Garden

A vegetable garden is one of the first things that we wanted to have when moving into a house. We purchased several gardening books over the last two years seemingly just to torture ourselves as we longed for some green space of our own. Now that we finally have that space, the gardening has begun.

We decided to start everything from seed even though we were behind the spring planting curve. We decided on a mix of plants that included tomatoes, squash, peas, some herbs, marigolds, and poppies. The direct sow seeds have done marvelously so far; the indirect not so much. Impatience got the better of us with the glacial progress of the wimpy seedlings that were growing in the house, and decided that since it was unlikely to freeze here in June to go ahead and plant them. They withered up in 24 hours. 

Plan B consisted of buying a few tomato plants from a nearby garden shop, which we have managed to keep alive thus far. I started off thinking about going geek with the garden and meticulously tracking dates, weather, successes and failures, but decided to just let nature take its course and figure it out over time. That and pay attention to the simple directions on seed packets next year. 

Progress

I spent some time the other day thinking about why it has been so long since either one of us has posted anything. Being busy jumped to the top of the list, but specifically for me there were several other reasons. First, the pace of fourth year was a little frantic. I had several rotations where I was only on a service for a week, which based on the volume and the fact that posts would have been low quality kept me from writing about them. In addition to that the application and interview process was stressful, and I was weary about posting my thoughts online. Of course anyone who read before knows by now that our lives have moved forward even as the blog has stayed silent.

Erin transfered to a different department at her hospital, I matched into general surgery here in Memphis, we own a house, and I graduated from medical school. I am going to say there is no time like the present and just skip the details.

There will be a slight shift in the focus of the blog since I have decided that writing about my job could get murky. There are a lot of concerns about privacy and professionalism when writing about medicine and many well-intentioned people have created big problems for themselves. Some get around this by writing anonymously which grants the freedom to write nearly anything they want, but that isn't a path I am interested in at this point since I can't keep up with even one place to post content. Posts about residency will be pretty general and perhaps less interesting, but hopefully still insightful to those who just want to know the basics.

I am going to spend some more time writing about the domestic front and the progress of our first home. There are a lot of things that really excite me about the house on Melrose, and some things that certainly need work.

Time to beat some life back into this old blog, hope everyone enjoys the revival.

PS