jenniferhawke.com

Brandon wanted me to apologize on his behalf to those of you that have noticed that the last time he posted on his site was May 1st.

My grandma’s Hungarian Goulash is good, but you can only re-read it so many times…

Instead of blogging (or Facebooking or Twittering) he has been slammed with a double-duty work schedule. He is spending 50+ hours each week at the hospital learning Internal Medicine and 24 hours at the Halfway House making money to pay our rent.

An snapshot of his schedule this past week…

Monday & Tuesday: work at the hospital from 7am-5pm

Wednesday: work at the hospital from 7am-5pm
Wednesday evening: sleep from 6-10pm
Wednesday night: work at the halfway house from 11pm-7am

Thursday: work at the hospital from 7am-5pm
Thursday evening: sleep from 6-10pm (that’s 4 hrs of his fave pastime in 48)
Thursday night: work at the halfway house from 11pm-7am

Friday: work at the hospital from 7am-5pm
Friday evening: fall into bed exhausted

Saturday: see below
Sunday: work at the halfway house from 7am-3pm

Monday & Tuesday: start all over again

Today (Saturday) is a rare day off for him and he has to spend it doing stuff he didn’t have time to get to during the week instead of catching up on sleep and relaxing.

You know, fun stuff like working on his MBA course and paying bills.

And yet, do I ever hear him complain? Not even for one second. Quite literally the only thing he complains about is not having time to blog.

He promises to be back soon. Unfortunately, he doesn’t get much of a long weekend, but I think he’s going to attempt to dedicate part of his non-holiday Monday to a post.

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photos: A few shots of Brandon enjoying his favourite hobby.

The husband is at work, the dogs are walked, the decaf is hot and this Sunday morning is all mine.

Brandon and I had an amazing day off yesterday. For the first time in months, I didn’t have any studying to do and for the first time in almost 8 weeks, he had 24 hours away from his job and the hospital. Bliss!

Contrary to what might have been a popular choice, we did not spend the whole day in bed. We actually got up early (dang internal alarm clocks) and took the dogs to the off-leash park before the heat of the day set in. Then we went to Babies ‘R Us and drooled over the crib and changing table that we-love-but-is-out-of-stock-until-July and tried on baby-carrying harnesses. After a healthy fast-food indulgence lunch, we headed home to watch the USA try to come from behind (again!) in the FIFA World Cup. Then we went to an early movie at our favourite $3.75 theatre (recently re-opened and mostly renovated after extensive hail and flood damage) and came home to sleep for an uninterrupted 9 hours.

It was a rare day for Just The Two Of Us and immensely treasured as they become fewer and farther between.

Today I am back online and hopelessly behind. There are 549 unread posts in my Google blog reader. So you can safely assume that unless you directly emailed me (and it didn’t get sorted into my junk mail folder) if something interesting happened on the internet in the last month, it doesn’t exist in my world.

I hope you all are having an amazing summer so far. I know mine is about to get a lot better.

Oh, and how did the exam go? It’s tough to say and I’m always horrible at estimating those things, but it felt a lot like Step 1. Some stuff I knew cold and some stuff made me feel like I hadn’t cracked a book all year. How well I did depends on how many of each I answered/guessed correctly. I’ll let you know as soon as I know, which should be in about three weeks.

[Originally written January 26th. There are a lot more "drafts" from the last couple of months coming up.]

Ever have someone tell you not to think about a pink elephant?

Ever have a pink (or blue) elephant actually standing in your room? And not only are you not supposed to think about it, you’re not supposed to talk about it for at least 12 weeks.

So, you’re fighting the urge to think or talk about it and try to write a blog post with your thoughts without including the elephant.

I’m sorry I haven’t been writing much. There’s an elephant standing on my foot.

They have been driving me nuts since I redesigned the site and though tossing them in might generate a few extra bucks each month.

Yes, they’ve generated a few (very few) extra bucks each month. But I honestly can’t say the eyesore annoyance is worth it.

I’m also not sure I can go through with the project to start selling my photography online. I’ve spent almost 3 months flipping through thousands and thousands of photos I’ve taken around the world over the last few years and have come to a couple of conclusions:

1) I’m not stock worthy. My style is snapshots and artsy-fartsy. Definitely not marketable to a corporate climate.

2) I’m afraid it won’t be successful. I have to start studying (hard) for Step 2 in March and am worried that investing time in this project just won’t pay off. Maybe sometime in the future.

In the meantime, I’m still writing search engine articles at $9-a-pop and piling up student loan money, generous donations from my parents, and spare change from between the couch cushions to pay my next $10,000 tuition installment by March 31st. After that, only TWO MORE TO GO. I absolutely know the day I pay off all of this debt will be heart-soaring thrilling, but a close second will be the day I make that last bank-account-sucking-giant-investment toward the piece-of-paper-that-is-the-magic-carpet-of-my-wildest-dreams.

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photo: From the entertaining and educational Underground Tour in Seattle.

Disclaimer: We are not worried about money. Brandon has a job. Our families love us and support us. We are paying all bills on time and can indulge in fast-food or $3.75 matinees occasionally. Life is good. We are not worried about money. But…

I found something I really, really want to buy Brandon for his birthday. It’s only 9 months away and I need to sell my soul a few photos to help pay for it.

