In Lieu of Cash, Please Send Granola

I have lived in the Upper Valley for over a year now. I am now qualified to pass judgement.

And my first judgement? Granola. I don't want your stinkin' granola. Who wants your granola? I don't know anyone who wants your granola. And, yet, everyone here makes it. Do they eat it? Feed it to their birds? Wash their childrens mouths out with it if they say naughty things? For something that generally costs a few bucks from the grocery store and tastes like different flavors of "myeh" I never could fathom why people bought it, and now I live in a land where people make it.

Making things is a way of life in Vermont and New Hampshire. In that sense it is this certain sense of true self-reliance and "Yankee ingenuity" which makes folks up here remarkable and unique. Unfortunately where as back in the day people made wooden trunks and wagon trains, now they make bad art and apple sauce.

Which brings me to my second judgement: apple sauce. The second largest state export behind granola? Apple sauce. I am fairly certain in the rest of the United States apple sauce does not remains a food product passed the age of three, but here everyone takes pride in their sauce. I'm sure there's even an apple saucing subculture if I were to look hard enough. Complete with their own lingo and apple sauced-based inside jokes. Initially I was inclined to believe the popularity of apple sauce stemmed in as much part from Vermonter's refusal to admit they just grow too darn many apples, but the longer I stay here the more I am convinced they may just realy love apples.

And lastly, syrup. I know grocery store syrup is essentially a flavored corn product, but it sure takes like syrup to me (in the sense that syrup to me tastes like a flavored corn product.) It's thick, it's amber, it's smell syrupy, it's essentially syrup in ever way aside from the fact that it's not. Most importantly, though, corn syrup syrup costs half the price of real deal, genuine maple syrup. Nevertheless, despite this, genuine maple syrup is the way people prove their Yankee roots in New Hampshire. Nothing will go further for your Upper Valley street cred than showing off a pantry full of maple syrup in every grade. Yes, there are apparently multiple grades of syrup? Why? Because the last thing you want to be seen doing is eating riff raff syrup.

There Are No Puffin in Maine

Puffin are little tiny birds that live in the North Pole and can only be seen by Eskimos. They are also a delicious cereal. They do not, however, despite claims to the contrary, seem to exist in Maine. I had never before considered what it would be to see a puffin in person, and would never before have claimed to have wanted to do so, but then I moved to New Hampshire which apparently is next door to Maine, and that's where I was told puffin hang out, like, all the time. Now I had to see one. Capture and befriend one if possible. Forget moose, there're itty bitty flightless birds up here! They are flightless right? And grant wishes?

That was the plan at least. Kristen and I ventured up to Boothbay Harbor, Maine, this last weekend nominally in search of a charming bed and breakfast, but secretly to abscond with a magical sea parrot. Unfortunately it turns out they only seem to manifest in late spring and early summer in these parts of the planet so we failed. That should come as no great surprise considering puffin are probably as real as the chupacabra -- made up beasts to keep children in line. "Eat your soup or the puffin will get you!" What was perhaps more of a surprise, though, was that there are apparently no people in Maine either. March is still the off season for tourism in the area as it is typically still encased in snow and prowling with blood thirsty snow men, and so the town of Boothbay Harbor is still in the hands of a caretaker government consisting of a pair of snowbirds too old to migrate and a swarthy sea captain who just can't quit the sea. The town was sparsely populated during the day and all but abandoned at night. We could have looted the place at will had we only thought to bring a larger car. Seeing as off season also means cheap season though we went anyway, and it was great.

We stayed at the Welch House Inn, affectionately known, we imagined, as the Wench House Inn by the locals, and it was amazing. For $90 a night we had a beautiful room, a gorgeous view of the harbor, a tasty breakfast, a cozy gas fireplace, and a whirlpool bath. The owner was exceedingly friendly and helpful and made a delicious Gypsy Eggs Benedict which was both the first time I'd eaten Eggs Benedict and the first time I'd eaten gypsy. The whole experience was as I would expect a bed and breakfast experience to be were I to have ever before considered a bed and breakfast. I am not sure any other B&B will be able to compete now; we will forever be bed and breakfast snobs.

