Vertical to horizontal mattress

I have arrived in Elective City. Hooray!!
And I managed to more or less pack up my house and move out. And I am still not sure where I will be living next year, except that it will be somewhere round Rurality and surrounding countryside.

Things not to do while I am packing:

1. Offer constructive criticism such as "oh my goodness, whatamess. How will you ever get this disaster into boxes?" Not helpful, though I am sure you meant it in the nicest possible way.
   
2. Say "wow, you have a lot of stuff". I have been away from home for 8 years. My parents live > 1 plane flights away. This does not make for ease of transporting textbooks etc back home for storage. (Many notes have been jettisoned, sentimental value or no). And I have cooking implements. So yes, as an independent (well, more or less) adult who cooks and cleans for herself, I do have more than someone who has just moved out of home this year or last year.
3. Offer to help or be there. Sorry, I'm a private packer. It may be a fear of 1) or 2), some sort of Pavlovian response (people around while I am packing = bad, grrr) that has been built up and reinforced during my multiple house moves. I appreciate it, but lets have a meal or a coffee or a wine AFTER the packing is done.

Most of my packing was done beyootifully. Seriously, Allied Pickford would be proud. But I have decided that when it comes to deciding which hospital I shall inflict myself upon for intern year, states that pay for your removalists as part of the contract will be favourably looked upon (oh yes, and whichever hospital gives me a job is a slightly more important consideration). Or else Mama Dragonfly might be called in to help.....(my father has already told me that if I have to "road trip" to get wherever I am going to work, that he is coming along and will play terribly old fashioned music the entire time).

About 95% of packing was a work of art, while I was winning against the schedule that is. Then the schedule bit back at me with a vengeance
The remaining 5% consisted of me upending my sock drawer into a bucket, my underwear drawer and a stationery drawer into a rubbish sack, and throwing all of my shoes into another rubbish sack. And a pile of paper and textbooks which I had manged to overlook underneath the backpack I had packed everything for the next 2.5 months in got shoved in on top of the socks. I will sort it out in January or February. Or March.....
Lesson? This is what happens when you are a perfectionist. I decided at the 11th hour that if I bought my laptop with me, my bag would be lighter as I could use books on the intertubes and and as a consequence leave a few textbooks behind. If anyone has any recommendations for online neurosurgery reading, let me know.

I have now puddlejumped through a number of airports (cheaper flights = many transits), including one 5 hour stopover where I got to spend time with a dear friend M, which was lovely. Interestingly, there were about 7 people I knew on that plane trip (doctors and medical students mostly), which made her remark "you seem to know half of the plane, was all of Rurality trying to get out for the weekend?"

The cumulative effects of exams (not that I sleep deprived myself for them, but still) and less than 6 hours sleep in 72 hours meant that I slept the entire way (apart from at the airport). I restrained myself from buying a plane pillow, but had no trouble sleeping bolt upright (vertical mattress). But when I arrived here yesterday I was embracing the horizontal mattress at 6.30pm. Thankfully I didn't repeat what happened when I transited with M once last year (falling asleep on her very comfortable leather couch until it was time to go back to the airport).

Now that I have woken up, here is a completely random book meme I found on a friends blog.

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

I tag: Sara the msilf, Outback Ambo, t. @ aquackening, Katie @ You'll Never Know Everything (if she has time around snuggling the Turnip), s. @ Discuss It With The Pillow, Milk and 2 Sugars, Dr Cris @ DrCrisReads (if she has time around phDing, mothering and blogging) and Awake in Rochester.

I had to go with the second closest book as the first closest God Bless You Dr Kevorkian, by Kurt Vonnegut
has a blank page on p56. And 57 doen't have 5 sentences on it.

In addition to which, something steely had entered Reverend Mother; and she resolved to do nothing, to keep her silence intact, and let Adam Aziz discover just how badly his modern ideas ere ruining his children - let him find out for himself, after his lifetime of telling her to be quiet with her decent old fashioned notions.

Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie (1980)

I managed to jettison a number of books which I will never read again by taking them to a 2nd hand book dealer and swapping 2 for 1 + $1 per "new" 2nd hand book and gaining a stack of new books to read over summer while I am separated from the public library system which I so regularly use and abuse.

I start neurosurgery on Monday. So now I can use the phrase "c'mon people, its not brain surgery!!" I meet one of the neurosurgeons on Monday morning and start my attachment with him. My father asked me "are you going to pick his brains?" Gotta love those Dad jokes. As my sister (Butterfly) would say "bahahahaha. And ha!" Maybe I should have included neurosurgery as a list of career options for Sylar here.
Anyway, am looking forward to it.Bring on the transphenoidals and EVDs!