Black Is Traditional!

Coraline.

Amazing stuff.

Not having read the book, I watched this with the anticipation of a Neil Gaiman fan collective resting on my consciousness and a middling trailer seen on Apple.com.



It didn't disappoint.

A story about a young girl bored with her parents, and who thinks her parents are bored with her. So she finds new parents, who look just a little odd.

Definitely not a typical feel-good Disney/Pixar variant, which was refreshing. Scenes flipped between the eccentric to mildly amusing to an anticipation of an exciting finish. This is the sort of book I would've loved when I was young. Maybe even now!

The website was the icing on the cake - plenty of fiddling to be had for those with plenty of time on their hands.

Buttons anyone?

Bit s and Bob s

Actually just a bit.

Heard that Coldplay's offering their live recording LeftRightLeftRightLeft as a free download here.

It's got some classics plus some ones off their latest album.


Can't believe its so soon till we finish our first year as junior doctors.
In the space of minutes we'll morph magically into SHO equivalents, expected to make decisions on discharging/admitting patients/sending patients to intensive care/taking over complicated patients from junior doctors - wonder if I'll be up to the challenge.

It does sound like fun though, so we'll see.

Plus, this weekend, if it pans out, should be fun!

PS: If you've still got an appetite for legally obtained free music, check out Amazon's free MP3 site.

Etsu

The last time I ate Japanese, I threw up.

My sister is a big fan, my last housemate back home, my cousin and countless people I know swear by their sushi, sashimi, sake and every raw food that ends with a vowel, so I decided there must be something to the whole cuisine that I'm just not getting.

Etsu was somewhere we've been planning to go for a while. It was the 'place we would go for our first paycheck', then the 'place we would go for our second paycheck' then just 'arrggh are we ever going to go to that place'. Jack, Gil and I planned to make it a house affair, Esther and Naomi, always game to try out a new place, decided to join in.


Restaurant of the Year 2008 in Liverpool, plus rave reviews online - we were expecting good stuff. Gil was especially excited as she knew the chef from a houseparty not too long ago - turns out he remembered her too!

I think we all came with the idea that helpings were going to be small for some reason, so we might have gone a bit overboard in ordering a mixed sushi/sashimi plate, some gyoza and some tempura to start with, plus a main course for each. To complete the feast, some Asahi and Kirin for the guys and plum wine for the girls.

Now I'm a poor judge of what is fresh and what isn't, but the fish that night stuck in my mind as being 'fresh' from the moment I bit into their bouncy flesh that wasn't mushy/soggy in the least. Grains of rice that came apart easily in the mouth yet held together firmly enough to be moved in small clumps easily by chopsticks. Tempura was pretty normal, however the main courses were brilliant all around.


My unagi-don came with a sweet sauce that was light enough not to be cloying, and went beautifully with the white rice - the unagi itself reminded me of a very sweet ikan bakar from back home - similar texture. The tuna and red snapper steaks that Jack and Gil had were firm and went well with their sauces.


Surprise, surprise, we were full enough not to bother about dessert and instead sat around for an hour or so chatting about random stuff till Naomi had to go home and study for finals.

Definitely going back to try their bento boxes.

Free stuff is fun!

I've not won many prizes via random competitions before, so this was a big deal for me. Being a Waterstone's Cardholder, I rarely receive a parcel from them without knowing in advance, so I was surprised one morning, coming back from an all-nighter, to get a fairly hefty white envelope.

Inside was a letter informing me that I'd won an unproofed edition of Martyr by Rory Clements to read and would I be so kind as to submit an online review when I'd finished.

First of all, I mentally and physically prepared myself.


I remembered entering the draw for the book, thinking that I wouldn't mind reviewing a light historical murder mystery, a little light reading in bed would be fun. At the same time, I was wondering whether I would be able to be objective about it, as I've not read that many pseudo-historical thrillers before (Phillipa Gregory - I'd better read one of hers after this to compare)

What makes a good read, for me, is something I've never thought about; this might be interesting as an introspective for myself!

Firstly, I guess I like it when a book is easy to get stuck into - ie if the language is not too fancy, sentence construction isn't too long . In other words, how 'readable' it is.

I also like it when the scene/setting is painted naturally - ie descriptions flow from the pages naturally, making it easy to picture the surroundings without feeling as if the author is trying to draw my attention to each and every object present in order to make me believe in the authenticity/accuracy of his writing.

Descriptions of food are a bonus, I personally like it when meals are described in books, besides making me hungry, it helps to keep me in the scene, as it were.

Pacing of the plot would do quite a lot to keep me reading. I found books with slow plotlines very dull to read. This goes also for books with obscure references to events that only become clear when I keep reading. However some books reward persistence when the plot picks up a little way on; I found Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell very hard to get into at first-by the end, I didn't want it to stop.

Books with difficult-to-follow plots are an issue. Most murder mysteries, court-case-based books (John Grisham) are not on my reading list because most of them require a lot of attention to really be able to get the most out of them.

