Ever is coming

2003-11-19 - 9:54 p.m.

I'm so used to not being able to see out of my left eye that sometimes I worry it'll shrivel up and become a vistigial organ and then people will laugh at the hole in the left side of my face and wonder if it once had a purpose.

Anyway, I got online to start writing today's entry over an hour ago. I got distracted by an e-mail I received. The e-mail contained a link to photos taken by someone who recently went on a motorcycle excursion through Africa. The person is a friend of a friend of a friend or something. Maybe add in a few more generations there. Ok, ok, I have no idea who this person is. At any rate, they took some awesome pictures. It makes me want to invest in a much fancier camera than my current point-and-click, but I think I have other things I need to invest in first. One of my favorite pictures they took was this one:

The owl just landed right in camp. And yes, it has a bat in its beak! How cool is that? Interested in looking at cool pictures taken by somebody you don't know? Here they are.

I want to describe to you what I did today, but I'm finding it difficult to convey exactly how torturous it was. I went back to that same closed-door pharmacy. Only this time, the other pharmacist out-maneuvered me into getting the "good" job. See, in this pharmacy, one pharmacist stands there all day and puts pills in bottles. That pharmacist is almost completely unrelated to the operation of the rest of the pharmacy. There are also five techs constantly working on filling blister-packs of medications. The blisters go to patients in nursing homes, usually. A blister-pack is somewhat like a carton of eggs, only instead of a dozen spaces, there are 4X7 spaces. It is made out of a little sheet of tagboard and each space has a little clear plastic blister about 0.5X0.5X1 inches large. So the medications are placed in each blister by day of the week and then time of day--morning, afternoon, evening, and bedtime. Some of these patients have over twenty different medications in each blister. My job was to sit at a table and, using a pair of tweasers, dig through each blister and check to make sure that the techs put the correct medications in the correct blisters. Sound easy? Well, sure, except there are tons. And tons. And tons. I had to read the inscriptions on each little pill to make sure each one was correct. If I recognized it, fine, if not, I had to look it up. I was sitting at the table with blister-paks stacked up around me higher than my head and periodically the techs would come in and cart away the ones that I had checked and cart in more. One of the techs said to me, "Have you ever seen the movie 'Groundhog Day?' This is just like that. No matter how hard you work, you'll wake up tomorrow and it'll be the same thing all over again." I really can't imagine doing that as a permanent job.

Tomorrow is the championship volleyball match. I'll have to go straight there from work. If we win the first match then we play again later that night for the championship. Which means I may never come home tomorrow! But I'm not working Friday, so that's ok.