In Which She Inflicts Vacation Photos On All Of You

So I'm back, sort of. Back in the sense that the bags are unpacked and put away, the wash is done, the house is in its usual state of disarray and the kitty has forgiven us for abandoning her. Actually, she seemed fine with the whole thing and looked rather horrified when we walked in the door all loud and stinky. She wore that look of "Oh. God. I thought you were coming back tomorrow. I thought I had another day to finish that season of My Name Is Earl."



All told, we had 4 days in lovely Door County (that pointy bit of land at the NE end of Wisconsin that sticks in such a fragile way between Green Bay and Lake Michigan) and did little but eat, nap, hang out with each other and go fishin'. (Caught nothin' but a very small bullhead that looked really pissed off, but after all was said and done, was left with a belly full of worm and tales to tell of his abduction to the drowning atmosphere above the lake and the monsters that live there. I'm sure he'll get lots of use of that tale down at the fish pub where they'll buy him pints and await the tale of how he single-fin-edly beat up the 4 enormous aliens and then escaped back to the deeps with their sweet, wriggling food. Good for him.)



We also taught Colin and Sara how to play Monopoly and how he who 1) buys up all the railroads and utilities and 2) doesn't get bored and quit after the first couple of hours tends to win. It's good to pass on such knowledge from one's own childhood to one's offspring.



We did, indeed, go to a fish boil and ladled butter on fish, potatoes and onions. We ate many cherry-inspired products, like pie. And wine. And brought back lots of pancake and scone mixes. And jam and syrup and dried cherries. And wine. I also let Sara learn to take pictures with my camera, and so for the first time in 20 years,I have vacation photos with me in them because someone else was snapping the scenes as well.



And so we all had a short, lovely, restful time, except for poor Molly-dog, who just thought the whole thing was wrong and WHAT the hell were we doing in this little house that smelled funny and had red tartan carpet in the kitchen and hall and WHAT would the kitty do with no one to chase her and give her a good butt licking. She clearly felt that it was all so wrong and couldn't understand why we didn't take her hint of staring hard at the car whenever we passed it, and just get in and go back home where we belonged.

It's always good to mess with your dog.

And so we've been and gone and returned and had our vacation.

The second half of the ag-med conference was as good as the first. I can now talk of ROPS and help you figure out what sort of respirator you need if you are cleaning out a silo, working in a CAFO or spraying your fields. I can also be found hollering from inside my car when driving past the fields and barns in my locale, "Hey! You! What the hell are you doing driving that tricycle tractor with the front end loaded!" and "Hey! You! I see you plowing that field in your cabless tractor without adequate hearing protection, sun screen, wide brimmed hat, respirator mask or ROPS!" In short, I've become even more of an embarrassment to polite society.



Now I must get the contents of the 2" (5cm) syllabus and good-sized textbook into my squash, so I can pass the damn test and make my employer proud to have spent all that money (actually, in the scheme of things, it wasn't that much money as such things go) for me to have done this, which means that I'll still be blogging sporadically for weeks to come. That study time has to come from somewhere.

Charles is winding up his days as principal at his soon-to-be-old district. He drove to work today in the SUV to load up almost all his office-ly possessions and move them to the new digs. He starts next Tuesday, which means we have only one more day of driving in to work together. The end of an era.

And, so, I'll leave you with this year's before and after shots of the front flower beds. You'll notice that the 3 low-lying juniper bushes at the front of the bed have gone the way of Wanda and Muriel, last year's alien-abducted cinquefoil and have been replaced by about 20 pretty-pretty flowering lovelies. (Well, they will be flowering when it's their time to do so.) You'll also notice that I need to get busy and divide all the pretties that have cancer-like grown and taken over the garden, transforming it into something that looks like the Amazon jungle.

Gone Fishin'

Bags packed?

Check.

Paper towels and plastic bags and fishing gear and more paper towels?

Check.

Molly's food, bowls, bed?

Check.

10 lbs of kitty food left out and all the toilet lids up (because she just won't drink out of anything else and getting everyone to remember to shut the lids in this household so isn't going to happen)?

Checkity, check, check.

