January 12, 2021

by drplasticpicker

It wasn’t enough to make an entire dish, but I grew it. I grew it all myself. The shallots were from the store but I saved the ends and just stuck them in some water. I chopped them up, and put the bulbs in my container garden. The radishes and beet greens I planted from seed in my container garden. I did it myself. I sold our Honda Odyssey Minivan https://drplasticpicker.com/the-road-to-fise-let-it-go-the-2006-honda-minivan/, turned our backyard concrete parking pad into a minicontainer garden. This took learning how to sell the Minivan myself and filling out the DMV paperwork. Then after selling the minivan, taking multiple trips with Mr. Plastic Picker to Home Depot to buy the containers and soil. I had to clean the entire area. I moved an old outside rug that had been upstairs on the roofdeck for over a year, and very dusty. I vaccumed the rug and carried the heavy thing downstairs myself. Then I moved the patio furniture around, and a chair over to my mini-container garden area. Suddenly a small wicker end table appeared, my mother-in-law brought it out from their stash. I bought seed packets of radishes and beet greens. I bought them because I want to start eating them more, and I read that they are almost impossible to mess up. And then I started gardening. It’s been a multi-month process. The parsley I tried got riddled with these unknown bugs and I have no idea what they are. But finally, yesterday – it was time to harvest.

It’s so important to plant things. I need to set a good example. I was standing at the local taco shop across from our clinic, and Dr. Dear Friend and Dr. MM and I were buying lunch. Then Jupiter Ascending was playing on the screen. That movie is a closet vampire movie about this god-awful sci-fi fantasy about people harvesting souls. It’s horrible and now a cult classic. I want to be a creator of life and I don’t want to live forever young. I am happy being middle-aged and wise (but with lucious hair from my new HiBar shampoo bar!). So I am trying to plant a garden myself for my children and myself, and to set a good example for my patients and the world. I honestly didn’t know if I could do it. Succulents that people have gifted to me in the past have died in my office.

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January 11, 2021

by drplasticpicker

I’m definitely more in tune with my feelings and my body. Last night I did 12 minutes of yoga before going to bed, and I was stretching my arms and reaching for the sky – I could hear cracking of joints and popping. I’m sure I’ve been moving my arms and body for over 40 years, but I never heard the sounds of my body movement. I guess I had never been quiet enough to really listen.

Despite being more in tune with my body, nature, the world and shifting my personality type (I kid you not) – I still have similar thought processess. I find many people annoying but without the blaming anymore. And I know there are many false gods and false people out there. Yes, they are still out there. Actually becoming Dr. Plastic Picker has helped me see some of those false gods more clearly especially false finance gods.

It’s no use pointing them out. In generaly it doesn’t do well to be unkind. We need so much kindness these days.

I cleaned up 4 bags of plastic pollution near Hornblend and Mission Blvd. I had seen the VANS store signage in the background of the news coverage of the riots. When I saw the VANS store sign in the background I was upset because that is where I sometimes walk in our neighborhood and my sister is named VAN and she used to buy VANS shoes a lot. I know it sounds silly, but seeing riot police in front of the VANS store triggered something. So I went yesterday and picked up four bags of trash there. I won’t post the picture again because I already put it on Dr Plastic Picker’s instagram page.

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January 10, 2021

by drplasticpicker

I love anyone who feeds me. I think this is true for everyone. Especially if you feed me home-made fancy waffles with Belgian sugar pearls (which I had never heard of before). The expresso had no sugar and no cream and it didn’t need it, because it had this lovely waffle to go with it.

I’m sitting at my kitchen table a bit later in the morning than usual. 7am. I have to drink my coffee first. I’m finally using the Starbucks Hiroshima Mug Nurse Lan gifted me years ago. I don’t know why, but I had saved it in it’s new packaging for several years. I’m not sure if I didn’t think I deserved to drink out of such a nice mug or that I wanted to use up the old ones. But at some point it seemed ridiculous especially since the house is so decluttered from our almost 2 year long minimalism streak, to not use something that was lovingly gifted to me. Also I have a Instagram friend FamilyThemes who always profiles their mugs, and it seemed to me we should enjoy not only the coffee that comes in the mug and the mug itself – which I think is her entire point.

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January 8, 2021

by drplasticpicker

Sending appropriate work emails is really exhausting. When you send an official work email that is some part of an official correction of workflow for the department, it has to be worded well. It has to have appropriate workflow departmental content. It has to be sent and endorsed by the right people. It needs to be written in a way that most should want to read. And then one has to forsee the nit-pickers and what they might say or reply, and try to avoid certain booby traps that the departmental nit-pickers or debbie downers will deploy. I had Dr. Dear Friend proofread my email yesterday and had read it to two different people before I sent it. It was better for the combined input. There is email silence since sending that work departmental official email, which is a good thing. Just one humorous reply of someone who likes to make me laugh.

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January 7, 2020

by drplasticpicker

What a horrendous day yesterday. I was expecting to have a Georgia Senate Election party, and had far-fetched dreams of making peach cobbler for desert. The senate still flipped but then there was an attempted coup in Washington. Seriously, as attempted coup by a bunch of idiots who were taking selfies. They were domestic terrorists which shows the world how stupid terrorists are. I came home after a normal morning clinic and having tried to deliver good care and actually to attend to departmental needs and concerns, and I expected to have a “We Flipped the Senate” party with Peach Cobbler in honor of Georgia. Instead I fell asleep on the couch in the afternoon watching live-stream CNN, as the newscasters just sounded like my Facebook Feed friends. I wonder if I can become a CNN analyst?