Based on the above, I'm actually quite a superficial reader!

However bearing all that in mind, I enjoyed this particular book, because it ticked all the boxes above. Plus I felt that since I'm not a writer, I shouldn't have been too harsh when I genuinely enjoyed it:-)

Almost

An up and down day - in between attending and assisting in flexible cystoscopy clinic, I managed to lose a USB drive, and post a letter minus the stamps.

And at the eleventh hour, when dinner was in the oven and I was wandering bleary-eyed around the house, Ai Wei's frantic tones via Jack's mobile informed me that I was within 15 minutes of missing the farewell tour of Riverdance.

Having seen them already on DVD, I had some idea of what to expect, but the dancing, the music, the showmanship generally was a sight to behold. Everything seemed so meticulous, from crowd pleasers such as Trading Taps, to wildly crazy dances like Morning in Macedonia, to choral performances and instrumentals; to my untrained eye, not a foot looked out of place.

Sitting back during the intermission we wondered aloud how one of the dancers could twirl on tiptoes while in a squat, and almost immediately get back up and perform without losing her balance.

The musicians were excellent, especially the fiddler, who played immunerable solos and generally kept us entertained for the better part of two hours! Must be something, to be part of such a spirited band.

We were lucky to have got such high seats - AiWei's work, and as they are apparently going to end their run of shows sometime in 2010, about 10 years after they first started (an offspring of a Eurovision performance, I just learned!) so if anyone is still wondering; they're very much worth a watch!

wORSHIP

Song of the night:

At the foot of the cross


What made the most sense:

'I lay all my burdens down, at the foot of the cross.'

I wish I may, I wish I might

Got through today, which I'd been dreading for some time now...

Talked about urinary retention in front of the FY1s at the RLUH, which was strangely more nerve-wrecking for me than I thought it would be-I think its getting up to talk in front of people I'm not that close with that makes me nervous.

As expected, ended up talking fast, and trying to cover too much in too little time. Every time I prepare something similar(which isn't all that often anyway), I seem to picture having a lot more time, and prepare a lot more than I actually need to, with the result of having too little time to say all that I want to say. (I'm sure there's a more efficient way of writing all that out as well!)

Was followed by Jack, who did an amazing presentation on COPD. Amazing because he held everyone's attention via a gameshow aka Who Wants To Be A Millionaire style, and amazing because he included plenty of important points for house officers faced with patients with COPD. Enjoyed revising the FEV1 cutoff points for mild-moderate and severe COPD which I'd totally forgotten after doing the respiratory job.

The rest of the day was particularly busy, but mostly enjoyable - ended the day with an unexpected invite to a drug rep presentation at Mayur, an excuse for urology consultants and registrars to mingle and enjoy free food and drink. Vinny and I felt a bit out of place amongst all the big names and timidly asked for a couple of glasses of coke, while around us, Johnny walker Black Labels were being consumed by the glassful.

To mask the event in a show of actually learning something, the registrars had a couple of talks on recent advances in PSA monitoring, and it was pretty heartening to watch senior doctors argue over the definition of a screening test, and how a receiver operating characteristic curve should be interpreted and what 'area under the curve' actually meant. Kind of reminded me of a long ago evening in Barrow 4th year med school where HP, Ed and I sat down to discuss statistics for exams. Much like then, everyone came to the conclusion that no one really fully understood matters:-)

Dinner was good - and while I kick myself now for not indulging in lassi, it was a good, if brief, night out. If only I wasn't working tmrw.

Happy Good Friday!

Holding my attention

Popped into theatre today for only the second time in my Urology rotation - watched a cystoscopy - basically a camera going into the bladder via the urethra, looking for cancer. The fluffy specks, fronds that swayed in the clear irrigation fluid pumped into the bladder were actually worrying - muscle invasive tumour. A 5-year survival rate of 50%.

Back on the ward, a patient became abusive and took a swing at me as I was examining his chest to detect the crackles and creps of aspiration pneumonia to determine if he should continue on IV antibiotics. The staff wonder: how do we assess the mental capacity of a patient whose family are not immediately contactable? A mini-mental score and a call to the Mental Health Liaison team are in order; plus I shouldn't feel too special about the whole thing; he has taken swings at all manner of staff from SHOs to junior nurses.

Jack and Gil are watching Hospital - a reality programme about NHS and dealing with different patients - too much work for me, I'm glad to come home to Heroes, to a nice cup of hot Milo with condensed milk(!) to the latest book waiting to be read, not to more work:-)

Saw tonight on the Apple trailers site that one of my first books growing up, is being made into a movie. Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, to me, was a tale about a troubled child who went to the land of the Wild Things to escape his ominous life at home. Seems that the movie is going along those lines - will be interesting to see how it pans out.

