Experimental Treat: Basa Fillets and Sticky Rice

A few weekends ago, as I recovered from switching between nights and days, I felt up to cooking and decided to try something new to me but very old to Viet Nam: sticky rice and steamed fish.

I love "glutinous" rice and have loved it since childhood. It's stickier than jasmine rice due to a higher amount of amylopectin, not gluten, and it's prepared in any number of ways, both savory and sweet. I've had it dyed red (wedding colors) with plums, white topped with peanuts and sugar, the famous "mango and sticky rice" way of Thai restaurants, and as a portable pocket stuffed with mushrooms, green onions, and select meat. However, it has always failed me when I've tried to make it. Traditionally, it's soaked for hours and then steamed. I've tried shortcuts with rice cookers and saucepans, to no avail. It always comes out burned at the bottom, soggy at the middle, and too hard and uncooked on top. EW. Perfect sticky rice, in my mind, should be firm but not hard, clear, and well hydrated. The solution was to finally use the wok that Sunny'd gotten me last fall, along with accompanying bamboo steamer, line them with banana leaves, and steam. Perfecto! Sticky rice for a side to the main course, and then mango and sticky rice for dessert.

To top it off, I ran across a fish I hadn't heard of at the organic market I shop at. "Basa from Vietnam" was the title. A quick wikipedia search showed that it's a catfish analogue that Mississippi Delta farmers are offended by because it's taken up quite a percentage of the domestic catfish market, so the lobbied to have it labeled as "basa" instead. They've got a point. I'm not really convinced that there are significant numbers of aquafarms in Vietnam that would hold up to US inspections. However, I slapped the fillet on a banana leaf, drizzled it with sesame oil and some ginger, and steamed it, and it came out perfectly. Yum.

References:

1. On Food and Cooking, the ultimate food science reference
2. Wikipedia on Basa

First Prenatal Visit

Our first prenatal visit today went as expected for me. Sunny's never been to one, so I made sure that he got to see my cervix. I think that both of us are reassured that our doctor will listen to us and communicate well; the great news is that since she is a family practice doctor, our relationship doesn't have to end once the baby's born.

Now, I thought that we were about a month pregnant since we started coming up positive the first week of January. Normally pregnancy dating goes by the date on which you started your last period, but since I stopped birth control just a few days before that, I figured that it would take a while before I would ovulate. However, my uterus apparently feels about two months' pregnant, so we'll see what next week's ultrasound shows!

The Mommy Diet

After discussing it for quite a while, Sunny and I stopped birth control on December 1st. A month later we're pregnant, which alleviated quite a few worries. Now we're trying to figure out how to optimize my health while the prototype human being develops inside of me. Now I've always been short on exercise, and I love food, so making healthy choices in terms of that is high on our priority list. The babies in the Newborn ICU whose mothers had raging, uncontrolled diabetes haunt me. An infant of such a mother can have just about ANY defect, and that's not going to be my baby.

Research on nutrition and diet has always been unsatisfying because it is impossible to completely control someone's diet. You can't really make two hundred people eat exactly the same diet for years in order to truly study the effects of a diet. Add the insurance liability of studying pregnant women, and the end result is that I view a lot of the dietary advice for expectant mothers with skepticism. For instance, the March of Dimes website suggests that 12 ounces a week of fish that may have mercury is safe. How do they know that! I love salmon both as sushi and as gravlax, and now I'm avoiding both. I have blatantly ignored any advice about soft cheese containing a dangerous amount of bacteria. I figure that as long as it is made from pasteurized milk, and it's made from a reputable dairy, I can handle it. I am unhappily avoiding raw oysters, but cooked clams are still on my radar!



The food restriction that really breaks my heart is the restriction against coffee. I love coffee. I associate it with good moments from my childhood and great moments from college. Have you ever had Vietnamese-style coffee? It's drip brewed slowly to extract all of the essence of the ground beans, and an inch of sweetened, condensed milk adds creamy lipids and wonderful sweetness. It's better than a daydream and sweeter than cutting class. Now to hear that caffeine can make for smaller babies and have possible, subtle psychological and neurological effects on the baby is scary. But it's a possible, and I love coffee. An occupational concern is also that I use coffee deliberately to perk me up at the end of a long night on call. Otherwise I run the risk of making bad decisions or one of those desperate let-me-sleep-damnit decisions. My current solution is to switch to hot chocolate, which is a bit too sweet, and avoid caffeine except for those situations where I really need it. Not a satisfying solution, but I don't have enough evidence to give it up entirely, or to keep drinking it blithely.

