First post in a month

Sorry for being away so long, for the four people or so who read this blog.

A lot has happened:
1) I finished at the VA and now am in the beautiful Potrero Hill district at the world famous San Francisco General Hospital. I believe it is world famous for being the most urinated upon building in the Northern Hemisphere. It is the site of a homeless encampment so large that the UN has a permanent platoon of Cambodian soldiers deployed to it.

2) I did a week of sleep medicine. This was an interesting experience. Realty, and by proxy, hospital beds being in dire shortage in the UCSF system, the geniuses in sleep medicine have rented out a wing of a Best Western in Japantown. This hotel, being in Japantown, true to form has giant vending machines in the lobby that dispense Japanized souvenier toys and t-shirts. Regular rooms have giant anime figures painted on the walls. There is a lounge with giant televisions and game systems, and it hosts gaming tournaments.

The sleep medicine folks have geared out 8 rooms with night vision cameras, EEGs, sleep sensors, snore sensors, CPAP machines, intercoms, etc, and have another 2 for control rooms. Every night, the chronically tired and morbidly obese come to Japantown in order to diagnose sleep apnea, narcolepsy, bruxism, restless legs, and so forth. All the while, 14 year old boys point their Wii mats to the same hotel 5 times a day...

3) I took the national internal medicine boards. 240 questions, most of which were three paragraphs and started with "a 54 year old woman" and ended with me trying to remember the correct treatment for cryoglobulinemia. It sucked. It was shorter than I thought it would be. They just had to work harder to cram the annoyingness into a shorter time.

4) Hosted the parents, went to Sausalito, the Muir Woods, Muir Beach and its overlook, Monterey, and of course all over San Francisco and the East Bay.

5) I've eaten like a huge hog. Working in the Mission doesn't help. We've gone to shabu, sushi (and the dude from Mythbusters was at the next table), original Mission burritos, the most unbelievably good tortas, excellent Chinese food 5 blocks from our house, incredible banh mi in San Jose on the way to Monterey (we knew the way...), not to mention countless neighborhood sandwich and coffee places. I need to stop eating. It's wreaking havoc on my gastrointestinal system.