How to bake an 11-year-old:  Our home has room-specific electric heat with on/off switches in each room.  While the heating season is virtually over, by some standards, there is still this damp chill in the air that comes with the onset of the spring season, our marshy area and the fact that our house does not have a basement but is built on a floating cement slab.  Anyways, I routinely wander the house, turning on the heat to warm up the rooms and erase the damp chill, especially prior to bed.  None of the switches in the house have auto-thermostats, so once you turn them on, they are on for good, so you have to remember to turn them off or set them back, whatever the case may be.  Usually, since the house is well-insulated, this means turning them off once a comfortable temperature has been reached.  Well, last night, I warmed up my 11-year-old’s room, tucked her in and then returned to my desk, worked some more and finally went to bed.  Though I checked on her before bed, I failed to register the fact that her heat registers were still engaged and on. Her room felt warm, but when you have an 11-year-old germinating under quilts and you have previously warmed up the room, hours prior, you don’t really register the fact that the heat is still on.  There is always heat on in some respect.  So, last night I never thought to double-check the wall switch and turn off her heat. 

Consequently, when I returned to her room at 6:55 a.m. this morning, I had a fully baked 11-year-old.  I pretty much rendered her to the likes of beef jerky, long, lean and yet really quite tender.  You do this by baking a child on slow heat, approximately 79 degrees Fahrenheit for a period of 11 hours.  Because of the fact that she also has a heated mattress pad which I also failed to turn off, her tummy was delightfully warm, albeit hungry. 

This kid is already long, lean and slightly tender … so if anyone has a recipe on how to reverse this process, I sure would like to see it.  I tried punching her down like bread dough, but it didn’t work.  She was already fully baked!

If she’s out in the sun at all today, when she comes home, she’s sure to be 8-feet tall!

Cardiothoracic surgery and then some:  I spent the entire day yesterday inside the head of a cardiovascular surgeon.  At first, she was irritating the heck out of me because in the name of “consultations,” it seemed to me that she was just perusing thick charts and “thinking aloud,” formulating her hypotheses as to best care options, etc.  This lent to what seemed like a jagged thought process that fit no format I could think of.  However, after the fourth or fifth patient of the many I transcribed yesterday, I grew to love her “thinking aloud,” was able to format it correctly and coherently, and felt blessed to have been involved in the conferencing of care she was doing on these complicated patients.  I used to really hate cardiology dictations of the “statistical” variety where it’s all numbers and fractions and blah, blah, blah, but gradually I have learned to understand the math of the human heart and its ability to be manipulated to keep on beating.  If we could apply this science to our ongoing relationships, imagine the outcomes.

Conference calls, stocking feet and really hot coffee:  We have a mandatory meeting today, via conference call, any minute now.  I have dripping wet hair and I’m wearing sweat socks that I don’t think really match.  I haven’t seen my shoes since Sunday afternoon.  Every day is dress down/blue jean day in the home office, and my sweatshirt has seen better days.  The coffee is always fresh and snacks are within reach.  I can putter at whatever the heck I please, as long as I don’t make noise during the call, and I get paid for all of this!  Life is good, this Thursday.