Tag Archives: surprise

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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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Visitor

I was folding up a small quilt that I use to block the door open and found this small visitor. It made me jump back at first because I felt something cool and a bit soft that then moved and was not flaccid at all! A small toad visitor. I thanked her for coming by and put her back out in the grass for the day.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: flaccid.

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Take off

Our family of four is visiting the Hoh Rain Forest. I think my husband is a relatively normal person and that he and my daughter are just being silly.

Suddenly they morph into dinosaurs! Pterodactyls! Ferocious long toothed beaks and weird speckled feathers! My son looks at me and gives me a hug. “Thanks, mom.” He morphs too and they are in flight, off in to the rain forest!

They weren’t being silly. They were practicing and apparently my daughter has now learned to fly.

I still miss them terribly and hope that they are well. Be careful, and do not marry a pterodactyl.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: fiction.

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Covid Morph

So far I have gotten positive Covid tests on one patient a week, all with really different symptoms.

One older person who was short of breath walking, tired, coughing and loose at the other end.

One young one whose only symptom was profuse throwing up.

One with a sore throat, nasal congestion, cough and feeling fairly awful and about to go on a trip, darn it.

There isn’t a nice pattern to tell me what the local strain is doing. It can do any darn old thing. I have also seen someone with strep throat and another couple who had similar symptoms to the others but did not have Covid. It’s morphing like an AI, I swear. I am masking in clinic but so far so good.

The Ragtag Daily Prompt is essential. I think it’s pretty essential for me to wear a mask in clinic, in crowds and on airplanes, since I am quite tired of pneumonias.

I have been the only “provider”, that is, doctor, in the clinic for the last two days. The medical assistants and front desk and I are starting to work as a team. I ask the front desk person how to communicate with her from the clinic room most efficiently. Something was weird about the refill system and it kept refusing refills. On Tuesday I had over 100 “documents” in the computer “box”. Lab work, specialist reports, refill requests, x-ray reports, nursing home things, surgery reports, wound clinic, emergency room, and so forth. I am trying to skim them, but I can’t say that I will remember person A’s dermatology report after skimming 60 others. If you go to your primary care provider and have had some major medical thing recently, remind them. They may have gotten and read the note, but gosh, it’s hard to remember at 100+ per day. Right now I have not met most of the people, so it is even harder.

The photograph is just for fun, taken a few weeks ago on the trail that runs by the Colorado River. Lovely!

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doppelbird

A doppleganger for a bird! Three hummingbird moths were hovering around this flowered bush yesterday! They are huge, 2 by 2 inches and I think the proboscis that curls up must be another 2 or 3 inches long. Beautiful!

And where am I with these strange bird like moths?

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: doppelganger.

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Walking a pet

I would have trouble walking this pet, who weighs 90 pounds, a bit cumbersome The owner explains, “She’s happy to go to a stranger because her goal is to get to the ground. Strangers are not as good at holding her.” We were at the PACNWRS, with many many many snakes. Most of them are not out, but are contained.

Of course, if you need a special hat, well, maybe it’s the place to be.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: cumbersome.

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teen toys today

Um, you say, these don’t really look like toys.

I had friends visit last week. These are the thirteen year old’s toys: he enjoys fixing cell phones and computers and asked if we had any old game platforms. I talked to my son and the thirteen year old is taking the ones he wants. And what was he working on in the picture? Replacing the broken glass in my cell phone.

Now many of you are jealous and would like this teen to visit you. My cell phone has a lot of parts and many tiny screws. There was only one left over and the phone is working fine and the glass is unbroken! Wow! Toys of mine that were used in explorations and repairs included my vacuum and I provided the super glue.

I thanked him with a comic book subscription, since we share an enjoyment and appreciation of comic books.

One of the most useful toys I had growing up was a china doll. Useful you say? Yes. We sewed doll quilts and doll clothes and made our own furniture and hoped for the tiny books in the Cracker Jack boxes. How is this so helpful? Surgeons asked where I had learned my stitching techniques. It was quite delightful to reply, “Doll clothes.” It really did help. I made one old fashioned dress with miles of ruffle, all hemmed by hand. In the 1970s I was embroidering my jeans and adding studs and we dyed t-shirts with melted paraffin and crayons. My sister and I nearly burned down the kitchen once, but we did learn which techniques to use to stop wax fires.