Windows shut so we only come back to a wet basement and not a wet 2nd floor, what with all the damn storms stacked one on top of the other from Kansas on, all pointed straight at us for the next few days?

Oh, yeah, baby! Check!

Crackers, coffee, granola bars, other junk?

Are you kidding me? Of course check. That was the first thing I packed.

DVDs for the kids in the car (clearly I was born a generation too late, having to look out the window and play the 'alphabet game' with license plates and signs) and Harry Potter V on CD for Charles and I?

Check.

Destination directions and phone number of the lovely lady renting us a place on the lake in Door County?

Check-a-roo.

See y'all in a bit. Off to spend some time with just us. Then off to the second part of that agriculture in medicine conference.

Camera?

Check.

Kiss, kiss. It's been 7 years since we've done a vacation with just us. I'd say that's long over due. Over and out.

Check.

Bleak, Living Hell

There's this wan, peacefulness I've seen in the faces of grandly multiparous women. You know the ones--those with more than 5 kids. They seem serene in the face of all sorts of chaos and I'm fairly sure I know why.

They've had enough of their souls removed, a piece at a time from that horror of horrors: the school concert. In particular the Grade School Concert. At least in the secondary years, the 'music' is at least somewhat recognizable and, if you are lucky, there's a tune you know and can therefore count down the stanzas until it's done. Unless it's been butchered by scatting and whatnot by some demonic jazz stylist, and then you'd best just resign yourself to your misery.

I've heard there are some districts, pushed to the brink by budget crunches, that are forced to cut music in the schools. "Hah!" I scoff. It's not that the parents are not willing to pay the taxes, it's that they've wised up and realized that if they vote down referendum after referendum on school funding that they'll NEVER HAVE TO GO TO ANOTHER SCHOOL CONCERT AGAIN. These are fine, intelligent, free-thinking people.

"It's not that bad," you who have yet to experience the horror say. I, too, remember performing in these concerts and looking forward to the singing of "Feelin' Groovy" and "Rainy Days and Mondays", complete with hand gestures and careful swaying in time while standing on the bleachers on the stage, or the playing of "The Theme From M*A*S*H", if you were of an orchestral bent. (This was particularly subliminal as the lyrics, as most of us know, go "Suicide is painless, it brings on many changes, and I can take or leave it as I please." I wonder if the actual suicide rate did bump over the following days among those exposed to such sawed out works. Someone commission a study.)

So as I sat, with Sara at my side (the kindergartners only have to do the winter concert), in the 100+ degree F (38+ degree C) fetid, rancid gymnasium, hunched among the sweaty family members of the rest of the student body (some who spent the entire time in a slack-jawed stupor, others, like the pair behind me, desperately trying to hang on to their shards of reality by dissecting the private lives of various and sundry of their village acquaintances throughout the whole thing in normal speaking voices), I realized that I felt progressively lighter and lighter--the result of bits of my soul being torn away, piece by piece. The largest bite, sadly, was when Colin's grade performed a piece called, I kid you not, "Galactic Swamp Dance" entirely on flutophone (a cheap, plastic recorder sounding rather like a kazoo, but more nasal and grating, if possible). Painful does not begin to cover it. Nails on a blackboard could take a lesson. We had descended to the depths of hell: hot, smelly, humid, hopeless, helpless, interminable. At this point, trapped as Sara and I were, in the middle of the bleachers, having gotten there too late to score one of the folding metal chairs or at least a bottom seat on the bleachers, by the doors and the fire alarm pull, I abandoned myself to my fate and sunk into a funk. "Oh, woe is me" droned on the interminable chorus of one song. Oh, woe, indeed. Trapped like rats.

But then! Lo! Sara pulled free, and summoning her strength (and perhaps with the help of a guardian angel or 4) uttered the words of my salvation, "Mommy! I HAVE to go to the bathroom N.O.W." A small shaft of light pierced my psyche and somewhere the trace of a breeze stirred. The lackluster clapping of my fellow suffers gave me hope and a shifting of time and space indicated a slight path down from the bleachers.

I grabbed Sara's hand and took the shining way, jostling those still trapped in their misery and garnering many baleful and downright angry looks. "Sorry, coming through. She needs the bathroom." While envious, none dared to bar our escape. No one wants to mess with a child in need of the toilet.

