Words cannot describe how good if feels to be back home in Boston. I almost went to hug my refrigerator the moment I stepped into my condo. Well…almost. I feel as though I just stepped out of the past and into modern civilization through some portal from the Twilight Zone (I’m actually thinking of a specific episode). Luckily, I now have a bit of time before my next rotation begins. Unfortunately, my ciricadian rhythm over the past few days has been completely thrown off – not because of jet-lag or anything, but by the lack of a regular work day. While I’ve been busy running errands and catching up with my life, not having the necessity of waking up at 6am each morning to do so can be pretty disorienting, especially when I’m home alone. I don’t know how people who work from home do it. It probably requires a level of discipline that I just don’t have.

Since this is the last weekend before I fly back to Boston, it would have been blasphemous to leave Baltimore without sampling the city’s famed crabs. Last evening, my friends took me out to dinner at Bo Brooks, where we sat on the balcony overlooking the waterfront of Inner Harbor just as the sun was setting. But as the evening went on, the serenity slowly deteriorated into a battlefield of carnage as I fumbled with my mallet trying to get all the little bits of meat from our dozen steamed blue crabs – reminscent of the scene with the monkeys from 2001. Although Melody was not available to join the feast, she did get to enjoy free music back home at the Boston Blues Festival this weekend. Sadly, I will just miss her when I get back, since she’ll be on a plane to a conference in Minneapolis that same day. Fortunately, she has promised to leave me plenty of home-cooked goodies for the rest of the week!

From the same resident that brought us the 12 Types of Medical Students a few years ago comes another genius comic strip to help perpetuate the medical specialty stereotypes that pervade our profession. It’s scary imagining my wife as an “overworked bitch goddess,” but these are just “stereotypes,” right? Heh heh (nervous laugh). Too bad there isn’t one for Ophthalmology. I wonder what it would be?

Have you ever tried to stalk someone with your favorite search engine, like Google? If you haven’t, be aware that there are people out there (but not me, of course) who might be googling you! I recently tried to assess my own “googlability”, and realized that my name is rare enough that searching it with quotes yields more than 70 hits that are all about me! It’s nice on Pubmed, where my publications all show up as a unique list. But it’s unsettling to think that you can learn so much about someone on the web. I guess that’s where having a name like John Smith can be a good thing. Before you do decide to google that new neighbor or co-worker, however, be aware there are things that you may not want to know. A quick search with my wife’s name would make me think that she was trying to kill me!

I finally went to Safeway this past week to stock up on food for my dorm room. My mini-excursion took longer than I expected, however, as it was tough coming up with a grocery list that didn’t require refrigeration. In fact, I was surprised that I left with more than $70 worth of stuff including canned soup, canned veggies, Spam, Tuna Helper & canned tuna, pasta and pasta sauce, peanut butter, jam, bread, and breakfast bars. I also bought apples and bananas, and a bunch of snackies like chips, nuts, and pudding =P. I even got some tomatoes and eggs which I kept semi-chilled in a bag I hung in front of the AC. Anyway, now that I’ve gotten in touch with an old labmate and college friend, I should have no trouble surviving the rest of my month here in Baltimore.

This Labor Day afforded me the opportunity for a weekend in NYC to escape the drudgery of my prison-styled dorm room and cafeteria food. Unfortunately, getting there was an adventure in itself. Being the cheap bum that I am, I had ordered tickets from a Chinatown bus company online. Little did I know that saving those extra bucks meant getting totally lost in the middle of nowhere just to find the bus stop. And when the bus finally arrived an hour late, the driver wouldn’t even let me on, saying there was a mix up. I ultimately had to shell out $20 to another bus company for the ride. Despite the fiasco, the weekend trip was definitely well worth it. On Saturday, we spent the afternoon window-shopping in Soho, followed by dinner in K-town with an old friend, and … dessert on the West side. We went to Coney Island on Sunday, mainly to buy yet another aquarium mug for Melody’s collection, but also for me to fill in that missing piece of my childhood, when I enviously watched my elementary school classmates chow down on original Nathan’s hot dogs and cheese fries during a field trip to the famous (but now ghetto) Astroland theme park. Unfortunately, it’s just another one of those things that I had always wanted as a kid, but now that I can actually afford it, it’s no longer the same.