Archive for February, 2008

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Mayo Clinic Tour, First Half

Friday, February 8th, 2008
On Saturday I toured Mayo with SWE. It was a really cool tour, and I even learned the names of some of the Mayo buildings, something I had never been able to do even after living several years in Rochester and interacting with a few Mayo people. We started the day by gathering at Victoria’s for lunch. After lunch we walked through the underground tunnels to the clinic.

We began the tour with a few presentations. The first presentation was about the history of the clinic. The town of Rochester existed because it was a low point in the Zumbro river, where it could be forded. A tornado devastated the town of Rochester in the early 1900′s and the Mayo family (a father and two sons — all doctors) started a hospital with the help of the sisters of Assisi Heights. They adopted the technique of aseptic surgery. This meant that they were sterilizing things, so they were known for success in their practice of medicine very early. They hired more doctors, including Henry Plummer, a doctor with an engineering background. They eventually converted their practice into a not for profit organization, and it also became a medical school as well, but I’m not sure when that occurred. The Mayo Clinic was the site of the first heart lung machine and it was used to correct congenital heart defects in babies (called blue babies). They have one of the early heart lung machines on site, but that room wasn’t open on Saturday.

The second presentation was about deep brain stimulation, research on going at Mayo. Deep brain stimulation involves inserting a sensor into the brain and monitoring chemical levels. The results that they showed us were amazing. We saw a video of one man with Parkinson’s who could barely walk. We saw a video after his deep brain stimulation procedure and he could dance. They also use deep brain stimulation to treat many other neurological problems like clinical depression. I was impressed with the results they were achieving and by the end of the presentation I wanted my own brain sensor.

We then toured the Plummer Building which has beautiful architecture. If you’re in downtown Rochester, it is the building with the bell tower. We went through the reading room for the medical school library. This is an awesome room with beautiful leaded glass windows and tables for reading. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves. Except for the picture of the windows, that is. I am not good at taking pictures of windows, but take my word for it…they are cool.

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Other News From The Days Of Our Lives

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

Here’s some miscellaneous stuff that I couldn’t write an entire blog about individually.

  • American Idol has started again. I’m so glad the WGA[EW] doesn’t consider the reality TV writers to be WGA[EW] material, because if they did I wouldn’t get to watch American Idol. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are now booked for me.

  • We broke a chair. This is an office chair with like 6 legs, and one of them broke when someone was going to sit down. It is hard to believe. We threw away the bottom half of the chair, but the upper part is now our new video game chair.

  • I’m knitting a sock. Lots of my friends knit, and I’ve finally caught the bug. This isn’t my first time knitting, but I haven’t done it since I was like 12. And I love knitted socks — I have enough for a few weeks worth of them. I may never knit anything other than socks.

  • Andy and I decided to move the PS2 upstairs, and consequently we have rediscovered Katamari Damacy. In the past week, we’ve rolled up stuff into the moon, made the stars Virgo, Taurus, Gemini, and Pisces, and all in all we’ve made the king of the cosmos very happy. He’s wanted to cry after he’s seen some of our katamaris. We find ourselves with the Katamari music stuck in our heads quite often. We’re going to look into investing in We Love Katamari, the sequel. If I remember correctly, XPlay loved We Love Katamari so I’m guessing we are really going to like it!
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  • I have fallen off the picture a day wagon. I’m trying to get back on it. Stay tuned.
  • I’ve read a lot of books. Maybe someday I’ll tell you what they are. :)

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Book Club Reads Lake Wobegon 1956

Monday, February 4th, 2008

This book has pretty much erased the bad memories that Shroud of the Thwacker left with me. Garrison Keillor is hilarious, and there were multiple times that I laughed out loud while reading this book. This is not my first time reading this book, but I don’t remember much from that first time. The main character of this book is a teenage boy in rural conservative Minnesota in a morass of teenage hormones.

