Hey all,

Nothing really going on at home. I am doing a lot of running.
Did I tell you I am training for another marathon. I want to try to break 4 hours. I am realizing this is a huge undertaking. This is about a 9 minute and 9 second mile. That is if you don't take breaks.
So now the training is harder and the breaks are shorter.
We ran 14 miles on Saturday. I ran 4.5 on Monday and I did speed work yesterday and I will run tomorrow.
Like I said, lots or running.

I went to the Nickelodeon Hotel last weekend. My wife's cousins came up from Miami. See our niece and God daughter turned three years old.
Here is the deal. It appears that I have become a resort snob.
You see when you go to the pool and it looks like the scene in the Titanic and when the ship sunk and there were thousands of people floating in the water you start to think, "Oh no".
Personal space went out the window. See the rooms were all suites. So some people thought, hey lets bring 25 people and jam them into a 3 bedroom suite.
So not only was I sharing my personal space with people in the pool, I was sharing it with people with tattoos on their necks and some with tattoos on there stomach.
Now I don't have a problem with tattoos. I have problems with tattoos on your neck and hands and stomach. Like if I see a guy, who has a tattoo on his hand and when he make a fist and it says a cuss word, I am at the wrong resort.
If someone has a tattoo of a spider web on his neck or chin is swimming next to me...I am at the wrong resort. He might be at the right one but I am at the wrong one.
My kids...they loved it. Me...not so much.
I had to wake up before 8am and go and put our towel on chairs so that when we made it to the pool about 9ish there would be a seat for us.

I have finished The Same Kind of Different as Me. Everyone that read this book absolutely loved it. Me...it was okay. It was good but for me it wasn't great.
I am now going to read a book called the Unlikely Disciple. This is about a intellectual. An undergraduate student at Brown University that decides to spend a year at Liberty college. Liberty is Jerry Faudwell's school.
You know the one....No Cussing, no dancing, no music, no dating.
I have a bad feeling about this book already.
I mean I don't like people looking at religion like a science experiment (especially my religion).
Or looking at Christians like cells in a peitre dish or mice in a maze..."lets see what they will do."

I want to start a series about my experiences as an employee in the Community Health.
I have told you about my past jobs. When I started full-time at my practice I was not busy enough to warrant working here five days week. I would work here three days a week and at the clinic 2 days a week.
At first I worked under the director of the clinic and over saw the clinic. At the beginning I would work on regular patients. Doing regular treatment plans and carrying them out.
We would see three emergencies a day on a first come first serve basis every day.
After about a year of this they changed the way the clinic ran. We now became a partner with the University of Florida, and this meant that the two days I was there I was going to be watching junior and senior dental students. They would come to our clinic for a two week rotation.
I have to tell you that I like this part the best. I loved the students that came in and wanted to get away from school for a week and just do work. No grades, no professor breathing down there neck. No pressure what so ever.
I gave them a bunch of autonomy (that is me asking how they would do it and then gently telling them how I would do it, and then making them do it my way).
I would usually take the students to lunch on the first week and if I liked them I would invite them over my house for dinner.
One thing that would always get me was the ego.
Even as a junior in dental school. Now let me say I think you know about 25% of what you need to know about "real" dentistry when you graduate from dental school. How much do you think they know a year and a half before they graduate? Maybe 5%.
I saw some people really screw up some things because they wanted to proceed before coming to me and asking for some guidance.
It is so hard to talk to a student and tell them it is hard on the outside. In school if you are getting "A's" on all your tests you start to think that you have it all together.
So this is why I had them over because then my wife tells them what a mess I was 3 years after graduating.
Then I moved. I moved to another clinic. Now I worked in this clinic as a dentist doing the same thing as I was doing at the other clinic (as just a dentist) for a couple of years. Then this clinic turned into a AEGD residency. For you non dentists this stands for Advanced Education in General Dentistry, the clinic became a place where graduate dentists come and do a two year residency.
This was good. The young dentist realize how much they didn't know and came to learn more.
I loved doing this. I loved preaching. I would come in with my problem of the week and the three of us would just rap dentistry.
But one thing I would always try to do was show passion.
I never wanted the young dentists or students to think that dentistry for me was a job.
Sometimes if feels like a job, and I have to drag my ass out of bed, but it is never the job.
I wanted them to know that regardless of the problems I was having, I consider it joy.

I am getting somewhere with this series.
I will show you an article on Friday about Community Health and I will push my opinion on you.

Have a great Wednesday,
John