jumpingfish

1.

Oh, was this a messed up set of appointments. 

We’ll have a follow-up appointment in three months, they had told me. And sure enough there were appointments that popped into my calendar on precisely that date almost the day after I walked out of the radiation center. But those were minor appointments. The actual doctor appointments didn’t show up and didn’t show up, which wasn’t a surprise because in my experience the doctor’s schedules never got finalized until near the appointment dates, anyway.

But as time went on, the actual doctor appointments still didn’t show up.

Finally as the three month date was less than three weeks away, I sent a message and then some more messages on the next day and then left voicemail. It was at this point that appointments started furiously popping up in my calendar with messages of apology and phone calls to disregard some of the other messages they’d left me. It was clear that I had allies there who were working very hard to straighten things out. Adelaide in particular came to my rescue and somehow figured out how to squeeze me into the already over-booked CT schedule. And Mary called. And Gary.

But the thing of it is, by that time too much time had passed, and it was simply too close to the appointment date to get everything lined up nicely. 

2.

So the first appointment of the first of two days was at 6:45 in the morning. That was for blood work, and we waited there until time ran out and I was due for my CT scan. So we told them we’d be back, and we walked off to the far reaches of the building to check me in for my scan.

And that check-in process took a long time.

As Trudy went off to get breakfast in the cafeteria downstairs, I sat squinting as a nurse tried several times to get an IV line stuck into my arm — evidence of which I will carry with me as a dark bruise for several days. But I’m kind of used to needles by now, so (squinting aside) it was all good.

Then I went to wait in a big chair with a wonderfully warm blanket over me (because those CT rooms are so dang cold) and the Benadryl coursing thru my veins making me sleepier and sleepier.

Beep. “Hot oatmeal ready,” Trudy texted me. “And cold milk.”

I texted her back and said I was still waiting. And a while later, I texted the same. And a while later, too. And then I fell asleep.

“Mr. Hasan?” a nurse asked, which made me jump.

She took me to the CT room. They scanned me quickly — in far less time it seemed than the time it took to start that IV. And then I was done.

3.

Back in the waiting room, the fair and industrious Trudy was holding my oatmeal and milk. It seemed to me that it had been a very long time since she had texted its arrival.

“And look,” she said, “It’s still hot!”

I was starving. I opened the container and took the spoon and started chowing down. It was indeed still hot. And it tasted great. It had cinnamon. And there were raisins in it.

It was the best breakfast I have ever had.

“I’m pretty good with a shovel,” I told Gilbert. “I’ll dig the hole.”

We are replacing our main circuit breaker panel, and we have to put in a new grounding system in order to be code compliant. Gilbert’s attempts to drive two 8-foot grounding rods had (unsurprisingly) failed, since there’s solid limestone four or five feet down. I was offering to do the digging for the city’s alternative grounding scheme: a 3 foot x 3 foot steel plate buried three feet down.

On Friday, Gilbert said we could do two smaller plates rather than one big one.

“I’ll dig the holes,” I told him.

I started today at 2:00. The sun had just passed behind the eves of the roof, so I was in the shade. 

There was gravel below the loamy garden topsoil, which was not a surprise. And then I hit black clay that made me set my shovel aside. I started using a post-hole digger (a hard way to dig two 1 foot x 2 foot holes). 

3:00 came and went. Then 4:00 came. And 5:00.

After 18 inches of black clay, there was another 18 inches of reddish clay. It was grueling work. The clay didn’t fall off of the post-hole digger, but the fair and industrious Trudy came to the rescue, scraping the gunk off the blades so that I wouldn’t have to bend over after each load.

6:00 came and went.

I hit solid rock and bent the blade of my grandfather’s post-hole digger. This is bulky-trash weekend in our neighborhood, and the salvaging/scavanging/recycling trucks have been driving up and down the streets for two days. I was mighty tempted to set the bent post-hole digger out by the curb, but Trudy would have nothing to do with it.

“You can’t get rid of your grandfather’s post-hole digger,” she said.

Ok, but I couldn’t use it, either. So I went begging: first to Ron who has a long rock-bar which sadly is in a shed 30 miles away, and then to Bill who loaned me a rock bar and his heavy-duty post-hole digger.

By the time 8:30 rolled around, the deed was finally done. I could barely speak.

Let’s just say that I might be good with a shovel, but with a post-hole digger in gunk — not so much.

We sat on the bench enjoying the soft ground and the cool fresh air that last night’s storm brought — and look what else.

Vyas and I had just finished testing our software. It was an end-to-end test of some automated data flows: moving data about, transforming it, passing it on to other systems and finally modifying the output of a web application. The two of us had worked closely for a couple weeks, and we were in a mood to congratulate ourselves.

“Did you ever watch Fractured Fairytales?” I Skyped him. I knew the answer, but I asked anyway.

“Ha ha. No. Why?” he replied. 

“There used to be this two-headed dragon,” I explained. “It (or they) would get into all kinds of trouble, wreaking havoc and so on. And when their pillaging was thru, they would look at each other and say (in unison)… Teamwork! Teamwork! That’s what counts! And as they shook hands, they would say (again in unison), Yeaaaaaaah!”

“Lol,” Vyas wrote. “Yeah!”