We discussed the book, and then rest of book club included watching funny YouTube videos and knitting. Our new book is: The Big Over Easy. And our next meeting is only 3 weeks away.

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Christmas in January

Sunday, February 3rd, 2008

It always turns out that we are too busy to have a Christmas party in December, so on January 19, 2008, we attended the annual Christmas party at Adam and Amber’s. (Don’t confuse this event with the Greatest Christmas Party Ever that I blogged about a few months ago…that was a Greatest Event Ever with a Christmas theme).

The food was spectacular. We were instructed to eat 2 lbs of ham each, and ha ha…we didn’t do it although some people tried. Andy and I brought spanikopita triangles. And Lee made me realize that I do not, in fact, hate cream cheese. She made a dip, I tried it, and I liked it. And later she called me and told me what was in it. As many of you know, I have an aversion to several dairy products. I may have lumped cream cheese into that general aversion unfairly. Since then I have tried one wedge of laughing cow (the garlic and herb kind), and it wasn’t bad either.

Lee’s dip Blurry ham Dessert

We listened to N Sync and other unlikely candidates sing Christmas songs. And then we moved on to the white elephant gift exchange. There were no magnetix this year! And most of the presents were fun.

Pile of presents. Patrick opens a present. Lee shakes presents.

Andy stole a weather station from Patrick, something we had been talking about getting for a while. No one else must have wanted it because we kept it until the end of the game. And Lee got the angel. This is the neon angel that has been making it around the white elephant parties for a while now. I’m glad we didn’t get it.

The angel no one wants. Our weather station. Patrick’s gift.

I vote for no white elephant next year, if anyone out there is listening.

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Our Blizzard And The Weather In General

Saturday, February 2nd, 2008

Sorry, I have realized that this video doesn’t so much work in Safari. I know it works in firefox.

It doesn’t even work in internet explorer, but don’t get me started. It has become one of my goals to fix this video for all browsers. But seriously, use firefox. It’s just better.

We’ve had a lot of snow. We’ve had to shovel several times, and there was one day that the high was -2. Ugh! Now we’re really happy when it gets up to 20, and then we go outside without coats for short periods of time, just because it is so warm out!!

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This is footage from our living room window on the day we had a blizzard warning. Andy and I went home from work early after the blizzard warning was announced, and we worked from home for the rest of the day, just in case the city didn’t have their snow plows out working hard. It was snowing, but the winds were high so that the snow was horizontal. We didn’t get a lot of snow accumulation just because the wind wouldn’t let it settle anywhere. But there were some big drifts in inconvenient places. This video isn’t that exciting and it doesn’t really do justice to the crappy weather, but there is a lot of wind and you can see the snow speeding by. And I wanted to edit a video and post it so here it is.

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Rock on, little girl!

Saturday, February 2nd, 2008


Amazing Young Organ Player Rocks Out – Watch more free videos

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Have Balls, Will Knit.

Saturday, February 2nd, 2008

Inspired by Darcy and my friends, Jim, Pam and Jon I have decided to take up another hobby, knitting. Now, I have flirted with crocheting and it was ok, but I just didn’t get into it that much. I think it was mainly because I couldn’t get excited about the things I could have crocheted. This doesn’t seem to be the case with knitting though, socks, hats, scarves, hell even laptop cases. The possibilities are endless.

So in my quest to begin my new found hobby, I went to the place where people go to learn about new hobbies, the internet. A while back while reading my DIYLife.com RSS feed (an excellent site btw), I saw a story about a site called knitty.com. Let me tell you, this is one very cool site. It has articles, a forum and tons of free patterns. They had an article from a regular write that was all about knitting for men, he mentioned a book called “Knitting with Balls”.

knitting with balls

I then went to the next place people go to learn about new hobbies, Barnes & Noble. I browsed for a while and found the book, enjoyed a latte while perusing it and decided to pick it up. My adventure into the world of knitting has begun!

Now onto step 2, needles and yarn.

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