And so, we spent the last sets of the most recent Concert from Hell seeking out and then dawdling in one of the grade school bathrooms. And then we caught the Grand Finale, standing just outside one of the gym doorways, where all the little darlin's come in and do the splashy finish-y song, some incomprehensible number called "Save the Earth", complete with cheerleaders (Yes. Really.) and hand gestures and cartwheels.

Actually, just before breaking into this cacophony, some poor kid spewed his gastric contents all over the gym floor, next to the piano, causing an interminable delay as the janitor was frantically sought via loud speaker and faculty runners. He appeared with mop and rolling pail and attended to the sick. Sadly, the rest of the audience was too far gone to break free and flee, and just continued sitting there while this took place, waiting as cows for the slaughter.

But finally, it was over and Sara and I (Where the hell was Charles? Why at school registration. So he said. I'm not entirely sure, though, as he is widely known to have an extra helping of brains and more than his fair share of dislike of such things.) struggled through the halls, with the rest of the lemming parents, in search of our young, who had been kept hostage-like from us. (The only announcement at the start of all this was that we WERE to REMAIN seated until ALL the children were done performing. NO ONE would be allowed to collect their children before the concert was over. Sneaky bastards.)

It wasn't quite as bad as this, but close. At least last night's concert had a program that could be followed, so you could count down the years until your sentence was served.

And so, here I sit, several ounces lighter, thanks to the soul-ectomy, plotting ways to organize my fellow parents into a "We'll pass any tax that'll fund schools as long as music remains firmly separated from us." Sort of like church and state. Complete separation or else no tax dollars.

I see why people home school. It's starting to sound worth it.

In Which She Reports In And Goes Overboard With The Links

For most of us medico types, there is a love-hate relationship with zee conference. On the one butt cheek, there is the familiarity of sitting and have someone drone on and on about some esoteric disease topic. It's how we were raised, so to speak. Sort of like returning to the womb.


But on the other butt cheek, after the first several hours or after the first day if it is a very good conference, you realize why you were so very eager to get away from learning by lecture and so gleefully dived into trial by fire.


So, it was with a combination of up front eagerness and yet lurking tedium that I hopped in the car early Wednesday morning and headed south to the First Annual Agricultural Occupational Health Training Conference.


It's always good to go with a buddy to sit in the back with, eat meals with and make snide remarks to. I was fortunate to have at my side, C, one of the two nurse practitioners in the occupational med clinic that I am to lead at some point in the hopefully far-distant future. In addition to being a fun person to hang with (and a damn good practitioner), C had lived in Springfield, IL, where the conference was held and theoretically could co-pilot me through the roads with the help of the set of Internet directions, which feel that having the correct information 95% of the time will get you an "A".

We respectfully disagree and point out that substituting a "left" for a "right" will, in fact, lead one way the hell off in the wrong direction and get one rather hopelessly lost.

But, we made it, thanks to leaving extra-early, along with the other 30-40 of us, to the small building that is the administrative offices and classroom space of the School of Nursing for Southern Illinois University. As an added bonus, they served lunch before hand! As a special added bonus, the lunch was not only edible but really quite good, with brownies (very small but tasty) at the end. Charles and I often shake our heads over the difference between the fare of the education conference and the medical conference. I definitely chose the right field.

