Today starts the next chapter in my life — I start my pediatrics residency! I really haven’t been able to sleep for the past few days; it still seems so strange to me. Of course, we have orientation for two weeks, so hopefully I’ll be acclimated by the time I start on the inpatient wards at the end of June.

OK, I’m back from orientation, day 1. A few cool things to know:

• there’s a website that handles all of the residency scheduling stuff (who’s on call, when, when is clinic, etc.) for residency programs all over the country;
• my residency program is pretty cool in that the alumni association pays for my membership in the American Academy of Pediatrics;
• my residency is 25% male, 75% female, yet I think maybe only three or four of the women are not married;
• my residency is very serious about enforcing limits to work hours — the department secretary pages us at 10:30 AM on our post-call days to make sure that we aren’t in the hospital anymore;
• I can never, ever, ever be on call on Monday night, since part of enforcing work hour limits means that I can’t be on call the night before I have my clinic, which is Tuesday. (I guess this means I need to find a bunch of people who go out drinking every Monday night!)

Researchers in my old hometown have found an interesting (but logical) conclusion: marital stress increases one’s risk of developing type II diabetes. It’s been known for a while that there is a pool of people who are at higher risk of diabetes; it’s thought that a stressful marriage is one of the factors that helps select those from this pool that go on to develop the disease.

Another ex-Yankee with drugs in his past rejoins the fold. I’m not sure how I feel about this, although it makes perfect financial sense (Tampa Bay still owes Gooden the majority of his salary, so the Yankees are taking nearly no risk).

Jason Hopper, of the California legal newspaper The Recorder, takes a look at Judge Jackson’s uncoventional interviews just after his Microsoft verdict. I didn’t know that Jackson had actually been taken to court (so to speak) because of an interview he granted after sentencing Marion Barry to jail; Jackson apparently doesn’t read judicial canon 3A(6) the same as most other judges. (That canon reads that a “judge should abstain from public comment about a pending or impending proceeding in any court.”)