06-FEB-A-3

 

VISIT WITH HARKENS, GRAND ROUNDS AND CONFERENCES

 AT UCSF HYLAND HOSPITAL IN ALAMEDA COUNTY, ADLER FELLOWS OPERA AND RETURN FROM CHEZ HARKEN AND THE JAGUAR WHEELS OF WALNUT CREEK IN AND AROUND EAST BAY,

INCLUDING BERKELY TO THE JULIE MORGAN THEATRE

FOR VERDI’S LAST OPERA, “FALSTAFF”

 

February 2--4, 2006

 

            I am enroute home after what seems to be a long trip in multiple venues, this one concluding the second one in California’s week, following the conclusion of two full weeks in The Philippines.  This last several days has been packed with the kinds of round the clock activities that are the standard at the Harkens in their hospitality, with multiple conferences in both the Kaiser Hospital Venue in Oakland East Bay and the Highland Hospital Alameda County where I had listened to Grand Rounds by some speakers and given others in the surgical residency here.  I have made my way around with Laurie’s big new Jaguar sedan in the pre-dawn rainy season here at East Bay, and had somehow found my way back and forth from Walnut Creek, which is in Contra Costa County.

 

            On Thursday, we made it in from Walnut Creek by way of BART to downtown San Francisca to attend the Adler Fellows Opera and heard excerpts from the performances, then adjourned to a French Restaurant with a delightful young faculty addition named Minnie Swift, now the Assistant Medical Director of the Highland Hospital after being chief medical resident here.  She had helped organize the Measure A which increased the millage support for health care and now has some ideas on how to reform MediCal.  She is working with another dynamo named Adameka who is on leave after her second year as a Harvard Medical student and a CDC employment, as they write up proposals to extend their study of the frequent users of the ER at Highland to include a housing initiative.  Minnie is an Indian by ethnic heritage, though born here in the Bay Area and she and I could compare notes on the Mahabharata as well as a number of other issues of common interest.

 

            As always with the Harkens, it was a three ring circus of fun, with early rising followed by late evenings, first in the San Francisco opera environment and then in the Berkeley college environment –a liberal college town of weird and wonderful folk, with an eccentric female architect Julie Morgan having made a barn-like theater where we went to see Verdi’s last opera—Falstaff.  It is a ribald comedy with a cast of performers who have a close contact with the audience.  I had a chance to commune with Buffy, the yellow lab who has a daily exercise pattern that is going on now as the Harkens have just dropped me off in the SFO airport to go on to Pacifica to throw the sticks into the Pacific for Buffy to retrieve. 

 

PROPERTY MANAGEMENT IN MARYLAND AND IOWA

 

            As I sat here in the airport, I got a worried call from Jim, my mailman who was worried that I was overdue by two days for my return—so Derwood is being looked after well by his visits.

 

 I think it would be considerably more difficult to be away and to extended such away visits not only with the overdue items in the ELDP, but especially if I were to have livestock such as a dog named George or a horse named Leon, each of which seem to be real live examples hovering in time and pace over a project Virginia has envisioned as a property five miles from DesMoines and twelve miles from Simpson which has a log cabin to live in, a studio in which to give voice lessons,  a residence for a live-in teacher of beginning riding, and indoor riding rink, and pasturage for the ability she might have to both keep her own jumper Porter, and a “hunt horse” (Leon, for example) and an assortment of dogs (such as the aforementioned Katrina refugee George, as well as Corgi Cherry.)   She is now visiting her friends the Shurtses in Florida as well as brother Rob, while making phone calls to try to arrange some kind of financing to relieve her of the heavy expense of the Horse Habit which she finds unsustainable as a Simpson school teacher and she would like to work out her ambivalence about a two-state relationship as well as a way to relieve herself of the cost of a balloon mortgage due in August, and acquire a twice deductible asset as opposed to her after-tax income draining horse-housing at the Maiffat Barn.  So, she has suggested these thoughts as she is trying to work out a way to keep herself independent despite the ongoing horse expenses she might be able to transmute to deductible expenses in a neutral or income-producing property.  She had tried to work out with the Dean some indication of her future at Simpson but since he is a lame duck, her conference with him on m y birthday, January 19, did not resolve any of here questions on her Simpson future, so she is trying now to balance out here outgo expenses.  We have had a few phone calls on this matter as she is thinking of how she can manage her own future in a changing environment.