Tour guides say Maine is the land of lighthouses and that is true. Just look at our pictures -- they're stacked like dominoes. But Maine is also just as much the land of toll booths and toll ways as it seems you cannot drive on any highway without being asked for a dollar. As a man that prides himself on his supply of quarters he carries (I sometimes have to drive a toll road for work), I was quickly quarterless. Thankfully Kristen had an assortment of loose change scattered throughout her purse and we did not have to resort to offering the contents of my glove compartment in barter. I suspect the majority of the nation’s quarters are currently residing in Maine thanks to their toll booths, and I have a suspicion it is secretly feeding an underground pinball economy. 

Anyways, for those who have not been to Maine here is a summary. It is rocky. There are a lot of lighthouses because of said rocks. People say "wicked" a lot. Oh, and lobster.

Pink Slime is Ruining America and Poisoning Your Kids

Pink slime. Hide your children. Hide your wives. It's in your beef, and it's in your family. If the volume of attention a subject gets is any indication of its importance in life -- and it is -- pinky slimy slime is single-handedly destroying, corrupting and befouling everything, everywhere, all the time. Beware the slime Yahoo News tells me.

Thankfully we still have heroes. Thankfully we still have TV chefs, a feckless press, and a shallow social media which can all mobilize to save our great nation. Thanks to their tireless yet trendy efforts pink slime, or ammonia-treated ground beef filler as it is perhaps less pejoratively known, has been removed from a number of fast food chains and now, glory be, will be removed -- at least in part -- from our children's schools. With this great victory in mind let us revel.

Never will we have to be like the Native Americans who consumed all parts of the animal. Huzzah! That's what pets and Fancy Feast are for.

Never will we have to worry about infections from a food product never associated with infection. Hurray! But lets fret anyway. 

Never will we have to pay for ugly food. Hot dang! Instead we can pay more for normal, regular food.

Never will we have to worry about ammonia in our beef. Shazam! Just the ammonia in the hundreds of other food products.

Never will we have to think critically about a subject. Good gravy, holy moly! Blog posts and Internet petitions are sufficient substitutes for due discourse and democratic action.



Alright. This is getting boring already. Time to tweet about Kony. I hear he's dating one of the Kardashians.

The Winter of My Discontent

When I first moved to New Hampshire I was told to get my affairs in order, I would likely die this winter by snow storm. Inevitably at some point during the six months of continuous freezing maelstrom that is a Northern New England winter I would perish in a snow bank, in front of a snow plow, underneath a snow mobile, or inside a giant snow ball. The towns would all freeze over and the wilds would be no refuge. Especially seeing as how they would both be packed with blood thirsty snow men living in snow forts bent on righteous snow vengeance, the worst kind of vengeance.

Instead there was never more than a few inches of snow. Temperatures never got below zero. Only actually got to zero once the whole time. And my snot never froze to my face -- a true indicator of a good winter I am told. January was actually most notable for the amount of drizzle there was. It was an angry drizzle, no doubt, but just drizzle. I never got my chance to break a leg snow skiing, fall through the ice ice fishing, fall through the ice ice skating, fall through the ice snow shoeing, or even to build an army of eight foot tall snowman storm troopers a la Calvin and Hobbes. I was robbed. I was promised an icy death and all I got was a relatively temperate, boring waiting period between fall and spring.

Speaking of spring. It is now springing and I am told to anticipate the start of Mud Season where, from what I can gather, everything gets covered in mud. I'm not buying it, though. I come from a state where it rains mud! Unless I'm swept away in a river of brown goop sometime this April I will be unimpressed.

Not all was lost this winter. We did have enough time to build a tiny late season snowman -- err snowthing.

Part snowman. Part mothman. Trapped in two worlds, he is accepted in none. He will lead a life of tragic irony chasing the light that will one day be his demise. Coming to Lifetime this spring.