Other Mommy diet resources:

• Food Standards Agency in the UK


• American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology patient handout


• Kid's Health patient handout

Being Whole: Certifications I Aim to Acquire

Ones I Have Achieved:
Bachelor of Art
Bachelor of Science
Medical Doctor
Kukkikwon certified 4th Degree Black Belt
Wife

Ones to Achieve:
Registered Massage Therapist
Ph.D.
Professor
Associate degree in Culinary Arts
Registered Yoga Teacher
Author
Mother

Being Whole: Teapots

I have just purchased an item that I've been eying for years: an iron teapot! I love Asian tea, and all the accoutrements that come with it, from fancy porcelain teapots to whimsical, handmade ceramics to intricate trays designed for Chinese-style tea consumption to the fabulous, hand-tied teas I adore.



Iron teapots are lovely and functional, which is more than I can say for the ceramic teapots I love as well. Artisan ceramic teapots are often handmade, and they are very thin. In order to use them, I boil a whole pot of water, with the teapot and teacups submerged in the water to ensure that the whole piece is warmed evenly. Any bit of uneven temperature means that part of the ceramic expands and part doesn't. You have no idea how many teapots I broke in my youth doing that, but with my iron teapot, I can just dump in hot water and enjoy tea. Still, the iron conducts heat well, so I purchased an iron trivet anticipating just that.

Pediatric Check-Up: NICU or Neonatal/Newborn ICU

I'm currently doing night shifts in our baby intensive care unit, and though I hate being separated from Sunny at night, I am enjoying the experience. What do I like about this sub-specialty that Sunny's nicknamed "xeno-medicine"?

Firstly, I really enjoy doing procedures. In English, a procedure is a course of action or series of steps. In medicine, a procedure is usually a series of steps involving some kind of invasion into the body, whether that be a spinal tap, a knee joint aspiration, or in my case, umbilical catheter placement. I'm getting super-good at placing tiny tubes into babies' belly buttons, and I like it because a) no pain for the baby is involved, and I'm saving them from needlesticks b) it provides a good, reliable way to give nutrition and to get lab data. One of the things I really like about our residency program is that there are few fellows here. Fellows are doctors in training for a sub-specialty, and they often need experience with procedures. Even though our NICU has fellows, though, residents often get first dibs on procedures, with fellows supervising. I'm getting pretty good at this one, and soon I hope to become an expert at another common procedure here: intubation, or inserting a flexible, plastic tube to assure a good airway for breathing.

Other reasons to come!

About Albuquerque Life

I often get asked about Albuquerque: "Why did you move to Albuquerque? Do you like living there? What's in New Mexico anyway?". Considering that my relatives thought that I was moving to Mexico, it's not unexpected that most people are curious about Albuquerque itself.

I truly enjoy living in New Mexico. I contrast it to Nevada, where I lived most of my life. Northern Nevada is similar to New Mexico in that it has a great, high-altitude desert climate with most days sunny and bright. There is an amazing amount of outdoors hiking, climbing, skiing, fishing, and more to do, though personally I think that New Mexico's outdoor attractions are more interesting. In a prior post I mentioned that Sunny and I had gone sledding at White Sands, and we are planning on going to Carlsbad Caverns soon. Both states are predominantly rural states with a few population centers. Both of them look like endless stretches of sagebrush and highway as one drives through them. Yet they are very different to live in.

What I think is fascinating about New Mexico is that it has its own distinct culture as a state, and Nevada definitely lacks that. It starts with food. New Mexico has its own cuisine based on local products, especially chile, blue corn, and cheese. Next, art abounds; people here have a much more natural philosophy about art, that art can be produced by anyone, and many people create some form of art without hesitation or worry that they are pretentiously claiming to be "an artist". I am the proud owner of several pieces from a local part-time potter and hope to own more. The Native reservations are still very much alive and producing new techniques based on their traditional pottery, stonework, metal smithing, and weaving. Architecturally, many buildings, including my house, are built to appear similar to ancient Pueblo dwellings; I can actually look around in a suburb and know that I'm in Albuquerque and not, say, some random place in California or Connecticut. Finally, as a modern touch, New Mexico has a great density of scientific work and atomic history, such that Sunny is very excited to be working on his Ph. D. here and is in no way compromised by our location.

