easy afternoon

As it turned out, I didn't have time to procrastinate on my jaundice talk last night, so there was no blog. (Presentations always take longer than I think they will!) But yesterday was relatively relaxing overall. There was a long-term doctors' meeting at 8:00 instead of morning report, so the rest of us got to start rounding an hour early. I'm not precisely sure what the combination of circumstances that precipitated this particular outcome was, but by some miracle, we finished rounding both on the peds ward and in the nursery by 1:00. This has never, ever happened to me before. (Okay, it probably had something to do with the really low peds census, the extra hour of rounding in nursery, and the absence of any resuscitations.) At any rate, it meant that I got to head down to lunch at the hospital restaurant with an unusually light load. Wednesday lunch at the restaurant is scheduled to be a weekly occurrence - on other days visitors alternate between the guesthouse and missionaries' homes - but had sort of fallen into disuse of late. But this week, at Shannon's suggestion, we all made a pact to come. So it was curry all around, and I enjoyed a refreshing Stoney Tangawizi. (Try not to be jealous, Jeff Schlaudecker!)

After lunch, I admitted a pretty stable preterm baby to the nursery and wandered over to the library to work on my presentation. Laura found me soon afterward to tell me that Kevin had just left clinic for lunch and there were no patients to be found anywhere. We gave it about forty-five minutes, and then I called over to MCH again, but they denied needing any help. (A lack of pediatric clinic patients at 3:00 in the afternoon is fairly shocking.) After another forty-five minutes, I made an excuse and wandered over to investigate at MCH myself, but I found Kevin finishing up with the last patient and really, really there were no other children to be seen. With such a break yesterday, one wonders what God has prepared for today! Heh.

Feeling our freedom and noting that it had actually not rained, Laura and I decided to take advantage of our early day and go for a walk. We headed out around the Freije loop, which is a nice length for a pre-dinner walk, and made it back in plenty of time for me to make an egg-and-tomato sandwich and head upstairs to work on my talk (note a theme for the day?) before Bible study. This week at Bible study we talked about the latter half of Ephesians 6 (the armor of God), and - in contrast to last week - I did not fall asleep on the couch in the middle of the TD Jakes video.

It's about time for me to pack up my laptop and head up the hill for morning report. Today has dawned sunny and breezy again, and I wonder if it portends another rain-less day. I'll let you know later.