Pregnancy has been uneventful, unless you count those recurrent waves of nausea and vomiting that Mala’s been experiencing. Hopefully that will get better as we move into the second trimester.

blueberry

A part of my apprehension has always been that someone will read my writing and laugh at how ridiculous I am. How could I possibly take myself seriously? Yes, I am quite self conscious. But, I figure that now that I’ve posted just about nothing for the past year, anyone left here is going to be pretty forgiving of what I write.

So, I hereby announce my plan to start writing blog posts again. I don’t know what exactly I’ll write about, but I don’t think there will be much focus. Whatever I’m happening to think about will become the new focus of kurup.org.

Kavi is now 18 months old. He loves to sing, dance and make art. He has about 25 words that he says, although you have to be his father or mother to understand most of them. To my delight, he loves to sit in my lap just before bedtime and listen to me read stories. His favorite at the moment is a book called “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt.” It’s a silly book that has a repeating theme with the words “Uh oh” and “Oh no!” at regular, predictable places in the story. And whenever I get to those words, Kavi sings them back to me as only a toddler can. “Uh ooooooooh!” and “Nu nooooo!”. I’m actually going to miss these days once he’s speaking coherently someday…

Work has been getting better. I’ve been at DRH for over a year now and I’m starting to feel more comfortable as a hospitalist. I have much more confidence in my gut feelings than I did a year ago. Medicine, however, is always humbling, so whenever you start feeling comfortable, you can almost guarantee that something is going to blindside you and make you re-evaluate your thought processes and assumptions. I had a case like that the other day, which I’m not going to go into at the moment, since it’s too fresh and I haven’t had time to figure out what lessons I need to learn from it yet. On the whole, though, I am feeling better about work. I’ve even volunteered to lead a project to institute online progress notes (Electronic Medical Records) at the hospital. This, to me, is scary. There are so many things that can go wrong with any computerization project in healthcare and this is one that I badly want to go right. If there are any people who have been through this process before, I would love to hear from you.

PS. Thanks Mark

If you’re just interested in pics of Kavi (and I know that’s most of you), go visit my Picasa photo album.

Cathy Sarisky, who had so kindly hosted kurup.org for a few years now, has decided to exit the web hosting business. I took the opportunity to scale down my web operations a bit. This blog is now powered by WordPress instead of OpenACS. I’m hoping that “outsourcing” the tech stuff to WordPress will allow me to focus more on writing stuff, rather than tweaking settings. Hold me to it! I’ve stolen the design for this blog from diveintomark. I’ve always enjoyed his writing and his design sense. I hope he doesn’t mind.

So much has changed since my last post. Kavi has just continued to grow and amaze us. I know for a fact that he is the most adorable little boy in the universe. He’s gotten even more adorable now that he sleeps through the night (as of the past month!). We’ve moved into a house for the first time in our adult lives. We are now residents of Chapel Hill, NC. We’re living the American Dream. I’m going to skip right over the whole purchase process which was more nightmarish than it should have been thanks to some very difficult sellers. Since moving in, we’ve replaced a missing toilet tank, shampooed carpets, changed locks, and hired painters, landscapers, electricians, pest control people, gutter cleaners and house cleaners. Almost makes you want to move back into an apartment.

I started work as a hospitalist last September, and I’m starting to get into a groove now. It was quite a shock to switch from outpatient, academic practice to inpatient, private practice. At times, I still feel like a resident, but for the most part, I find this job to be much more rewarding intellectually and spiritually. It’s more exhausting than I thought it would be, though. I can’t see myself working this kind of schedule for the rest of my life. So, as always, I’m still trying to figure out exactly what I want to do when I grow up.

Well, enough rambling for my first post back. Hope to speak to y’all soon (That’s the southerner in me now!)

There are more videos on my youtube page and I’m uploading pics as often as I can at Kavi’s Photo Album

His name is Kavi Puri Kurup and he was born at 11:28 AM on June 6th, 2007. He is 6lbs, 8.5oz and 19 inches long.

A few more pics. Many more to follow.

At my next quarterly evaluation in August 2006, I sold DSWL at a loss of 16.7% because I had held it for 2 years and it no longer met my criteria for a stock I would want to buy. I bought SYPR and BSET.

In November 2006, I sold SEMI because it reported a negative quarter on top of negative trailing 12 month earnings. I sold it at $3.02, for a 42.8% loss, just a few days before SEMI announced that it was filing for bankruptcy and dropped to $0.28. Sometimes you get lucky. I bought SGC, IAL, FLXS, CULS, PRCP, and PARL.

In February of 2007, I sold KEYN for a 18.9% gain and SYPR for a 22% loss because both reported a negative quarter on top of 12 month negative earnings. I sold SRT for a 16.2% loss because it was such a small portion of my portfolio and it didn’t meet my buy criteria. I sold COBR for a 23.9% gain and PATK for a 16.7% gain because I’d held both for 2 years, but they no longer met my buy criteria. I bought AIRT, HDNG, AWX, CAV, and JCTCF.

In April/May 2007, IAL got bought out for a 16.8% gain and BL got bought out for a 11.0% gain. I sold JCS for a 21.4% gain because they had fallen behind multiple quarters in their filings. I bought PMRY, POP and HOOK. POP dropped about 40% on the day that I bought it. Sometimes you get unlucky.

Here’s how the rest of my portfolio is doing as of May 31st, 2007.

Midwest Airlines is restarting direct flights from Milwaukee to Raleigh-Durham.

Just FYI