Tag Archives: RDP

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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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Austere choice

What could be more austere than rock?

Taken in Echo Canyon in the Colorado National Monument, Thanksgiving, 2024.

Austere choice

Why do I still feel sad when I think
that I am best off with my cat
and that I should eschew dating.
Why do I feel like I am rejecting love?
I don’t have that sort of love.
It’s not like I am rejecting anything.
I am rejecting looking for it.
I am rejecting active interest in a partner
other than my cat.
What is wrong with that?

I do not ever want to reject hope.
I am not trying to reject wanting.
Hope and want are the deep and terrible ache
for the Beloved. I do not reject that.
I am still open, Beloved, to what you send,
though getting more particular in middle age.
A writer says that he uses a pencil and a pad,
because no better tool has been invented.
I take the same approach to wanting love.
If the relationship is more work than my cat,
for less love, why bother? It seems silly
and until I go home to the Beloved,
so far, I am best off with my cat.

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The first thing Sol Duc does when we go out for a walk, is roll on the sun warmed dusty sidewalk. The house faces south.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: austere.

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Vision

What will peace look like? People
will still disagree often
but like my parents they will appreciate
evidence and science. They will listen
to each other with interest, with respect.
They will bet a penny or a quarter or a million
imaginary dollars and one will go to look up
the correct capital of Azerbaijan, while
the other argues that they MEANT back in 1478,
really, so they do not owe one million imaginary
dollars and they both start laughing again.

_______________________________

The photograph is of the ice in Echo Canyon, two days ago. Or maybe it is angels, waiting.

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Surreal failure

I am still thinking about Friday’s Ragtag Daily Prompt: failure. Now that I am middle aged (by my clinic definition, which put over 90 as older), I think the biggest failure of my generation is a peaceful world. For me, a peaceful extended family. I am good friends with my father’s family and my ex-husband’s family. But the maternal family, well. I have thought about that for the last two days: could I have changed that?

Yes, but at what cost? My sister followed the “family rules” on that side. She is dead from cancer. My mother also followed the rules and died younger than me from cancer. I can’t say that the rules cause cancer. But doesn’t our culture say over and over, be yourself? To fit in the family diaspora, I would have to play the triangulation game and gossip about others as they have gossiped about me. No, thank you, no. I don’t want to. They seem to need a family member to hate and have chosen me and labelled me and call me angry. I think they are silly and emotionally immature. At the very least, I would have had to keep my mouth shut and accept them gossiping about me.

The family failure and untrue gossip, with no one ever asking for my viewpoint, mirrors the US culture. Split and needing someone to hate. At this rate, we’ll need the hippies back, with flowers and joy and counter culture and dropping out. Someone fun, at least until the drugs wear off. Someone to say, we need joy back, we need friends, we need love.

It’s not just my failure though. The family failed. They make cruel choices and target people. It happened in my generation, my mother’s, my grandparents. I wonder if it is happening in my adult children’s generation. Who is the next target? Who will refuse to counter-gossip and fight with each source? My adult children are not part of it at all, because I had less and less interest in spending time with mean gossips and I did not want to expose my children.

Lies and drama and meanness and gossip. I hope my adult children’s generation does better. We went to Wicked on Thursday. I did not like it much. Too much drama. Why do we want drama? The world seems more and more surreal. Give me the lovely hike we did on Friday instead, Echo Canyon.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompts: failure and surreal.

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Print or cursive?

My father’s father was a pressman and the head pressman when he was in Knoxville, Tennessee. This is back in the lead type times, when the type had to be set before printing the newspapers. Before they moved to Knoxville, they lived in Connecticut. My father said that my grandfather helped develop the four color process for the comics. My father would get the new comic books, Superman, straight off of my grandfather’s press. Too bad those were thrown out!

I started cursive in school in about fourth grade and I did not like it. I learned, but I thought it was ugly. My father knew how to write in italics. I liked italics much more and asked him to teach me. I adapted the capital letters to make them easier and then I wrote my papers in italics when we were not allowed to print. The teachers objected but I pointed out that we weren’t allowed to print in the papers, but it did not say, “No italics.” I imagine that some teachers found me difficult.

My cursive is still stuck in about fifth grade and I almost never use it.

Meanwhile fast forward. A law is passed in Washington State that prescriptions cannot be written in cursive. However, it does not say that we have to print. The same loophole. I usually printed prescriptions anyhow, so that the pharmacist could read it. I got compliments occasionally for printing in a legible way. I didn’t spell certain medicines correctly, but the pharmacists never seemed to care about that. Now it is all by fax and since Covid started, even the controlled substances go by fax.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: print.

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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.