September Revisisted

If you will kindly remember, September was supposed to be the month of clarity. Well, here we are on the last day of the month and I still have beer waiting to be bottled next to the vacuum in the closet. Also as a side note, we have 20 gallons of apple cider in our garage waiting to be turned into REAL cider a la a little fermenting once we get the closeted pilsner out of its fermenting container. However there has been progress on other fronts.

J has decided to go for a fellowship in palliative care. While I made pro/con lists from hell and taped them to the fridge, listened for hours, etc, etc, etc, there was only one person who helped him reach that decision and it wasn't me. Nope. It was a good friend of ours in J's same year who is now interviewing for jobs around the area. This is the same guy who came up with the molecular structure for Splenda at the winery. We'll call him Dr. PDA (not for Public Displays of Affection, but for the real gadget).

The night before our anniversary, long after I passed out and went to bed, they stayed up talking. Dr. PDA pointed out that while he is efficient, these jobs want their docs to see somewhere around 27 patients a day. 27 patients in an 8 hour period. That is less than 1 patient every 4 minutes. And this is for a primary care physician!!! No wonder our health system is going to hell in a hand basket. He then pointed out that 1) J cares too much about his patients, 2) his strength is communication, and 3) when you are specialized, you can basically tell the HMO's to go screw themselves because you are a specialist and can take as much time as you damn well please. That was all it took for J to make the decision to get his CV in order.

J went through his CV and met with his advisor last week. Her first words were to the effect, "Don't tell me you aren't going to apply out of state just because you don't want to uproot your wife." Up until that point, J was seriously just thinking of putting 80% of his eggs in the one basket labeled, "Indy," but now he is thinking of other places to apply.

Yesterday we went up to Lake Michigan with Edgar to take him swimming. (Yes, he is like our child and I am sublimating my baby hunger with the dog for now, which by the way isn't getting any better now that I work with labor and delivery PRN.) It was an exciting adventure 3 hours north where Edgar navigated the waves and you could see Chicago's skyline in the distance. As we were driving home with exhausted puppy sleeping in my arms, J remarked that if he were to apply to Boston's program, Edgar wouldn't have a lake. In fact, we would live in an apartment (renting, of course), without a yard or a lake or anything a doggie needs. I had to remind him that we would survive and he is just a dog. (Very hard for me to verbalize that last part.) I reframed it by saying it would be an adventure as we could live in a downtown loft, just like his fantasy of being a bachelor, except for the fact that he would be married with a dog and trying to get pregnant. Ok, so my reframing abilities suck, but that was what I could come up with.

Other options include: Milwaukee, Rochester, quite a few in the South, etc. J is against anything in Florida as he has evolved from the polar bears and would definitely melt. I might chalk it up to his strange fear of Mickey Mouse and Alligators, but then I would be making things up in my head.

As we have been moving forward with this new direction, I've been having a ton of dreams about my house back in Utah. It is currently being leased by a very nice couple from the UK who are professors. My dreams (read: nightmares) involve me coming to check on the property only to find that they have done major renovations, painted the walls awful colors (or colors that I do in fact like, but am pissed because they did it, not me), threatening litigation, freaking out about losing the income source, neighbors taking sides as to who misinterpreted the lease, etc, etc, etc. Freud would have a hay day with that one, I'm certain.

Doing a fellowship means that we will be postponing an eventual goal of returning to Utah. However, I've noticed that now J is making statements that he would be happy returning to the general West (not specified as to Utah.) The house in Utah is something that I identify with simply because it was my first house and that I bought it all by myself. I suppose that this new evolution of fellowship direction will just coincide with another revision of me.

In the meantime of this potential revision, there is beer needing to be bottled, a deck to be stained, cider to be fermented, and perennials to be transplanted.