I Love Spring

Of course this spring kind of sucks around here, I woke up to 28 degrees this morning.

TWO DAYS BEFORE MAY!

But still I'm not bitter, spring means fresh fruit and veggies and that makes my tummy happy. I went to the grocery store Sunday night to get my weekly groceries and emerged with a beautiful bunch of asparagus, three scrumptious avocados, and two amazingly delicious mangos (and a partridge in a pear tree). Like I haven't had mangos this good since I don't know when and I haven't taken that much enjoyment from eating in a very long time as well.

I think I'm going to go tonight and see if I can get more.

I love spring, I just wish our weather would catch up.


Traditional May Day song:

Last May-day as I skipp'd the garland round,

Cheer'd by the merry hurdy-gurdy's sound,

I look'd, methought, with an unusual grace,

For Molly herself had wash'd and chalk'd my face

Anonymous c. 1773

Gray: Of Work and Coffee

As my head continues to pound I must finally admit to myself that I am addicted to caffeine. Coffee, O Coffee, why must I hate you yet love you so? Like a crack addict I break down and feed the monster.

I find myself falling into a bleakness in these darkest, grayest months of winter. I wake up and leave for work before the sun has risen and I get out and drive home once the sun has set. Working in the black hole of this clinic filled with negative energy and people who just don't care, and then leaving the hospital to the gaunt and hopeless torn-down ghetto of Minneapolis covered in a thin layer of ash-colored snow.

My world is a lot of gray. Gray is the world when I get up. Gray is the world when I lay down. Gray is even the color of my dreams when I dream them at night.

I want to love my job. I want to love what I do. I want to wake up every morning and look forward to getting something accomplished. Doing something that is meaningful, something that just might change the world even just a little.

In the bleakness of winter it seems like I make no mark and tomorrow is the same as the uselessness of today.

A Snow Globe World

Would somebody please stop shaking the globe. We're forecasted for another 6-8 inches today (upgraded from the measly 3-4 we had been told to expect) and its already snowing up a storm. Pardon the pun.
For this girl, who got a bit soft during her three years in sunny AZ, snow has quite possibly never been disliked so much. It makes things slippery, it covers my car (which I continue to procrastinate buying a snow brush for my car until I'm standing in front of it, staring at a foot of snow, sans brush), and it makes shoveling necessary. Its like having to mow a lawn, except a lot more often. I'm a palm tree girl, why am I back in the snow? It is really fun to watch the squirrels scamper across the bare tree limbs because they're puffed out to twice their regular size. Like cute gray fur balls that jump.

As I'm writing this, at work no less, my co-workers are bustling with Christmas decorations for the front deask. And I must admit, despite not celebrating the holiday myself, they have fabulous taste. No ugly Santa tchotchkies, or garish red and green hangings from the 80's. In fact the beauty of their decorations makes me want to decorate for Christmas. Help!!!

Some of patients here really creep me out. I think if the patients are inebriated, acting crazy, or obviously high on something, we should be able to kick them out. Oh, and bathing should be a pre-requisite (I feel so bad for our doctors sometimes.) Unfortunately I can't always get what I want. Today we had a patient come in who was quite apparently high on something. Her male companion came later to make an appointment for a physical.
"Do you prefer a male doctor?" I ask.
"No, I want a female."
*gag* Creepy. He also just had an air of general sleeziness.
Number 4,312 on why I never want to be a doctor.

Also, just to add to the random thought process of this post (I have coffee induced ADHD) for anyone who is as nostalgic for Egypt as I am, check out this photo blog of daily life in Egypt taken by a Canadian ex-pat who has been living there for the past 15 years. It makes me all ferklempt.

It's Snowing

And I really had a lot of things I wanted to do today like return those books I've had for almost two months to the library. But instead when I woke up it was snowing and we're forecasted for 6-8 inches. I think I'm stuck in the house today and I'm very upset about it. I want a starbucks.

The Weather Outside is Frightful....

I got up this morning and the drive into work was horrid. Traffic wasn't bad at all (I am lucky enough to have the best commute of everyone I know), but it was that it was so cold the gear shift was frozen and getting my car through the gears was my daily upper body workout. The clutch was also abnormally stiff, so I worked out my left leg. And this was all after I sat shivering in my car for 10 minutes while it "warmed up".

I'm dreaming of Arizona and the lovely December weather of mid 70's. If it weren't for my mom and the absurdly low amount of rent she asks for, I'd ask my husband to move us back down there. But economically and socially things are much better here. You would think that Phoenix, being the booming metropolis of sophistication that it is, would be much more open to cultures and religions. But it is in fact the exact opposite. Phoenix is the playground of the rich, white, golf-playing republican and conservatism runs rampant. You would instead think that Minnesota, being the recently growing but still backwater community that it is, would be closed to outsiders but it is not.

I think this is entirely due to the baptism by fire the Twin Cities endured with the Somali influx in the mid to late 90's. During this time the Muslim population went from what I am assuming has to have been a relatively small community of at most around 5,000 people, to an extremely large, Somali dominated, population of nearly 300,000 Muslims. Minnesotans had no choice but to become immune to the sight of women in long hijab and the idea that Muslims exist, are perfectly friendly, and cause no harm. A dash of this and a dash of that, and what do you get? A community in which women wearing hijab can actually get a job. Imagine that. In Phoenix it was impossible, I even had one interviewer look at me and ask, "Do you have to wear that costume?"

We'll be the last ones laughing though. As I left Phoenix there was a very large migration of Minnesota-plated cars entering the town driven by, you guessed it, Somalis. Knowing their tendency to move whole communities together, I'm guessing Phoenix will soon be going through their own baptism by fire. I'm eager to see the outcome.

And for now I guess I'll keep shivering in my car each morning.
*sigh*
I hate winter.