Tea Drinking continues

We’ve been settling in more, albeit slowly.

The hospital Kate works at has had its name change frequently over the last 10 years as various schools and corporations have merged and sponsored it. The ambulances say “New York / Presbyterian,” people commonly refer to “Columbia / Presbyterian,” signs around 168th St say “Columbia University Medical Center,” and somewhere in here, Morgan Stanley got involved. The folks who work with Kate call the hospital “CHoNY” (rhymes with “Joanie” and stands for “Childrens’ Hospital of New York”), so that’s how I’ve started thinking of it.

Kate’s been at the hospital 5 days a week, 7 a.m. (which means getting up at 5:30 a.m.) till 3 p.m. (which means getting home at 4:30 p.m.). The early morning wake-up-and-fall-back-asleep routine costs me a little, so I’m trying to go to bed earlier, too.

I’m still turning out kinda boring written pieces, but I’m feeling a lot better about my radio bits. My classmates and I have been editing each other’s work, which has reassured me that I’m not really that far off from everyone else in terms of overall ability and perception. Also, some well-timed advice reminded me that there’s no way I will learn anything this year if I’m frozen up with panic. My grandmother’s yankee frugality in my genes makes it impossible for me to pay Columbia’s tuition and not learn anything, THEREFORE: I need to calm down. And I’ve largely done so, though not without some interesting observations on my procrastination techniques, which deserve their own post, later.

Still no gas hookup. Cooked dinner for six on the camp stove over the weekend, which was the first real cooking I’d done down here. It felt great, though the dishwashing aftermath made both Kate and I pine for a dishwasher. This morning, while heating water for tea, the gas bottle emptied. So I microwaved a cup of water, noting that the following numbers on the microwave’s keypad no longer work: 1, 2, 4, 6 and 7. We’re basically reduced to solving a Sudoku puzzle each time we want to microwave something for a particular length of time.

Today my RW1 class will do a 30-minute radio news magazine webcast at 4 p.m. precisely. We all applied for the various jobs one would normally find in a radio newsroom; I asked for and got one of two “Day Reporter” positions, meaning I’m going to go out and find a story today, acquire sound, and produce a story before 4. (Unless something else comes over the wires shortly, I’ll be going down to the UN to cover an Ahmedinejad protest involving Israel’s Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni.) I asked for the job because rapidly developing a story seems to be where I’m weakest just now – here’s hoping this works.

Speaking of responses to Ahmedinejad, here’s a sarcastic piece by Scott Adams on the subject which I found amusing, and then his response to the commenters on his blog who started calling him all sorts of nasty names.

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/09/a-feeling-im-be.html

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/09/sorry-i-confuse.html