Murder on all Hallows Eve???

Balihi the RogersandHammerstein Monster and Madame Garlique


Mummy Aldrinktotat and Angela Deth, DDS


Hannibal Schecter and Lizzie Bordeaux


Glumda the Wicked Witch of Depressed and Asthmadeus the Prince of Dimness


So for Halloween this year we thought it would be fun to have a murder mystery dinner at our house and then we found out they had one called "An Affair to Dismember" and were sold. It was really fun thanks to all the wonderful actors and actresses who portrayed their characters so well. Chris found out how hard it is to dress as a mummy and we found that our pathetic one-ply toilet paper just does not get the job done. He started unraveling even before he was done raveling and most of his costume was on the ground by the end of the night. After much investigating and interrogating, we found Hannibal the newly turned vegetarian cannibal guilty of murder. Thanks everybody for coming, we had a lot of fun.

Happy Halloween, Gosh!

Last night we had our second pumpkin carving contest with the Dodds. As you can see, there were a lot of pumpkin guts and a lot of fun going on last night. Dave did the little Pinocchio complete with Cardinals logo, Kathryn the one with a big smile, Linzi was true to her nursing roots, bandaging up her pumpkin and even starting an IV, and I attempted to make a Napoleon Dynamite. It took me like three hours to finish the shading on his upper lip. It's probably the best pumpkin I've ever done.

Hopefully you don't run into any wolverines, ligers or creatures with large talons this evening, if so just use a freakin' 12-gauge or your nun-chuk skills to save yourself. Uggghhhhhh....

Happy Halloween everyone!

a bone to pick.......

So I just need to do a little venting because something happened today that really rubbed me the wrong way. It all started a few months ago when some friends of mine told me about a couple of 10K's that were happening in October. Well, time went on and I finally decided to commit to one and signed up for it and also selected the size of shirt I wanted.

So today we get to the race and I walk up to the line and say "Linzi Brown" and the women sifts through the number tags and finds mine and then says, "We only have XL shirts left, do you want one?"

This is where my face dropped and my anger stirred and I had to bite my tongue knowing that it was not this woman's fault. I said, "even though I pre-registered for a small?" She said, "yeah, we had a lot of extra people sign up this year."

SO WHAT! I pre-registered! They get the XL's for not doing so. So it turns out that I payed $28.50 to run a 10K where I got a shirt that I will have to give my father. BOOOOOO. We all know that the entire purpose of running is to get the shirt right?

Anyhow, if you are ever in Missouri and you think that running the Gumbo Flatts Pumpkin Run would be fun- don't pre-register and for that matter, don't think that you will see any pumpkins either.

how to save money 101

So for quite a while now Chris has been wanting a computer chair. Apparently a stiff wooden chair does not meet his needs. So we have been looking here and there, but always came to the conclusion that it was not a need. Well, patience paid off the other day for us. I went to throw something away outside (here is where I admit that it was a dumpster I was walking to) and what did my eyes spy? 2 computer chairs just seated right next to the dumpster (not in it, just next to it you know). Chris was outside so I yelled to him to come and see. As we were examining the worth of the chairs and how we could look cool while stealing things away from the trash, our neighbor came outside and caught us in the act, the act of dumpster stealing. I can not say we were ashamed, for people always say that one's man trash is another man's treasure. Needless to say, after some Lysol and chloroxing, we have a new chair in our house!

Hair nets and tin cans...........

So today Chris and I got the chance to go to the cannery for the first time. I guess we decided that in an emergency situation our families are clearly too far away for us to live off of their food storage, so it was about time we start building our own. It's not much, but at least we have a start.

One of the cannery leaders sealed up an empty can and offered it to us, saying that it made a great bank account because you can't get into it without a can opener. I told him I didn't want it because I have enough money that I can't get a hold of. Chris and I did contemplate taking it for a storage place for all the loan statements that we keep getting in the mail though.......

Now I just have to figure out what meals I can make with macaroni/spaghetti noodles, powdered milk, sugar, flour, beans, and wheat....add all those up and you don't have much flavor do you??

