post call fun

Man, it has been a bit since anything was posted here... so here is a piece of our lives...

My favorite part of Sara's 30 hour shifts at the hospital is when she wakes up in the evening after she gets home. I think for the same reason that it is my favorite part, it is probably one of her least favorite parts - but that is alright.

When she wakes up she is totally disoriented with things and so she says and does the funniest stuff. She always tells me that she wants to get up at a certain time and so I go in to wake her up. One time when I went in there she started to ask me for the kid's charts so that she could check on something. At first I was not sure what she was talking about and so I asked her and so she kept saying something else about some levels for them or something... good times.

The best is when she mixes things that are contextually correct with things that are not. The other day she was working on getting up for like an hour or something like that and we had to make some meatloaf for dinner. I yelled in the other room to ask her if she was sleeping again. She said that she wasn't but was thinking about making the meat loaf - makes sense. but then she said that she wasn't sure how the kids wanted it or something about making our dinner for the kids (as if she was still at work and had to feed them or something).

I was thinking about how it would be funny if at some point I was so tired from stuff that I would wake up and talk about how to make meatloaf seasoned with things like religious economies or constant religious demand with varied preferences or something. Probably wouldn't be as funny though...

Mompou!

Last night a few other kids in the department and I went to this piano 'concert.' It was a bit funny because we were expecting some Cuban and Spanish piano solo stuff and it turned out to be like a 45 min talk about complete boring randomness and how anyone can go to grad school. I think the guy was trying to inspire the undergrad kids to go on for more schoolin'. After fighting off a nap for 45 minutes, the dude played some music for us.

It was awesome. I love to watch people that are really good at music play. More than that, I love to watch solo performances. A lot of the time the piano is the best to watch, too. So much of the time they play these complex pieces totally from memory, and when they are playing, they are so enveloped into the music. Mompou is a Spanish dude that is know for his delicate and intimate compositions. The guy playing was super awesome. His expressions as he played made it all the more better because he would have these expressions that made it seems as though he was as surprised as I was at where the music was taking him. He looking like he wasn't sure what to expect from moment to moment.

I guess that is how Mompou wanted his music to be. He wanted his intimate composition to be carried through each time it was played. He didn't put measures on his sheet music to tell the musician the time count because he wanted the music to be a bit more open and inviting each time it was played. There was some influence of Flamenco music mixed in as well, which is heavily influenced by improvisation - another thing that Mompou tried to retain. So, maybe the guy last night really was waiting moment to moment to see what would happen.

Either way, I think it is always interesting all of the different way that people are able to, or at least try to convey their life to those around them. Many of us (if you are like me at all!) struggle to convey everything that is going on inside and experientially to those around us that we want to share these things with. I love to see when people are able to do this successfully in whatever manner they find fitting - music, art, photography, writing, ect. Maybe this is one reason why I have a love/hate relationship with photography. I may have something in my mind, but am rarely, if ever, able to share that. The love is in the potential, the hate is in the failings and frustration. Maybe it takes more time than I give it, too......

Spring!

Alright, so it really isn't spring yet, but we are back in the 50's now, so it is on my mind (seriously, this is the TX winter I was expecting!). This spring, Sara and I are going to go on a little backpacking trip in the Grand Canyon. We are pretty excited about it because neither of us has seen the Grand Canyon before, and what better way to see it than to hike down into it, camp, and hike back out.

Before I mentioned that I have been playing around with Google Earth. I got into it because I figured out how I could map out hiking trails on it and them export it to our hand-held GPS unit. I thought it would be fun for have that info on there. So, I hop on Google Earth to put our GC hiking trail into it... and now I am a bit nervous, too. Below are pics of our exit trail (I think if you click on them, they can get bigger) - that thin white line zig-zagging almost straight up the wall... yeah, that will be us. I think I had better start getting in shape now, and even then I am going to die (for anyone concerned - we probably won't literally die). I am not sure why this was surprising to me, seeing as how we are hiking down into a famously large canyon, but I think actually visualizing it in '3-D' made me realize what a trail with an altitude change of that many 0's behind the first number would look like.

From A Step Beyond

From A Step Beyond

Colorado!

Well, it has been a while now since we have posted anything so I thought I would put up some pics of our time in Colorado for New Years. It was really good to be back there again to see family and friends, and also to see and get reacquainted with the mountains.

We opened some gifts the first night that we were there. My parents were really excited about it and it took a lot of work to make them wait until the end of night to open them. Or... maybe that was me. Can't remember.

From CO Christmas 2009

We also had an awesome fondue dinner one of the nights. We had a cheese fondue appetizer, followed by marinated steak and marinated shrimp for dinner. It was lovely. Here are the kids with the spread...

From CO Christmas 2009

We also went by the Denver Art Museum (DAM for short - not just because that is more fun). The DAM neighborhood has some really cool architecture, and the DAM building itself is really cool. There are no 90 degree angles in the DAM building, and apparently some people can get vertigo when they are inside of the DAM.

From CO Christmas 2009

We also went on a short snowshoeing trip. We hiking up to a small alpine lake called Lost Lake. The snow was a bit packed, but it was still fun. It was blazing cold out, strong winds, and snowing a little bit for the trip.

