From junk to treasure

This past Saturday, my daughter and I got up early to do one of my ALL time favorite things, shop local Goodwill and Salvation Army stores looking for old china, and boy did we have a GREAT time!! For those who are into second hand stores and what not, DC is has some of the best "stores" of ANY area I've ever lived in! And even though I've lived in metro DC 10 years this Fall, there are still many, many places I've never been or seen so whenever we decide to explore the area, we always get lost! And Saturday was a beautiful day to get lost tyring to find the Goodwill and Salvation Army stores!

Almost everyone I know collects something, and that something for me is a tea cup with a matching saucer. Since I was 11, I've always collected old china and Saturday I found more beautiful pieces than I'd seen in almost a year of looking. Now, I'm what they call seriously frugal so when I found a beautiful set at a Goodwill in Annapolis a few months ago, I simply refused to pay $6 for a single tea cup and saucer. However at one DC Goodwill, I found 4 different sets for a total of about ~45 pieces including a few that had matching plates, bowls, ect and paid ~$18 for everything. The picture with this post is of my favorite in the group.

Hopefully, everyone has something they do to relax and for me, nothing in the world makes me feel as good as having a cup of peppermint tea in one of my special "finds". And I so throughly enjoy drinking tea from a beautiful piece of art, masquerading as a tea cup!!!!

On to the MCAT, I've started again with my Organic review while also trying to finish up Chemistry and Physics. At this point, my study plan has NO rhyme or reason other than it's working for me, so I'm rolling with it! And also thinking about how I will need to approach my study for the boards, deciding the key to that will be to decide what my weak areas are (and those most certainly will NOT be either histology/pathology, LOL) and also which study materials I need. Recognizing that I have a photographic memory I think significantly changes how I need to learn vast amounts of info, so I've played up my strengths in study prep for the MCAT in an effort to get this together NOW. And I think it will be real interesting to see if this works for me when I take the real thing because if it does, I'll most certainly want to pass it on to others. To go from a 17M (taken the night after partying ALL night long in 1991) to a 30 something Q, would likely be a story MANY would want to hear, LOL!!!!

Finally, I need to share with my readers a blog I found which is probably one of the best personal/medical blogs on the net. "Reflections of a Grady Doctor" is an amazing story of life as a Doc at an urban hospital, combined with motherhood and matrimony. Please take a moment to check it out as I HIGHLY recommend it!