Tag Archives: outdoors

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New scar and whale songs

My receptionist of 6 years at Quimper Family Medicine, Pat McKinney, died on February 6th. The photograph is from October, when I was in Port Townsend again for two weeks. She and I went for a walk. Well, I was walking and she was in a wheelchair. She was in hospice for over a year.

We had fun working together. Pat played music at her desk because the patient rooms were not quite sound proof enough. One day she was playing whale songs. I hear her on the phone with a patient. “The noise? Those are whale songs.” Pause. “Oh, Dr. Ottaway insists on whale songs.” I started laughing, because she was the one that picked them. So much for MY reputation.

When the covid vaccine came out, I got mine as a first responder. A few days later we had a lull between patients. I was standing in the hall near Pat’s desk. I said, “I don’t know why people are fussing about the vaccine, it seems fine to me,” and I gave a big twitch. Pat started laughing. I could set her off all day by twitching at her.

Patricia McKinney, 2/17/1943 – 2/5/2025.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt scars.

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Ice climb

Friday afternoon I drive to Ouray, Colorado, to meet a friend from high school. She has been ice climbing for years! I plan to watch, because ice climbing sounds terrifying. But I do take my harness, just in case. My friend talks me into trying it. The picture is NOT me. That is a competitor and she is amazing!

My climb was at the beginner ice wall. There are volunteers with loaner gear from gear companies. Boots, crampons, two ice axes and a helmet. My friend and a friend of hers give me instructions and I watch my friend climb first. She will be climbing all week!

I am wearing 1980s snow pants. Puffy and unstylish, but very very warm! I got all the way up and acquitted myself decently! Kicking each foot into the ice and then trusting that it will hold me, that is the interesting bit. Heel down, so that the crampon, boot and foot become a lever. And all the time in the climbing gym helped me to trust the harness, trust the ice axes, trust my feet.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: lever.

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Why mean?

Why do people do that smiling mean thing? Where they are teasing too close to the bone, meanly, with a smile. If you object, then you are labeled as someone who can’t take a joke or who has no sense of humor. How do people handle them? I put them on avoid and do not want to be around them. But really, what motivates them? Power? Humiliate others to feel better about themselves? What a very sad and pathetic way to go through one’s life.

This is related to me thinking about what people think about. I think about what motivates people a lot and why they do what they do. This, apparently, is NOT what most people think about. My curiosity about people dates back to being a very small child and being passed from household to household because my mother had tuberculosis. I decided that adults did not understand children and that they loved me but didn’t understand that babies should be kept and loved. My sister was born when I was three and I told people that she was MY baby. I was determined to take care of her. Alcohol continued to make the adults in my household unpredictable and sometimes dangerous, at least emotionally.

My mother could charm a room and all visitors, but sometimes she would talk about them after they left. My family tended to ignore me if I was reading, because I really did not listen if I was deep in a book. Books were an escape and a safe place. People would have to call me three times to get me out of one. But sometimes my brain would click me out and I would listen to the conversation. My mother would talk about people’s motivations and was often quite negative and not nice. Interesting, but not nice.

When I realized that most people don’t think about others’ motivations most of the time, I felt rather freed and enlightened. I promptly ran into not one, but two mean people, at different sites. I do not understand meanness. I worry that it will be in the White House soon, as well. And what, that meanness wants to annex part or all of two other countries? Is this fascist envy? That’s what I think. So there.

The photograph is Sol Duc in 2022.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: mean.

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Honey

Work is being a bit of a difficult place. I think that if a clinic is has two new providers with one new medical assistant, there should be some formal support in place. Not the manager of multiple offices sticking their head in the room with the three of us at computers and saying, “Everyone happy?” Um, no. This came to a head two days ago. Then yesterday I am asked to write up what I said to the manager.

No. I don’t think that is appropriate. If they have formal evaluation forms, fine. If they want a biweekly formal meeting, fine. If I ran the zoo, I would be sitting down biweekly with the job description to say, “This area is going well, this part needs some more attention. What is going well from your perspective and how can we communicate better to help each other and the patients?”

In fact, in my very first practice in 1996, I asked for a meeting with my receptionist. They had one for each pod of 2-3 providers. She was so freaked out by it that she brought the office manager, much to my surprise. I didn’t care and just said, “What is going well, what isn’t, where are the communication gaps, how do we fix them?” The receptionist looked at the office manager, said she had been scared that I was going to yell at her, but since I wasn’t, she let the office manager leave. We were fine after that. I just want a well functioning team and I am happy to help build it.

So, after thought, I am going to refuse this write up and ask what their HR process is and say that I am not satisfied with the office support and that it is quite unreasonable to leave two providers new to the clinic to guide and train a new medical assistant.

The Ragtag Daily Prompt is honey pot. That bring up this delicious and quite naughty Taj Mahal song, ooooooo. As my mother would say, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

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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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Batter batter

Right now the nuisance in clinic is not a bat or a batter but a battery. I have a hospital issued laptop from last April. I had a day of orientation and one day that they walked me through the electronic medical record. I absorbed about ten percent of what they said. One day is silly, it should be broken up over the orientation, over three days or more, but places do not do that. Anyhow, Friday afternoon I was done and supposed to see patients on Monday, with support.

I wandered back from the IT office to the HR office. “Um, I’m supposed to have a laptop. Is it already at the clinic?” HR didn’t know. They called the clinic. Nope, IT was supposed to issue me one. We went to IT together. IT was in the middle of a massive update. No one had remembered that I needed a laptop. They “found” one and set up my program. This all took another hour.

Months later we were on the phone with IT and I had to say the name of the laptop. “Oh,” said the IT person. “THAT’S where my laptop went.” I was issued an IT one, not a provider one. I don’t care, do I?

Except, the battery is old. I guess the laptop is “old” too, but it works. So far. However, the battery won’t last even through a morning now. I put in a ticket to IT about a month ago and a battery is on order “because that’s an old one, we don’t have those in stock”. I plug it in to the desk top in the office, but we run two or three exam rooms and it’s awkward and a nuisance to plug in and unplug in each room. I leave the cord in one room and cross my fingers.

Yesterday someone from IT shows up right before my last patient and takes the back off my laptop. Except the battery he’s brought doesn’t fit. He has to put it all back together. I laugh, because it’s kind of ridiculous. He does leave me a second charging cord, so now I have ones for two rooms. The risk is that I will forget and walk away with it plugged in and drop it. Of course, then I might be issued a “new” laptop.

That is the present silly mildly annoying nuisance at work.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: nuisance.

The picture is from the Saturday parade, a tree on a distant roof.

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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.