Eight weeks of Freedom!

I am currently on my last of eight weeks of no clinical duties. Free as a bird! What did I do with my time off? Well, I'm an unusual bird....

This was supposed to coincide with interview seasons so that I wouldn't be interviewing while working at the hospital, but I actually only had two interviews at the beginning of this "Christmas break," so I've basically had the time off.

Half of this eight-week break was actually a stay-at-home elective with teaching duties for the second-years preparing for their STEP 1. The other four weeks were pure vacation. Interestingly (ahem), I have done almost none of the teaching duties (I guess I'll do that during those apparently free afternoons during anesthesiology and radiology). Instead, I've been doing other things I'm really interested in:

• Taking courses in four main methods of NFP: Coupe to Couple League, Marquette, Creighton, and Billings
  
• Giving presentations to medical students about NFP (one on Marquette, one on Creighton, and one on all the methods)
  
• Starting a research project! (Late in my med school career but early in my reseraching career.)
  
• Finishing up a required "Quality Improvement" study...basically a shell project for a required fluff course
  
• Continuing to work on the two inventions I'm helping with. Gah, these things move so slowly!
  
• Preparing a talk with FACTS to give to OB/GYNs and to eventually (hopefully) integrate in OB/GYN clerkships and residencies. I'm going to help give this presentation at the AAPLOG conference in February.
  
• Working with a medical illustrator to create the BEST fertility cycle chart EVER
  
• Playtesting a gamebook I wrote and vacillating about publishing it (email me if you want to help playtest, which means reading it and discovering all the mistakes I made)
  
• Planning for residency. I used to think I could float through life without much planning, but third year showed me that you can't float through 70+ hour work weeks without meal planning and aggressive prayer planning. Therefore I am planning a year of meals and a year of Scripture meditations. So much fun/work/screen-staring....