Category Archives: photography

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Impersonal Day

After I post my story about nuisance on Thursday, I have a bigger nuisance show up. I get ready for work, tell my cat to have a lovely day, get in the car, open the garage door, back out and press the button to close the door.

It doesn’t close.

I try again.

It won’t close and is wonky at the base.

Dang it. I pull back into the driveway and investigate. Two of the wheels are out of the track and it’s obviously broken. There is a button lock between the garage and the house, but the garage also has stuff in it from the owners, including tools. I get a chair, stand on it and am clear very quickly that I can’t fix it.

Next I call work and apologize, but I can’t secure the house and can’t leave. They cancel my day. I have to dig around for the rental number but I find it. I call once, text, wait a bit and call again. He calls back and sends a person over.

The person take about half an hour to get there and he can’t fix it. They call a garage door company.

So now I am cooling my heels and stuck here. My kids all have wishlists for Christmas so I get everything ordered and sent off to my son’s. They will be rather inundated with packages since one Amazon order generated 7 packages all on different days. Goodness. I do some cooking, read a novel, and wait.

At 3 pm I let the rental person know that I am still waiting.

At 4:15 two garage door people show up. The wire at the opposite side from where the wheels are off is all tangled and off the rails. They have some specialized tools and it is fixed by 4:45. Part of the time is just them waiting for payment permission to go ahead with the fix. The garage door now opens and closes! I thank them and they head out. Turns out that their boss lives on my street.

A friend says, “You called in a personal day.”

“No,” I reply, “I called in a stuff goes wrong day. A very impersonal day.” My work did not give me any grief at all about it. We were already shorthanded but what could any of us do? Apologies to any patients who got canceled! We all do the best we can, right? Things break down sometimes.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompts: shopping and nuisance.

I deleted some past posts to make room but apparently not enough, sigh. Another bit of a nuisance. I can post a phone photograph but not one from my bigger camera.

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Parade

This photograph is jittery but I like the effect.

On Saturday I went to a restaurant downtown at 3 pm and then to the Grand Junction Christmas Parade, presented by the Bank of Colorado. The theme, oddly enough, was Christmas in the tropics. This was a difficult theme when the starting temperature was about 40 and dropping from here. No hula dancers, that is for sure.

Mostly the parade is trucks. Cement company, police, the fire stations, a shingle company. There are three marching bands of 70 entries. Three trucks are flatbed with a live band set up. One has an elk head mounted beside a blow up Santa. Spongebob Squarepants is there. Dune buggies are well represented as well as Harleys. The bank has a giant inflated black piggy bank balloon. I thought it was a fairly weird parade.

My favorites is a float entry about services for families and kids with Down’s Syndrome. There are lots of kids on and around that one, some with Down’s Syndrome, some probably not. Whole families. Bravo.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: jittery.

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Solo vessel

A duck is a sort of a vessel, isn’t it? Can you nap while floating in the water? I can’t. I hiked part of the Connected Lakes Trail and spoke to a member of the local Audubon Society yesterday. I did not have binoculars but he shared. I used my Panasonic DMC-FZ150, zoomed all the way in. It is still a bit difficult to identify this bird.

Now the pair are both awake. I think they are a female and a male ruddy duck, but it is a touch blurry and abstract. I like the photograph anyhow. The water and ducks and grasses and reflections were so beautiful.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: vessel.

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Cliff collapse

This is taken on Marrowstone Island, going south from East Beach. The king tides take down sections of cliff and whole trees every years.

The island surfaces in the low tides and the seals rest and sun and ignore the ships.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: collapse.

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From Washington to Colorado

Whew! My daughter and her friend leave Denver to drive here Tuesday night. They hope to beat the storm. I am anxious. After 4 hours they are past the second pass, but the bottleneck is the visibility. It is exhausting to try to peer through the blowing snow and the lines on the road are covered. They stop at a motel. Whew! I can sleep!

They got here yesterday and made pies while I was at work. No bottleneck Wednesday, clear road and clear skies.

Half-Fast at halffastcyclingclub asks how I ended up working in Colorado.

I work in Colorado fresh out of residency. I did residency at OHSU in Portland. My now ex says, “Let’s go somewhere sunny, I am sick of the rain.” I reply, “Fine, find me an interview.” He does. One of his co-op housemates from Madison, Wisconsin is working as an emergency room doctor in Alamosa and directs us to a group there. We go.

In 2000 we move to Port Townsend because the Alamosa job is making me miserable, my mother has ovarian cancer, I have a job offer, and my parents are in Chimacum, Washington. Our clinic folds, as do nearly all the primary care clinics, into hospital employed clinics in 2002. I work for the hospital until 2009 and then start my own small solo clinic. This makes the hospital very grumpy. I close in 2021 because Covid and I am not comfortable signing another lease. I go to work in a town north of Port Townsend, in the next county. However, I can’t enforce the mask rule there. I get Covid in 5 weeks and am on oxygen for a year and half, and out for two years. I start some part time work.

I did not think I would get better enough to work but I do. I contact a couple locum tenens companies and start looking for another position in Washington. A less abusive one. The town north of me had only twenty minute visits, no administrative time to read laboratory results, xray results, specialist notes, notes from the previous doctors and honestly, the patient charts were a mess and looked like hoarder houses. So now I knew what to look for and avoid.

At some point, the locums representative says, “What about Colorado?” “Where?” is my reply. I do not want to go too high in altitude after having to recover for three years. Alamosa is at 7500 feet. “Grand Junction.” I look it up and it is at 4600 feet. I have already visited my daughter in Denver and was fine, so I think it will fly. “Yes, let’s try it.” In the interview I am much better at scoping out the schedule and how they handle controlled substances and whether there will be time to do the work. I bargain for slightly shortened days. Being close to my daughter is one attraction and I have read about Grand Junction and the fabulous hiking and mesas and mountain biking.

And that is how I came to Colorado.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: bottleneck.

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Chew on this

No, hummingbirds don’t chew as far as I know, but they sure are tough. I had an Anna’s hummingbird that would overwinter in Port Townsend, surviving even when it was snowing and got down to 17 degrees. The food would freeze and I would have this small fierce creature swooping over my head making a ticking sound to remind me to thaw the food out.

My daughter and friend started over the mountains last night but holed up in a motel partway. They said that the roads weren’t that awful but the lack of visibility was exhausting. It is hard to see where the road is in the teeth of the storm! I am glad they are safe and we will see what happens today!

I learned to take the food in at night, so it would be all ready in the morning.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: chew. (Choo choo! I wonder if the train is getting through!)

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Snew

“Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Snew.”

“Snew?”

“I don’t know, what’s snew with you?”

I will have to pull out my patience cards today because, yes, it’s snowing. And I have family supposed to come from east and apparently that atmospheric river is dumping in the mountains. It’s supposed to snow in the mountains until midday Thanksgiving. I’m not sure I can have the whole meal all ready for them to arrive.

Ok, but patience, and let’s get creative. We could always do the cooking and have the meal on Friday instead of Thursday.

It is supposed to turn to rain here and the snow will be gone by noon. I jumped out of bed like a little kid, though, shouting “SNOW!” Sol Duc is unthrilled. The roads don’t look too awful and I wonder if anyone will cancel in clinic or it will be as usual.

Yesterday was a bit of a zoo, mostly because over 100 people realized that they are nearly out of some prescription and called for a refill. I knocked my message box down from 48 to 31 in the first 25 minutes and then it kept piling back up over 50. I also wish that if an 87 year old has a serious emergency room visit, they’d give me a longer follow up, because it can’t be done WELL in 20 minutes.

I expect that today will continue a bit nuts. Getting ready for Thursday and Friday off, to lie around pooped!

It’s all good.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: patience.

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More dance

Now, here is some tricky twirling. The photograph was taken by Terry, in April 2023 at the Bishop Hotel. Tom had an injured ankle but we danced anyhow! I was very careful twirling because his balance was tricky, his foot was sticking out and I did not want to knock him over! I didn’t, and we both had a good time anyhow.

This is from March 31, 2023, right before the Swinging on the Sound dance weekend. Live band and lots of dancers warming up for the dance weekend.

My daughter called home from college at one point and said, “Mom! I love to TWIRL!” She was contra dancing and soon started swing dance and shag and other styles. I bought her dance shoes for her next back to school supplies. We bring shoes that we don’t wear outside, to protect the floors of old 1930s dance halls. We need leather or suede soles often so that we can twirl and slide!

Here is the band that Tom and I were dancing with: Jonathan Doyle and friend.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: twirl.