More specifically, I really love our part of Albuquerque. Sunny and I are all about living in a "live-walk" community where human-powered traffic predominates and neighbors actually socialize with each other. We live in University Heights AKA Nob Hill, and we can easily commute to school and work and grocery shopping by bike. A cluster of small businesses and great restaurants featuring Greek, Italian, sushi, other Japanese, Korean, Irish pub, and Vietnamese food lives on Central Avenue, three blocks north of our home. Plus, I have little problem finding most of my cooking ingredients as there are multiple Asian markets near by. Furthermore, There are a lot of young families as well as established families here. Greenspace abounds, with four parks and public tennis courts within walking distance. Finally, a library and a well reviewed elementary is 3 blocks south of us. We've been to several house parties on our block, and will probably host one next summer. If you're interested in moving here, leave a note with any questions!

Blog Moving...Possibly

Since deciding to blog more often, I've been posting the last 10 months of blogs on my website. For my latest exploits, visit me there!

Addendum: However, the software that enables my blog on my website has been becoming buggier (it broke just after I wrote the above), and I don't want to spend time doing the upkeep, so the blog may migrate back here depending on my level of laziness.

Addendum #2: Blog has migrated!

White Sands National Monument and Trinity Test Site

This weekend, Sunny and I took a day trip around southern New Mexico. We started by heading to the Trinity Test Site, the site of the first nuclear device explosion in the world. It was pretty anticlimactic. The whole of the original crater has since been filled in by dirt, so none of the fused sand is visible except for some pieces in a display case. There are also some historic photographs, including an aerial view of the site that includes a view of the site of the 108-ton TNT explosion they used as a calibration so that they could measure to force of the atomic detonation. These pictures were interesting, though only a brief nod was given to how devastating the force of an atomic explosion is on life and non-living structures. The picture of the sign is at the gate to ground zero. I thought the distances were interesting given that the flash was seen from Albuquerque, and windows were broken in Alamogordo during the explosion.

Then, we went to the White Sands National Monument and sledded on the gypsum sand dunes until we were tired, and hiked a bit. Sledding in October! Hiking in bare feet (not us, though I was tempted)! On our way back we looped through Las Cruces and drove by the future home of the nation's first spaceport. Since I'm starting a food section to my blogging efforts, I'll have to mention that La Cocina, a restaurant in the town of Truth or Consequences and one that was well reviewed in a Frommer's travel guide, was awful. Billed as New Mexican, their enchiladas and chile rellenos were awful, my prime rib was unevenly done, the Blue Moon (on tap!) lacked an orange slice, and their “authentic” New Mexican chile wasn't even hot.

• Trinity Site web page: http://www.wsmr.army.mil/pao/TrinitySite/trinst.htm
• Trinity test on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_site
• White Sands National Monument: http://www.nps.gov/whsa/
• Don't eat the food: http://www.roadfood.com/Reviews/Overview.aspx?RefID=3912

Brief Check-In: Food Blog

So my newest project is to tour Albuquerque in the pursuit of food. Good food, that is. In brainstorming with Sunny, I've come up with a list of various food tours I could work on, including oysters on the half shell, flan, sushi, pho, microbrews, mead, and more to come. Yesterday we went to a local Red Lobster and tried shrimp, lobster, crab, and oysters. It was a decent baseline for what uninformed persons might consider good seafood, but I'll never go there for seafood again unless someone twists my arm. More on that later. Email me with any suggestions for a topic!

Cheers, Truc-Ha

Being Whole: New Things

I started medical school in Connecticut not knowing a soul for about 300 miles. The jumble of studying, New England snow, Eurocentric culture, and complete lack of friends made medical school a rough stretch of years for me, and I didn't adjust well. As I tried to grow as a person and as a clinician, I also clung to the few stable things I established in my life: calls to Sunny, my bedroom, my favorite books, and a few teachers I had longitudinal contact with through the three years. One of those teachers, Dr. Hom, is an experienced internist in Northwest Connecticut. I'm not sure if he guessed the extent of my disorientation, but we did speak often of how to balance a clinical career with a well-rounded set of interests. One of his strategies was to subscribe to a magazine on a new hobby every few years. When I started working at his practice, I think he was reading about chess.

