Kids’ Doc in Jos

Spent the morning preparing the PowerPoint for tomorrow’s Sunday School class — we’re listening to the second in a series of lectures on C. S. Lewis. (The Life and Writings of C. S. Lewis, by Louis Markos, published by The Teaching Company). I like the lectures a lot, but the second is a little more difficult than the first and I’m not sure how everyone will like it & understand it. Having the notes on PowerPoint and some pictures to go along helps.

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Since I mentioned the lectures, I’ll digress and rave a bit about them and The Teaching Company lectures in general. I have listened to many of these courses, often with Barb, have bought six or so, and loved nearly all. Their courses are taught by college professors rated among the best teachers, and vary from Superstring Theory to poetry, from focused topics (e.g. C. S. Lewis or Augustine) to broad (e.g., Western Civilization). Some courses are only in audio, some only in video, but most are in both formats. The standard prices are fairly high (for my budget) but you can get around that in two ways: (1) borrow them from your local library or (2) look for the courses on sale, because The Teaching Company is always offering some courses at great discounts (a fraction of the normal price), actually trying to make a large portion of them more affordable at some point in the year. The 6-hour C. S. Lewis course is on sale now for only $19.95 on 6 CDs or $15.95 download. If you get on their mailing list, TTC now-and-then sends links to free sample lectures. But believe me, you’ll probably love any courses you buy or listen to, at least if you’ve read the description to be sure what you’re getting into. And, no, I’m not getting any commission for this rave, it’s just to alert you to a way to help you with life-long learning that’s fun.
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After lunch, I installed software on my laptop toward the goal of having a copy of my patient database & interface able to run locally. Took a nap, and spent the rest of the afternoon scanning medical journals and health news using FeedDemon news reader. I’m not sure yet whether it’s more efficient than looking through the journals one by one. Probably so. Still, it’s frustrating to read through hundreds of titles looking for what might be important. It’s a challenge facing every profession, and the reason digests are important. And, since I want the hospital website to be useful as a digest for doctors in Africa, I need to scan quite a bit. (Problem: my scanning is limited to specialties I know something about).

Saralynn & David joined us after dinner, along with Sharon, a friend of Saralynn who is in Nigeria for a couple of weeks working with a health NGO. Actually, they helped us finish up the leftover stew & rice. We played Puerto Rico … David has become a fan and Saralynn already likes it. Saralynn beat David by one point, with Sharon and me behind. We enjoyed caramel popcorn baked by Barb … yummy.

Finally, we had tea and discussed health care issues, and possible career options in health care for someone like David.

It’s Saturday (or it was when I started writing), and I spent even less time with Luke than usual . He doesn’t watch as much video these days as he used to, but today he did little else, watching the Star Wars videos most of the day. There is still tomorrow, and I’ll have to be sure to spend a good chunk of it with Luke.

Oh, yeah, and, really finally, I spent far longer than planned writing this blog.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 28th, 2007 at 12:43 am and is filed under Mike's jottings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.