MAR-B-2
LAUNCH THE THREE WEEKS’ TRIP TO THE
March 19—20, 2004
I am on
board the Northwest Air series of flights that begin today in the cold wet
nation’s capital with an advertised deadline of the Cherry Blossoms scheduled
to be in full bloom in ten days around the festival in their honor. It looked like an early spring when I ran in
what could have been shorts and shirt on a glorious Monday afternoon. This marked the first time in four months
that I had seen the
IN NEED OF A
RESURRECTION RUN,
AFTER
NON-PARTICIPATION IN EACH OF MY USUAL
SPRINGTIME LONG
RUNS, UNDER BLOSSOMS
But, my six to eight miles convinced me that I was not ready for a long run, so it may be just as well that I will be absent for the Cherry Blossom Ten Miler for which I am booked and pre-paid, (I dropped the tag off at Joe’s house when he called me on St Patrick’s’ Day to say his clothes dryer had again shorted out, and could I come over and try to start it up again as I had on Sunday morning when I found the circuit breaker switches that could re-activate it). I am also NOT running the Boston Marathon this year (for the first time in over a decade since I will be on the Amazon at that time) and I did not sign up for the even longer Bull Run Run, as I had last year—and would not be able to survive a fifty miler right now. I did finally manage to sign in to the Fifth Third River Bank Run last night, after trying for many days to register On-Line (as their frequent advertisements boast) in an on-line registration system that projects nonsense characters and simply does not work after multiple tries on several days. So, I printed out the application for the may 8 race of 25 K---at least twice as far as I could travel right now on foot!—after flunking out on both the Active.com did not recognize my confirmed password and refused to allow a new one, nor the direct line of the River Bank Run—which is advertising everything from wearing apparel, to GR Press Special Issues to Pine Rest Christian Home contributions as a part of the on-line registration system that does not work.
SPRING FORWARD,
IN A TEASER
FOR AN EARLY SPRING,
FOLLOWED BY A
WINTRY SPRING VACATION,
AND THIS
YEAR’S MATCH DAY CELEBRATION
It is Spring Vacation for the medial school
underclassmen this week, for which I had helped my freshmen get a series of MAP
pack medicines and hooked them up with the Honduras alternative to the Haiti
mission we had planned, but for reasons that everyone from you to Aristide know
would not be happening this year. The
Spring Vacation Thursday is always the day nation-wide for the Match, so I
learned the fate of the senior students who had been my protégés, all of whom,
like all the other senior medical students in
The pretty
day on Monday when the young girls were promenading along the DC Mall in short
shorts and basking in the warm sun, I had hoped to get out and do more
running. Alas, that was the last of it,
and the freezing rain and sleety snow has continued since then as March got
back to the last gasp of winter—so that hose blossoms that would have been
coming out right on schedule---when I am on the far side of the world whence
those blossoms once originated—will probably bloom with frostbite. I will miss almost all of the blooming in DC,
as I had outlined last night in the following message Mar-B-3, which explains
that I will be gone for the next six weeks with only a three day gap in between
when I will be able to see what will be purported as the “finished Derwood.”
Which I will be moving into about the time I get back from
I have had several presentations in Washington in my last days of being here—the lecture to the Washington Association for Tropical Medicine being held last night at GWUMC only down the hall from my office which was well-attended and enthusiastic—and another televised testimony.
THIS OLD
HOUSE---
NO LONGER
I met with the landscape architect at Derwood to go over the plans and proposals for the exterior plans which are postponable to after I am moved in. But, after agreeing that only something simple to accentuate the natural beauty of the woodland setting was appropriate around the house, I myself got expansive with future plans I suggested. I walked Sharon Poole, the architect half of the husband and wife team, down across the stream to the fenced in garden on the lower part of the extensive lot, saying that it would be a good idea to open up that area and incorporate it more into the main house footprint, so that I can make a small trail down to a bridge across the stream and a small gazebo or tool shed for the garden implements, and perhaps put a picnic table or chairs down there, possibly with a screened in portable picnic spot near the garden. All of that is for the far future, since I left Derwood with a flurry of checks flying thick in the air as I left, with an as-yet-not-wire-transferred loan that will be the mortgage for less than half of the improvements invested in the renovation which I must set up on an automated payment scheme on my return on April 13.
The household status is that the cherry cabinetry in the kitchen had their marred doors replaced, and their hardware installed and they were balanced and leveled. The internal framing was raised to accommodate the over size Viking Professional Refrigerator/Freezer, and the electrical outlet was raised up the wall for the power source to the ice-maker. The replacement cabinets for the insert of the double ovens are still awaited. The cabinets were lifted in order to compensate for the elevation of the floor when the Mexican tile had been laid. The new interior Viking Hood and powerful motor for the recycling fan and its charcoal filters were suspended over the cut granite counter tops as Blake and Wilcox plumbers were running the gas line through the wall that will fire the stove top. I went to Suburban Propane meanwhile to order the 100-gallon propane tank that will be placed under the deck next to the heating oil tank—all new installations. Another new tank is awaited, the pressure tank from the well pumped by the Jacuzzi pump into the all metal tank which is going to be rusting out at some near term future, so it is now being replaced as well. There was a brief scare when the hot tub was filled, and seemed to fill slowly for reason of a fall-off in pressure, but the hot water heater no longer worked, and it is relatively new. It turns out that in the course of moving the oil tank and re-feeding it through new piping, the wiring of the water heater pump got switched, and that was figured out in time to get it working again.
The other
marks of progress are that the shower stall we had picked out for the guest
bathroom has been installed, the master walk-in closet overhead fluorescent
lights and the entrance ceiling fixtures have been installed, and the light
switch pads have all been installed, with the painters making their last
appearance fort the downstairs completion.
They had completed the staining of the walnut banisters and then
polyurethaned them, a process they repeated twice, with a sanding in between
polyurethane coatings for the oak book cases and their shelves in the
library. The missed recessed lighting in
the Game Room was cut into the ceiling which was repaired in new dry wall, and
the
The cleaning crew should be going over the hose today to mop up all the plaster dust and clean all the windows of their stickers and any paint dabs on them. After this housecleaning, the furniture will be moved in on the 22nd and 23rd of March with the “window treatments” carried out on the same days, with the foyer and powder room wall papering. The last of the kitchen appliances should be inserted of all those stacked, and the now boxed and stacked lamps, etc, should be ready to unbox with the uncrated furniture “white glove” delivery and placement next week.
As this is happening on the main floor, upstairs all the master bedroom, bath, walk-in closet and hallways will be carpeted, and then the finished rooms will be the recipients of the furniture, books, and boxed household and closet good that I had stacked into the two guest bedrooms on those long hot sticky days of July last year before I departed Derwood for India never to return to “This Old House” again. Now when I move back in on return from these sequences of long haul trips, it will be a brand new house from the basement to the roof—with complete replacement of every window, every pipe, every wire, light bulb, ceiling, wall, flooring, tiling, railing, decking, door, plumbing, fixture, and all the furniture contents therein. So, it is an all-new Derwood to be returned to, just twice as long, and three times as expensive as projected at the outset. This should fit right in the middle of national averages for overages!
DELAYS IN
TRANSIT FROM EAST TO WEST
I have time
to complete this chapter in the new Mar-B-series which will have me arriving
tonight in Tahoe after a bounce through LAX and
REGISTERING
FOR HUNTS AND RUNS—
ALL ON LINE—SO
VERY SIMPLE!
It is a
year since the “Shock and Awe” during the start of
OF CHIPS AND
MEN
The computer era has simplified some things, and created a lot of full time employment by many of us who would not have otherwise chosen to be computer technicians in doctoring the systems which seem to have the habit of going down altogether too regularly! I had three successive generations of computer replacement of my office-based machine, several of which I had upgraded with new memory capacity or other attachments, until the fourth one I now have. I packed three of the computers back with Craig Schaefer after their weekend visit, and two of them have gone to Bill Webster and one to Craig’s office. I am not sure they will thank me for adding a new dimension to their lives—and these labor-saving devices require another several hours' service from each day!
AN ETHIOPIAN
MENDICANT MAKES A PLEA
TO A PERFECT
STRANGER HE HAS NOT MET,
BUT THE
PROFESSOR HAD AT LEAST MADE A “
WORTH A REQUEST
FOR “GUNS AND BUTTER”:
FOOD FOR THE
FAMILY THAT IS STARVING,
AND A COMPUTER
FOR HIS OWN ACCESS TO THE WORLD OF THE “HAVES” ABOVE THE “COMBAT STUDY” OF
EAGER LEARNERS IN THE
Just after
I had packed away the three redundant but fully functional “CPU’s” of my
desktop computers, and after the Spring Vacation Match Day for all the senior
students, I received a powerful letter from
This letter started out as all the rest do, and he was fulsome in his gratitude for my spirit and assistance in reaching out to his poor country and its downtrodden citizens. But, then, he goes on to name at least one of those downtrodden in a mad scramble for food handouts that the population though might be coming from a passing vehicle—thought wrongly, as it turned out. The downtrodden one was his father, and because of the suffering of his family in their starvation, he is going to have to drop out of his surgical residency to try to provide for them in the only way anyone there knows how—by appealing to the international aid community for full time dependency.
