Over the last few weeks, we took the opportunity to hit up a couple of Chowhound favorites, from the tasting menu at Craigie on Main to goat cheese raviolis and pan-seared barramundi at the Jamaica Plains Ten Tables. The meals were a bit pricey, but within the norm for fine dining of this caliber. This weekend, we returned to NYC to celebrate my mom’s 60th birthday. Now I’ve been to a fair share of Chinese seafood banquets, but this was my first time shelling out nearly $100 per person for Chinese food. At Brooklyn’s East Harbor Seafood Palace, our lavish meal included a lobster salad, dual-style fried jumbo shrimps, crab-stuffed bamboo piths, conch & geoduck with fried tofu, sharkfin soup, stewed whole abalone (the bulk of the cost), deep-fried soft shell crabs, steamed jumbo grouper, longevity noodles, egg and dried scallop fried frice, and a stewed hasma dessert (yes, that’s frog fallopian tubes). If there were an “extreme edition” for Chinese banquet meals, this would have been it. It wasn’t haute cuisine, but definitely worth it to have my extended family together and see my parents enjoy themselves after a very tough year. On Sunday, we scarfed down some old-school pastrami and beef tongue sandwiches from famous Katz’s Deli with one of my oldest friends in NY before returning to Boston.

After my last shift as a junior resident, I browsed through my records and estimated having seen between 1200-1300 patients last year in the Emergency Room alone. That’s 2500 eyes in 365 days! Yet, all that experience did little to prepare me for my new rotation at Children’s Hospital. After trying to examine a crying 11-month-old and an indomitable 3-year-old on my first day, I was already missing the days when patients actually followed directions, or at least not trying to kick me in the nuts. Second year also introduced me to the notion of “home call.”As a junior resident, we stayed in house overnight, so the threshold was low to see everyone who was referred to the infirmary. But deciding whether to drive into work when consulted from the comfort of my own bed is a whole other issue. Luckily, working closer to home means more time for fun and relaxation. Despite being on call, we enjoyed a morning brunch and afternoon barbeque with work colleagues over July 4th weekend. And after reaching the unexpected yet satisfying conclusion to Heavy Rain, we are now embarking on the second installation of the Assassin’s Creed series. This time, we take to the rooftops of Florence and Tuscany and continue investigating the mysterious plot of the Templars, all with the help of nifty poison daggers, dual hidden blades, scantily-clad courtesans, Leonardo da Vinci, and an uncle Mario, whom we believe was so named for the sole purpose of his unforgettable entrance with the line “it’s a-me! Mario!”