3rd Year Begins

Today is Sam's first day as a 3rd Year Orthopedic Surgery Resident at UCI.  2nd year is over, and that means we have officially survived the most challenging year of residency!

That's not to say we didn't have our ups and downs over the last 12 months, because we certainly did.  But it wasn't as bad (nor did it seem as long) as I was preparing for it to be.  Hopefully this next year will bring with it more hours of sleep for Sam and less crankiness.  I feel badly for how exhausted he was this year and I appreciate how much he tried to not let his schedule interfere with our life outside of work.  Who knows, maybe I'll be relinquishing my "Ortho Widow" title!

To celebrate Sam's huge accomplishment, I decided to give him a little something he had mentioned that he wanted, along with two things we've needed that I have been meaning to get:

The first thing, was a muddler.  Sam is really into drinking Old Fashioneds but he doesn't have anything to muddle the bitters and sugar with.  I also love me a refreshing mojito during the summer months so it will serve all of our bar tending endeavors well.  And I purchased my favorite brand- OXO!  I bought myself their shaker and Sam can't get over how nice it is.  Having well-made cooking stuff really makes a huge difference!

The second thing is a lemon juicer.  We have a lime juicer and it's awesome!  The downside is that it doesn't handle lemons very well.  So for Sam's amazing lemonade and his latest creation, coconut citrus margaritas, we have to quarter the lemons before we juice them.  This is going to make the whole process so much faster!  And it will be great for seasoning fish and making my Green Energy Smoothie in the mornings.


Finally, Sam has mentioned that he wants a cast-iron skillet.  So I decided to take advantage of a Sur la Table sale and pick one up to surprise him.  Well, killing two birds with one stone, I selected a Le Creuset skillet.  I have been wanting to dive into the world of Le Creuset for a while but everything is SO expensive!  That said, as I wrote two paragraphs earlier, using well-made cooking stuff REALLY makes a HUGE difference.  So I jumped in.  I bought Sam the skillet and me the two-in-one pan and pot that can be used separately or together as a lidded pot.  I went with the Fennel color.

I wrapped everything up under Hunter's watchful eye in the last bits of our UCI wrapping paper.  This was pretty funny because it made Sam think I bought him stuff at the UCI student store... which I most certainly did NOT!

New Mac & Apple TV

So my personal laptop has been falling apart lately... I did get it back in 2007.  I decided to go ahead and bite the bullet and buy a new MacBook Pro since I love my current one so much!  I did a lot of research and was debating between a solid state drive (SSD) and upgrading the memory on a ATA drive.  In the end I went with the ATA because I don't usually drop my laptops and they are relatively well taken care of.  Plus, I always seem to need more memory space, my poor iTunes couldn't even play movies I had such little hard drive and memory left.

So anyway, while I was in the store they were mentioning Apple TV and I had looked into getting it for Sam.   He hooked up the AirPlay device his Dad got us last year before we had cable so we could stream music wirelessly from our computers and iPhones to the living room stereo.  Unfortunately, we couldn't have cable TV and cable internet both in the living room because we didn't have enough cable output from the wall.  Oops.  

Apple TV is better anyway because you can steam movies, and rent movies, and basically access all of your movies, tv shows, and anything else through iTunes (like Sam's video games on his iPad).  So this is really much more versatile, and it's all through just power, an HDMI cord to the TV, and our wireless router in the guest room.  Very, very neat.  

Sam's been on call a lot the last week and he's pretty exhausted, but we did play around with the Apple TV a little bit last night and I think he was pretty impressed.  I'm excited for him to get home from being on call tomorrow- hopefully we can put on a movie and Sam can pass out on the couch while I work on some marketing collateral for the trade show we are attending in March.

I am in the process of downloading all my iTunes movies and it's amazing- I have been at it for over 24 hours and only 1/3 of the movies have downloaded!  Can you believe that?  Good lord, the Harry Potters are SO long to download.  This whole thing makes me want to buy faster upload and download internet speed!  

The other really freakin neat thing is that iCloud syncs all music, movies, calendar events, and reminders on my computer and phone.  So that means when I change something on my phone (add an event, an item to my grocery list, buy a song, etc.) it automatically syncs with my calendar, reminders, iTunes library on my computer.  So there is no need to constantly plug in the phone and update things via a cable.  This is going to make my OCD so much easier- and probably worse!

But seriously, the convenience of all the new technology is really, really amazing.  Even if it is expensive!  With all the bachelorette planning, and now I am heading up planning our 10-Year High School Reunion in June too, I am going to need a functional computer that IS NOT my work laptop.