Shadowlands

So far the weekend is off to a good start. Currently my husband is sorting out his garlic bulbs on the coffee table in preparation for planting them later (he's got quite the green thumb), and I'm trying not to watch the news, which I'm currently overloaded on.

Last night we had our community group (a bunch of medical residents and students and friends) over for a movie night. Usually we meet on Sunday nights and I make a huge dinner over which we discuss the mornings sermon and sunday school lesson. The church we attend is quite large (so different from the small churches my husband and I grew up in) and we need these smaller groups within it to foster true community and accountabilty.

So back to last night. We chose to watch the movie Shadowlands. Anthony Hopkins as C.S. Lewis and the story of his marriage to Joy. I've watched the movie countless times, and even saw the play on stage in London last Febuary...and I love it. To counter the guys hestitation in watching a movie certain to invoke tears from all females in attendance, my husband suggested that they all bring pipes (despite the fact he's an oncologist?) and take a smoke on the porch afterwards in honor of ol' Jack.

Highlights from the movie are some of the words from Lewis' writings. I'll say that you can feel the awkwardness between Lewis and Joy at early points in the movie. Anyway some of the favorites:

"The pain now is part of the happiness then." -stated by cancer ridden Joy, as they sheltered in a barn in the golden valley during a rain.

"Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world." -said by Jack (what Lewis went by since he hated his first name Clive) during several lecture he gave during the movie.

I loved the shots of Oxford. My husband and I went there while in England as well, and even tracked down the Eagle and Child pub where Lewis met with The Inklings, the little literary club he developed with friends like Tolkein. It was funny to walk through the pub to the back room. People were enjoying it with friends as a normal night at any English pub, and I wondered if they knew the conversations that had been carried on in that back room decades ago, and how far the ensuing stories and ideas now reached.

So anyway, that was our friday night. Also making friday day great was the fact that I finished the first draft of a large writing project I've been working on. More on that later. So other than my baby girl falling and scraping up her little cheek this morning, the rest of the weekend looks promising. See that photo at the top of this post? That's from Magnolia Gardens, one of the oldest gardens in the country. I live about 5 minutes from it and several other equally stunning southern plantations. Being a local and a member of the Artist's Guild here (I paint a lot) I have access to all these great places that make me feel like I'm either walking through time or Narnia or something like that. So perhaps later this weekend we'll do a little exploring...

The Cranberry Challenge: Part 3...Cranberry Scones

I think this is my favorite cranberry recipe in this use-three-pounds-of-cranberries-while-they-are-fresh challenge. Scones are so great. They are comforting like my favorite southern breakfast food, buttermilk biscuits. But they are just a little more civilized and fancy. Scones bring back memories of my 29th birthday, when my husband and I were in London. He suprised me with high tea at the Ritz in the famous Palm Room. It was unreal--a once in a lifetime thing for a girl from the most rebellious state in the colonies (SC!). There were silver tea services and tiny tea sandwhiches which kept multiplying. The best birthday present: I found out that very morning I was pregnant with our first child, but had to give up caffeine all at once, meaning the withdrawal from my 6-cuppa day fix was just starting to kick in by the time I ordered my chamomille...But those scones...unreal and oh so london.

I think the key in making successful scones is using very cold butter. I've tried other versions of scones in the past without paying attention to the temperature of the butter, which turned out to be a terrible mistake, resulting in scones which were really more like slightly-less-sweet cookies. In any case, I found this scone recipe here. I changed it up a little, of course. Pecans are always my go-to nut in these recipes so I used those instead of walnuts. They turned out great. Of course I was glad I could enjoy them with coffee again, though the little cuddly toddler snuggling next to me made those caffeineless months well worth it!!

Brain stimulation among other things...

Yesterday I was reminded of this crazy job I had once when I was in medical school. I worked at a place called the Brain Stimulation Laboratory, which was located (of course) a Psychiatry Hospital. I did this for almost a year, some while taking med school classes. It was a strange place. There was the mad scientist/inventor/manic doctor who ran the place. He was rumored to only sleep a few hours each night and had a CV that weighed about 10 pounds because he had so many publications and inventions. I had a desk in a room with two other scientists–one was a Israeli-Russian guy, Jewish, who happened to hate working with the other one–a Japanese women. They were in cubicles on opposite sides of the room, as far as they could be from each other, and the fighting exchanges between them were outrageously entertaining. My desk was of course located in the cubicle between the two, where I spent most of my time trying not to laugh when they lapsed into their forgein tongues to mutter curses at each other. Fortunately I was out of the room and down the hall in the lab most of the time.

We were working on something that the defense department was funding–an investigation into whether we could create a “thinking cap” to keep fighter pilots from falling asleep when sleep-deprived. I was just doing my part in the war on terror, ya’ll. What it involved: getting volunteers to sign up to be sleep-deprived for several nights a week (they were monitored in a wing of the hospital where I can only image the poor nurse poking them to keep them awake all night), and then instructed to fly a flight simulator program for most of the next day. While they were “flying” I directed either real or placebo magnetic stimulation (TMS) to a specific part of their brain. (We had previously used a fMRI to locate the area we’d target in each indivual). Lest you think that a magnet can’t stimulate the human brain, think again! For part of the set up of the procedure, I moved the magnet over the motor cortex until the subject’s thumb twitched involuntarily with each pulse of the magnet. Needless to say, we were not successful in creating a “thinking cap.” But the data we gathered revealed a whole lot of other stuff in sleep deprivation research, and people are still anazyling what we gathered and writing about it in professional journals!

Why this is sorta cool: scientists have to add me as an author any time they use the data I collected in their studies! So that means there are all sorts of studies that I get my name on without having to do any more research than I did that year in med school. Cool deal, right? I guess it works out well if you are building up your CV for all the hoops you have to jump through in academic medicine. So to all my med student friends: try to get in on the data collection or benchwork level whenever you can, since it’s higher yield in terms of the number of times you get your name put on stuff. Just part of the game, ya’ll.

So anyway, yesterday I got an email with another manuscript to review and sign off on that’s going to print. And I hardly lifted a finger!