White Coat Ceremony

This last Saturday was James's White Coat Ceremony.  If you're anything like me, you've never heard of this before and/or don't get what it is.  Good news!  I now know and will explain it to you.  Towards the beginning of their medical school career, med students have a ceremony called the White Coat Ceremony that celebrates this transition into med school.  It's kind of like a pre-graduation.  At this ceremony, they take the osteopathic pledge (a pledge to treat patients well, to follow the tenants of their schooling, etc.) and they receive their white coats.  This is the coat James will wear in all patient encounters until he completes med school.  This includes rotations, volunteer hours, and his simulated patient interactions.  Here's James with his fancy new coat:

He's really a med student now! Medical schools do this ceremony at different times (first week of school, a few months in, etc.), but for us it was after 8 weeks of school.  Presumably anyone who decided they actually didn't want to do this would have dropped out by now.  The ceremony was nice, with some good speakers.  The "coating" (I love that...it sounds like he's being marinated) took longer.  He feels and looks legit now, and I'm so proud.

The Cashier Chronicles

I recently got a job here as a cashier at a local grocery store.  As the newest cashier, I've been shadowed by some coworkers to make sure I don't mess anything up too badly.  How busy the store is depends on the time of the month, as most of our customers are on Food Stamps and WIC, which are issued at the beginning of the month.  The end of the month is pretty slow.  It's interesting to see how different people will spend this money versus how they'd spend their own money.

I've also learned some new stuff about produce.  I've never actually seen okra before this week, except when Tiana made gumbo in The Princess and the Frog. Who knew?  Fascinating item.  Another produce item with a twist: cucumbers.  Our store carries two sizes: normal and small.  When I got the small ones, I spent forever trying to find it on our produce sheet so I could enter the code into the system.  It turns out their official name is not "small cucumbers" or "mini cucumbers" or "midget cucumbers."  Nope- their official name is "picklin' cukes." Picklin' cukes!  I love it.  It's a good thing I was being shadowed that day or I'd never have found them.

In addition to okra and picklin' cukes, we sell bags of ice.  We do not sell blocks of ice, however.  I was trying to make this distinction with my trainer ("Well, what do I type in if they want a block of ice instead of ice cubes?"  "Who would want a 10 lb block of ice, Sariah? What would you even do with that?") and explained what ice blocking was.  She responded, "That sounds amazing.  Why haven't we done that?  I reckon it'd be great on our hills...hmm.  Do you need grease for it?"  (She puts oil on the bottom of her inner tube to go sledding in winter.  I've never heard of this.)  In return for my explanation of this fun new pastime, she told me about a Southern alternative: muddin'.  Muddin' is where you go out driving (preferably in a mud-friendly vehicle) through mud puddles.  How muddy you yourself get depends on if you're in a truck instead of ATV and if the windows are open.  I feel like ice blocking might be a cleaner option, but still, if we get bored, we'll know what to do!

Heavy Driving

Since moving here, I think that on average we're in the car at least 45 minutes a day. Just to put that in perspective, I bought gas yesterday and have already driven 100 miles. Crazy. I know. Basically everywhere we want or need to go ends up being about 20 minutes away. I think that I'm starting to get used to it, but that's just me talking. At any rate, there is flea market that is, you guessed it, about 20 minutes away. Sariah and I went once a couple weeks ago just to see what it was like. The only thing that I've experienced that was remotely similar was a thing in Argentina called a feria. People have booths that sell a wide variety of things from bootlegged DVDs and CDs to food to animals to old tools. These things are a Southern tradition as the sign proudly proclaims. As a brief side note here before the point of this post starts, the first time we went, Sariah and I were amazed at how many things are sold there illegally. She looked at me and whispered, afraid of offending the wrong booth-keeper, "This is illegal, isn't it?" To those who aren't sure, it is. It's grossly illegal. Maybe I'm wrong; this is the South after all. Things are a little different from what we're used to.

Anyway, we decided to make the 20 minute trek to the flea market for a rug. We found a lovely, Moroccan tile rug that was just the right size for our living room. We even haggled with the guy manning the table and got 5 whole dollars knocked off the price. Life was looking pretty sweet at this point. We gently tossed the rug into the back of our truck and got ready to go home and let our feet bask in the soft fibers of our newly purchased rug. Due to the popularity of the flea market, we were forced to park on the shoulder of the highway. Now if you've ever tried to turn left on a highway, you know that it can take a while to do so. I quickly remembered that we were close to a local BBQ that is supposed to be the bee's knees and it just so happened to be to the right of where we were pulling out. Being the impatient driver that I am, I suggested that we turn right and go on a little excursion to find Heavy's.

I honestly thought that this would be a quick drive and that we'd be back home 5 minutes later than had we just gone home after the flea market. We both thought that. It seemed like a good decision at the time. I'm still glad that we did it because it was kind of fun trying to find this place. Anyhow, we turned right and then turned right again where the sign for the Heavy's was. Things started off well enough; we passed some homes and a few churches without any sign of the place. We thought, "It must be a mile down this road. Surely they wouldn't make their restaurant hard to find." Wrong! We kept on going another mile,which turned into five, which became 20. The road we were on became pretty narrow with barely enough space for two cars to pass each other. However, it was a pretty road. We saw plenty of the soft green water of the Powell River through the dense trees. We even saw some small strips of tobacco plants here and there.

Eventually, the road ended without any sign for Heavy's. We had a choice to make: left or right? I chose right. For whatever reason, Sariah trusts me when it comes to driving. I hope that I didn't destroy that. We drove on and on and on and on. I kept thinking that we would make it back to the main highway any second. Suddenly we saw a sign that said a familiar-sounding highway was coming up on our left. I breathed a sigh of relief and made a turn there. After driving for roughly 15 minutes, we had passed into another county and I knew that something was wrong. Our tank of gas was starting to run low too so my anxiety started to rise. We turned around and drove back the way we came until we ran into a relatively nice couple that were doing yard work together. I got out of the car and asked them how to get back home. Apparently we had gone the right direction, but we shouldn't have turned down that highway that sounded familiar to us (I could have told them that); we should have kept going straight. We hopped back in and drove for another 20 minutes and made it home.

What should have been a fairly short trip to the flea market ended up being a 2 hour escapade deep into the back country of Tennessee. I enjoyed it, even though I got us lost. It was nice being with Sariah. Plus we were listening to Jim Dale read the last Harry Potter book, which we both highly recommend. That man does a fantastic job narrating. But I digress.