This past year, there has been more new things than I can count. I'm now a homeowner and a cat keeper. I'm an MD with a paying job. I'm finally living with Sunny, and I have a partner I can share day-to-day work with as well as all the other lovely parts of a beautifully growing relationship. I have a new set of friends, though no new confidants yet. Still, as winter crashed the hospital with more patients than I could count, I found that sensation of disorientation becoming frighteningly familiar again. I will always remember my first winter with a pediatric service as a bleak, exhausting, and depressing time. Trying to avoid my usual habits of depressive episodes, I decided to try something new.

First, I started with yoga. Yoga is an interesting flip side to being depressed. A yogini still concentrates on herself, but on her musculature, balance, and posture instead of the roiling, confused mass of negative emotions that characterize me in a slump. I'd lost almost all of my Tae Kwon Do muscles and some of my flexibility by the time I came to Albuquerque, so it's been nice to work out while working on something. "Going to the gym" has always been a self-inflicted punishment of boredom for me. Yoga is fun, and as I'm naturally very flexible and non-violent, it fits well with me.

Next, I've started with more craft-type arts. I'm sculpting a tree out of copper and various other metals right now; the leaves will be out of origami paper. It was originally supposed to have origami hanging from it, but this one's too small. The next one, maybe.


I'm also gardening. I don't water consistently, so right now my tomatoes and squash are doing well, but I've managed to kill various bushes that should have been more drought resistant than the tomatoes and squash. My indoor plants are doing better. My kumquat tree has just flowered, and the whole house smells like its fragrant little flowers. I don't know how many fruit I'll let it grow yet, but since the tree looks pretty hardy, I might let it make a few.

Lastly, today I colored my hair purple! Not really an unusual thing to do, but my father has some old-fashioned ideas about that (something about changing your appearance means you reject your family; to see what I think of that, see this link ), and I am also generally conservative in my appearance. I now have purple highlights. I was originally going for anime-colored purple, but I decided on a very dark, almost black, purple so that I still look professional. Can you tell from the picture? It's hard to see; some day I will have hair like Aeon Flux.

No, we are not pregnant yet, but we're planning to start trying next year.

Pediatric Check-Up: Out Of Intern-ment

Part 1:
Back in World War II, the US government rounded up a good portion of Japanese Americans and sent them to detention camps simply because the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. They were considered "security risks" based on their ancestry. During the scary days after 9/11, a good many of us worried a similar fate would befall the South and Middle Eastern Asians.

Now, during this year of internships, I have not been locked up or had my civil rights violated by my program, but all the same, there is a sense of imminent release. I look back on a long, scary year of tremendous forced growth, and try to assimilate it into myself in the most useful way possible. I feel that I've grown, but am still figuring out where and where I have more growing to do.



References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_internment_in_the_United_States

Iron Chef: May 2007 = Strawberries

What is "Iron Chef"? Iron Chef has been described as a "game show", though I tend to disagree based on the fact that creativity and inspiration are what win the day, not just blind chance and regurgitation of facts. Iron Chef is a Japanese television show with the whimsical premise of an eccentric gourmand who has Iron chefs and guests chefs face off against each other. In each episode an ingredient is chosen as the theme for a meal of multiple courses. Crazy dishes as well as hilariously voiced commentary make this show entertaining, though unfortunately no DVD's of the show were available the last time I looked. If I could just subscribe to the Food Network, I'd actually watch TV.

At medical school, 5 of us started having themed cooking nights about four times a semester. While none of us ever went as crazy as squid ice cream, it was a fun way to get together and enjoy each other's company in a homey fashion. We never got around to having a competition since most of our houses didn't have enough kitchen space, but good times and good conversation were abundant. Since experience and good conversation are especially valued by Sunny and I, I'm hoping to continue the tradition in New Mexico. An added twist is to try and make the theme ingredient something seasonal. At some point in time we might add something like a conversation topic, and this last meeting we did a bit of origami. Hopefully Iron Chef will expand beyond the demesnes of Truc-Ha and continue even after I move on and out of Albuquerque, but I'll have three or more years to establish it, so we'll see.


