Cutting the Grass

Apparently in Ireland they don't say , "I'm going to mow the lawn." They say, "I'm going to cut the grass."  I learned that in church 2 weeks ago.

The other day I was driving home and I passed a house with a guy on a massive riding mower/tractor in a teeny,tiny yard--like 12x15 ft!. It was so funny, wish I had a picture.

This past Sunday there was a special youth session at 0800 and so we had muffins (aka cake) for them at 0730. All the kids were coming in all puffy-eyed and sleepy looking. We were talking to one of the girls about being tired from getting up so early and she was like, "Yeah, I stayed up so late. I went to bed at 10 PM!"
Ha ha ha! Hilarious!

Nightmarish

I was listening to an interview on the radio last night as I drove home from work. The guy was some expert in the history of leeches in medicine.

So back in the days of bloodletting, leeches were a popular choice. They produced visible improvement of inflammation and were thus used anywhere there was swelling. His specific example was tonsils.

My throat is reflexively closing off .

Although effective at reducing the size of swollen tonsils, the leeches were problematic because once they had gorged themselves they would simply drop off, causing the patient to either (a) swallow them whole, or (b) choke and die as the fat leech occluded the airway.

The solution was to "pass a silk thread through one end of the leech" so that it could be pulled out once it was done feeding.

Fatso Gene

I've put on a few pounds recently...

Actually, I do not sport that much hair on my abdomen. I found this picture attached to an article about the Fatso (FTO) gene.  Get this, the Fatso gene was discovered in a mouse with Fused Toes, hence the FT part of the name (FT + Obesity = FTO.)

Hi, little mouse, we just mutated one of your genes and gave you deformed toes. Might that same defective gene also make you fat? What on earth, where do they come up with this stuff??  Igor, it's quite obvious the fused-toe mice are choosing hi-calorie mouse chow...

Cable vs Dial-up

I've spent the past 8 weeks meticulously recording and presenting histories and physicals in the ER, and even after writing everything I still have to refer to my papers. Somehow the docs, without taking a single note, are able to recall every blasted detail on every single patient. Hello, you have 10 patients, how do remember all this?

Then there's my 23 year old classmate who, having misread the calendar, put together a brilliant presentation during a 30 minute lunch break while the rest of us labored for hours the night before.

And, oh, I am not tone deaf but I'll spend like 20 minutes banging on the A key of the piano, trying to tune my cello. I show up for lessons and my teacher flinches when I play the open strings. "Can you hear it?" she asks. Help!

The geniuses are the ones who were doing long division while I was still trying to figure out which way the whale's mouth went for greater-than and less-than. That's New Math for you and I am clearly a victim. (Actually, I have no idea if that's New Math or not, lacking genius and all...)

I've decided what separates the geniuses from the rest of us are 1)  Photographic Memory  2)  Exceptional Insight 3) The organic equivalent of Cable vs Dial-up--whatever that may be.