There could be dogs, too

2003-10-20 - 10:07 p.m.

The nice thing about working the closing shift is that I didn't have to set my alarm to get out of bed in the morning. Without my alarm I've been getting up at eight every day. I didn't leave here until eleven this morning. That gave me three hours to do, of course, nothing. I got online, answered some e-mails, read the paper (yay, the 49er's actually won a game!), and then noticed that there was some action going on out in my cul-de-sac. The neighbors directly across the street from us have recently acquired a mobile home. For the last few days it has been parked in the street in front of the house to the right of them. Today though, somebody finally moved into the house to the right of them, so I guess the neighbors directly across the street from us felt a little obligated to move their mobile home. It is now parked in their front yard and I doubt it will move again soon. I wonder what they plan to do with it. In-law's quarters? So I got to watch one neighbor move their mobile home--a very tricky operation--and the other neighbor move in. On top of it all, my neighbor two doors down to the right, I believe is having an affair with the neighbor who just acquired the mobile home. So she was out there flirting with him as he was trying to maneuver the mobile home. It was all very entertaining. And, even better yet, the people moving into the house to the right of the house directly across the street are good-looking. Two guys are moving in there. I haven't seen them up close yet, but from across the street they both look nice. They appear to be in their late twenties and from the cars they drive (one drives a convertible Mustang and the other a Tacoma (drool)) and the fact that they just purchased a house, they must be fairly successful. The gayness factor is yet to be determined.

Working today was ok, but I didn't much care for the pharmacy I worked in. It had the worst set up of any pharmacy I've been in so far. It was like a maze to find anything. The other pharmacist who was working the morning shift and worked with me for the first few hours of my shift kept calling me "kiddo." I was very annoyed by that. Nothing went particularly wrong though. I did have one patient who I'm pretty sure tried to fake a call to us to get her Vicodin refilled. She received a thirty day supply twenty-one days ago and today she was claiming she was out and needed more. We called her doctor's office for authorization to refill it and they denied it. So we told her and of course she was very unhappy. Later on in the evening we received another call from the doctor's office stating that she could have the refill after all. First of all, it was after five so the doctor's office should've been closed. Secondly, the person on the phone just sounded...fishy. I asked the tech to call back to the office to verify that they had indeed just called us, but she never got through. So I went with my gut and refused to refill it. I don't know which I hope for more, that I was right and I prevented a fraud, or that I was wrong and my patient really is an honest person.

I've been thinking about NaNoWriMo some more and realizing that I really don't know how long 50,000 words is. I'm probably biting off more than I can chew here. Especially since NaNoWriMo occurs during November and I already know I'm going to be in Houston with family for a week. Anyway, I decided to write something, just to see what it was like to crank out words for the sake of quantity not quality and then see how many words I wrote. I wrote for fifteen minutes and ended up with about 600 words. According to my calculations I would have to write about three times that much every night for thirty days to reach the goal. Forty-five minutes of writing each night doesn't seem so bad, as long as I can keep interested in the story. I think I already have a plan to help make that possible though. At any rate, if you'd like to read last night's 15-minute stream-of-consciousness story inspired by my neighbor's yappy dog, you can find it here. Please don't think too poorly of me for my lame attempts at technobabble--I was just trying to keep typing.