Cooking, I've observed, is an artform that can be 1) avoided 2) dreaded 3) practiced daily 4) mangled. I personally do a lot of survival cooking that I use shortcuts to make tasteful and somewhat healthful. I have a lot of excuses. Part of my problem is that I don't really enjoy grocery shopping; going to farmers' markets twice a month is a fun and community-conscious alternative, but it doesn't provide for the rest of the month. I could go on, but sometimes I think about the philosophy of the endeavor. A cornerstone of daily life, I've often used the preparation of a nice meal as meditation practice. I don't chop well or evenly, but if I concentrate, it gets better, and I relax. I have to concentrate on planning everything out so that the scallops won't be in the pan long enough to get tough, and so that the salad won't wilt. I don't tend to have side conversations, and the house is usually quiet, waiting for the meal. The results are very concrete as well as mental. At the end of the two hours of standing meditation, I have a yummy reward for my endeavors. Either that, or my attention wandered, and I'm scraping the burned part off the chicken. As any meditation student, I also try to educate myself. This is a great justification for trying the cuisines of many ethnicities, as well as spending time at gourmet joints like Graze (thumbs down) or Ambrosia (thumbs up). Thus, I think that anyone can develop themselves as a capable cook (and should), and I'm have a lot of fun doing it for myself and with friends.

References

Iron Chef article on Wikipedia

First part of an Iron Chef episode

A Cat's Life: Weight Management

Today Ulysses has gone to the vet for some dental work. Trust me he hated it, but I was also a little worried about it because he has gained quite a bit of weight over the last year. When I got him, he was 14 pounds and looked well. Now he is almost 19 pounds and is a fat, slow-moving cat.

Psychologically, many people tend to see the obese as people who lack brain power. The train of thought goes like this: if they were smarter, they'd make better food choices or at least do something so that they wouldn't neglect themselves and look like that. For doctors, we tend to cringe even more as these patients have more medical problems, come to see us more, hear us talk about weight loss, and often have a hard time getting anywhere with the root of their medical problems. As a pediatrician, at least I can often talk about weight maintenance, since your average overweight Caucasian 10-year-old really should weigh more than 140 pounds in a decade, and they just have to hold the fat until they grow into muscular adults. I hope.

Anyway, with Ulysses, he's not smart enough to understand that he needs to diet, and he's obviously failed to self-regulate his own intake. He loves food, and I can certainly empathize with that. I've tried a few different regimens involving a mix of canned food, AKA “wet” food, and kibble, or “dry” food. I used to give him a lump of wet food (1/4 of the can) in the morning and let him snack on as much dry food as he wanted through the day. Then, after a significant weight gain, I tried limiting the dry food. Then I tried halving the dry food and increasing the wet food. Last week he was on wet food only and ate about 1.75 cans a day, begging for more.

I've done some reading. First, there's the problem that cat food packaging, which unlike people packaging, does not necessarily list the absolute calories it contains, and how much of those come from fat, protein, and carbohydrates. Instead it lists percentages, without stating how those percentages were calculated. Because of this, you cannot compare the percent protein on a kibble package (33%) to the protein on a can (10%) and conclude that kibble has more protein, which it doesn't. Secondly, cats' metabolisms are geared to protein and a mostly meat diet, though Ulysses likes some grass now and then. Thus, a high carbohydrate diet gives them a metabolic state similar to adult diabetics. To give you an example of the health risks of that, an adult human diabetic has the same risk of getting a heart attack as the risk of a second heart attack in someone who's already had one. Not good.

To complicate it further, I can't bear the thought of him starving, so I can sympathize with those moms of obese kids who don't have the heart to make their kid diet. That won't stop me from doing it, but I really hate it. It also drives me up the wall when he begs too.