From CO Christmas 2009

From CO Christmas 2009

From CO Christmas 2009

Now we are back in Dallas doin' out thing. Sara is working, and I am... slaving away... at something really important. I have been looking around this week for a possible new place to live. It has been a bit of fun. I take our handheld GPS with me and mark the locations of each place, go home and put the locations into Google Earth so that we can see where they are and do street view to look at them and remember which is which. Yesterday I found a bit over 40 places in the nearby neighborhood. Obviously not all of them have turned out to be what we are looking for, but Google Earth has been a more fun way to keep track of them all. School starts back up on Monday for me and I am already missing the Christmas break.

Stockings Hung with Care

Stockings Hung with Care, originally uploaded by a b franzen.

Merry Christmas everyone! Sara got home from baby-day-care a bit ago and is now taking a nap... Later today we are going to have some of the other Dr. kids over for dinner that had to work today as well, and so Sara wanted to get stockings for all of them. Should be a good dinner - complete with marinaded beef tri-tips and Absolute La La Land martinis, ha. Hope you all have a good Christmas!

[Untitled]

[Untitled], originally uploaded by a b franzen.

Yesterday it was 65 here.

It has been really nice being off of school so far. Sara and I have been able to do a lot of stuff together since being off and being home more (taking into account that she is not off, of course). Yesterday we went running around this little 'lake' nearby to enjoy the beautiful day out.

We also went to a new church to change things up a bit and to see if we can find some friends. It occurred to me that Christmas was actually this week, and it doesn't feel much like Christmas. Partly I thought of this because this church focused on Advent in their service and I hadn't realized until then that I don't think the other church had even mentioned the existence of Advent.

Sara has to work on Christmas day, but should get off relatively early in the day. As such, we are going to have any of the other residents that will be around over for Christmas dinner. Should be a good time. We have 3 takers so far. Maybe later this week it will feel like Christmas more.

Yesterday it was 65 here.

The Judge

The Judge, originally uploaded by a b franzen.

First semester is now finished (apart from giving a final in the morning)! Good times. That's all I've got for now.

Clara

Clara, originally uploaded by a b franzen.

Just as I was about to put this picture up I realized that I tend to have a fair amount of pictures with beer in them. Oh well. I am alright with that.

I just finished up 2 out of 3 big papers at the end of the semester here and thought that deserved a little bit of a break and a quick post.

One nice thing about working from home is that beer can keep me company. Besides the fact that drinking at a place of work is typically frowned upon, my place of 'work' is a Baptist institution and word on the street is that they don't even allow dancing on campus (in an officially sanctioned kind of a way, I assume).

I know that in general I can be a bit of a weird person, but one weird thing about me is how I write papers. Typically, by the time that I sit down at the computer to write a paper it is already essentially all written out in my mind and it only needs to be materialized with the help of my friend Word. But, it is getting to this point that is the most painful.

Sometimes I know what I want to write about and it is all fairly smooth and quick, other times this is not the case. It took me almost a solid month to think about the basic idea, direction, and argument for my theory paper. It took me almost two full days to chose the variables I would look at for the stats paper (how many hours a person works and how much welfare they receive). That is just to choose the variables to look at, too! For this last paper I have to write, it took me almost the entire semester, essentially, to think of what I would want to do.

The worst part in all of it is that it is typically the same each time. I get very frustrated that I don't know what I want to do, and this is made worse by the fact that in the past it has worked out just fine. I mean really. There is no reason to think that just because in the past I was able to finally come up with some idea that it will happen again this time. Hence in the midst of the angst there is also no exit.

Anyways, there is another beer picture for you, and a small piece of my weirdness for you. Thanks for celebrating finishing up #2 with me.

interactions and healthy lifestyles

Here is a quick post to follow sara's on health. Above is a figure that I made that may (I haven't totally decided yet) visually depict the basic theory of that paper she mentioned. The interaction between the patient and the physician is a very interesting one. Why do some patients listen and do what is best for their health, and why do some not? Why are some interactions with doctors pleasant and some not? All patients and all physicians go into their interactions with expectations built upon their past experiences (whether experiences they actually had, heard about, or are merely common to their social and economic status). Sometimes these experiences and expectations (one's 'habitus' in the figure) overlap significantly with that of the physician and other times not at all. In addition to this, there are varying levels of voluntary trust that one may have in the physician, or the health system in general. The third part is that of how responsive the physician is to the actual individual with whom they are speaking. If they have very set expectations about how all patients should be and do not change according to different people, then they are not reflexive at all (they poorly react to specific situations or individuals). All of this together will, in the end, go a long way in determining whether some patient/physician interaction is positive or not, makes an impact or not, healthy lifestyles are adopted or not, and so on.

So, if you are still with me, I think this helps to answer the question of what, if anything, fighting at school has to do with one's health and medical care. The more that we are able to instill healthy living practices in people, the more this will change and shift their overall 'habitus,' the cognitive perspective from which they live their life. The more that we can teach children that fighting is bad for them in general, the more that we can change how they interpret their world and make decisions accordingly. In the end, they may actually grow up with a more healthy lifestyle than they otherwise would have.