I KNOW I LEFT MY HEAD AROUND HERE SOMEWHERE

2 July 2002

I had all sorts of wonderful intentions of getting the On Display collaboration assignment done tonight. I knew what I wanted to do, but this one, like last month's assignment to write an entire entry using only song lyrics, is also going to take more thinking than I seem to be capable of this evening. So now, pushing midnight, I've finally given up and am writing a "normal" entry instead.

This whole day seems to have been fragmented. It started with waking at about 5 a.m. I had gone to sleep without doing a lick of work, still feeling the effects of the weekend in San Francisco. I decided that the two doctors would just have to live with my having a life this weekend.

When I woke at 5, I was wide awake, but still hobbling like an old Chinese woman with bound feet (felt like it too!). It was obvious there was no treadmill in my morning. Before I went to sleep, I had wonderful, virtuous intentions of just going out for a long bike ride instead of going to the club, but anything more strenuous than checking e-mail just seemed too much effort.

After I got coffee made and e-mail checked I realized that I wasn't really entirely "slept out," and I decided to go back to sleep. I wasn't sure I'd be able to get back to sleep, having slept a full night already, but the next thing I knew it was 8:30 and Walt was getting ready to leave for work. He had fixed himself breakfast and I never heard a thing.

This is our "afternoon day" at work, so I had the morning to get something accomplished, but my head just couldn't wrap itself around anything serious for most of the morning. I put the finishing touches on the slide show from yesterday, and I can't really remember anything else I did to pass the four hours before I had to leave for work. I didn't even do much playing around on the computer. My head was just in a fog. (My scalp is tender tonight, and I think that I picked up some sunburn through that mass of salt and pepper on top of my head and I'm using that as my excuse for this "distracted" day!)

Fortunately it wasn't a very strenuous day because I just couldn't seem to stay "on task" with much of anything. Dr. G had several patients, but only one of them was there for a real physical exam. I was trying to organize things around my desk and get things done, but somehow my brain just didn't seem to comprehend things.

Dr. G's first office manager stopped by on her way home from work. She had been involved in the recent videotaping project that we'd had and Dr. G had a small gift for her, which I had wrapped and which she was coming to pick up. We spoke at length about Dr. G's plan that I will take over all medical billing on September 1--a little fact I just learned today.

Fortunately, I have her backing and her assurance that with zero background in billing, I will be totally lost until I've at least taken a class in it. She gave me a lot of good "buzz words" to use when I confront him with all this tomorrow.

He rushed out of the office around 6, uncharacteristically focused on getting home in time for dinner, so I didn't have a chance to talk with him about this, and I packed it all in and went home myself, very soon afterwards.

The plan this evening was to: write the OnDisplay entry, finish Dr. G's transcription, make a dent in the psychiatrist's transcription, and do all that while getting dinner cooked (and eaten).

I don't know where my head was. I simply couldn't settle down to do anything. Here it is midnight and the only thing that I actually managed to get done was getting dinner cooked (I passed on having any myself since I'd had a momentary "dietary indiscretion" earlier in the evening, and tomorrow is weigh-in day!)

I got distracted by checking with the Att2Go web site to learn how to download ring tones to my new cell phone.  (My phone now rings to the theme from The Avengers.   Aren't you impressed?)  I haven't had a "fun phone" since the whole cell rage began and I'm having too much fun.  Do you know you can send (and receive) e-mail on your phone now?  Yeah--only 160 characters, but still....  My clunky old phone wouldn't do that.  Heck, my clunky old phone wouldn't even hold a battery charge, so you could only use it when the motor of the car was running.  Now I have something small enough to fit in the pocket of my camel back to take on bike rides--even though I almost never even use a telephone at home, let alone when I'm out on the road away from civilization.

I downloaded my ring tones, and in the process discovered how many were already stored in the phone.  I even tried to compose my own, which meant I had to close Opera (my current browser--it lives up to its claim of being "the fastest browser on the Internet") and use IE, which I hate, loathe, despise, and abominate.  It's slow as molasses and since Opera has the option of NOT accepting pop-up ads, I'd forgotten how irritating those things were.  But it was all for the sake of procrastination, so I couldn't complain too much.

Finally, I decided to get serious about transcription.  I had the first progress note for Dr. G about half transcribed when WordPerfect froze (Windows ME---grrr!) and I lost the whole thing.

As the evening ends, I've written no collab, I've transcribed nothing for the psychiatrist, and only one brief 2-page thing for Dr. G. And worst of all, I'm sitting here with drooping eyelids really, really wanting to go back to sleep, which I think I'm going to do.  (Besides, if I stay up much longer, I'm going to go eat everything in the fridge!)

So--the work day was lame, the after-work work was lame, and now the journal entry is lame.

One can only hope that the effect of the weekend's festivities and physical activity will have worn off with one more good night of sleep under my belt.