The Last Summer (Maybe)

But before that, a picture of our baseball ball park with a rainbow. I haven't been to a game in a while.  This picture was from the days when each ticket was $1 off every time one of the pitchers, Tim Lincecum, struck 

out a hitter. 

Yesterday was my med-school-bound friend's birthday + going away party. It was also held in conjunction with her little brother's birthday party. It's not in this photo, but there were four cakes. One birthday cake for each person, a medical school cake, and a random cake-sized fruit tart just for funsies (!!). The medical school cake was a Napoleon cake and the round dome pictured is a Princess cake.

I don't know what it is with her mom, but she cannot or does not judge how much food to order for the number of people coming. Three cakes is really, really not necessary and four is just too much. It's not just the fact that some of it probably gets tossed, but also because my friend will make us play a horrible, horrible  game that involves making the loser eat food.  (I say "horrible" in a very tongue-in-cheek way because, you know, true hunger and starvation is genuinely terrible)  She always picks the food item that our group collectively did not like.  This year, it was the princess cake. The cake is way too sweet for me, even without the marzipan coat. We played a card game this year. Each person had to guess whether his/her card was higher or lower than everyone else's card, without knowing what his/her own card was.  The player has the opportunity to keep the original card or swap from the deck and hope for a higher one. The two people with the lowest cards have to eat cake.  I can proudly say that with two people colluding against me, I was the last man standing, winning by the narrow margin of cake icing and marzipan. She is a sadist. 

Ugh, my stomach hurts just thinking about cake. I don't want to eat cake for a long, long time. 

This might be the last summer where 90% of us were together in one group, because this sadist friend was kind of the common denominator for the girl-group and guy/nerd-group.  I'm not particularly sad about seeing people go. I think more along the lines of, "Hey, that's cool. You get to do something really cool and maybe fun."  Mostly, I hate that feeling of being left behind, doing not-fun and not-cool things.  It's a lame feeling, but I'm not the only one who thinks that way.  

As my friend puts it, "Who will we have wine-jug parties with now?!?! The two of us can't finish a whole jug of wine!!" 

In a Nutshell

I'm not reaaaallly sure where the last couple weeks went....I think I burnt myself out during the first month and a half of class, so I had to sit back and gather my sanity.  I definitely have figured out that I struggle with content more, as opposed to test-taking strategies...so starting now I will need to knuckle down and torture myself diligently review flashcards.  I've also been using Examkrackers books to review content I am unsure about and found that it saves me time and frustration.  Kaplan books have the tendency to give analogies that I think are stupid, or the books provide a really long-winded and over-detailed explanation for concepts that really DON'T need that much detail.  

My physical therapy is progressing pretty well, albeit conservatively per doctor's orders.  The final two ranges of motion that I will need to work on are the external rotation at the elbow and abduction.  Strength training is progressing smoothly, and the exercises they have given me will also be helpful once I begin doing my own strength training after rehabilitation is complete.  Most of my strength building exercises seem to focus around using the muscles behind my scapula (rhomboid major muscle?) correctly and NOT using the trapezius muscle to compensate, which seems to place unwanted tension on the shoulders.  Consequently, my upper back between the shoulder blades are pretty sore today =/  

Last night was supposed to be my last night of fun-time before I re-engage hermit-mode to study.  My night ended with a bang.....several bangs, in fact: 

pewpewpew!

I dunno if there's a stigma against doctors (and pre-meds) wielding firearms as a hobby but I don't see anything wrong with it, as long as shooting is done legally in a safe space and as long as all participants abide by the rules for safety.  I would trust a doctor to handle a loaded gun safely as opposed to some random person, although I would still prefer to stand behind the doctor....just in case.  After using a few of the rental guns the shooting range had, I can definitely understand why some dudes get super excited over guns: it was pretty exhilarating on a very primal level.  I can also appreciate how much damage a gun can do, and how much skill/practice it requires to shoot well when the target isn't just a piece of paper with a giant orange dot in the middle.  Holding a gun is also no joke - pistols look small sitting in a glass case but some are surprisingly heavy.  

The beginner's course I took (required for all newbies) included a nomenclature and safety class.  The class had a bunch of girls, and collectively we learned that any idiot can load and shoot a gun (that same day at work, I learned that not everyone knows what a PDF is *facepalm*).  We started off range-time with a Ruger MKIII which was pretty easy to handle, upgraded to what was probably an older model of the M4 rifle and ended the night with one of the smaller Sig Sauer 9mm pistols that could fit in my tiny Asian-girl hands.  I had the most fun and the best shots with the 9mm.  The only downside was that since it was a rental gun, it gets a lot of use so the casing would eject straight at my face instead of off to the side.  

Overall it was a fun night.  I wish I could get this much excitement out of reviewing physics X_X