Operant conditioning

So today, we started our Academic half day. Which means that we have lecture all Wednesday afternoon. My classmates don't have clinic scheduled in the afternoon. The time is supposed to be "protected" for all residents. Which means they sat in lecture and I got paged all frakking afternoon.

Blah.

Okay, I ignored most of the pages, mostly in the hope of beginning the process of conditioning the floor to not freakin' page me during the hours of 12 and 5:30 on Wednesday. It didn't go so well. Particularly when the medicine resident misordered the blood gas she didn't bother to tell me she was ordering in the first place. Argh.

My dog, though, has the concept of operant conditioning down cold. So, now, Maggie, is useful for keeping things clean around here. We have a good system. I drop something edible on the floor, I say, "Uh-oh, doggie!" (shortened from, "uh-oh doggie, you'd better come here!"), she immediately drops whatever important doggie task she's doing, and she gets a tasty tidbit for her troubles. When this becomes particularly amusing is, like, tonight, I'm making dinner, and I added way too much of something, and I say, "Oh, shit!"

Dog wakes up out of a dead sleep, leaps off the bed, scrambles into the kitchen, and gets all confused when she can't find anything on the floor. It was very cute.

Today was long. And I'm so tired. And I still have six notes to write, but, I came home to write them, and now the electronic medical record won't let me in.

::sigh::

I did get a lot of knitting done during our lectures, at least. And, since I was knitting, I was paying attention, and they were actually enjoyable.

Have I mentioned how excited I am about psychotherapy clinic this year?

Also with the being done with intern year. I'm definitely excited about that as well. 25 more days.

In my continuing efforts to live life on life's terms (to borrow an AA aphorism), I am taking this as a sign from above that I am supposed to snuggle with the dogs and go to bed early.

Oh, but I'll leave you with today's SVU quote of the day, courtesy of everyone's (okay, my) favorite TV psychiatrist, Dr. George Huang:

"Boys are socialized to express their anger. Girls are socialized to be nuts."