I like weekends

It's nice to wake up at the ungodly hour of 9am, without being jolted out of sleep by the alarm and knowing that, if I chose, I could go on sleeping and no one would be harmed in the least (not that they would anyway).

So had a relatively lazy Saturday where I finally dragged myself out of the house to the Liverpool Empire to catch the Witches of Eastwick. It was surprisingly good, and provided plenty of entertaining moments, though we did wonder about the subject matter and there being plenty of kids around - colorful language and sexual innuendo abounded - parents would have a lot of explaining to do.

The story, for those too lazy to follow the links, revolves around 3 women living in a town small enough that everyone knows who's seeing who, and the conjuring up of a devilishly handsome man that proceeds to charm the lady-folk of the town, with both creepy and hilarious effects.

Here's hoping Riverdance will at least be as good when we watch them in April!

Saturday night saw us at Jody's where a number of Malaysian medics had been invited. It was nice to kick back and chat, if a little too medical-oriented:-) (what an amazing phenomenon that when medics gather, the conversation always turns back to work) and considering his house wasn't too far from ours, we stumbled home at 1am without too much difficulty.


Have decided in bits what to talk about on Thursday (benign prostatic hyperplasia management) and am a little miffed at finding out I am working the next couple of bank holidays.

Things are getting exciting

Grand Nationals this weekend...the nursing staff are talking about going to the races, everyone's worried that the rain will spoil things and recounting hilarious past experiences where people spent ridiculous amounts on a bottle of wine.

Will be watching Witches of Eastwick - of which I know nothing about as of now with Jack, my long suffering housemate with whom I've been out together on more occasions than I care to remember. Gil bailed out leaving the two of us to scrounge around for someone else to share the evening with.

Am feeling a little pleased at having survived today after covering 6 different consultants worth of patients. SHOs who are willing to pitch in are a Godsend.

And Easter is coming up. Wonder if I'm working then?

Its nice when things go right

Had an enjoyable Saturday diagnosing and managing at leisure what seemed to be all the various surgical causes of abdominal pain, all of who came in at nicely spaced intervals so that I never felt rushed to do things.

And while Sunday was a little more free than I'd have liked, I diagnosed my first acute appendicitis.

Its the little things that make me happy.

'Twas a curry lunch saved my life today

Yup, carrying that packed lunch of lamb, dhal poured over white rice and overlaid with fragments of a crispy poppadum around to the various wards certainly helped the day go by quite well.

In THe eNd

So its final - I'll start my second year as a doctor working in Infectious Diseases, then Accident and Emergency, and finally Critical Care.

Should I try to sit part 1 during my first block of 4 months? - yet to be answered.

But

'But let all who take refuge in you be glad; let them ever sing for joy.
Spread your protection over them, that those who love your name may rejoice in you.
For surely, O Lord, you bless the righteous;
you surround them with your favor as with a shield.'
Ps 5:11-12

Its been a while..

Introspective

I like to sit on the fence.

I'm not a risk-taker.

I self-indulge a little too much.

I like to start things, but often find finishing them a real pain.

I actually eat quite a lot of food - I wonder where it all goes to.

'The issues' bother me for a while.

As of yet, I haven't committed towards a definite career path yet.

Commitment is more of an issue with me than I'd like to admit.

A lot of my thinking is shaped by my peers/outside influence growing up - I am not the most original of persons.

Probably the only thing I still enjoy doing now as much as before: reading.

Given an unpleasant experience, I'd be the person who'd rather slog through it, head down, rather than spending time figuring out a way to circumvent it.

If I had time, I'd spend more time building friendships and maintaining those that I'd forged over the years.

My estimation and prediction of group dynamics is not as intuitive as I'd like to believe.

Music to me is more about the melody and harmony rather than the lyrics, which is the opposite of what I'd like it to be.


Making lists is something I like to do - lets see how this one turns out.

Disorgnized

I've got myself a diary, 2 in fact, and am still feeling that there are a lot of loose ends to tie up in my life.

Need to get started.

Happy CNY!

Meeting family in a matter of weeks! - save me biscuits!

To everyone who is of Chinese parentage, upbringing, or enjoys a good hot cup of chinese tea..

So Close

So if I hadn't been getting my National Insurance Number sorted on that day, I'd have been here.

And now with the hospital getting into the news for all sorts of reasons, and with staff being increasingly easily provoked due to the increased workload, coming into work daily is becoming more and more fun.

'We are an acute medical unit'

One of the most quoted phrases I've heard this week.

So I don't know enough yet eh?

I'll show them..

Christmas Dinner @18 Guelph Street!

Prepping after coming back from work.

Watching wedding photos..guess whose?

Fellow countrymen in a far off land..

Food - onion soup worked!

As well as roast pork!

Cheese board...we get more posh every year!

And christmas pud with brandy sauce - props to esther!

everyone gets a slice...notice the crackers!

Gift exchange...and our first proper tree in years!

Relaxing with a glass of mulled wine, basking in the aftermath of a satisfying night..