Saint Nickanuck of the Tundra

Today was my last day at my “old job.”

It’s a weird feeling to be without a pager and not on-call, at least for a couple of days, but trust me - I plan on relishing every moment of it. I’ll miss the old place and crew, certainly, but I’m not terribly broken up about it - I’m quite excited about the “new job,” and returning to my old stomping grounds. That said, I do wish my first official duty wasn’t at 7:30 Monday morning…

More importantly, today ends ten years of medical training, counting medical school, residency, and fellowship. I’m finally going to get to make a career out of what drives me in medicine, and in life. This is where things get “interesting.” I’ve got some big plans… I hope to start sharing them with you soon.

Many aspects of life have been interesting, busy, and and confounding to me of late. I’ve had quite a bit of newness I’ve wanted to update y’all on and rant about, let alone all the previously promised opining, but I’m still honing an “efficient blog reflex” that hasn’t really kicked in as of yet. That’s one thing to work on.

Laura’s in China, and doing quite well, by the sound of things. She’s working on getting interwebs access in her dorm room, and sorting out what web sites and programs are blocked, which ones are not. One way or another, her blog will start getting updates shortly.

Last day at the “old job” tomorrow. More to come on that, and plenty of other things, in a bit.

Did I ever have a wonderful part 2 of my Balticon post-mortem for you! Then, through a series of events that could only happen to yours truly, I somehow deleted it prior to posting.

“CMAAARRR!!!”

It will see the light of day… just not until after this weekend. It is coming, and will contain many entertaining and confounding anecdotes, such as how the above cry has become immortalized as my new moniker.

As to this weekend, I am about to head out to meet up with Laura (on the way back from Ireland) and catch a plane out to Phoenix for the Wingin’ It pool party, which should be quite fun and interesting, given recent developments.

Tee is unable to make it. I have been deputized by him to say something in his absence. This could be dangerous.

No final Balticon comment yet, I’m afraid. In great part, due an oddly distracting and busy few days. In smal part, due to wanting to say quite a bit, and being indecisive as to whether that is best served by a lot of words, or a few. Stay tuned.

I’ve been undergoing orientation to the upcoming job over the last couple of days, which has been mostly pointless, given that I only left two years ago. While it is clear that it fulfills an obligation of sorts, one can’t argue with the hilarity of 1. me being briefly in the training video I was required to view, or 2. a presenter catching sight of me in a crowded room five minutes into his talk, stopping in mid-sentence, and us having the following exchange: “Hey! Don’t you work here already?!?” “Yeah, but I left two years ago.” “And you came back?!?” [surprised laughter in the room]

Indeed, I feel the love.

I did learn one cool thing: the hospital has Daleks to deal with the bariatric surgery patients. Sweet. And creepy.

Graduation ceremonies for myself and others on the ‘morrow, parental visitation later this week, and Laura is off to Ireland on the weekend - ’tis an interesting week ahead.

Balticon 41 was, hands down, the most interesting convention I’ve yet attended. As I am greatly fatigued and need to rise in a few short hours to put on a good face for orientation at the new job tomorrow - ignoring the fact that I just worked at this same place for four years, and only left two years ago - I’ve decided to save my personal thoughts on my Balticon experience for another day.

Some of the excellent people I hung out with there have posted some great insights elsewhere, which are worth your time to read - a few of these belong to Steve Eley, Christiana Ellis, and Matt Wallace.

By virtue of it being “her” camera, Laura has quite the number of images up in her Flickr account.

All that said, Matthew Wayne Selznick’s retrospective is truly a home run. It’s been hard for me to put some of my feelings about our convention experience, and this community we’ve found ourselves in, into fulfilling words. Matt did.

My words, soon.

Wow.

Balticon was great, and interesting, and fun. Then Real Life ™ had a few things in store for me when I got back, between work-related fun and car repairs, so this has been quite the distracted and slow-to-recover week. I’ll have my own recap of Balticon and related excellence on the ‘morrow.

Laura finally has her visa for the China trip to ISU, so things are finally falling in to place. Last night and today fall under the category of “socializing with peeps before Laura leaves for months,” with us departing for Williamsburg, VA, and the company of friends shortly. As Laura will be doing some events with the incoming NASA academy crew tomorrow, I should have some time to play catch-up with those I haven’t yet from this past weekend.

Then again, sometimes I’m a bit of an optimist.