Little Laura Goes to War

A short while ago my good friend and former roommate Laura got a letter instructing her to get her gear, she's going to war. Deployment time. Brass knuckles time. Whether it would be Afghanistan or Iraq was still to be determined, but a few things were clear: she would be the first of us to deploy and she'd need to find a way to strap more grenades to her chest. As it would turn out her deployment was not per the usual, however. When her deployment letter finally came instead of being tasked to a forward operating base or major theatre hospital in country hers read: you're going on vacation! Her six months of service to the nation would be an all-expense paid trip to Germany where she'd visit the Swiss Alps, lounge in Bavarian beer gardens, and take in culture and class at many a Baroque Austrian palace or concert hall. Sure she'd be caring for patients and war wounded at the medical center in Landstuhl, but as judged by the constant stream of Facebook photos since, she's mostly there to party.
 
Despite the fact that she had likely ruined deployments for all the rest of us for all the future I decided to pay Laura a pre-deployment this-may-be-the-last-time-I-see-you-alive visit. It was also secretly a visit to the Historic Triangle of Revolutionary America and an excuse to get a tricorne hat. The trip was successful on all accounts.

The trip was not without hardship; however, especially if you like to use the word "hardship" as a stand in for "never ending rain." The rain didn't start till after we set out on our twenty something mile bike ride, but once it started it never stopped coming. Quickly we were soaked, but still we rode on.

Whenever I insisted we stop and admire a local landmark Laura often insisted she wait under a tree. We then had a very wet lunch, and proceeded to have a very wet ride back after leaving behind very wet chairs and table clothes behind us.

We didn't stay in Yorktown or Old Williamsburg all too long, but there's always time for victory poses. Just like back in 1776.

Once all that was said and done we settled down to what really mattered. College football and puzzles.

Laura made this while slowly losing her mind -- smashing together decorated styrofoam is apparently more difficult than it looks. Coincidentally I was also losing my mind for an entirely different reason -- thank you Fighting Texas Aggies. We also saw a movie, had some food and drink, and then Laura went off to war. Went off to war a few weeks later after visiting other family and friends to be entirely accurate, but I'm pretty sure what prepared her most was my inspiring visit. My hat spurred her into a patriotic furor.

Montreal en Lumiere

This last weekend I went to Montreal with Kristen for the annual winter festival. For those not in the know, which is I am guessing everyone south of the Canadian border, Montréal en Lumière is a yearly food and arts fair for those more cultured than myself. This year's theme was Belgium and so they had a variety of expensive Belgian food we largely did not partake in. But we did have Belgian waffles. Sweet, delicious, chocolate filled Belgian waffles. No doubt just like the Belgians make.

Montreal's about a three and a half hour drive from Lebanon, and it's a fairly beautiful one at that. The Northeast Kingdom, a green hilly feudal area I believe run by hobbits, is very picturesque and Southern Quebec though largely flat farmland is punctuated by mountains that emerge periodically from the country side, climb rapidly into the air, and then descend back into the flat plains just as quickly again. You'll have to take my word for this, though, we didn't take any pictures.

But we did take a picture at the border! It was a small crossing and so small in fact that the Canadians did not care to put much in the way of a welcoming banner around it. Just a sign at a largely abandoned rest stop.

Montreal is a beautiful city and Old Montreal is especially so. Although there's a fairly efficient metro system it's perhaps better to walk if the distance is not too far just to see the city. We got in Saturday afternoon and immediately headed for the festival. After redirecting ourselves in the proper direction about twenty minutes later we headed for the festival again. The fair grounds were a collection of random colored lights, plastic domes to keep warm when it got too cold (and which had their own random collections of random colored lights inside but otherwise served no real purpose), a Ferris wheel, bonfires, and a giant ice slide that unfortunately had a two hour wait. It was my only regret.

Things got a little crazy at times like when they played a trippy, psychedelic video short on the wall of one of the nearby buildings, and a little rowdy at times when the Canadians spontaneously broke out into dance during the free concert by a French Canadian band later in the evening. Belgian waffles aside, we also had some poutine which is Quebec's contribution to the culinary world. Seriously, though, I cannot get the video short out of my head. Or my nightmares.