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January 5, 2021

by drplasticpicker

COVID-19 is surging in the great United States of America. Between seeing patients and talking on the phone with families and catching up with them, I realized the common thread to all of yesterday’s conservations is that we are all living in this grim historic moment of COVID-19 infections and deaths. In pediatrics, we expect to see the wave of MIS-C (Mulitsystem Inflammatory System in Children) soon that occurs in about 1 out of 6,000 pediatric COVID infections and earily presents like Kawasaki’s disease. Our other Assistant Boss whose name rhymes with bong sent out a reminder to update our order panels with the labs that we have to order. I will do it today after the Pediatric Infectious Disease lecture at 8am. I didn’t give away some of my evening after hour clinic shifts for the next two months, because I know I need to be in the trenches with everyone else. So I’ll have my order panel ready as well.

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January 4, 2021

by drplasticpicker

I had baked 4 potatoes and 2 sweet potatoes last night. The house was cold and Mr. Plastic Picker was bringing home some Rubios. We mostly try to cook at home but some days are harder than others, and when my tween daughter becomes irritated at me – I tend to give in and just order out. Over the holiday we only ordered out 3 times over two weeks. That is pretty good. Last night was one of those nights. Our kids are doing very well, and I’m inordinately proud of them. I do realize the irony of it all. I used to think I was pretty hot stuff when I was younger, Crimson University grad and all. Now in my mid 40s I was annoying my tween who is an ex-preemie, who literally was trying to read excerpts of her Ghandi book as I was watching a romance movie on Amazon Prime. Earlier in the evening she was annoyed at me because we went jogging together and I couldn’t keep up, and after about 12 minutes asked if I could walk and pick up trash and she could finish running (she runs cross country). And then the Girl Scout project that we’ve been organizing together, she spent a good amount of time organizing it for the troop and is going to present a beautiful program today. Whereas I just cut out some slides from my previous Climate Change and Clean Air talk to the UCSD PRIME HEq program, and recorded what I thought was a half-hearted talk on Pediatric Health and Clean Air.

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January 3, 2020

by drplasticpicker

I spent the last week decluttering the house. Well, not actually decluttering but rearranging and trying to find more space. It all started when my younger brother had a leather office chair almost new that he passed down to me, and a shoe rack. I showed the picture of the chair to the kids, and they both wanted the chair. So began, this round robin of shifting furniture and decluttering to find out where that chair fit into our lives.

The chair ended up in my room, because the back is a bit too extended for the kids’ comfort. For now with a large body pillow draped behind it, it’s the perfect ergonomic position for me. My chair ended up in my daughter’s room, as she had always liked my office chair. Then her chair ended up in the game room built-in office space, and that chair ended up back in our master bedroom where I was trying to create a reading nook/yoga space. Then I realized that the large fancy leather Costco Euro-Lounger in our bedroom reading area should go into the Game Room. The bunnies were permanently moved from the Game Room onto the adjacent balcony that has a weatherized hutch. They have a huge space out there, and I have no guilt about permanently moving the two thriving bunnies outside.

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January 2, 2020

by drplasticpicker

Congrats, Dr! Your website was quite popular this year! You had 7,981 visitors!

Your best month was December with 1,299 visitors!

Total Visitors

7,981

Total Sessions

9,703

Your Top 5 Pages

Pageviews

1.Dr. Plastic Picker – A Personal Plastic-Picking Blog: Fighting Ocean Plastic Pollution One Piece At a Time9,845

2. The Star Trek Enterprise Romance of T’Pol and Trip: I’m going to give them the ending they deserve – Dr. Plastic Picker3,313

3. Pediatric Advice – Dr. Plastic Picker784

4. Who is Dr. Plastic Picker? – Dr. Plastic Picker592

5. Dr. Plastic Picker – Page 2 – A Personal Plastic-Picking Blog: Fighting Ocean Plastic Pollution One Piece At a Time480

Pageviews

Your Top 5 Referrals

Pageviews

1.m.facebook.com

2.retireby40.org

3. l.instagram.com

Congratulations to me!!! Almost 8,000 people know the name Dr. Plastic Picker and spent about 2 minutes on this blog scrolling through on average 5 blog post. Most of those were here looking for Star Trek Fan Fiction! LOL. The top outsider referrering webstie was retireby40, probably because his website is the only one I consistently read. It’s Joe, and I like Joe. I get some traffic from other FIRE blogs when I comment and read them. Again with this blog is quality over quantity, since we are non-monetized. The traffic is mostly from facebook which I honestly know are mostly my friends, families and patients.

January 1, 20202

by drplasticpicker

To the financially confused or spiritually financially seeking internet. I really have no clue what people read on this blog. In general, there is a good amount of traffic. A lot of it seems to be directed to my Star Trek Fan Fiction post of Trip and T’Pol from the Star Trek Enterprise, and the other hot post is one I wrote about Living Will and Trusts.

As I have explained before, I trust very few people with my money. I trust myself. We have a family member as our accountant. We have a very good trust and estates attorney. Otherwise, I have been our household’s financial CFO since 2009. This coincided with both Mr. Plastic Picker and I having attending level jobs with attending level salaries. The combination of my taking over at CFO, and finally making MD attending incomes contributed to that year being the year we started growing our financial muscle. For us financial independence has never really been about retiring early, it has to do with intellectual and professional freedom.

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