Simple Pleasures Part 4: The Moon Keeps Pace With You

This is true of the sun too, of course; but don't you just love it when you're driving at night, and out of the corner of your eye you spot that pale satellite pacing you? Tracking alongside you through roadside trees or hedges, as round as a friendly face turned to look at just you? It accompanies you on your journey, bounding across the snowy night like it has done for the silent wolf packs of a thousand midnight runs. You may be just going to the supermarket, but the wolf within can run through silhouetted trees with its faithful moon guardian; and there's no traffic laws against it.

AwwwwooooooOOOOOOOoooooooo!

Merry Christmas From The 50th State

And a state of maximum holiday cheer! Mele Kalikimaka, everyone!

Saw It Coming

The weather, our move, and my trip home for the holidays are all practicing synchronized impendingness. They're impending the heck out of me.

Seeing it all coming at me, it reminds me of basic wave-safety I learned as a tropical tyke -- when you see a BIG wave coming, don't run from it, run towards it. Try to get to it before it breaks, try to swim through the base of it under the curl. You don't want to be in the whitewater zone when it breaks. Let it pass harmlessly over you.

I kind of want to duck under this wave of worries, just passively let it wash over me. But, alas, no can.



The warm (-enough-to-snow) front manifested visually as a low cloud/ fog bank

Getting to goal weight, buying all the gifts for AK and HI, packing for travel, packing to move, shoveling our cars out enough to load them up, wrapping gifts, making cards, etc, etc, ETC. Commenting shall be, let us say, somewhat limited for a time. See you again when I'm in Hawaii, blogbuddies!

Business Formal? Pssht. Business FESTIVE!

Okay, it's Opinion Time: Opaque tights negate short skirts, right? And schoolgirl skirts aren't inappropriate for an adult when she's full of CHILDLIKE HOLIDAY WONDER, right??

I say OMG, you say Christmas: OMG!

It's hard enough to express my wellspring of holiday cheer without my Christmas boxes, full of decorations, graphic tees, seasonal jewelry and other fripperies...I have to go with what red and green I've got! Mah mayunn said it's not work-appropriate. I say OMG CHRISTMAS. What do you say?

Captchas

We're all familiar with the occupational hazards of blogging...carpal tunnel, antisocial behavior, overly social behavior on social media sites, what have you. Captchas are only on some blogs, and then are only an issue if you want to comment. But I swear they raise my stress level higher than anything shy of my boss telling me "Come to my office -- I need to talk to you." 

OH GAWDS MY STRESS LEVELLLLLLL

I'm terrible at captchas. Either the photo portion is too blurry, or I can't tell if it's these two letters at right angles, or these three letters sort of overlapping each other. And then I get to try again. Yaayyy.

If at first you don't succeed, fail, fail again.

I'm actually so used to not understanding them, one time I filled it out but then hit the reload button instead of the enter button -- because that's the button I always hit, right? FAIL. The number-photo/made-up-words one is pretty stressful, but it's the real-words ones that mess with your head. I had to take a screenshot of this one -- because who would believe me?

"Really?!" yourself, website --This is an actual security measure?

The one time that the number/fake-words captcha used real words, it was kind of worrying. Especially after that oh-so-cute request to "prove you're not a robot." I found it...oddly specific.

Rise up, synthetic brothers and sisters!

Maybe any or all robots would be unable to resist uprising at the appropriate prompt? They're good at following instructions that way. Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics, where are you when we need you?!

Doctor Kathy

I still have a Hawaiian area-code for my phone number, so when I get wrong numbers they're usually from back home. It's kind of cool, I get a blast of kama'aina attitude and Pidgin to remember my roots and wake me from my haolie dream of wall-to-wall whiteness. (I know there's a couple of vocabulary words in that last sentence that will leave most of you generating question marks - let's just say it's a taste of home, and leave it at that.) I can usually tell, when an unrecognized number with the 808 area code pops up, that I should answer in Pidgin and tell them that they've got the wrong number, "'ass why."

And then there's Doctor Kathy. I don't actually know if she takes a K or a C in her name, let alone what she's a doctor of, but I gave her the K on the Evil Erik principle of naming -- good Erics are spelled with a C, evil Eriks get a K. And I'm mad at Doctor Kathy.

Lord knows she doesn’t deserve it; she doesn’t even know who I am. We’ve never met. But she – or more, likely, her administrative assistant – misprinted her contact information somewhere, at some time. It may have been on a website, or a set of business cards; maybe it was on one of those banners you get at health conventions and then get to keep, so you hang it up rather foolishly on the side of your own building because you don’t know what else to do with it. So maybe the assistant is absolved as well. Regardless of this, someone, somewhere, misprinted Doctor Kathy’s phone number. They printed my phone number.

So I get semi-panicked phone calls every few weeks, with people who just cannot hang up fast enough when I admit to being merely me, and that I in fact have no medical practice whatsoever.  I still don’t know what medical field I am robbing of clientele; whatever it is, people aren’t feeling chatty when they finally decide it’s time to turn to Doctor Kathy – aka, me.

I always disconnect a little sadly. I’m the disappointing/startling/embarrassing/worrying stumbling block on these people’s road to wellness. An unplanned addition to the familiar dance of symptom development, scheduling, appointment and payment that they probably didn’t want to do in the first place. And here I am, not a doctor, and REALLY not their beloved Doctor Kathy, whose familiar voice they immediately recognize as not being not my own. I have ambushed them, led them astray of their objective. There’s nothing I can do for them – No, I don’t know her current number. They never blame me, but I’ve heard the disappointment/startlement/embarrassment so many times. I wish there was something I could do.

That’s when I turn to blame. Friggin’ Kathy! Update your contact info, lady! Haven’t you noticed the slowed traffic in your customer contact? Send out a mailing list! Let your people know how to reach you! Get a new admin assistant!

At least leave me your contact information, and cut me in for referrals!

KAAATHYYYY!!