Seagrove, NC

Today I finally made it to Seagrove, NC. This is a community of potters, some of which are descendants of families of potters that first came to this area in the 1700s and have been making pottery ever since! It's basically about 125 pottery shops, all along Hwy 220/705, and they're all in cute little houses, and you just go from one to the next, like a treasure hunt. I had so much fun! I learned about Seagrove from my North Carolina guidebook, and one of the pictures in it is of Buck Owens throwing a pot, and when I went to his studio, he was sitting out on the front porch welcoming people!

Below is the Ben Owens pottery studio/shop. There is some confusion over the Ben Owen III and the Owens studios...Apparently there was a common ancestor (Owens) and at some point the Owen branch dropped the "s." So they're related, but different studios, and very different styles. I don't know anything about pottery, but after visiting about 15 studios, you start to figure out who's an artist and who's not.

This is what the inside of most of the stores look like. Usually the kiln is right next door.

Face Jugs: I first heard about Face Jugs on Antiques Roadshow...They're something that southern slaves started making in the 1800s. According to Google, no one really knows what the point was. They're just normal pots thrown on the wheel, and then a horrible face is crafted on. They're really something to see, and apparently quite desirable as American folk art pieces...I tried to convince myself to get one a) as a pretty good conversation piece, or b) as a good investment, but they're pretty pricey, and pretty ugly! I tried to include a few pictures of them below, but BlogSpot is being weird and not letting me add any more pictures. So if you really really want to see one, Google "face jugs" and you'll get plenty of examples.

Add this to the list....

One more thing that only I could've done happened this week. I had to find out for myself that cell phones and washing machines don't make a good combo....I came home from studying (i.e. playing on the internet at Panera), had my phone in my sweatshirt pocket, and decided I should start laundry right then, which included the sweatshirt I'd been wearing...I remembered the phone right about when the spin cycle was about to start. This event was discussed by my fellow students the next morning, and some reasoned that I might have been better off had I let it go all the way through the spin cycle...I will leave this experiment for the reader to conduct for themselves...

At any rate, I am now phone-less. There are unfortunately no T-Mobile stores in North Carolina or South Carolina. There is one in Columbus, GA, and so hopefully my mom is picking up a new one as we speak, and will bring it to Charleston, where we're going this weekend. So in summation, if you've called in the past week or so, and I haven't called you back, it's because my cell phone was drying itself out on the bathroom counter....Incidentally, the wonderful SIM card in it, upon which I so carefully saved all of your numbers, is now non-functional as well, so can everybody please email me with your phone numbers! Thanks!!

******

(P.S. To all my friends who are G.A. addicts, hope you like the video - I liked the song but I put this video in for yall - you're welcome! And the new season starts Thurs. night!)

Crisis

So if you haven't talked to me in the past couple of weeks, I'm kind of having a crisis. For the last 4 or so years I've been sure I wanted to do ER, but then when I did it, I thought it was pretty boring. When I was a tech, you were constantly running around doing stuff, which was 95% of the reason I liked it. But as a med student, it's totally different. Most of your time is spent waiting around for stuff....waiting for the nurse to get labs/UA, waiting for your patient to go get their x-rays/CT/US, waiting for the official radiology report when you can see for yourself that there's no fracture, etc...So it's actually mostly standing around, and it's quite a different experience, which I wasn't exactly expecting, and now that's thrown me for a loop....

So what to do? The different fields are all so different, all with different personalities, different levels of patient exposure, different levels of lawsuits, etc. I think two can be summarized in an exchange from (what else) Scrubs. On their first day, JD (medicine intern) and Turk (surgery intern, but you can more or less include ER and other less-cerebral specialties here as well) are discussing what their respective interns are doing as soon as orientation is over:

Turk: "Hey the surgery interns are going out for a beer afterwards-want to go?"

JD: "The medicine interns are having a Pac-Man tournament...."

So any prayers over the next couple weeks would be appreciated. I should already have my applications in by now, but I haven't even started my Personal Statments yet, as I can't really write them until I know what I want to do. The things I'm thinking of right now are: Radiology (great lifestyle, but you get sued a LOT), Internal Medicine (see above exchange, and know that it's called Eternal Medicine for a reason), and Dermatology (great lifestyle, maybe a little more competitive than I'm qualified for...)