training of a triathlete.

So, I signed myself up for the Nautica Malibu Triathlon that will take place this fall. The proceeds benefit the Childrens' Hospital and past triathletes that have participated in the race include Matthew McConahey, Jennifer Lopez and my preceptor, Dana. Having a terrible history of leaving Jess' bike in the middle of campus after 8 blocks of near-death bicycle accidents on my way to a final AND quitting lifeguard class after one day for being deathly afraid of diving to the bottom of the pool to retrieve a brick (and of my reflection in a unflattering speedo!), I have exactly 6 months from today to learn to ride a bike and swim without half floating on a raft. I feel confident in the running leg of it but will have to adjust to swimming and biking before I jog. I'm super excited for this new challenge and having my past marathon training partner and motivator (Jess) in town for the weekend, I began training today.... We went for a fabulous tandem bike ride along The Strand from Hermosa to Manhattan Beach.

can't hardly wait.

After working 4 of the last 5 nights, I can't hardly wait for Jess to get here tomorrow for 5 fabulous days!! I've been working hard and now it's time to play hard!! 

idols.

Last Sunday we got together for another enlightening s.p.i. club meeting at a local coffee shop in Burbank. Lindsay, Angie, Carly and I met to discuss not just how our weeks were going (Angie, glad you are feeling better!) but re-occurring current events (the rising amount of middle-class Americans losing their jobs, the number of towns just over the border in Mexico run by drug lords, how much our media offends other countries and whether or not drinking alcohol reduces or increases cancers in women.) From here we endorsed some things we discovered that week that are so fabulous we had to share with others... On a Go Green! kick, I endorsed blackle.com, a search engine powered by Google that uses less energy than websites with a white background (set your home page to this now!). Angie endorsed modern medicine for creating the antibiotics that made her feel better this week. Carly endorsed the horoscopes page and Lindsay endorsed classic films and brought awareness to how appreciation for them is literally dying out. We also introduced a new vocabulary word including spoony, deipnosophist, lassitude and amphibology. Our homework assignment last week was to creatively present our favorite idols. Angie played James Taylor while she shared his story and how he has inspired her. Lindsay read all her favorite quotes said by Oscar Wilde, her favorite writer. I wrote a haiku about Patch Adams, my idol in medicine:

The red nose brings laughs

of mending smiles that cure

like a healing patch.

Carly wrote a creative piece about Diablo Cody, her favorite screenplay writer.

Top 5 Cool Things About Diablo Cody/Reasons It's A Good Thing She is One of A Kind

 If all the strippers ended up Oscar-winning writers, men would have a good excuse to be hitting the topless bar- "Honey, I'm searching for the next great Entertainment Weekly columnist."

If all the people on road trips took on the name of the town they were driving through- everyone in the south would be name Orlando or Key West, everyone in the East would be named Boone and everyone in Arkansas would be named Hope-which is better than Billy Bob.

If all the people sitting in Starbucks writing a screenplay actually completed their screenplays and then went on to get them produced, there would be a lot more emo kids living on Mulholland Drive.

If every former Catholic school girl moved across the country to marry their internet boyfriend who later encouraged them to quit their full-time job and pursue striping, it would not surprise me.

If all of the blogs with the word pussy in the title eventually became best-selling books that eventually launched the career of their author to Hollywood stardom, this town would really be the way everyone who doesn't live here imagines it to be.

*Stay tuned this Sunday when s.p.i. goes to the UCLA vs. GA gymnastics meet and rendezvous in Westwood to discuss different schools of philosophic thought and their own life philosophies!*

boarding in big bear.

When most people working night shift get off at 7am, they sleepily drive home and crawl into bed where they will remain for the entire day ... but not me! I head to the slopes and spend the day boarding!! =) Super sleep deprived and plagued by some sort of stomach flu that left me vomiting between lifts up to the top, I still had a fabulous day at Big Bear Lake... only 2 hours from my apartment near the sunny coast! Powder in the East, sand in the West ... I love LA!

co-habitating habits.

