Boy, if I hated the keyboard on Andrew’s laptop, I can guarantee that I’m going to hate trying to write a post on my I-pad.

Yeah, that statement was prophetic. I’ve had to give up on my pad and move to Andrew’s laptop which, while it has an annoying keyboard, at least has a keyboard on which I can type with nine fingers instead of two.

So here we are again. Double time change, standard to daylight, then a switch from Pacific daylight to Hawaiian which is three hours behind the west coast or two depending on what time of year it is. By the clock it’s only 8:15, but my brain is telling me that it’s coming up on midnight and I should be in bed.

I can’t remember where I heard it, but jetlag is the condition that happens when your body moves faster than your soul does and you can’t function normally until your soul catches up with your body. If experience is any guide my soul won’t hit the islands for at least another week.

On the other hand, walking through Kailua beach park and Lanikai at 6 a.m. is quite charming. Seeing the sun come up over the ocean and the sunlight hitting the Pali mountain range…
Beautiful.

We’ve been apprehensive for this vacation almost since the day we purchased the tickets. Andrew’s mom had a pretty severe health scare in early December which culminated in (undiagnosed, but likely) a series of small strokes which accelerated the progression of the mild dementia that we already knew was in progress. So we had these tickets and we had these plans and all of a sudden there’s a question of which Joan is going to be around in March when we fly across half an ocean to visit.
I’m happy to announce that Joan version 2.1 is a little frail and a little vague, but overall not markedly different than Joan version 1.2 has been over the last five years or so.

And Andrew and I are spending, and planning on spending, a lot of time around the house doing little things that just haven’t been getting done because Tony, Libby, an’ dem have been too busy to get done. Fr’ instance, tomorrow I’ve been given permission to go whackitywhack and do some pruning, some planting, some raking and whooping……. I haven’t been able to get much gardening done at home over the last few weeks because my hand has been in healing mode and because the weather has been stinky. Well, my hand is, to a certain extent, still in healing mode, but overcast and rainy (it hasn’t been) or no the weather here is pretty much always conducive to gardening. It’s March, right? When we went to Koolau Farmers’ this afternoon they had tomato plants with actual tomatoes on them.
I couldn’t live here, I’m flat out terrified of cockroaches and always will be and the palm spiders are enough to send me into epileptic seizures. Also the weather is WAY not to Andrew’s liking……..
But I could get used to year round vegetable gardening.

And I’m having time to think. Time to think when I don’t have phone calls to return, when I don’t have patients to worry about, when I don’t have medical puzzles to try and solve. I’ve been wondering about my career path lately, wondering if clinical medicine is where want to spend the rest of my working life. [Note to my boss if you’re reading this: Be cool! I’m thinking about thinking about working towards a change in my career path. If I actually start having any real serious consideration of changing my work life you’ll absolutely be kept up to date. Besides, read the following.]
But this morning I realized that whatever I eventually do end up doing with my degree to keep food on my table…. clinical medicine is going to have to be part of it. Walking through Kailua Beach Park this morning I diagnosed two separate and manageable medical conditions in dogs that were walking past me on the walking path. You can take the degree out of the veterinarian, but you can’t take the veterinarian out of the degree.

Which is not to say that we won’t be having mad, crazy island adventures. We’ll be doing that, especially since Caitlin and Lucy are on spring break and are wild to spend time with Uncle Andrew. It’s just going to take us a while to come up with crazy island adventures that we can do with a 14 and 17 year old.

In the mean time I’ll try to post more often. I’ll at least try to post a photo a day.

Here’s Joan’s 83rd birthday present from Andrew and I.

(click on the image, it’s prettier that way)