Latest stuff

Bob seems to get bigger every time I turn around. He is doing well now. Part of the reason I have not posted recently is because he has been sick. Thanksgiving week he was home sick on Monday and Tuesday. I sent him back to school on Wednesday as he was feeling better. By Friday, he was sick and running a fever again (He was well on Wednesday and Thanksgiving day only). He was out of school all of last week. He was actually feeling better on Wednesday and Thursday, but he still had a cough and a runny nose, so I could not send him to school - he would get the other kids sick.

We started decorating the house for Christmas, but have not gotten to the tree yet. We have lights in the windows and around the front door. Bob says he wants it to be Christmas already.

My new job is going well. I am still on orientation. The hospital I am at, however, is a level 2 trauma center - I misunderstood them. Their sister hospital which is about nine miles south is a level 1 trauma center. They just opened a third hospital last month which is eight miles to the north which is not a trauma center yet.

The hospital will pay for all of the certification exams they require and that they would like me to get, and they will reward me with a $2/hr raise once I pass the certifications.

Jim is doing well despite a root canal he got a couple of weeks ago. The dentist office messed up his appointment to get rid of the temporary filling and place the permanent filling. He told them the dates I was available. They gave him an appointment for one of those dates, but they recorded it for the wrong date. As a result he will have had his temporary filling for almost a month when it is replaced on Friday.

Q dog is sitting next to me acting really neglected. He is sleeping on his pillow with Jim's old pillow that Jim was getting ready to throw out until Bob gave it to Q. Q then adopted it. His left back leg is arthritic. He limps on it occasionally, and that joint is bigger than the one on his right leg. I think I am going to start slipping some aspirin with his supper again. We stopped a few months ago because he wasn't limping anymore and we wanted to see how he was without the aspirin. He did fine. But the last few days he has been limping. Then again it has been raining, so that probably has something to do with it. His nose still looks funny. It looks better when I remember to rinse it with saline daily - something that Q hates. He sees the bottle of saline and runs the other way. I think the weather here is generally too dry for his nose.

I had to learn how to use the windshield wipers on my new car for the first time. I even have a rear windshield wiper that works. It has been raining for the last couple of days. I found the Weatherpulse alerts (from the national weather service) amusing. The forecasts were calling for one-half to one inch of rain so flood warnings/alerts were going off every couple of hours for a day or two before it started to rain up until it stopped this afternoon. We then had a wind advisory until this evening. In Binghamton it would rain one half to one inch in an hour. Raining that much in a twelve hour period was enough to fill most of the washes, and flood many roads. Water just doesn't soak into the ground here. It just runs right off.

I am going to attempt to post a picture of Bob from Thanksgiving below. I will see how it comes out: