Hurricane Jill

I bet some duct tape would have held those levees together

Damn apartment. Today the toilets were backed up. Both of them. So I had to have the maintenance guy out yet again. It’s OK, though…I’m only living here for another month, and then it’s on to Seattle. I sent my 30 days notice in last Friday, along with a nice note to the property manager. I like her, despite all the problems I’ve had with this place (and there have been many). She lost her house in Katrina, and for a long time was driving back and forth from Baton Rouge in order to keep her job here.

So it’s always been a cost/benefit analysis over whether to stay here, with the pluses of a decent person as property manager and a great location just barely outweighing the minuses of a crappy property with a revolving door on the other side of the duplex, on a street requiring an off-road suspension system. And did I mention the burglaries? Yes, that’s plural.

But it’s 5 blocks from CC’s, 3 blocks from Whole Foods and 5 minutes from the pool where I swim. I think about that every time I consider moving out. In fact, I’m pretty certain that if I had actually liked this apartment, I would have seriously considered staying at Tulane for my prelim year.

I still probably wouldn’t have. Seattle has better infrastructure for resident training, as well as for health care in general. And housing. So if I have to live in a cardboard box, at least I’ll be living in a new one, and not an old, soggy, drafty one with temperamental plumbing.

Right now, it seems like the only things staving off disaster are duct tape and other people’s sympathy.

Bookcase Disimpaction

I just got back from unloading a whole slew of medical text and review books up at school. It was probably around 70 books. I sent out a mass email listing all the titles, so there was plenty of help waiting for me when I got there. Maybe 15 books actually made it inside the building. The rest went straight from my trunk to theirs. I felt like a drug dealer, or one of those people selling cheap designer knockoffs on the street. At one point, a security guard even wandered over to see if what we were doing was as illegal as it looked.

-No, sir, officer, we’re just addicted to studying medicine.

Traction, finally

Well, the fun continues. My rear tire is flat. And from the loud hissing sound it’s making now that it’s reinflated, I’m guessing it’ll be flat again tomorrow morning. If it isn’t already.

I’m perfectly capable of putting the spare on, all by myself. I’ve done it before. But what I may do instead is just put some more air in and drive it to the tire place tomorrow morning. It’s only six blocks to the gas station, and remarkably, the entire stretch of road is smoothly paved. Hard to believe in the this town, I know.

But hurray! I finally get to buy new tires. The tires that Honda uses for original equipment just plain suck. When my old Altima had needed tires, some guy at NTB gave me a set of Pirelli rain tires for super cheap–he said they were being discontinued and the store had to get rid of them. They were the best tires I ever had for driving in the rain. In contrast, my Honda’s tires have horrible wet-weather traction. It was bad enough in the torrential downpours of Texas and Louisiana; it’s completely unacceptable in a temperate rainforest like western Washington.

Of course, the irony here is that I bought the car in Seattle. And I decided right then that those tires had to go. I just couldn’t bring myself to buy new ones before it was necessary.

Tomorrow is my birthday, and surprisingly, people have remembered it this year. Stress has aged my face a bit this year, and I no longer look twenty-something. So I guess it’s a good thing I never traded on my looks.

I did eventually locate my poster. Or, rather, the poster located me. But not until after I had sprung for an emergency reprint at Kinko’s. The color scheme is beautiful, but the topic is very complicated. So basically it mesmerizes you into thinking the authors are all very smart.

During the conference, there was enough news access to hear about the shootings at Virginia Tech. It’s a sad story. And now the University of Texas is no longer the home of the deadliest college campus massacre in US history.

That was a record no one really wanted broken.

Sentinel event

If you’ll recall, I had to euthanize my cat on January 2nd. I wonder now if she was just an early casualty of this pet food fiasco. I wasn’t there, and my intuition is silent on the subject, so I’ll probably never know.