bastula.org: 4th gear

We were at Ikea today and noticed an interesting phenomenon: many of the young couples there were in interracial relationships. Not that this is anything new to us, but we never expected that it would be so apparent at a single location. I guess it makes sense though that young couples trying to settle down into their life would be shopping for household items there, but then why do we not see these interracial couples “en masse” in other locations (i.e. Michigan Ave, Navy Pier, the L, etc.)?

This wasn’t the first time that we noticed it either, it just happened to register in our minds today. Anyone else noticed this as well?

Alex typically doesn’t do the IMRT QA at Silver Cross. Instead, he only does chart checks and mechanical QA. I went with him this morning and we checked the outputs for all the photon and electron energies. We also did an energy check, which basically is determining whether the beam will produce a reading at a certain depth different than dMax.

We tweaked some of the beams a little bit, because there was a rising trend over the last few weeks (also noted by the therapists). After this, Alex finished checking his charts and I did a couch isocentricity test and verified the isocenter of the machine by using the front pointer and a pen. We both finished the day by resetting the lasers to an appropriate value using a piece of paper and a polystyrene block.

I have been pretty busy lately with exams, a paper, work and I am now working on my project in full swing.

This week went pretty slowly. First couple of days we just read and analyzed some data for BrainLab. Also got a lot of QA work done and out of the way - Mark seemed pretty happy about that. On Wednesday, we had training with Mike, the guy setting up our BrainLab systems. He is very nice and brought us Dunkin Donuts and coffee. I finished some QA films that night and analyzed them on Thursday. I took off Friday since there wasn’t that much to do.

I can’t really wait for school to start back up, as it is starting to get a bit monotonous doing the same thing every day (well almost). I can see why I might get tired of this career after a while. Med school is starting to look promising again…

Felt pretty tired as I had to drop my parents to the airport this morning and go to work directly. I could barely stand as Mark was showing me what to do with some of the data that we took from the previous late night. I finished that and then was able to go home and relax a little bit before preparing for the long weekend ahead of me.

I went to the Sprint Store after work to get my phone diagnosed, but after looking for the damn place for 30 mins, they told me that their machine was down. Oh well, I don’t really care if my phone doesn’t work - it’s highly overrated.