Definitely worth publicly documenting... Carly and I have taken our relationship to the next level... we bought a vacuum together! For those of you already doing the math in your head.. yes, we have lived together for 5 years and are almost common law .. just kidding!! ... yes, we moved into our apartment nearly 6 months ago and have never vacuumed! To make you germaphobes feel a little better about our rather boy-like co-habitating habits... there are only 2 rooms (our bedrooms) that have carpet.. the rest are tile and wood and are cleaned almost weekly with our Swiffer. haha 

tristy & tocey take on tinsel town.

In anticipation for the birthday boy's arrival, Kristy and I spent the few days before he got here doing all the girly things that are "so LA"...

We watched sunsets on every beach from Zuma to Laguna.

We shopped in every beach town on the PCH (Manhattan, Hermosa, Laguna (pictured here), Newport, Malibu, Santa Monica, Venice)

We shared many fabulous epicurean delights including these milkshakes + popcorn from Millions of Milkshakes in West Hollywood.

We embraced the bad weather and hiked through Griffith Park in the rain.

We woke up super early after a late night of pillow talk to volunteer at the kick-off rally for the March of Dimes.

We learned that men really do prefer blondes... it's engraved in cement at Grauman's.

We went out 8 nights in a row... 

We drank draft beer... I mean watched a hockey game.

We went back to the 80's for Steel Panther at Key Club.

We relaxed by the ocean (Hermosa Pier).

it's saturday night...

...which can only mean one thing ... You can find me in Hollywood eating yummy yellow curry with special brown rice at Toi before attending Carly's super amazing sketch show at Sierra Bonita Theatre. 

birthday wish.

For Kevin's birthday, we headed down the coast to check out Huntington Beach and watch the surfers' soak up the not-so-sunny weather which only resulted in big waves... After a delicious meal and heart-to-heart over home-brewed beverages at a local brewery we headed to the Hollywood Hills so Kevin could see the infamous (but for me, kinda getting old...) HOLLYWOOD sign. I thought it would be your seemingly everyday hike taking you just below the sign which always makes for a nice photog spot with the sign touristy-screaming in the background. What I forgot was that I was hiking with Kevin.. who wanted to touch the sign ... who had been apparently dreaming about this one birthday wish for two weeks and he wasn't getting on a plane later that evening without getting up there. Well a big believer in wishes, I couldn't be the one who prevented this dream from coming true so next thing I know Kevin is pushing me up the side of a mountain (literally!!) through itchy plants and steep inclines. I hike quite often on my days off but this trail honestly was incredibly challenging. In addition to me and my fear of breaking the rules, the law, security and sensor system and a huge fence wasn't going to stop this wish from coming true either...  

turn of a (quarter) century.

Kevin, Kristy, and I had a fabulous few days celebrating the old man's birthday!! Placing his hands in Clooney's at Grauman's Chinese Theatre, checking out the pre-Oscars party at Kodak Theatre, (window) shopping on Rodeo Drive, partying with cougars down at Hermosa Pier, and watching the street performers in Santa Monica (Kevin's is the 4th bum from the right) were just some of the ways we celebrated in the short visit! 

universal studios.

Because Kevin has spent his 5th and 10th (not sure what happened for 15th and 20th) birthdays at Universal Studios in Orlando, it only seemed appropriate that turning 25 in LA would take us back to U.S. LA-style... this time we walked there from my apartment.  

Wisteria Lane.

Soaked after surviving Jurassic Park.

Whoville -the original set.

donning 3-D glasses for terminator .... wow! i feel so safe as a californian having the terminator as our governor!! =)

oscars.

beach bum.

Living on the pacific coast makes it incredibly tempting to abandon reality and become a beach bum ....

huntington beach

venice beach

laguna beach.

broken hearted heart breakers.

what is life?

What is life? 

It is a flash of a firefly in the night. 

It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. 

It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset. 

the heart of LA.

Home to the best pediatric heart surgeon in the world, CHLA really is located in the heart of LA... To give you an idea of where my hospital is (although I still expect everyone to come see it in person!), it is the smaller group of buildings to the front right in this photog - the hospital, its parking garage, research buildings and the new wing that will be done next spring. It is located on Sunset Blvd about two miles down from the infamous Kodak theatre and Chinese theatre. You can see the Hollywood sign from the top of our parking garage and directly behind us (about five miles) is the downtown area with all the skyscrapers, Staples center and Nokia Theatre LA Live. 

griffith park.

