Seriously?

I heard on the news the other day that CU-Boulder wants to ban on campus parking for their students in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Before implementing such a ban, they want to be sure that the $1.2 million dollars that they would lose would not have a negative impact on their budget.

This sounds like a bad idea to start with, but they say that 75% of the students already use an alternate form of transportation and that a car isn't really necessary on campus. According to their website, CU-Boulder has a student body of almost 29,000 students on campus. Sure 75% is alot, but that also leaves 7520 students who do commute in a car. Where are they going to park? On the street? The administration says that bus passes are included in student fees, but sometimes RTD isn't too convenient, at least in Denver.

So that's my rant about that. I don't go to CU-Boulder, so I'm not sure why I care. Maybe they should take a cue from the Health Sciences Center and ban parking lots first.

Just as I Suspected

Anybody who watches TV in Denver, and maybe those who live elsewhere, have probably seen the commercial with the mom venting her frustrations at the government for wanting to tax juice drinks and sodas. She rants about how the pennies can add up when you're trying to feed a family. This commercial annoys me on so many levels. First, if you're so concerned about not having money to feed your family, why are you tanking up on stuff that had no nutritional value in the first place? The answer to that is, of course, that the commercial is paid for by the group Americans Against Food Taxes. Who are these Americans? If you guessed Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Dr Pepper Royal Crown Bottling, Canada Dry Bottling, The Can Manufacturers Institute, 7-Eleven, and Yum! Brands, you'd be correct (its nice the internet allows you to find out such things). I don't really have any beef about people drinking soda, I just think that the commercial is funny since this mom is so concerned about the price of nutrionally deficient junk food going up when she's trying to feed her family.

Pharmacy School Rotations

For my once quarterly blog, I will talk about my pharmacy school rotations so far. They are each six weeks long and consist of going to various and assorted sites throughout the state, or, if you are particularly ambitious and want to go through all the work, the country or even the world. Since I'm not that ambitious and preferred to have someone else do most of the work, I chose to do all of mine in Colorado.

My first one was in a hospital. It was my first experience working in a hospital and was interesting. The end of my first day came to an end when I passed the "mortuary guys" as they are called wheeling someone out of the hospital in a body bag. Then I remembered that people tend to die in hospitals from time to time. But overall it was pretty good, I got to see lots of interesting stuff like a PCI and a knee surgery. I also learned what hospital pharmacists do besides sit in front of a computer and do order entry. Once I had to do some research about what could medications could be causing a problem that a patient had, and typed up my response and it got put in the patient's chart. A few days later I was reading a progress note on the patient and the physician that wrote it mentioned my sheet. I wanted to tell everyone: "I wriote that." But I refrained from doing so. I had to drive quite a ways to get there every day, so I'm glad to have that part over with.

My next one is doing diabetes management at a community pharmacy in a small town. It starts tomorrow and should be interesting. I'm especially excited about not having to commute. It can't take more than 5 minutes to drive across the whole town, so that should be great.

Bracket Fun

I'm not an expert on college basketball, but I'm pretty proud of myself for correctly picking 13 of the Sweet 16 teams.

Oh the Horror

Something bad has happened in the world of pharmacy. Generic Percocet 5/325 is apparently on some sort of nationwide backorder. For anyone unfamiliar with how often this is prescribed, let's just say that it is a lot. Not as much as Vicodin, but probably #2 as far as painkillers go. Although I haven't had to deal with anyone with one of these unfillable prescriptions, I can imagine that there are a lot of unhappy people out there. My only hope is that doctors got the memo, and aren't prescribing it. I didn't see any last time I worked, so maybe that's the case.