04-JUN-B-8

 

A SUMMER WEEKEND AT HOME IN DERWOOD,

RATHER THAN ON THE ROAD TO CALVIN COLLEGE’S 40TH REUNION OF GRADUATION,

 AND WORK ON FURTHER SETTLING DETAILS,

NOW COMPLETE WITH DRIVE-IN GARAGE

 

June 25--27, 2004

 

            Good news!  I have the first garage I have had during my lengthy stay in Maryland, and I have just wheeled the Audi A-4 into it with the click of a button.  Bad news.  I can’t get out of the garage and into the house.  The house is locked from the garage to basement door, and there is no key from the outside in.  Further, I cannot shut the door, since if I punch the garage door closer, and then run out, the sensor stops the door going down.  So, with a great anticipation of carrying the groceries into the house as it rained outside, I carried the groceries outside in the rain to go through the process of unlocking the front door with my hands, as always, full, and then had to return to turn on the lights and get down to the garage to close the outside door and the inside garage to house door, the only one that is alarmed by ADT.

 

            So, it is not all come together yet.  I have a little electronic button in the Audi built-in, and it would be better to have that transmitter programmed to open the garage door.  But, it is happening a little at a time.  I got up early on Saturday and went to Home Depot to buy the “paving edgers” so as to hammer them into the brick walk to try to keep it together.  Right.  It is supposed to work, and in some areas of the world it might, but hammering on one end of the paving siding causes the other end I had just seated to pop out of the sandy grout in which the bricks have been seated.  This is the approximately same story for a number of things I could have but almost wound up doing this weekend, including making a trip to the Great Indoors to pick up the big and luxuriously framed papyrus—not ready yet—meaning not at all done.

 

            I have been running daily, long and hot though it may be.  The new Reeboks have worn the skin off my Achilles tendon and I had bled into the sock so much that I decided I would send the sock as well as my report back to Reebok—material evidence..

 

VISIT BY BILL WEBSTER,

BRINGING GOOD THINGS FROM THE EASTERN SHORE

ADM LEADIKNG TO AN UNFORTUATNE DISCOVERY

 

            With an aversion to the big city, Bill Webster has not been across the Bay Bridge in his adult life.  He was curious about my place however, and after multiple tries to get him off the shore (the first time in 26 years was his leaving in January to go down to Cumberland Island to go hog hunting with us!)  and he made a plan to drive on over carrying my last fall’s now mounted deer had from Gina Tyler taxidermist, and the venison from that same deer all processed up well.  My goal was to get Bill to look over the Derwood property since he had taught VoTech at Somerset County all of the last 26 years, and now was freshly retired—this trip to my house marking his vacation after a quarter century.  He can tell at a glance the quality of construction, and the final inspections walkthrough and approval is scheduled for Tuesday.

 

            I coached him through the turns by phone, and he arrived on a glorious day in Derwood, with the pileated woodpeckers hammering and deer standing staring back at him from the forest as we unloaded the good mount that Gina had done from last fall’s deer.  She is working on the wood duck in flight, and then will start on her prize project, the wolverine pedestal mount.  I had cleared out the refrigerator freezer to accommodate the processed venison, and it fit nicely. 

 

            We walked around the house, with Bill noting things like doors without door closers and cabinetry off plumb.  We would make a list and then fix a few things ourselves.  He and I packed up the Weber Grille that got hammered in the Hurricane Isabel downfalls, and he went to inspect the boat.  I went downstairs to get the outboard motors—the little Elgin that I had for the canoe on an outrigger and the Johnson Seahorse for the trailered boat—they were not there.  I searched in the basement and everywhere and did not find them.  Not only that, but I also saw that the gas tanks with the gas feeder lines were stored in another place and they also were missing.  The canoe flotation cushions were here, but not the pieces for the boat.  I kept looking, but Bill realized immediately that they were all gone. I reported that to Dale Kramer’s voice mail and apologized since I had hoped Bill and I would be able to go fishing together, now with a boat that is not useful.  This is the first missing item in the year of semi-vacancy.

 

            I called Daryl the plumber again, since the toilet tanks and bowls are filling with a silty sand, and Bill and I screwed off the faucet filters to discover all of them plugged with sand, as well as the awful racket they make when they cough out the air leak.  I went back through my photo albums twenty five years ago to see if I could see pictures of the kids playing in the sandbox, since the sandbox is over the well and pump, and the most expensive part of this project would be to search for where the well was located.  I did not find pictures of the pump location, but a lot of other sentimental favorites of seeing the kids at the ages their own kids are now. I have not heard from Donald after p-honing down my plans to visit to see Matthew David several times on the voice machine.  I did remember where the sandbox was and put a stake in its location.

 

            So, most of my time here is tryi8ng to still get moved in while sleeping in the basement and walking around the major projects which will require finally acknowledging that I will need to fill the holes—and purchase a complete set for the master bedroom and the missing parts of the dining room and den as I have already filled up all the furnishing s of the rest of the house.  None of that will be ordered and moved in by the time Michael and Judy visit with the twins, whose third birthday is on Friday, to be celebrated when they are here overnight on July 12. 

            I should b e working on my paper and other projects for the ELFP like the statistics course for which a conference call is scheduled on Tuesday.  But, most of my time at work is taken up setting up al the details for the Haiti/DR trip to be departing on July 19.  I am the only doctor, and the only licensed professional of any health care typed, with a bunch of freshmen medical students and MPH students and a few EMT’s and college wannabes, so it will be just like the Himalayan projects in which a lot of “filler” was added to make it profitable for the outfitter, but hardly to enhance the quality of either the health care or the medical education experience, both of which were short shrifted, which is why it is just as well that I will not be doing these India trips this year, despite the fact that my two bags and my Nikon lens are still there to be picked up by the GWU students whom I had recruited with the assumption on both our parts that I would be once again the leader of the trek through Ladakh.

 

            I will have enough going on now as it is without the hassles of a low level screening clinic for freshmen clinicians, now being repeated in Haiti and the DR, when I had better use what I am capable of in seeing one hundred surgical patients with senior students and residents instead of two thousand outpatients with a couple dozen freshmen non-clinicians in teaching the rudiments of physical diagnosis and the elementary pharmacology and pathology that none of them have had at the time they accompany me in their summer vacation break after their freshman year.

 

            Dr. Avram Cooperman, a pancreatic surgeon from New York, is coming to see me on Tuesday to talk about his retiring and trying to do some of the kinds of things I am doing.  He gave me an incorrect email address, so I had sent him the information on the coming Haiti mission, but I cannot hold the last seat on the e plane when the coordinators are calling for the last listing of the names and passports to get clearances for the medicines and for the border crossings an visas, not to mention that I am at risk for all the American Airlines seats for which I have signed a contract while the group can loiter to decide if they would like to go.  So, we will firm that up this week, having a pre-departure meeting and a fund-raising party.

 

            I have been a big part of four different fund-raising efforts today only—in projects as far as Guyana, the Athens Paralympics, the “Quarter Century Club”  (transplant patients of mine who have gone over 25 years—a few passing thirty years now!) and another student who needs help to go to Haiti.  I am already extended on several tabs, and with my yard being dug up for an unanticipated change of wells, in addition to the closing out details of a house I will now have to complete the furnishing in contrast to the original plans around several pieces that were designed in, I may have to back off many more of the travels, especially in view of the time and expenses of the ELDP multiplying local commitments.  But, there is this intriguing opportunity coming up in the Sudan…….

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