Well, I turned in my ACLS application, so I feel good about that. If nothing else, at least I have a chapter to show my advisor. Onward to writing the paper for the conference in Poland!

Today I got my residency permit. The last hurdle was the medical visit, which consisted of sitting in the outer waiting room before being called to the inner waiting room. Then they call you into a room where you take your shirt off and wait for them to call you for the chest X-Ray. Running the chest X-Ray today were one male doctor and one female doctor, and they were having a blast. (I think they were mostly laughing at people's names and how incapable they were of pronouncing them.) So then you go back into the inner waiting room and wait for one of the other two doctors to read your X-Ray results and take your blood pressure. The doctor I had said, "Everything is fine, but you have a weight problem. You need to see a nutritionist." And I guess my reaction was not sufficiently grateful or excited or something, because she then said "You're going to have back problems and knee problems. You'll see." So she gave me the chest X-Ray to keep, but I left it on the table, and she brought it out to the waiting room to give to me. (I didn't leave it on purpose, but really, what am I going to do with this chest X-Ray?) And then I went down the hall to stand in line to get my carte de sejour.

There were two people in front of me. The woman giving out the cards got really angry with the first person in line because she had said, "Check the front and the back of the card to make sure everything is right." And I guess the girl did not check carefully enough for her taste, because she yelled at her to check it, and said a couple of words in English to drive her point home. So when she gave me my card I looked at it for a very long time and read my address aloud undermy breath before I told her it was OK. She was pleased with me.

I called STA Travel in Evanston about my return flight to Chicago the other day, and the person I spoke to was so nice. It really made me miss American customer service.

Now I'm really tired and I'll probably actually go to bed at a reasonable hour tonight.