7/18/2009

Phew!

MargaretMargaret
Filed under: @ 8:32 am

Can I be done now?
I realize it may sound like unabashed whinging, and perhaps it is being as I only work three days a week, but y’all gotta believe me that I’ve been running around like a particularly caffeinated chicken with its head chopped off.

June 10th (Wednesday): Got back from Hawaii — late — not so late if you’re on Hawaiian time, but late enough if you’ve been up and about since 0530 and have been packed into a godforsaken aluminum CEE-gar tube for 5 or 6 hours. Spent two days getting back onto Washington time, unpacking, putting the house back together, soothing ruffled kittens, and picking up the organizational threads of the upcoming 50th wedding anniversary party.
Discovered that while Shawn & Annie had taken meticulous and excellent care of house, cats, and garden, the garden had taken advantage of the meticulous watering and the nice hot weather to grow every weed in the south end of King County so I spent the weekend pulling weeds….. and only managed to get about a fifth of the back garden weeded.

June 15th (Monday): Back to work. Cracking busy schedule with only just enough time to check my e-mail at lunch and discover that the caterer for the party (here not named. My mamma taught me that if you can’t say something nice about someone you shouldn’t say anything at all) had gone particularly pear shaped. See, when I engaged said caterer I was told that they wouldn’t be able to provide me a formal estimate until I had a head count for the party. Well that’s reasonable I guess…. I was working numbers out on my own and had a basic idea of about what the catering should cost based on the caterer’s “price per person” list on their website. EXCEPT that when I got the estimate from the caterer on the 16th (four days before the party for those not keeping track) their estimate came up to about two times what I had estimated and I had no, absolutely none, time to deal with working out WHY until that Thursday (June 18th and only TWO days before the party).
Enter my semi-sister Renee. The godsend. Despite being six months pregnant and having a two year old, Renee was able to take the estimate to pieces, rinse the pieces out, hang them out to dry, and get the caterer to agree to something MUCH more within my price range. Renee and the caterer worked things out to the point that all I had to do on the two days I had off between the end of my work week on Wednesday and the party on Saturday was…. laundry, party shopping, more party shopping, and a hundred million other little details that are involved with being a functional adult and planning a party for nearly 100 people.

June 20th (Saturday): Par-TAY. If I must say so myself it was a lovely party. We were there at the church (the Bellevue Unitarian church where my parents have been members for nearly 40 years) to do setup two hours before the party was set to start and two hours was only JUST enough time.
The caterer was late.

More working and an insane schedule. Instead of getting up in the morning and lifting weights or walking for half an hour before going to work I was getting up and weeding the garden for half an hour before I went to work because I never have the energy to do so after work and I wanted to get the garden done before our annual July 4th party. Andrew thinks I’m nuts.

Got a bit of a break the next week. Went to Sheri’s birthday party the next weekend but when we weren’t partying with Sheri et al we were winding up (including a mad bout of weeding) for our July 4th party.

I was absolutely insanely grateful that I didn’t work on July 3rd. For those who don’t live with a veterinarian, you’ll not be familiar with the phenomenon of The Last Two Weeks of June. TLTWJ is a mass insanity that takes people who haven’t had their pets to see any veterinarian, let alone you in anything less than two years. As a veterinarian TLTWJ ensures that your schedule will be FULL with those people who are willing to have their invariably ancient pet examined before getting a prescription for sedatives to keep them calm during the noise storm of the 4th. TLTWJ will also ensure that any time you have in between your scheduled appointments will be filled with arguing with people about why you will absolutely NOT prescribe sedatives for their invariably ancient pet who hasn’t been examined, let alone had any blood work done to be sure the sedative won’t kill them, in at least 2 years without at least examining the creature in question. Our best example of TLTWJ this year was a woman that didn’t even have paper records for her dog, let alone computer records (making it at least 8 years since her dog had even smelled our building) , who wanted to get “just a few pills” until she could bring him in “next month when I get some money”. When she got the standard spiel from our office manager, that we couldn’t prescribe medications for a pet we’d not examined within the last year because we wanted to be sure the dog was healthy, she countered with “Well you wouldn’t prescribe a drug if it was bad for his health, right?” She didn’t like being told that we had no idea of the state of her dog’s health and we absolutely wouldn’t prescribe meds for him without an exam and started to swear at the office manager before (gosh, I wonder how that happened), the phone connection got cut. The cusp of TLTWJ is July 3rd, and being far, far away from the office on July 3rd is the place to be.

July 4th (Saturday): Par-TAY. It was a great kaboom.

The 146th annual convention of the American Veterinary Medical Association started on July 10th in Seattle. My schedule has shifted so that I’m now working Wednesday through Fridays. Convention opened on the evening of the 10th. I had 0800 lectures on July 11th and July 13th. Last Sunday I actually got a break, my first lecture wasn’t until 0900. I’ve got a whole different piece to write, inspired by one of the lecturers that I was there to hear, but I’ll get to that later. Suffice it to say that I managed to sit fifteen hours of lectures in three days taking care of half of my continuing education requirement for the next three years.
Having been out of school for a while, I’d forgotten what sort of a pain sitting for eight hours can be. Literal pain, not figurative. Those convention center chairs are HARD and the padding is almost non existent.

So this is the first weekend in almost six weeks where I can spend a good deal of time with *gasp* my husband. And what am I doing? Tomorrow morning I’m packing a mini-van full of garden fanatics and driving 100 or so miles to the Dungeness coast to smell lavender all day.

Andrew may be right.


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