Wide open

2006-10-02 - 4:27 p.m.

We're back from England! Hopefully I'll get around to a detailed description of the trip soon, but not yet. Let's suffice it to say for now that we had a very good time with no major mishaps. The worst that happened was a lost credit card and the best...Lolo and I were together for 11 days straight and still love each other. I took over a thousand pictures (hooray for my 4GB memory card) and have a lot of sorting to do before posting them. Obviously I'm not going to post so many. I'll share with you one of my favorites, taken by Lolo. It's actually one of the last pictures he took on the trip--me at Paddington Station, ready to catch the train to Heathrow.

One of the things I liked in England was the books. OK, so I'd probably like the books in any English-speaking country, but I enjoyed looking through bookshops in London. Lots of familiar books with unfamiliar covers and titles, but also lots of unfamiliar books. And books there that have yet to be published here (only I didn't find that out until after I got back here--too late!). I ended up only buying three books for me (and one for Lolo) while I was there. We saw Les Mis�rables so I was inspired to buy (and hopefully read) the book. I bought it from a shop at 84 Charing Cross Road, which, if you don't know, is significant because there is a book by Helene Hanff about that particular shop (which I read two years ago). The other books I ended up buying at the Heathrow Terminal C Borders because I had a few leftover pounds in my pocket, time to kill, and I couldn't resist. I bought Cecilia Ahern's "If You Could See Me Now" (my first chick lit--400 pages finished in one sitting on the plane) and "Captain Alatriste" by Arturo P�rez-Reverte. Those two had actually been on my wishlist for a while (movies starring Hugh Jackman and Viggo Mortensen, respectively) so I felt somewhat justified buying them, but I was also inspired to head to Half Price Books the day after my return and spend nearly $40 there. Ah, books!

Actually, though, my spending at HPB was not entirely on fiction. As we waited for our first flight from Seattle, Lolo and I sat near a stand selling Rosetta Stone software for learning new languages. We both have an interest in learning new languages, and have both taken multiple language courses in high school and college (me: Spanish and Mandarin; him: Japanese and Italian) and we decided it would be fun to learn a language together. But we had some difficulty deciding which language it should be. My top choices are Mandarin and Russian, mostly based on the population here in Seattle--I'd be most likely to use those languages here. Lolo's top two choices are Italian and French, based on the fact that these are the countries he'd most like to visit (neither of us thought it was worthwhile to learn Icelandic). I thought that was silly--I'm going to spend my time learning Italian so that I can use it for two weeks while I visit Italy? But he thought it was silly to learn Mandarin just so I can tell a few patients not to drink green tea while they're taking warfarin. He wouldn't be swayed and I--well, I seem to be swayable. We settled on Italian. I bought a "Teach Yourself Beginner's Italian" book and CD's from Half Price Books yesterday. I can now say "thank you," "sorry," and "do you speak English?" in Italian. It would be neat if we actually stuck to this and learned Italian, but what are the odds?

In other news, I survived my first day back at work today. Luckily, I'm working the OR shift. My body hasn't adjusted back from England time--I was wide awake at 3am this morning. That's not so bad considering my alarm was set for 4am anyway for the OR shift. After work I had an optometry appointment. Lolo had today off, but he came in anyway so that he could help me pick out new frames after my appointment. But it turned out my corneas are warped again, just like they were last time, so instead of a prescription for new glasses, I was told to not wear my contacts for two weeks. So he came in for nothing. Mi dispiaci, Lolo. He's working a week of graveyard shifts starting tomorrow, so I won't be seeing him much at all for the next week. That makes me sad.

A while back I volunteered at work to take over the job of writing the schedule for our technicians. Whether the lady who does it now truly does a bad job of it I don't know, but the techs perceive that she does. They think she just makes a schedule without regard to reality and is susceptible to favoritism. We had a few meetings and discussed how things should be changed, but I was told that this lady would continue doing the schedule and in the end nothing changed at all. This was months ago. Recently we all filled out a staff satisfaction survey. Pharmacists in my department, it seems, are relatively satisfied. Satisfaction for the technicians, however, had sunk to a new low. Top on the list of things that pissed them off: the schedule. Today I was asked if my offer to write the technician schedule still stands. I said it does. Looks like it's going to become my job after all. I don't know when, but hopefully soon. I hope I can make people happier than they currently are. I hope I don't make things worse. I'll probably regret it in the future, but at the moment, I'm excited about this.