Adjusting

This week has been fairly uneventful. I've been working a ton, as projects keep piling up. The nice thing is that there are lots of deadlines so at least procrastination is kept to a minimum.

Currently I'm finishing up the curriculum for a gait evaluation course I'm co-teaching with our PT, Ilona. The course isn't for another week or so but everything has to be translated into Lao...which of course takes time. I'm also writing up a couple of research studies we're going to try to do before we host the ISPO conference in Sept. The idea is that some of the Laos staff could present the results about current Clubfoot treatment in Laos. The hard part is getting the Laos staff excited and motivated about research. It looks like I will likely be doing most of the work and hopefully getting some cooperation with data collection, etc. Thankfully we don't have a Committee for Human Research in Laos...so things should go a bit faster than they ever did at UCSF. Get some government stamps and go for it.

We are also starting a remodel of the P&O workspace. This means for the month of April we're shutting the space down...as part of that I'm attempting to alter the work flow of the P&O lab to make things run more smoothly and have some rhyme and reason. I'm still trying to get someone to pin down their current practice for me. No actually seems to know how or why things happen the way they do. Quite the project!

Along with the work flow plan, I'm also hoping to reorganize the physical space, tools, work benches etc. and update their forms....and provide training on how to use them (which I'm sure they received at some point but have long forgotten).

Needless to say, April is going to be  busy month for me. Plus, we have the Laos new year called Pi Mai mid-April which means that no one does any work for at least a week or two. Officially we get three days off but apparently all the Laos staff takes a couple weeks. I'm planning a trip to Siem Reap, Cambodia...although now there are rumors of a beach holiday, so who knows. Either way, a getaway to see some other amazing parts of SE Asia. I also booked a flight to Sri Lanka in June to meet up with Garrett. So I'll get the beach holiday one way or the other. The astonishing part for me is that flying to Sri Lanka was half the price of flying to Cambodia.