04-JUN-B-8
A SUMMER
WEEKEND AT HOME IN DERWOOD,
RATHER THAN
ON THE ROAD TO
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
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
ADM LEADIKNG TO AN UNFORTUATNE DISCOVERY
With an
aversion to the big city, Bill Webster has not been across the
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
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
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