A little bit of random research into photo printing and publishing options led me to a few conclusions:

1) There are a lot of bad photos for sale online.

2) I really don’t want to add to that cyber landfill.

3) I have a sneaking suspicion every professional photographer out there dies a little inside when someone armed with a digital camera and Flickr account decides to “go pro.”

So, I had to step back and ask myself a few questions.

Would I print and hang Photos By Me on my wall? Heck, yes! I would love to have an unlimited printing-and-framing budget to add some personality to our little home.

Does that mean other people feel the same way? I’ve learned to stop believing my intrinsic view of the world is shared by many others.

Is it worth a shot to find out? With a free service like RedBubble, I’m not really sure what I have to lose. I guess stranger things have happened.

So, where do I begin?

After spending even more time flipping through my photo archives (16,000+ images in the last 4 or 5 years), I realize I am a horrible judge of the quality of my work. I like some pieces for personal reasons. I hate others without any reason. I am not trained in art. I have no idea what the difference is between a photograph that is artistically and technically flawless that doesn’t sell and other weird crap that people love to buy.

I think the last paragraph just made any professional photographer out there throw up a little in their mouth and nearly pass out while choking on fumes of disdain.

I’ve decided to take the amateur-ness of my lack of photography (or art or marketing) training out of my decision to sell my photos online. Or rather, I’ve decided to increase the amateur-ness exponentially by including all of you in the process. Yes, that’s right. YOU are going to decide which photos I upload to sell online.

Each week I will choose a different theme. I will upload 5 photos and open the voting to ye loyal readers. You don’t actually have to say “Yes! I’m going to buy that photo! Here is my money!” but if you did buy a photo from that set, which one would it be? At the end of the week, the winner will be uploaded to my RedBubble account and we’ll see if anything sells.

And since I’m making you part of the “work” process, I have to include you in the “payoff” process. For every 10 prints I sell, I will send 1 for free to a random reader/voter.

Do we have a deal?

Website will be down and up and down again this week. My team of interweb leprechauns and I are still updating and exporting and importing and teleporting.

Things will be broken for awhile. And then they should be fixed.

i’ll try to talk more and gesture less with my hands photos.

unfortunately, updating this website is becoming a short-term sacrifice for a very important long-term goal.

i have been working hard at balancing my life and work, my hobbies and studies and my family and friends. i have sacrificed studies for friends and friends for studies. i have neglected email for weeks on end, which really means neglecting friends and family when it’s my only lifeline to them. and i have scheduled time away from the books for long phone calls with my mom and lengthy updates here. i like to think i’m learning to achieve harmony and balance. that i am able to do the the things i want to as well as the things i need to.

but i really really really don’t want to be one of those people that gets my exam grade back and says “well, i didn’t do as great as i hoped, but it’s good enough.”

i have made a lot of sacrifices along this path so far. it would seem a shame to waste them on a “good enough” Step 1 score. there are doors and opportunities i want to open up. there are big exciting things i want to do for myself and my family. and yet, there are only so many hours in a day. one of my top priorities is about to take up a lot more of those hours and the very very top priority is sitting next to me at the kitchen table. jenniferhawke.com is a little further down that list.

March
9th – Block 3 Exam
14th – Clinical Skills Assessment Practical Exam
17th – Introduction to Clinical Diagnosis NBME Subject Exam
23rd – Pathology NBME Subject Exam

April
13th – NBME Comprehensive Subject Exam
15th – to Antigua
16th – to Toronto
17th – to Regina (Moose Jaw)
20th – to Denver

May
1st – to Regina (Moose Jaw)

June
15th or 30th? – USMLE Step 1

don’t worry, i won’t disappear until July. but posting is likely to be light and whiny and filled with woe-is-me-get-me-out-of-the-library blues. i have a few pre-written posts coming up this month about our last few exams.

i will be checking email and all things interweb once a day, probably right before i go to bed or right when i get up. if your email is warning me to jump out of a burning building or some other sort of helpful, pertinent and timely information, then i might respond. otherwise, thank you for your thoughts and kind words. your encouragement keeps me going on the rough days.

seeya soon. xoxo.

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photo: First Aid and First Aid Organ Systems dissected from their proper bindings and inserted into the biggest binder i own. my trusty Merck Manual is sitting on top.

go check it out!

as a lot of you are already aware, almost all of the photos i post in my blog entries are linked to my flickr account. huge thanks to my Aunt Jean in Saskatoon for the latest extension of my pro account.

i love flickr. well, i loved flickr when i had the time to enjoy it as the addicting social network it can be. with the adventures of medical school, my online socializing has taken a drastic nosedive. along with my photographic experimenting. so, flickr sort of turned into a photo archive for me.

which i can do much more easily (and privately) from iPhoto at home.

as such, i’ve nuked the photos from my account and am managing all 8,000+ of them on my hard drive instead. this means all of the photos from previous entries will be “broken”. sorry for the inconvenience and annoyance and extra large white boxes. still figuring out how i want to handle future post photo uploads.