Much of the rest of the city was beautifully lit up as well, and we took pictures of some of it, but you're going to have to use your imagination for the most part. I was told by Kristen that much of it looked like Boston so, you know, if you've been to Boston before it's kind of like that but with more Frenchmen. The next day we tried to go to the biodome, but there was over a one hour wait in way too sweaty a line so we hiked over to the Montreal history museum instead. That's when our camera died, and when we'll say the trip ended. After a very long wait at the border to get back into the US. I'm pretty sure I've smuggled Mexicans across the border in less time than it took to get back into New Hampshire. It's good to know that part of the border is safe, though. From the terrorists and their flannel.

Pictures!

Volunteer to Make Money

Charity is supposed to be simple. You, in plenty, give; someone, in need, receives. You're hopefully a slightly better person as a result, God gives you a tip of the hat, and the individual receiving can lead a slightly better life afterward. The more you give the better, but every little bit helps. If you don't have money you can give time. Nobody wants your old frumpy clothes. See? Easy peasy.

One part of giving that seems to commonly confound is absolute giving versus relative giving. Should Mitt Romney be praised for giving millions of dollars to charity ($7 million over two years) or should we shrug that he simply gave just above the minimum required of him by his church and only a small portion of his enormous yearly income (16%)? And what should be done of Newt Gingrich who managed despite his professing of Christian values to give only a little over 2% of his similarly impressive intake ($3.1 million)? I'm sure in Mitt's case the rest of the money went to creating jobs and in Newt's well, shucks, he would have given more had he not been loving his country so hard. 

The uninspiring compassion of our politicians aside, I have recently come upon another problem of sorts. As I step further and further down the path to full blown, fully independent doctorhood I am finding it easier and easier to fill my pockets with cash. Cash being cash it is thankfully liquid. It's readily transferable to whichever charitable organization I fancy at the moment and cash in general has undoubtedly built many houses for veteran, one-legged snow owls down on their luck recovering from addiction. The ease with which money comes into my possession, however, has this year reached a critical level. I have arguably passed the point where it no longer makes sense to volunteer.

Now being board certified and fully licensed I have the opportunity to moonlight. I can sign up to work a weekend or night shift as a general internist for an hourly wage. And the currently reported going rate at our hospital: $100 an hour. A twelve hour shift can net you over a thousand dollars. If I were to then donate that to the local food bank for the poor and penniless they could buy chili mac for everyone. Even have enough left over probably to upgrade to frito pies. Heck, if I worked a few shifts they could even buy puppies and milkshakes for everyone. Milkshakes for the puppies too, why not. More pertinent to the point, were I instead to volunteer at the food bank making the same chili mac myself for those same twelve hours I'd arguably have only made twelve hours worth of someone else's donated chili mac. From a slightly different but purely economical -- and perhaps relatively dispassionate -- standpoint for every hour I moonlight I could hire ten individuals $10/hr to make ten times as much chili mac in the exact same time. My choice not to volunteer's friggin' creating jobs now! How then does it make sense sense to ever volunteer for anything else? To tutor a child is simply an inefficient waste of time.

Unfortunately where as I used to obtain a quiet satisfaction from sorting canned goods from boxed cereals I hate the very idea of moonlighting. I do not believe I'd obtain any joy from spending my evening sitting in the ED admitting people for chest pain rule outs. And there in of course lies the problem, charity is not supposed to be about the giver. It's arguably not even supposed to be about the gift itself either, yet the thought of volunteering to dig a ditch rather than volunteering to pay a team of ditch diggers just because it makes me happier seems selfish even if they are both acts of charity. Moonlighting is arguably one of the most generous things I could do right now and yet I still have no desire to do it. Paper Bird would be so disappointed.



Speaking of Paper Bird, here, finally, is a picture. He denotes all his money to charity. What a guy.

The Resurrection of Paper Bird

And then a shaft of light spread the sky. Paper Bird descended on a cloud. The whole heavens were resplendent with singing, the lambs danced in the fields, and the sick of DHMC stood up and were healed.

