the gas peddle? Forgive my rudeness my friend, but I respond to that slap in the face with an eye roll and snort.  Those last 4 miles home were probably a bit more on the excessive side of fast.

Going to be having my second over-night guests visiting tomorrow night, so I did half the cleaning this evening.  I turned my music up loud and serenaded my poor unsuspecting neighbors while scrubbing the toilet bowl.  I hope my usual quietness makes them more on the forgiving side.  After awhile Apt 5 started playing his guitar.  I pretended he was joining in and playing along. Instead of trying to drown me out! ;)

Got another quote for you from one of my officemates.
JMV: "Are you trying to decodificate me?"  (a.k.a. Can you make sense of what I'm saying?)

Hasta!

Yo estoy avergonzada.

Over the past week or so, I've had a couple experiences of positive reinforcement.  For example, finding out I passed my test is one such experience.  And,I've felt a little weird about it.  I'm not used to it.  Over the past couple of years, there hasn't exactly been a whole lot of external positive reinforcement for me to work with.  Even now in "interview season" I get a steady flow of daily rejections from programs.  It's about 1-2 rejections a day.  Can one get used to rejection?  I'd venture to say, desensitized at least.  When it becomes the usual, just another fact of life.  You learn to instead focus on the steady beat of eagles wings.  So then when you get some physical feedback that says, 'hey good job there!', or 'hey someone liked what you did there!'  I was feeling rather wary of just why I'd get so much suddenly.  I actually took a short time out this morning at the hospital to have a heart to heart with God.  To let Him know that I needed to be brought back down quick as I was in danger of getting a big head.  And I chuckled to myself getting back to the work at hand because I knew what was bound to happen sooner or later, and I was curious to find out just exactly how He would do it.
If I had guessed how it would happen, I would have guessed Dr. A.  And I would have been right.  There was a research meeting this afternoon, for which I'd had to quickly put together an abstract for one of my projects.  When the conversation of the meeting turned to focus on the project, Dr. A picked up my abstract expressing, "What the #*!@#$%^!* is this!"  You could hear a pin drop. Slowly all eyes turned to stare at me. And instantaneously I could feel the burn all the way to the tips of my ears.  Ooooo boy was he Ticked. Off.  Picking up papers and throwing them on the ground, cussing up a storm and everything.  He hadn't actually read my abstract, but I hadn't put any numbers in it, which he could see by glancing at it.  Now, I have many many many numbers in the data that I've collected and reviewed.  So much so that the tables I've organized them in are really rather large.  And in keeping an abstract to one page I opted to leave them out.  So, there's no numbers in the abstract.  So, he threw a fit right there in the meeting.  And all one can do is sit and let it blow over.  But hey, nothing like a heaping helping of public humiliation to deflate one's ego right?  Plus, I've learned a lesson.  Never give anything to Dr. A unless it has numbers in it. 

Hasta!

Yo estoy trabajando.

My officemate asked me why I'm so smiley lately.  I responded I didn't think of myself as any more different than normal.  His response: "No you are.  You were sad two weeks ago."  I played it off, denied it.  But honestly, I can tell you exactly what he was referring to.

I was feeling incredibly pointless two weeks ago.
Project 1: We're waiting to hear if it's accepted.  So nothing to do at the moment.
Project 2: We're waiting for the IRB to be approved so we can expand the patient search and complete the data extraction.
Project 3: I'm waiting, been waiting, will probably continue to wait for my access to the specific program to be granted so I can actually analyze the data that is sitting in the office on CDs.  Soooooooo frustrating this bureaucratic red tape.  The work is right there in front of me and I can't touch it.
Project 4: We're waiting for organization.  It's over 100 years of data to comb through.  Just how is this going to be accomplished?
Project 5: So this was technically the only project that I could accomplish anything on.  However this is the vaguest of all the projects.  I've been working on this since June.  Will probably be working on it until I leave, whenever that is.  But if anything ever results of this research in matters of publication or benefiting the medical community, it will at minimum be at least a year from now if not more.  Most likely when I'm gone.  And all of this work I've done will be handed off to someone else, revised and then another name put on it. So......I was asking myself, just why exactly am I spending time and effort on this?

I reiterate. I was feeling incredibly pointless.  My work was not proving to be productive.  No one was being helped. There was just no clear reason, why or purpose.  And feeling as such, Colossians 3:23 was just not coming easily.  And this.  This was making me sad.


I know Jesus is reason, why and purpose enough to work heartily no matter how productive or helpful the work is.  I knew this, and really gave myself the daily pep talk, but I still struggled.  We all struggle sometimes.
So the next time the work isn't as productive, maybe that's when our 'Good morning' to someone in the hallway, or a smile to a coworker is the most important.  When we need to remember that our work which doesn't leave a papertrail is more important than the work that does.

 Hasta!

Colossians 3:23 And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men;

Yo estoy hablando en español????????

There's three of us in the office now.  Alex just came from Spain Wednesday night.  So Fridays have apparently been declared Spanish days in which within the office we speak 100% Spanish.  We lasted a whole two minutes before Juan pronounced 'lluvia' as 'shoba' prompting an argument about how Spanish is properly pronounced.  This argument existed primarily between 'Argentina' and 'Spain', because the one thing they could agree on was that 'Mexican' Spanish was the worst. 
The Spanish language is a very emotional language.  Emotion and feeling is so much easier to express in Spanish than English.  So you can imagine how awkward someone would feel walking into a room to fax something and a Spanish argument is in progress.  Even though it's just a friendly argument, to the English ear it sounds like they're about ready to resort to blows.  They picked up on that eventually and would pause when someone would come in, only to resume once they had left again.  Of course the argument was all in vain.  In the end the Argentinian still says 'sho' and the Spaniard 'yo'.  And me, well, I'm very happy to stay a Mexicana!!!!!


This reminds me of a really good video making fun of the differences between different Spanishes.  :) "Que dificil es hablar el espanol" (How difficult it is to speak Spanish.)



Hasta!