I am not sure who made this dress for the doll. My grandmother Katy Burling sewed doll clothes for us and helped us make patterns and nine patch doll quilts. My other grandmother Evelyn Ottaway could knit the tiniest doll clothes on knitting needles: I still have some of those as well. A tiny stole knit out of a furry yarn and lined with brown satin. My mother was an artist and loved crafts as well but NOT sewing. Pottery yes, sewing no.

My daughter promptly illustrated her lack of the packrat gene by putting half the furniture and stuff away and having a spare and elegant doll house. She learned to sew but does not like it much to date.

What childhood toys and ideas contributed to your adult skills?

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: toy.

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Unexpected hero

When I first think about divorce, I call my sister.

I say, “I am thinking about a divorce.”

She replies, “YOU don’t want to be a single mom.”

I think, well, crap, that is true. Me: “I AM a single mom. It’s just that one of them is FIFTY.”

My sister proceeds to tell me how difficult it is to be a single mother.

I have to self examine my OWN prejudices against single mothers.

Then I wade in, to solo and couples counseling, for a year. My ex fires our couples counselor after a YEAR. He says the counselor is on my side. “We have been talking to him for a year!” I protest.

“I want a new one,” says my then husband.

I find a new one. I am filling out the paperwork. It asks, what is your goal?

That is the moment I decide: I write “Amicable divorce.”

The two years before that moment, I am not sure. I am trying very very hard to see if it can be fixed. But it takes two to tango and my then husband will not tango. Not one step.

We were each attracted to something specific in the other person. My then husband did not want to work at any sort of traditional job. His father would come home angry from work for years. I loved working, always.

I was a terribly serious child, growing up in an alcoholic family, and I have food insecurity. That is, at some deep level, I always worry about whether there will be food. When I meet my then husband he says that his goal is “To have fun every day.”

This slays me. Have fun? And he WAS fun. Biking, jitterbug dancing, he was a tennis and golf pro, he was smart, well read, divorced from a marriage of convenience to a lesbian to cover so she could be a small town librarian. Really? Yes, really. I demanded to see the divorce papers before we got married. My then husband thought I was very very funny and I thought he was too.

When we divorce, people tell me he will never pay child support. He won’t stay in contact with the kids. There are a lot of opinions.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. My ex returns to school, gets a “displaced homemaker scholarship” because he was a househusband (yeah, I said he was smart). He goes to nursing school and gets an RN. “You’ve yammered about medicine at me for fourteen years, I might as well.”

He gave me hell about us living in an “old person’s” town. Then in nursing school he calls. “Hey, I’m doing a rotation. Guess what it is.”

“Don’t know, what?”

“Nursing home.”

I laugh.

“I LOVE these OLD PEOPLE.” he says. And he DOES. He is wonderful with them. He works in a nursing home for years. He gives scholarships to the medical assistants when they leave for nursing school. He brings coffee to his medical assistants and the other staff. He drives by on his day off because one elderly woman will only take her medicine if he gives it to her. He gets pianos for the nursing homes. He does memory loss concerts, where he tries to engage memory loss folks. We store music as entire songs, or entire albums, so if someone starts a song, they can often go through the whole thing. He can sometimes get someone singing who no longer can string a sentence together. Families love it.

Early in covid he calls me. “I have covid.”

“Sh-t.” I say. “Are you ok?”

“Oh, yeah. Everyone at the facility has it. Two staff didn’t so we sent them home. We are working sick because there isn’t anyone else.”

“Holy crap.”

“Yeah, it’s a little depressing. My memory loss folks can look ok at the start of the shift and are dead by the end.”

A quarter of the patients die. This is before the vaccine. My ex sails through covid, says he doesn’t feel bad, for him it’s just a cold. He says, “I miss some of them.” Yeah, holy crap.

So another hero. And he paid the child support every single month and stayed in touch with his kids in his own odd way. “Mom, he tells me about his golf shots,” says my daughter. I laugh, “Yeah. Well, he loves you.” “I don’t care about golf.” she says. “I know, me either,” I say.

The photograph was taken with my camera by my friend Amelia in 2014, I think. It is me and my ex, seven years after the divorce was final.

I read this to my ex prior to posting. Posted with his approval.