Friend or Foe?

Spent a great weekend skiing with friends in Tahoe. The skiing was great but unfortunately we came home with this.

Hot Tub Folliculitis, or "the plague" as my friends now call it, is a common and benign skin infection caused by the otherwise nefarious bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa. In postoperative patients, that bacteria is responsible for mousey-smelling wounds full of greenish discharge, death, and long ICU stays. In party-going skiiers staying in rented houses with inadequately treated hot tubs, it causes a red itchy rash in the bathing-suit covered areas followed by pustules and general embarrassment. Thanks to cipro, hydrocortisone cream, and chlorine, no long term harm is done.

All I can say about the hot tub is that it seemed like a good idea at the time...

Soundtrack of Life

It's been a whirlwind 3 days of virtually no sleep and lots of paperwork as I lock down my home loan, insurance, appraisal, and all the other legalities of real estate ownership. And with my closing date less than 3 weeks away, there is a very real and intense sense of urgency to all of it.

Which is why I had to laugh out loud at the song on the radio when I jumped in my car to race over to my mortgage broker appointment this morning. The Ramones said it all:

"I wanna be sedated..."

The Dream Realized!!!

I am a HOMEOWNER!!!! Or I will be, if the bank says it's ok, on March 27!!! (Wow, that seems fast...)

After my first failed attempt, I really thought I didn't have the stomach for this market. Then driving home from church just YESTERDAY (less than 24 hours from my offer) I saw this darling house, a "jewel box", as my good friend Dick Peery puts it, in College Terrace, right across from Stanford University. It is tiny (about 1000 square feet) but absolutely darling inside, and as you can see, is dripping with "curb appeal". It had been on the market for 4 days and was having its first showing.

I called my agent immediately...unfortunately, so did eight other potential buyers. Thus ensued another diet Coke and generic Excedrin Migraine-fueled day of number crunching in Excel, crippling anxiety, and waves of nausea looking at the number of zeroes in my offer. Call it the "Bay Area Real Estate Diet". Then about 6:30 pm my agent called with the good news. I cycle through the full range of human emotion about every 2 minutes. I also realized I have slept for the last time in about, oh, 5 years.

Hooray!!!! I think I will go throw up now.

Misadventures in Real Estate

Yesterday I had my first experience at buying a home. Unfortunately this had to occur in the meth-fueled overpriced giant-bubble-waiting-to-burst market of the Bay area. After a year of looking I found a place I liked enough to mortgage the rest of my lifetime income. It was a sure thing; it had been on the market 38 days and had zero offers due to being assigned to a bad school district. It even had a dog park over the back fence; my future doggie was within reach. The owners needed to sell ASAP to close on their new house. Everything seemed to fall into place perfectly.

And then suddenly fell out of place 12 hours later, when out of nowhere a "second buyer" appeared and outbid my offer by an eye-popping amount. This new buyer has several contingencies, whereas I am ready to move, but evidently that isn't worth $40,000. So I'm still a renter. With a giant, giant headache.

The whole process was a wild ride, and not one I am eager to repeat soon. It's as if I handed over eight hundred thousand dollars for the privilege of being put in one of those zero-G astronaut training centrifuges, spun for two hours until I barfed, then dumped back out with the check torn up and told to try again another time. It takes nerves of titanium and a lot of Ativan to negotiate in this housing market.

So for now I remain a mortgage-less, tax-burdened, dog-less renter. But I will sleep well tonight.

Monster Cure for Diabetes?

Today I attended a course on exentide (Byetta), a new therapy for diabetes. It's an injectable peptide hormone that helps the pancreas secrete insulin appropriately when glucose levels are high after a meal. (For you nerds out there, it binds the glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor in beta cells). GLP-1 is deficient in diabetics; the whole mechanism is not fully understood. Many of my diabetic patients are adequately treated for the first time in their disease course because of this new therapy.

Here's the interesting part: Exentide comes from the saliva of the Gila monster. It's part of the nasty venom cocktail released down grooves in the teeth as the Gila monster chews its prey. Wiley scientists now have a way for bacteria to produce the lizard's magic molecule, so PETA won't need to protest Gila monster-farming anytime soon.

Even more interesting is that there appears to be extensive conservation among species: exendin-4, the reptile peptide, is very closely related to latrotoxin, the chief neurotoxin in the venom of the black widow spider. Other venomous species all appear to have this same peptide homologue.

It's puzzling to me. How can something which evolved to be toxic to us now be our deliverance from the obesity/diabetes epidemic? And will I have to prescribe spider juice in the future?

Separated at Birth?

Wisconsin's Kammron Taylor and comedian Chris Rock. You make the call.

Know your Badgers

Lately I've become a Wisconsin Badger fan mostly by association. Today before the Iowa-Wisconsin basketball game, an Iowa fan threw down his best smack-talk by shouting into the ESPN cameras that "a badger is really just a big, ugly rat!"

Either our Hawkeye friend never passed high school biology or they have some Rodents of Unusual Size in Iowa, because there are some pretty substantial differences between rats and badgers. For starters, badgers *eat* rats. And squirrels, chipmunks, and birds. One even chewed through the ignition wires of a car parked in front of our cabin in Canada.


Badgers aren't rodents; they are more closely related to polecats, ferrets, and skunks (whew). Which they also eat. So while rats are disgusting and transmit disease, badgers are just plain mean.


And from what I've heard, so are Wisconsin fans.