Art and balloons!

Just wanted to share a few pictures from some weekend activities over the past few weeks. First, we went to a new park downtown called "CityGarden" (oddly enough, we found out about it after my dad read about it in the Deseret News and called and asked if we knew about it). It's just a few blocks from the Arch and has a bunch of interesting statues and art and a nice fountain to run through. It seems like a fun place to hang out, maybe have a picnic. The sumo-stretcher piece was my favorite (that and the random flamingos around...sorry no pictures).

Then last weekend was the annual balloon glow at Forest Park. It was a lot of fun again this year. I picked Linzi up from work, and we walked over to the field where the balloons were. We were able to meet up with the Allens, but that was pure coincidence...cell phone coverage is non-existent at this event, so we just had a no-signal message all night long. But we got to wander around the balloons (the wind was blowing them around pretty good...it was kind of funny because all of a sudden one of the guys holding the support ropes would just go flying by you trying to keep it from toppling over...slightly reminded me of Mr. Pitt on Seinfeld with Woody Woodpecker), watch the fireworks at the end, and of course, enjoy the biggest corndog we've ever seen. All in all, a very fun night. We can't wait for next year (maybe we'll figure out a way to get a ride in one of them).

Sorry, these are the best balloon shots we got...a nice b-day cake and goldfish. There was one with rats on it that I wanted to get a shot of, but must have forgotten. :(

What is that sound?

So this weekend I finished (finally) my Internal Medicine rotation. It's the longest of the rotations this year, 3 months! I spent one month at St. John's doing outpatient clinics, one month at the VA, and this last month at SLU on one of the geriatrics teams (sorry Mom and Dad, Scott and Colleen, but it didn't quite entice me to go into geriatrics). I think it was a great way to start out the year, and hope that it was a good foundation for everything else this year. I took my Shelf exam on Friday and it was a doozy...I definitely could have used another hour to get through it. But as long as I did better than the 5th percentile I'll be just fine. Tomorrow I start my 6 week rotation in Family Medicine...I imagine that it will be pretty similar to outpatient internal medicine.

Anyhoo, I should have shared more funny stories from the past three months as they happened, but never really did. Something funny did happen the other week. I saw one of my patients (who had broken her femur and was extremely hard of hearing) in the morning before rounds with the attending physician. I went to the area where our team was going to meet and started to write my note on my patient. After a few minutes I noticed there was a high-pitched buzzing sound, kind of like some feedback coming over a sound system. It was extremely annoying, but I tried to forget about it and keep writing. Another student was sitting with me and asked me if I could hear the annoying sound. I said yes and we both expressed how annoying it was and that we hoped it would stop quickly.

As we went on rounds, the buzzing was still with us...it was in the hallway, in each of the patients rooms, it was especially loud in one of the doorways of one of rooms we went into. Weird. I thought it might just be a problem on the 9th floor, but it was just as loud an annoying on the 8th and even the 7th floor. I was very annoyed and was planning how I was going to figure out the cause of the sound after we finished rounding. I wanted to find out who was responsible for this and let them know that it needed to stop.

Then we started talking about one of our last patients. He was another elderly gentleman that was hard of hearing. My attending said that we might want to use the "Pocket Talker" with this patient as well. When she said this, I immediately felt like an incredibly huge idiot. Why you ask? Well, first of all, a "Pocket Talker" is a little amplifying device...it's basically a microphone hooked up to some earphones. My attending had lent me one for the last week to help me to talk with my patient. It's a great little device and had really helped with my patient, but as with any other technology or electronic equipment it's only as useful and helpful as the person who's using it. I reached into my pocket frantically and switched the On/Off switch and IMMEDIATELY the sound vanished. Just think, in a little under two years this Einstein is going to have an M.D. behind his name and might have a little more responsibility than just a little Pocket Talker. I'm just saying you've been warned. Needless to say I felt incredibly foolish and apologized profusely to my team for driving them nuts for the last 40 minutes.

It's tougher than it looks for some of us :)