I settled in for the duration of the afternoon, prepared to enjoy the first 15 minutes of the novelty of sitting and having someone blither at me rather than being the one to blither for a change. And, damn, if the whole afternoon had me with my attention riveted to the speakers. I mean, really, hardly a daydream of wandering the shops or taking a nap. Unheard of. I mean honest-to-God, chin in hand, elbow on the table, eyes blinking less than usual, attention riveted on the speaker for the whole 2 +1/2 days. And the stuff I learned: The various risks of old vs new tractors (here's a hint--a covered cab WITH a roll-bar is a handy thing if you are fool enough to operate such a machine. Also--mowing the ditch with your beast of a tractor? Bad idea. They tend to roll over when used at a 45 degree angle (duh) and the odds of surviving a tractor rolling over on you? 25%. And your health benefits as a farmer? Oh, let's all laugh at your $10,000 deductible unless you're lucky enough to have a spouse with an outside job with insurance. ) And silos? "Silo" is the Russian word for "Certain Death Should You Venture Inside What With The Silo Gas And The Sucking Down Into The Grain Where Death Awaits You In Less Than 2 Minutes Plus Your Rotting Buried Corpse Won't Make The Grain More Nutritious For The Cattle And Will Be A Burden On Your Family So Don't Be A Stupid Git And Stay The Hell Out Of The Damn Thing". We won't mention the multiple deaths as a result in unsafe exposure to the manure pits under the CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) where the hydrogen sulfide gas waits for you to succumb in 4 (yes 4) seconds and then pick off your buddies as they try one by one to rescue you. Bad that. No matter how you feel about such factory farming practices, I think we can all agree that it's best that the humans don't die, yes?

Oh, and the amputations and mutilations! 3 solid hours on this topic the second day, spanning lunch, with picture after picture, enlarged on the projection screen, of the most horrendous injuries and what to do. Oh, and the auger accidents. Seemed that 2 out of every 3 horrific injuries was due to the various damn augers catching a piece of clothing and pulling the human into the enormous machine. The lucky only lost body parts (which are sometimes re-attached, if not too mangled and are able to be retrieved and brought in with the rest of their owners within 4-6 hours). My favorite was the guy who lost 1/2 his hand (the distal 1/2 with all the fingers) that they fashioned a working limb with his two 2nd toes as transplanted digits that worked as a sort of a pincers so he could grip a bit with them.

I've the pictures in the syllabus. I've all the pictures in the syllabus. You know, just in case I need help with dieting some day.

And the Anabaptists? (The religious groups including the Amish, the Mennonites and the Brethren) Seems that while they don't have the tractor and auger injuries (as they don't have tractors and mechanized augers), they've got plenty of problems, what with being kicked and trammeled by the livestock they use in place of the wicked machinery, and, yes, the damn silos, and their natural distrust of modern anything. So that's what's up with the Anabaptists. Nice folk but leery.

And then! After the first 1/2 day, (which started out with us all going around the room and introducing ourselves, the horror!) we then all re-convened at a rather good bed-and-breakfast for no-bed-and-dinner and cocktails and appetizers and conversation and damn if we didn't come together and become friendly and start to chat together as acquaintances and not just isolated, anonymous strangers at a conference. C and I fell in with a nurse from Missouri and a Veterinarian from Illinois and ended up having dinner and walking around the town the next night together as well as walking the mile to the conference together the next morning, all gabbing like old friends.

They even had us all sign the official First Poster of the Red Barn AND had us all assemble for a group photo. As C said, "I think they'll be having us back for a 10 year reunion." It felt like that.

And it was good.

And it was so very interesting.

And we get to go to Part 2 in a few weeks.

And we can't bloody wait.

And why can't all the conferences be like this?

Sabatical

I know, I know. I suck as a blogger. I've been AWOL from visitin' and commentin' and all that. The digging and planting and weeding is nearly done. Well, sort of. Over half done. For now.

But! I'm off again for more conferencing and learning bold new things. Things like the human hazards of pesticides and herbicides and what to do if a farm worker inadvertently spreads some on a sandwich. And farm animal-to-human illness. And special farming community issues like what's up with Anabaptists. (I had to google 'Anabaptists'. Didn't know there were special farming issues with them. Still don't. Guess that's why I'm going to the conference.) And it's to be in glamorous downtown Springfield, IL!

A step up from Lisle, IL, I'm sure.

So, anyway, I'll be back around as soon as I can, probably this weekend, and I'll read every single word that you've all written, and leave finger-up-my-nose comments; but for now, I'm off for 2 nights and 3 days of fun and farm frivolity that is the agricultural medical conference!

Come on, admit it: You do wish you were me.

Can't Talk, Digging

Sometime during the past several days of aerobic gardening, something decided to siphon some of my blood, leaving a large, red, itchy welt right over my external jugular.

I sincerely hope he has a large case of indigestion.

Damn.