One of my favorite places to run in LA is through Griffith Park. It reminds me so much of Central Park in NYC and Stanley Park in Vancouver! Complete with it's own zoo too, it's smack dab in the middle of the Hollywood with trails that lead incredibly close to the HOLLYWOOD sign. Since graduating from the residency last week, I worked Sunday all on my own (and not a single patient died!) and have four entire days off to run, hike, read, photog and blog...  

off the record.

One of my favorite parts about Los Angeles is when celebs do things off the record ... and I am there to witness it. If I am at the Improv watching a comedy show and Adam Sandler just decides he wants to show up in character and do a set to promote an upcoming movie ... I didn't mind. Or Teri Hatcher wants to light our local Christmas tree. Or Natalie Portman and Jessica Biel want to play with the kids at my hospital... whatev. But my favorite things to experience "off the record" are acoustic shows that lead singers of bands do just because they feel like singing... Back in December, I went to a benefit for Invisible Children where the lead singers of Switchfoot (Jon Foreman), Saves the Day (Chris Conley) and Thrice (such an amazing musician... Dustin Krensue) all played an acoustic set in a really intimate venue and it was incredible. Last night, I experienced amazing acoustic again when Ed Kowalczyk (lead singer of one of my all-time favorite bands Live) played at Hotel Cafe and it was unreal! Lightning crashes, overcome, dolphin's cry ...Ed played the perfect set and it was awesome. 

self-indulgent scones & pretentious pie.

Today Carly and I hosted our second S.P.I. meeting disguised as a tea party complete with cucumber sandwiches, hummus and self-indulgent scones ... I was kidding about the self-indulgence, they were lemon poppy seed but I can't help but feel like we should be serving slices of pretentious pie with our cups of vanilla caramel truffle tea when we gather for these meetings. Like always (and by always, I mean just like at the last meeting) we started out with our cocktail chatter (Obama's economic stimulus plan, abortion clinics in Miami, ways to go green...) we then each presented a new vocabulary word before endorsing such things as brazilian waxes, skype, podcasts (they're free on Itunes... seriously, they're cool!) before we moved on to our homework assignment: creatively describing another member of the group.... Angie told a story about "Olivia Wilde", Lindsay's Parisian alter ego, here Lindsay is pictured reading her Native American fable about a crow who finds herself (complete with tribal music) to Angie, I made a scrapbookesque frame to show Carly's beauty and creativity and she wrote this fabulous piece about me:

If she were a quote she'd be "Everyone is the hero of their own story."

If she were a good deed she'd be volunteering.

If she were a place she'd be Sorrento, Italy.

If she were a class she'd be leadership.

If she were a disaster she'd be a tornado, just look at her room.

If she were a common courtesy she'd be saying good morning.

If she were a body part she'd be a smile and an ear and an eye, she'd be a face, without the nose.

If she were a lyric she would be I'm slow to trust but quick to love.

If she were a form of exercise she'd be a sprint.

If she were a song she'd be Akon's remix of She Talks to Angels by the Black Crowes.

If she were a magazine she'd be People.

If she were an abstract concept she'd be a wish.

If she were a tree she'd be a bonsai, hard to take care of but worth the effort.

If she were a feeling she'd be excitement.

If she were a bad habit she'd be eavesdropping.

If she were a reaction she'd be overreaction.

If she were an emotion she'd be love.

If she were makeup she'd be blush.

If she were a sound she'd be a giggle.

If she were an inanimate object she'd be a camera.

If she were a time she'd be last minute. 

If she were media she'd be a blog.

If she were a cliche she would be perseverance in the face of adversity.

If she were an adjective she'd be caring.

If she were an adverb she'd be cheerfully.

If she were a preposition she'd be despite.

If she were a way to kill a cat she would be curiosity.

If she were a piece of paper she'd be a greeting card.

If she were a pitch she'd be high.

 If she were a color she'd be pink, and glittery.

If she were a relative she'd be a mom.

If she were footwear she'd be a running shoe.

If she were a dessert she would be a cupcake with sprinkles.

If she were a pattern she'd be a polka dot.

If she were a person she'd be the kind you want in your life.

 

do good.