IT'S THE LITTLE THINGS....

3 June 2003

It's not the big things that drive you nuts, it's the little things. And today was a day filled with little things.

First, the day started with a very long report I typed for the psychiatrist.  When I type his reports and then type the bill, I use the original report, remove all the text, type the bill using the name and address and save it under a different name.  For example, a report on smith would be Smith.ltr and the bill would be Smith.bil.  Only I was in such a hurry that I inadvertently saved the bill as Smith.ltr, effectively wiping out the original letter.  Then I discovered that there is a mistake which throws all the pages numbers off.  On page 2.  My only hope is that he decides it's not big enough and that he'll send it off as is, or I'll have to retype the entire thing.

Then there was WeightWatchers. I was confident this week. I'd worked hard. I'd exercised, drunk my water, and not strayed from the diet once. I'd eaten usually on the high side of my points range, but decidedly within the point range, and only once went over by two points (on a day when I had 2 exercise points anyway). I had hoped to lose 3 lbs so I could record "70" for my weight loss. I certainly wasn't prepared to gain 1.6 lbs!

Oh I know all the possible reasons. I ate breakfast before the meeting, which I don't usually do. I've been exercising and muscle weighs more than fat, yada yada yada. So I'm not worried about it; I'm just pissed about it and it didn't start my day off right.

The morning wasn't too bad. I'm just feeling like a hamster in a wheel again, running and running and getting nowhere again. But that's nothing new.

We ran late with morning patients, so it was after 1:30 before I got to leave and had to go to the post office, have lunch, and be back for a 2:30 patient.

I discovered the true meaning of "going postal." Going postal isn't some disgruntled employee who loses it, it's patrons who lose it. Triple digit temps. Line out the door of the post office. ONE employee working and the patron at the head of the line had a complicated transaction that took 10 minutes to complete. We almost didn't need air conditioning because the head shaking and toe tapping by those waiting in line for please-dear-god-let-another-clerk-come-to-work was enough to create a breeze.

Then to Quiznos. My treat of the week. They have good low-fat sandwiches and I wanted an interesting different background for my food fotolog.

Unfortunately, since I was last there they seem to have changed hands and while I am the last person to make stereotypical comments about various cultures, the new staff all consisted of people for whom English is not the first language and who have no apparent equivalent in their tongue for "fast food."

I ordered my usual bourbon chicken (6 points) and I think they had to go shoot and pluck the chicken first. By the time the sandwich arrived, I had about 2 seconds to eat it in because the patient was arriving now.

What's worse, bits kept falling out of the sandwich. Fresh bacon bits. There is no bacon in my low cal bourbon chicken, so I don't have a clue what they fixed for me and suspect it vastly exceeded the points I thought I was ordering.

By the time I left, I had a huge lump just sitting in the pit of my stomach and my longed for lunch "hour" had been a "lunch minute"...or technically 10 minutes out of my 8-1/2 hour work day.

At the end of the day, when I finally gave up and decided to go home, I left the office three times and each time would just get to the car and then have to go back and get something else I'd left behind.

The air outside, after the nice air conditioned office, was like walking into an oven. Everything was moving in slow motion and the temp was definitely in triple digits. It did not make me feel good to get into the car, turn on a San Francisco station and hear the people complaining about how COLD they are in the fog. I want to be in fog!

Then I came home. My relaxation at the end of the day is to check e-mail and, now, to upload fotos to Fotolog. When I sat at the computer, it had frozen and I had to turn it off and wait for it to go through the checking it does when it doesn't shut down properly.

When it started up, Eudora's mailboxes had been corrupted so it had to fix those, which is a pain in the butt because there were about 150 messages that all went into the wrong mailbox and I had to get that straightened up, erase the spam, etc.  Again, not a big thing, a little thing...but a frustrating little thing.

Then I connected to Fotolog, intending to upload my Quiznos photo, and discovered that today they made what was an inevitable decision--to start charging for us. A minimal amount, but for free you can upload one photo and have five comments in your guestbook. For a "donation" you can upload 6 pictures and have up to 100 comments in your guestbook. Well, that's all well and good except the only way to donate is through Pay Pal and Pay Pal and I are having a disagreement at present. It won't let me charge anything without entering my member number, which I can only get off of my new as-yet-unreceived bank statement. So I'm dead in the water. I can't upload my lunch photo or my dinner photo or comments to my guestbook and there is nothing left for me to do tonight but work.

This is not what I needed to have happen at the end of this day.

The lump in my stomach is still there and it's too hot to go outside and ride my bike to get rid of some of the frustrations.

Nothing is a big thing. It's just a growing accumulation of little things, but like a ball of string, each little thing is making the whole grow that much bigger.

However, all was not bad today. When I opened my front door this morning, there was this lovely stack of plates with the flowers--my friend Nancy had been out to the second hand stores to buy new plates for me to vary the look on my Foodlog (if I can ever post there again).

And in the middle of the day, Cindy showed up at the office, riding her bike. She's back in the saddle again and so we will pick up where we left off tomorrow morning and go back to our old bike riding routine. I've been making the route with Walt since she's been recovering from her surgery, but it's just not the same.

Now I'm going to go beat my head against the wall for awhile. It seems the only productive thing I can do at the moment. (Assuming, of course, that the computer doesn't stall or the internet connection break down while I'm trying to upload this entry).