So the solution? The ideal solution would be to feed him only wet food a few times a day. It is not ideal for us because I work so much and there's often no one around to feed him more than once a day. I really hate to give him dry food again, but we may have to go back to it. The vet is going to give me the number of calories he needs (I tried to estimate using the formula we use for premature babies…obviously wrong), and I've written our current pet food supplier to ask them just how many calories are in their products. Based on that, I'll be able to calculate how much food he really needs. It still won't be the correct percentage of protein, fat, and carbohydrates, but at least I'll stop overfeeding him for a time. Ulysses gets grumpy when he's hungry. I'm afraid I'll have to wear thick socks this summer or risk getting attack kitty marks on my calves.

Pediatric Check-Up: Mom's Quote 1

Doctors, especially doctors in training, like to bemoan that "no one understands" just what we go through other than our allied medical professionals. Now I don't agree with that completely, but I do agree that a large percentage of people do not understand the training pathway or just what our training consists of. So here's a funny quote from my mom this week while I was visiting Reno (translated): "So now that you're out of school, you're less tired, right?"

Er, that didn't sound as funny, but please reference my previous blog post from this January:

Current total hours worked: 101.5!
Current days working on this part of the job: 7 days

Here's a picture of a fellow intern that same month. Can you tell that we were delirious?

Philosofiend: Wealth (And Gifts)

Everyone knows a person it would be hard to shop for: a colleague with everything, in-laws with odd tastes. I've got a mother who doesn't make decisions on her own. How do you find a Mother's Day gift for someone without an opinion, especially if you detest insincere holidays such as Mother's Day? Luckily, my mother in-law is very "girly" and into various scented sundries as well as cosmetics, so I picked up a spa kit from my favorite, moderately Earth friendly boutique chain. Of course, most perfumes and colognes make me want to puke, so I chose something with very neutral scents and not puke-o-genic. Additionally we went to a spa for massages together once we arrived in her city, and made her a mixtape of music she likes and may like.

Now this course of action may seem very simple, but it is still philosophically driven. In giving a gift, we are not limiting ourselves to find something material that the person may like. For instance, there's a lot of souvenir kitsch that my mother enjoys and that I refuse to buy for her. Instead, we've expanded our idea of gifts to giving something that will enhance the person's enjoyment for the moment but also broadens the giftee's perspective or introduces them to a whole new skill set or set of experiences. We've given mixtapes, how-to gift books, de-virginized sushi eaters, and taught origami. It's a lot of fun for both parties in the exchange, and it suits our value system while also allowing us to spread something that we enjoy.

Of course sometimes it's still a case of "you can bring a horse to water, but you can't make him drink." I've bought a few different "how to use your Mac effectively" books for my dad, and also spent some time introducing my mom to computers, but there's still a beautiful G5 water-cooled Mac desktop idling in my parent's dining room using maybe 5% of its computing potential. But I digress.

I was thinking about the concept of wealth in our country. Currently, many (though not most) people enjoy a relatively decent quality of life. On home visits in the more disadvantaged neighborhoods in Albuquerque, people have heat, clean water, shelter, clothing, enough food calories, and preventative health care. In better neighborhoods people enjoy more consistent heat, greenspace and parks, safe neighborhoods, and better food. In my neighborhood, it's quiet, mostly safe, there's lots of young families nearby, and there's a good elementary school three blocks down the road.

So what does wealth mean in the context of Albuquerque, NM in 2007? For myself, what works is similar to an idea my father learned in wartime Vietnam: "they can't take what's in your head." In my context, where personal safety is less of an issue, I'd revise that to say "what's in your head makes you wealthy." In this context, the wealth I enjoy encompasses multiple skill sets, many wonderful experiences, and the ability to acquire more. Sunny and I have gone to Amsterdam, Saigon, New York, San Francisco, Hong Kong, and a really nice spa. I garden, and he codes. I troubleshoot medical instances, and he's made all of our house's doors fit in their jams. We're healthy and safe enough to continue all of that and more in a context of love, respect, and mutual values subject to discussion and tinkering. I think that even in less prosperous circumstances, this method of conceptualizing wealth would serve us well.

Being Whole: Training And Development

Recently, one of the testier attending physicians in the department was speaking with another intern who appeared to be at least five years older than me. In reference to this intern's increased life experience points and presumably more focused and ambitious career plans, this attending linked them together and rather casually derided “the folks who go to medical school and don't know what they want and halfway through decide that they don't want all this [waving at the hospital].”