So was the second coming of Paper Bird. This last week I returned to my daily stair well to find him hanging out atop one of the stair cases resting on a hand rail. No mural can hold him back now. He sits where he wants to sit. He's Paper Bird.

I'm not sure where he disappeared to for a few weeks -- maybe flew south to Conneticut? -- but I am happy he's back. Paper Bird, don't you ever leave me again. Hurray for Paper Bird!



In other news. Back in November it was 11/11/11 at 11:11. We had a party at work. I took a photo that I wanted to share:

Not to be discouraged I quickly shot off another one:

What's perhaps more sad is my staff -- who also wanted to snap a screen shot full of 11's -- wasn't even paying attention when it passed, and my resident on service took a picture at the right time, but had the date displayed as November 11, 2011. What an amateur.

Needless to say it was the failure of the century.

Simply Having A Wonderful Christmas Time

This Christmas there were no children. In that respect it was sad.

This Christmas, however, there were zombies. And in that respect it was awesome.

All I want to talk about are the zombies.

The board game, Last Night on Earth, is a relatively complex game based around the relatively simple concept of brain eating zombies wanting to eat your brains. You can either be the brain possessing heroes or the brain craving zombies. The heroes have the advantage of various guns, clubs, and special traits while the zombies have the advantage of being numberless and relentless.

Round 1. Team Hero: Adam/Ellen. Team Zombie: Scooter/Ashlee.
The first game was a disaster for the zombies of their own design. The goal for the heroes was simply: kill a lot of zombies. The goal for the zombies was simply: eat some brains and don't get killed too much. And the zombies did quite well at first eating their first brain only two or three turns in. Worried that the heroes were holing up at the police station setting up a rowdy defense the zombies then decided upon the unorthodox plan of a strategic retreat thinking that time would run down before the heroes could kill enough of them to win then game. It turns out zombies don't usually run away because zombies aren't very good at it. The game ended when after the heroes loaded up on a variety of weapons the zombies didn't know existed they then proceeded to hunt down and execute a sufficient number of the poor, defenseless fleeing undead to declare victory. It was mass zombicide; war crimes were committed. 


Round 2. Team Hero: Scooter and Ashlee. Team Zombie: Adam.
Second game involved finding gasoline and a fire source to burn out all the zombie spawning points. The heroes for whatever reason spent most their time collecting awesome weapons, however, and eventually the time ran out. It turns out gasoline is a little hard to find in a run down, zombie infested wasteland, and it doesn't help when the zombies proactively guard the gas station. Make up your minds zombies: do you want brains or petrol?


Round 3. Team Hero: Adam and Ashlee. Team Zombie: Scooter.
The objective of the third round was to escape in the truck after finding the keys and some gas. Despite finding both practically strapped with a bow wrapped tightly around their faces the heroes still had a difficult time getting all the gear to the truck. The zombies succeeded in eating a number of the heroes, but this coincidentally led to their undoing because it turns out for every human you eat another one rises up in its place. Or more exactly in the middle of the game board right where the blasted truck is. Despite their being a dozen zombies on the truck with them -- and the corpses of a few of their friends -- the heroes managed to make it out of town at the very last moment.



Round 4. Team Hero: Scooter and Ashlee. Team Zombie: Adam.
Last game all the heroes needed to do was find four towns folk and then hustle their butts out of town. They performed swimmingly. They all quickly bound together at the gun shop, loaded up on weapons and obscene amounts of dynamite that no one had previously known were available, and then proceeded to blow the every loving bejeesus out of the zombies. Along the way they quickly collected their needed townsfolk and simply waited for dawn when they'd all stroll casually out of town leaving the city nothing but a smoldering crater of zombie parts. Unfortunately it turns out the zombies had the trump card of trump cards and the very last turn played it resulting in one of the four townsfolk running off to join the circus or some garbage like that thus leading to zombie victory. Stupid, dirty, cheating zombies.



Just so my Christmas story isn't entirely about the evil reanimation of the dead, let me say that we also went to a terrible Christmas carol opera in San Francisco and then ate a month's worth of chocolate at Ghirardellis. It's what baby Jesus would have wanted.  


It's toe lickin' time!