LA Bike Tour

Yesterday was the Los Angeles marathon. Last year I volunteered at a water/gatorade station and discovered that in the wee morning hours, before the race starts, they open up the course to bikers for a tour of the city. Well this year I signed up for the bike tour figuring that it would be cool but also that it would give me an idea of the distance I will be expected to race (after swimming a mile and before running a 10k) in the triathlon come September. Little did I know that my bike would be snatched a week before this biking venture so the day after I discovered my loss (may she rest in peace) I turned around and got a new bike. Now I'm not gonna lie, I was a bit devistated by the stolen bike but over the past month I had been thinking that it might be time to upgrade to an actual road bike so I will choose to remember the theft as a catalyst to a better bike instead of some shitty luck. So the bike tour was a chance to try out the triathlon race distance AND to break in my new bike! It was fun, I convinced one of the other nurses on my unit, Wes, to do the ride with me. I was working Saturday and Sunday which were the days of the race Expo so he had to pick up my registration packet and afterwards he promptly sent me a text to inform me that the race started at 5am (I can handle that), so we should try to get there by 4:30am (OK) which means we need to leave his house by 4am (ouch) which required me waking up at 3:30am (f*&k). It was a long day...

Swankified

I was getting report from the outgoing nurse on my patient last week and someone walked up behind us. The doctors have a knack for walking up and wanting to have in depth conversations about patients right in the middle of report, so I turned around expecting to see one of our residents and instead I am looking at Hillary Swank! I'll admit that I was caught off guard so I managed nothing more than wide eyes and a "Hi" - way to play it cool Paige. It turns out that she is doing research for an upcoming movie called The Resident in which she plays, you guessed it, a resident. Well, at least she has that whole interrupting the nurses in the middle of hand-off thing down.

Santa Monica Classic

I have a declaration to make: I have signed up for a triathlon in September. There, I said it. Now, I have to follow through or else I risk public shame and disappointment! Step one was stopping by a local triathlon shop to determine what I need and how to start training, the guy in the shop said a wetsuit, a bike and running shoes so I purchased a wetsuit, got my bike tuned-up and signed up for the Santa Monica Classic (which is a local 10k) to assess any leftover running ability I may have retained. Sure we only used to race 5k's in high school, and sure I haven't run in about a year but come on - it is only six miles for goodness sakes, who can't run six miles?! Me. That picture is of me at the finish line and it may be hard to tell, but lets just say that I FEEL like the guy behind me looks - ouch. Onto sport two, swimming. About a week later I suited up, rode down to the beach and (as I cockily zipped up my suit and pulled on my goggles) decided to swim for about an hour. 15 minutes later, after achieving nothing more than getting my goggles knocked off while dodging surfers and trying to swim out past the breakers (only to make it to the surfer-free zone past the breakers and have a panic attack about being eaten by a shark) I literally washed back up, like some kind of neoprene clad shipwreck victim, amongst the giggles of little kids playing on the shore. Two sports down, one to go. Of all things I should be able to not worry about, biking is at the top of the list. I bike every day to work (OK, I don't bike the entire way, but it is the thought that counts right?) and, worst case scenario, I could always sit back and glide for a minute or two if I need to catch my breath. Well the guy at the shop talked me into something called 'aero bars' which attach onto your handle bars and let you lean forward on your forearms to both get you in a more aerodynamic position and allow you to rest your upper body after the swim portion of the race. They looked cool and that sounded like two valid points so I had him install a set when he did my bike tune-up. Apparently I am not the only one who thought they looked cool because about a week later I go down to my car to get my bike (it was locked to my bike carrier because I had used it to ride part of the way to work the night before) and I see this: Thats right, somebody stole it. Shit. Needless to say, the training is going poorly enough that I felt as though I needed the public declaration to keep me honest - wish me luck!

Cabo 2009

From Julie:

Here's a little video from our trip to Mexico with Paige. We left the day before any word of "swine flu" broke, and we lived in ignorant no T.V. or newspaper bliss the whole week. It wasn't until we got to the airport that we saw people wearing masks or being freaked out. We've been home for more than a week now...and we're all officially flu free.

It was an amazing vacation with so many activities that I'm not sure how we had time to take videos at all!

Jeff and I love vacationing with Paige...never a dull moment.

Baby Rares

One of the nurses on our unit, Valentina, had a baby last week. She had the baby at UCLA so Ashley and I decided to drop in after work one day:We are wearing gowns because we didn't want to get work goobers all over the new baby...