New Year, New Location, New Travel Rotation

Well, my apologies, ladies and gentlemen.  It turns out that I'm a pretty terrible Blogger.  I was quite a good little Blogger years ago when I wrote about my Semester in Spain.  And I did a reasonable job of posting updates when I lived abroad in Australia, especially since I didn't have internet services half the time!  But this time around?  I just let life get in the way....

So I'm going to try again, and we're going to keep the expectations low!

First, a quick summary of what I've been up to since I last put fingers to keyboard on this site.... I mentioned that I extended my contract an extra 5 weeks in order to finish just before the Christmas holidays.  As part of the deal, however, I took a week off and zoomed down the coast to Los Angeles, Newport Beach, and San Diego, then drove inland to explore the desolate beauty of Joshua Tree National Park.

Over Thanksgiving, my mom and dad and sister came to visit!  They did some day trips up and down the coast while I went to work, but I managed to join in for some wine tasting and beach walking here and there. On Thanksgiving Day we built up an appetite exploring the Oceano Dunes atop rented ATVs (a massive area as been set aside as a 4x4 playground) and our Trader Joes  turkey dinner turned out surprisingly well.  My mom and sister and I also spent a lovely weekend driving up the coast along Highway 1 to explore Big Sur, Monterey, Carmel, and the beautiful coastline in between.

After I wrapped things up in Santa Maria, I flew home to Charleston for Christmas with the family. I had hoped to secure my next travel position before the holidays started, but I had to mix some job-hunting in with the holiday-ing- and actually ended up excusing myself from a Christmas party to do a phone interview! Stephanie and Jonathan headed back to NYC and London, respectively, so I drove up to Raleigh for New Years to catch up with my North Carolina friends and (ex) co-workers. It ended up being a really lovely finale to an already lovely holiday fortnight.

I was pleased to accept a travel position at Sanford Medical Center out in Palo Alto, California- and I'm already two weeks in!  They have me working on the Neurology and Neurosurgery units so the work is really interesting. While Palo Alto is part of the Bay Area, I'm a good 30 miles from San Francisco, and am instead living in the area known as Silicon Valley, home to lots of big tech companies and many more start-ups.

Unfortunately, I don't have any post-worthy photos of Stanford or Palo Alto yet because, although California is in a terrible drought, it is an El Nino year- and we've had nothing but cloudy skies and drizzling rain since I arrived!  My co-workers have been really welcoming and Eileen, the lady I'm renting a room from, is easy to get along with, so I seem to have landed on my feet!