Now I resemble this remark because I do not intend to find a job as a usual pediatrician or go into subspecialist training when I finish. I intend to chart my way off the beaten path that leads from medical student to practicing physician. I love the work some days, and it's a valuable body of knowledge that I can master. Yet I am looking for work that will allow me to use many of the skill sets I have, and also to continue to be a generalist, learning new skills as I go. Incidentally, I will also be looking for work that is more conducive to family life and to pursuing my wide range of non-career interests. Therefore, I disagree with the implication that I've wasted the seven years I'll have put into the medical career at the end of my residency.

In the gaming world a player's character gathers experience points in each battle, whether the beast is slain or not. I can stretch a simile and suggest that each endeavor, each moment in life, garners myself experience. Though I do occasionally regret a choice, usually I get over the unnecessary emotion and view the moment as a learning experience. Similarly, while I could have chosen to take more of a risk and just moved to San Diego with Sunny to look for a job instead of going to medical school, and perhaps been happier finishing a Ph.D. program in English, I made the best decision I could at each step of my path between entering medical school and finishing my intern year in a pediatric residency. Thus, I am now endowed with one of the rarer professional degrees one'll see in academic research, and I also have a large body of knowledge on how children might be raised, though not the experience of course.

I have always pictured myself as a person who constantly evolves and develops herself. Though this stage in my growth may seem very masochistic to others, it still serves as a stage of dramatic growth. It is very narrow-minded to consider it a waste of time despite the fact that the outcome is not the expected one.

Pediatric Check-Up: Friends' Babies

I have very prolific and fertile relatives, and many of my aunts are young and still contemplating further babies. Also, my friends are starting to drop babies, though thankfully not many. The first pregnancy in my cousins has been announced, and in any pediatric setting, you'll find lots of colleagues with fetuses or babies. The fertility boom makes it an awkward time to be a pediatric resident interested in sleeping at night.

Now, I am fond of babies, especially that class of babies that I can return to their mothers when they start crying or pooping. Still, the climb in pregnancies is making me slightly alarmed. I have your typical close, big, extended family that gossips constantly amongst itself. One misinterpretation of my grudging advice by someone, and then everyone will leave me alone...which is an attractive thought.

Homesteading: Xeriscaping, Zeroscaping

Landscaping a home doesn't necessarily result in monetary returns once the house is sold, so our home was perfunctorily landscaped in the front and not at all in the back. The front yard is definitely dated; it's two mature trees and a flat grass lawn with a few smaller trees. It brings to mind the white picket fence era, circa 1950, when the home was first built and municipal water didn't cost so much. It looks cute...when it's green. And at a mile high in the desert, it doesn't look green often.

Therefore, I'm looking at redoing the front in two years to be a multi-level xeriscaped succulent garden with a path going through it. Points of interest will be rocks, colorful shrubs, or groups of bulbs or colored grasses. I'm trying to use Google SketchUp for planning, though I'm currently figuring out the controls.

Succulents interest me with their variety of shapes, not all prickly, and range of colors. Additionally, like orchids, they tolerate my irregular watering habits well, which is why I've switched from orchid acquisition to accumulating small, brightly colored pots of varying varieties, including jade. Watch for pictures to come!

Xeriscape Council of New Mexico, Inc

http://www.highcountrygardens.com/

New Mexico Water Conservation Program

Citizen Of The World: First Tax

Ick, income tax filing. After four years of medical school, when I racked up debt and didn't have to file, it's an unpleasant experience to wade through the 1040 instruction manual again. Why does it have to be so convoluted, confusing, and difficult? Some would argue for a VAT (value-added tax) on all goods and no income tax, but among other things I'd be very concerned for the poor, having been from a previously low-income family. And why does the government tax two people differently if they are single as opposed to married to each other? Why should the tax code be so difficult that it takes up hundreds of thousands of dollars just to be codified and written each year? Flat tax can also hurt the poor, but it makes a lot of sense in cutting down bureaucracy.

Currently my solution is to provide Sunny with all of my documentation, and cook and clean while he does the taxes. Not the best one, but until I know enough to have an educated opinion.

Federal tax forms for individuals

2006 New Mexico tax forms for individuals New Mexico's state tax forms "piggy-back" on the federal form, like most states'.