Meanwhile, he details what it is like trying
to study medicine and surgery in
I already get a dozen such letters a month that are transparent in their blatant appeal to greed. They often start out “I am the only son of the late monarch of Sierre Leone, (or Zaire, or Nigeria, or whatever country has just gone through a long war—which includes most of Africa’—and I have been left the fortune that my late father had asked me to deposit in an American account, for which I will leave you one fourth of the twenty eight million dollars he had purloined to purchase arms to remain in power until the revolution (or assassins) had toppled him, and now it is accessible only to me and to you, if you would be so kind as to send me your bank account number and authorization to access it.” There were two of these obsequious and well-crafted requests by mass-spammed email, one from Congo alleging kinship to Sese Mobutu, and the second from Sierre Leone allegedly from the only son of the deposed, now conveniently dead leader, on the day this other more likely genuine letter arrived by post from Ethiopia.
There is a difference in his note, not alleging that I will have access to the enormous purloined wealth of his destitute country skimmed by its corrupt leaders to stuff into the bank account (that they will make room for the new fortune by immediately emptying it completely of any residual balance it might contain now). He does not pretend that I would get big benefits from adopting him in association but that he might plead with me to make him faint with joy by sending to him (conveniently listed are FedEx, DHL or Airborne couriers) a used or leftover computer. The letter is so compelling, that I might have done so if I had not already just now deployed the computers I had surplussed elsewhere.
Beyond that, however, the request is naïve, since he would not need the computer alone—after all it would be an expensive boat anchor to be shipped there and useless without the keyboard, monitor, and most important of all the hookup, software, and internet service provider through phone or high speed lie, which he has zero chance of accessing. If there is no money to buy foods or procure them in any way, there would be no “consumer surplus” to allow a concomitant donation to be diverted to such frivolous usage in the presence of his starving family being trampled in vain hopes of flagging down a car that might contain food.
If nothing else, it is a perfect African story. It is illustrative of the highest art form of a desperate African achiever who now has the language, the medical entrée, and the connections to make it worth the effort to make this “shot in the dark” toward a perfect stranger. It would only take one of these expenditures of postage stamps (the labor is freely abundant) to bear fruit to make the efforts worthwhile. I have circulated the letter—as he had requested—to other professors, who may not be quite as seasoned in the Africana of such requests, so that if any of them with more surplus and less misgivings are willing, let them supply him. I will forward the letter for your review so that you might know what is the context of my daily instruction on a larger global scale.
AND NOW, EAST
MEETS WEST---COAST, THAT IS,
BEFORE I
CONTINUE ON TO “WEST MEETS EAST”,
IN MEDICINE IN
THE FAR EAST
On the subject of small glitches that may cook the goose, this flight was delayed an hour and a half, and the flight attendants walked off to wait somewhere else, and had to be paged back to get the plane opened for passenger boarding. The flight was full and it takes four hours and seventeen minutes to cross from DTW to LAX. So, with the added time it would take to fill up their plane to overfilled status, and a further delay we finally made it out onto the taxiway ninety minutes late, when the captain called back that he had assumed that “the Lavs had been serviced,” but he was dismayed to learn that this was not the case. When it was found out that they had, in fact, not been, he suggested that with a long and fully packed flight, it would be in the interest of a better quality of life if we returned to the gate to have the lavatory services carried out before we were under way. That service required a special run of the trucks that do this sort of thing, and that took another half hour at the gate. This may make many of the people here feel that they are going to have a better quality of life on this flight, but it might almost certainly put me on a park bench or the airport overnight, since this would cause the missing of the connecting flight to Reno on the Alaska Air carrier, and the later, allegedly, sixty five dollar shuttle ride from Reno to Tahoe. So, I will let you know where I end up tonight, not likely on any kind of schedule on which I had been booked originally and not due to any fault of my own. But, life is full of little glitches, and we should be able to weather this one as well—stay tuned to find out just how well we might still make it!
ONCE
AGAIN—INTO THE UNKNOWN,
AND ROLLING
WITH EACH OF THE PUNCHES OF
MUTLIPLE
TRAVEL GLITCHES
I made it—barely. The bags did NOT—not even barely.
So, I am
staggering around the one arm bandits and slot machines here in RNO at what is
1:30 AM on my watch and 10:30 PM, among the beautiful people and their plastic
surgical models of makeovers, as I try to find the “limo van” I had read could
take me to Tahoe. The majority of them
said they did not go that way but were only interested in the casino trade for
I then went
over to the Alaska Air rep who was surrounded by a group of people I
recognized. They were also passengers
from the late NWA connection that had returned to the DTW gate to get the
“lavatories serviced.” So, I gave them
the “home address and phone number” I pulled out from the sheet of information
on the “Gorman Tahoe House” that Sammy had emailed me, and got into the car
near
I made the
trip in the dark around
Welcome to