"Actually, that's 'thanks for the cake, sir.'"

Okay, so nobody's ever said that, but that's how I feel sometimes when I forget that in the Army, you're supposed to attach "sir" and "ma'am" to the end of everything when you're talking to a superior officer. It's not as if I was familiar enough with my attendings at OSU to call them by their first name, but I didn't end a conversation by saying, "I'll keep that in mind, sir," either. Often I realize about two minutes after LTC Littell or LTC Wiesen walks away that I should have done that, at which point it's obviously too late. CPT Peik seems good about remembering that (which is probably why I keep realizing that I forget it; I keep hearing him say it), but CPT Wilson doesn't seem to say his sirs and ma'ams all that regularly, either, so maybe I'm not as insubordinate as I sometimes think I am.

Anyway, proper address of senior physicians aside, today was a fairly normal day around PM at Madigan. The morning was spent going through AR 600-110, which is the Army Regulation on HIV testing and surveillance. Quite a lot of legalese and government-speak in there without ever really saying anything, which by the end of the morning made me feel like my head was going to explode. Then we had an award-giving ceremony for COL Barraza, the PM department chief, who is going to be leaving Madigan for Germany in a couple of weeks. There was cake, which was where the title of this post came from.

The afternoon was one long education session for me. The residents take turns going over chapters of the epidemiology textbook with me, and today they caught me for two chapters (they had been slacking, and realized that the week was almost over, so they had to get caught up on their educating responsibilities). I also did some work on my scoliosis project, which is currently looking longer than anticipated. Well, it's always easier to remove slides than put them in, so I'm not too worried about that.

After work was another not-so-fun aspect to being on a very, very large Army post. Today the power went out on Ft. Lewis everywhere except the Madigan Annex (I don't know why; we don't have a generator). This meant that all the streetlights were out, which made driving around a post with a couple thousand other people quite the experience. I was headed up to Uniform and Supply to buy more tee-shirts for under my ACU's, which requiring driving across post, only to be told that they were closed due to the power outages. So what would have normally been a twenty minute diversion on the way home turned into an extra hour and a half--and I had nothing to show for it. Such is life, I guess.