Doin's

There's this back bathroom in our clinic, away down the end of the long physical therapy/chiropractor hall and around the corner past the tiny excuse of a break room. The advantage of that back bathroom is two-fold: First, it's away from a passing hallway, being at the bendy-end of the passageway, next to the emergency exit door (to be kept locked at all times on pain of hairy-eyeball of our practice director). It's a good place to go for some 'private time' with one's bowels, should the office coffee be a bit too much. It's also something of a game of Russian roulette with the toilet seat, as there's someone in the clinic who likes to anoint it and not dry it off. If you've a brain in your head, you check the seat every time before you place your cheeks upon it. If you've left your brain elsewhere as you nipped down the hall for a quick deposit, then approximately once a month you find your buttocks all wet and saddened as you've once again fallen prey to the scourge of toilet seats. (Fool me once, shame on you; fool me 43,892 times and counting, shame on me.) Actually, I don't think it's urine, I think it's water. God knows why someone would repetitively cover the seat with water and not wipe it off. I know who I suspect but it's not something you can just go up to someone about (especially this Someone) and demand that if they're going to wash the seat that they have the common decency to dry the damned thing off afterward (and while we're on it, why the hell are you washing the toilet seat?????).


Anyway, it's a small price to pay for privacy.


But the second reason to use the far-back bathroom is that a few times a year, there's a show. The bathroom abuts the outside wall of the clinic and about every 3 months during the non-frozen season, these tinytiny ants use the bathroom as their landfill.

It's fascinating.


I was thrilled to find that his week marked their spring return. Usually, their public works are partially hidden by the wastepaper basket in the corner, but this time it's been moved to the space between the sink and the toilet, so you can sit and watch the tinytiny ants tote them barges and lift them bales. Today, they were expelling grains of dirt, each the size of 1/2 their heads (the ants, themselves are about 2 mm long) and and! trying to get these two round white things (?? small donut sprinkles?? Who would eat a donut while using the crapper??) twice the size of their heads out of the bathroom and through the tinytiny crack between the vinyl baseboard and the floor and, presumably to their kitchen so they could dine upon them for dinner (it was past breakfast and lunch). 2-3 ants at a time would try over and over to get the sprinkle-balls through the crack, only to get stymied at the end and have the sprinkle balls shoot out of their grasp and pop back into the bathroom, flying about an inch (a whopping 25mm, such a vast ant-distance, just think) each time.


I have no idea what happened in the end, whether they finally found a wide enough crack or if 1 of the 3 workers said, "Fuck the rest of them, we've been doing all the work and we deserve a little tiny-sprinkle snack right here. Bob, Tina, grab a sprinkle and dig in." In any case, by the end of this afternoon, the ants and the tiny, white sprinkles were no where to be seen. Just small piles of tinytiny dirt grains at each break in the baseboard vinyl.


For some reason, they made me think of the manufacturing plant some of us went out to visit last week. 'Twere clean and well run as a factory goes but I was struck by the mind rotting tedium and the workers who didn't seem to mind their minds being rotted by the tedium. The plant pays well for standing and running a machine 8-12 hours a shift, 5-7 days a week (overtime pays well and most work at least 6 days a week). It was loud in many areas (ear plugs required), so no chatting possible. Many of the machines were fed every 10 minutes to every hour or so, and the rest of the time was spent staring and standing, perhaps tending another machine in the interim. The worst of the jobs (as seemed to me) were the 2 women chasing each other in a 6' (2m) circle as they moved small pieces of metal from station to station, washing and oiling and assembling the small parts for tractors and other heavy machines. Loud, dull, smelling of oil and metal. The lives of the ants seemed more full of interest. And these factory jobs, being both well paying and not requiring an education past high school, are in this town highly sought after and diminishing in number. I don't know what's worse: Having one of these jobs or wanting to have one of these jobs and losing it.


I am so lucky to love what I do and to find it endlessly fascinating.


Anyway, sadly, someone (the cleaning service?) will eventually notice Bob, Tina, Lou and the rest of the ant crew and spray neurotoxins and clean away the tiny grains of debris and all will be back to dull toileting, but until then, I'm only using that loo, wet butt be damned. There's worse jobs than being an ant.