Petulant Skeptic
@petulantskeptic.bsky.social
Pediatric intensivist. former Army officer. Husband. Father. Waffle expert. Opinionated.
tfw you learn from social media the toxic girl you knew in graduate school is on her third husband
To contextualize this headline the Spokane MSA has a population of 591,000; so more than 10% of the metro is under evacuation orders.
Spokane wildfires expand, force 65,000 from their homes in Washington
Three wildfires burning in the Spokane, Washington, area have forced roughly 65,000 people from their homes and destroyed hundreds of buildings.
usatoday.com
One more COVID anecdote: The chief nurse from my military PICU (an adult ICU nurse by training) got deployed as part of a FEMA augmentation team *to my hometown* in Idaho around Thanksgiving of 2020. I went home to see my family on leave and took him out to breakfast
Every single technology-related website needs a button that says "I played Oregon Trail on an Apple II in elementary school" to skip past all of the hand holding / service selling nonsense for setting up technology devices
Pretty sure my daughter overheard me tell my wife I was going to pick up her birthday present while I was out running errands today. I came home and got an inquisition about where I'd been and, "I checked on Find My where you were and it said you were at 7-11, why?"
It is shockingly hard to walk into an Apple store on a weekend afternoon and just buy something
pssssh, like that's impressive. www.espn.com/espn/page2/i...
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 3d agoTrump: “The Winning Shot in the Bedminster Club Championship! Thank you very much to all of those who participated. I won with a 70, & am so honored in that, unlike the rest of the field, I’m given very little time to practice, bc I’m focused on many other things. It’s called TALENT, and I have it”
The only thing I have to add to the COVID discourse: By a series of quirks I was given the job of writing the DoD's official guidance on how to triage ventilators and life sustaining devices for children. It never got published (thank god) since the wave ebbed before it was needed
The smoke forecast for 48 hours from now has basically all of WA, OR, and ID with insane amounts of near surface smoke.
You guys ever think about how much moon dirt we’d have to dig up and fly back to earth to get our acceleration due to gravity to exactly 10m/s^2
Eastern European families have an ability to absorb devastating medical news that is unmatched by any Westerners
My overall thesis on vaccine refusal and many other modern issues is that our primate brains cannot manage the chasm between how safe our world is and the constant barrage of bad things having happened; so we end up excessively worrying and seeking to avoid any danger that feels controllable
In my quest not to let the anxieties of my job wreck my kids' childhood I agreed to my daughter's request for a birthday party at a local pool (that has lifeguards!) and got a dream about doing CPR on a child pulled out of the pool for my good deed.
Tonight, apropos of nothing, I remembered a transfer phone call I got about a child OSH was going to intubate after treating their seizures. I accepted them and heard nothing. We called them back and they said they'd failed to intubate the child but now they were waking up. They went to our ward.
The look of abject disappointment on my dog's face when the sky just erupted in thunder for the second time this week (thunderstorms are quite rare in this part of the PNW) after dealing with 4th of July and neighbors shooting off their extra fireworks for another week. Poor guy hates July
I've been taught the Odyssey twice in school (high school, college) and somehow the connection between the Odysseus's Trojan Horse as an affront to Zeus' law and the abuse of Zeus' law by the suitors in Odysseus's house never made it into my brain. The Nolan movie was heavy handed in its delivery
There is a lot to say about the Nolan Odyssey movie. But one point that I think has not been emphasized enough is: this is a film about living in LA, as Nolan, my erstwhile British compatriot and age mate, has done for years. I gather it’s a strange place.
Weirdest thing about The Odyssey (since Nolan is known to be so snobbish about sound mixing) was the klaxon sound that was mixed into the final fight scene to heighten tension despite the rest of it being drums and orchestral. Good movie tho
The LLM-voice that called me for the VA Solid Start program this morning was the most poorly programmed one I've had to interact with on a phone yet.
A thread about my adventure today trying to get the Army to stop paying me, despite the fact that I left service (finished terminal leave) over 6 weeks ago (3 paychecks) and my final out was at the beginning of May. 🧵
Whoever put motion sensing lights in all the physician work rooms HAS CLEARLY NEVER SEEN PHYSICIANS WRITING NOTES
It's incredible how different it sounds when someone says they went to "doctor school" vs "medical school" (I went to the former)
It's jarring to come home from an ICU shift where I made hundreds of decisions trying to calibrate risk tradeoffs to optimize the chances of keeping fragile humans alive and scroll through news of politicians and authorities ostentatiously disregarding safety rules to flaunt their vainglory
I got out of the Army over a month ago but they won't stop paying me. Central military payroll answers their phones but say it's a local pay office problem. Local pay office won't answer their phones. I don't want to do the paperwork to get a base pass to go in person. One final round of fuckery
It’s not my best friend Haaland’s fault that he’s bigger and stronger than these lads
If Mitch McConnell really is brain dead and is also an organ donor it poses quite a dilemma about whether it's ethical to donate his heart of evil to anyone
I have never seen a man so constitutionally unsuited (pun intended) to wearing a suit jacket in 90º F (feels like 104º F) as Alexei Lalas