Well, it's been some time since my last post, and this one will no doubt fail to make up for that. So, I won't even try. I'm just putting the final touches on my first day of medical school (the picture above is my mom and me after the white coat ceremony), so this seemed like an appropriate time to make a short post. We had a week and a half of orientation preceding today to get us ready, and I think pretty much all of us were ready to get going after all of that. It was important stuff, but you can only absorb so much advice until you just need to jump in and make it happen.
I will relate one quick story about the orientation - one of the days was devoted to a community service project which we signed up for online a few weeks before. I signed up to paint and otherwise refurbish a Red Cross office, but the day before, my group got an email saying that the air conditioning had broken. For our safety, they provided an alternative to suffering through the stifling heat: we would be going door to door installing free smoke alarms in peoples' homes in Kansas City Kansas. My mom, who works in the area, later told me that a woman had been stabbed to death in her apartment literally one block from where we were just two days before we were there. It went off without incident, but I was very uncomfortable. I definitely feel like we made a small difference - we installed 15 smoke detectors in 4 different homes and handed out several others. And, there was one house that had a bunch of small kids living in it that actually had several smoke detectors, but not one of them had batteries. Not even old batteries, just none at all. So, hopefully we made a difference in an area that has a whole lot of house fires every month.
I think that's about all I can muster after a long day of class and studying. More to come in the following days, I just wanted to get the ball rolling again. Here, enjoy Beck at his finest.
