Photoreactive keratotomy, Hypoxia, and a little Sun on the Beach!

Pre-surgical prep for eye-surgery mostly just involves taping maxi-pads to the side of your head to catch the gallons of various eye-drops that they pour into your eyes throughout the day (anesthetic drops, antiseptic drops, re-wetting drops, etc.). It was such a good look, I [Jared] had to save it for posterity. From my happy expression, you'd think this was post-op (when I got my percocet).
Suzie already posted several pictures of our Big Day at the Beach. These little clear, firm, gelatinous whatzits were all over the beach. Kudos to whoever can tell me what they were. They were about 12-15 inches in diameter at the cap. Mushroomy jellyfish looking things (although they seemed too firm to be jelly fish), maybe a plant, or an anemone?

Here's another perspective of Tyler's first steps into a life of tagging. 'Tyler' isn't much of a street-name, though...

Suzie didn't get the wheat mill she wanted for christmas (probably because she wasn't all THAT good), but she had bushels and bushels of food storage grain from the Cannery that needed grinding, so she borrowed the Relief Society president's mill. After a day and a half of making flour, Suzie thought she noticed something funny about the way the grain was sitting in the hopper.

Turns out Suzie's tenacity for milling was greater than the mill was designed for. The motor heated up (due to a design flaw which prevented the cooling fan from drawing in air from outside of the unit), which melted the plastic housing.

Hat in hand, Suzie explained to the RS pres what happened, and now we are the proud owners of the Leaning Whisper Mill of Pisa (the manufacturer of which has mysteriously gone out of business. I know, hard to believe!).

My current rotation as a Clinical Psychology Resident involves the assessment of cargo and fighter pilots to determine whether they are still psychologically fit to fly. In order to better understand the professional stressors of my clients, I took altitude chamber training.

They first rocket you to the equivalent of 5000 feet (from sea-level) in less than 20 seconds just to check to see if your ears bleed. If they don't, they shoot you to 25,000 feet, then ask you to take off your mask. I was only too happy to take the stupid thing off, it was like trying to breath through a coffee straw, you really had to employ your diaphragm to suck air in and blow air out.

Once the mask is off, they give you some simple math problems to do and engage you in light conversation. Once you stop making any sense at all (3-5 minutes), they help you get the mask back on with positive pressure O2 so you don't experience too much cerebral atrophy.

Then they let you try the various forms of emergency O2, the first of which is like trying to breath normally with an air-compressor in your mouth (the pressure in the tank is 1800 to 2000 psi). Each time I tried to exhale, I couldn't push hard enough, so my lungs just kept filling. Not pleasant, eventually the air started to fart out around the sides of my mask, but I still couldn't exhale, so they let me take the mask off.

I wonder what my friends are doing on their psychology internships...