Skirting my own pathology

Over the years I have learned to shop with care, to ensure, to the best of my ability, that I actually LOVE the intended purchase, or that at the very least I need it.

Since my upgrade to office manager from teacher, I have also had to spiff up my wardrobe, and have hauled out many clasic pieces, and many pieces of drek, that lurk in the far reaches of my closet. Some of those lurkers are skirts. At last count, I have roughly 12 skirts. How often have I worn them? Over the last 15 years, I have probably donned a skirt maybe 10 times.

I have bony knees.

Yep, this is aptly called pathology, and I know this about myself, so I rarely purchase or otherwise obtain skirts, because I know doing so would essentially relegate that skirt, however lovely, to the pile of moulder at the previously mentioned back of my closet.  I just won’t wear them unless I am called to some Special Occasion, some shmancy dinner, some family Function, some stupid Christmas party, and even then, I am doing my damnedest to downplay the razor blade knee caps from hell.

So, knowing this, it comes as some surprise that I was tempted to buy one – the one at the top of the screen, actually – a few days ago. It was an impulse buy, but it was also based on a few criteria that neatly, if do say s0 myself, skirt the stupidity that is my bony knee pathology: it’s a long, tweed boot skirt, in exactly my 2p size, is by JCrew, so I know it’s quality, was $14.99 on Eb*y, and best, will professionally hide my damn knees!

It’s ridiculous. I know.

Know thyself, eh?

Leprous snickerdoodle

My daughter Boo and her first cousin, wh0 is a mere 4 months her senior, had at with a FB insult fight that makes my mother’s and aunt’s heart proud. Yea verily did they consult the examples of past insult collections, and I cannot wait until round two..

Boo – Obnoxious wench!
Nick – inconsiderate naive!
Boo – unknowing child!
Nick – blabbering infant!
Boo- pox-ridden scum!
Nick – leprous snicker-doodle!!
Boo – bawdy bat-fowling baggage!
Nick – raunchy milk-curdling bugger-cock!
Boo – craven clay-brained canker-blossom!
Nick – lackadaisical rock-witted kielbasa muncher!
Boo – mewling idle-headed lewdster!
Nick nagging “special” pole-hugger!
Boo – puking knotty-pated malt-worm!
Nick – retching, crawling, bottom-feeding gutter eater!
I bite my thumb at you
Boo – pribbling ill-nurtured maggot-pie! We retch in your general direction!
Nick – prostitutive cowardly slop fest!
I name my feces after you!
Boo -wretched turtle dropping, you are smeared on hell’s walls!
Nick – blasphemous laundromat, I push you to the gutter!
Boo – paunchy ill-breeding lout you dishonor your name!

Happy Saturday!

Ten Things Tuesday: Things that make me smile

So, two weeks in, and I am adjusting to the long hours, and to the rhythm of the front desk. This, however, is NOT about the clinic. Well, not much.

1. Delightful, rich, and chewy conversations with practically perfect stranger-type people.

2. Hot tea with honey, while looking out at hibernating trees being buffeted by frozen winds.

3. A quick kiss from the husband as he hands me a patient contact request.

4. The eyebrow raises and polite stares from patients who don’t know he and I are married, and the smiles that follow the explanation.

5. Knee high, stripey socks under my professional clothing.

6. Hot pink underwear under my spiffy wool pants.

7. That my nearly 15 year old is stepping up to fix dinner when I am rarely home before 6:30. She’s learning from her mistakes too; last week she took a roast out of its packaging on the counter instead of in the sink, and of course there was some spatter. Amazing how quickly THAT sort of thing becomes instructional!

8. Time in the car to listen to NPR.

9. Time in the car to rock out to the gems on my mp3 player i haven’t listened to in far too long. If you drive by some big purple van with some woman banging on her steering wheel, wailing along to Midnight Oil, wave, yeah?

10. The pretty views I see on my way to work, and the occasional opportunities to snap a quick photo. Et voila!

 

Ten Things I love about my new job

This post has been in the works for over a week. Ten things Saturday?

Here is the first of a series of shots of the clinic in its genesis. I will be taking more this week now that we are settling in. This has my daughter, Monkey, reading amidst a whole whack of boxes. It took almost an hour to clear all of this cardboard – I found someone to come and recycle it – and we’ve since hired him and his team for our regular cleaning.

My new job!

1. I get to work with my husband. I get to see him (ok, in glimpses) frequently during the day, and I get to sneak into his office and hug him until he squeals.

2. I am part of this new endeavor. and I love how integrated we all are in bringing this dream about. The role I play now – front desk/reception – allows me to get to know the people: the vendors, the delivery people, the building and cleaning people, and especially the patients, so I can better manage the whole thing when full time people step into the front desk role. I will work to find out what’s important to these people – among other things organic cooking and food selection, water bottle safety, personal product buying guides, etc – and eventually make this information on our clinic website.

3, The patients are by and large wonderful, interesting people, with a wide range of backgrounds and interests. Everyone I have met so far is engaged, intelligent, and easy to kid around with. I am so enjoying meeting and conversing with these people, many of whom are highly successful in their own fields.

4. There is a lot of laughter going on. It is a happy office. In the “other place,” laughter meant inefficiency.

5.  There is a LOT to customer service and I am happy to say I’ve been surfing a daunting learning curve with a lot more ease than I thought possible. Since I was essentially dropped, lukewarm, into the role of the front desk, I have got so much smoother on the phone, with stock phrases and conversation-steering tricks getting easier, and while I still have much to learn, have scheduling tricks and maneuvering down.

6. I get to work in a world I love. I married a curly-haired naturopathic doc (well, to be) 16 years ago, and we’ve raised our kids in a paradigm that I have never before been able to fully integrate in my professional world. I foresee a lot more congruence in my future as well, as I deal with my own medical issues and bad habits (like too much sugar and denial-based eating with regard to my dodgy digestion).

7. Reverse osmosis hot and cold water stations. There are three in the office, making dehydration much less likely. Sometimes I am just plain crap at remembering to have my stainless steel water bottle with me and now, using our clinic’s mugs or bottles, that is no longer an issue. Now, I have easy access my green tea, my ginger tea, and my copious amount of water. Of course, I get so bloody busy that my tea often cools while I am doing other things, but whatever.

the view from the front desk

8. Grown up clothing. I did have very nice clothing for teaching, much of which I still wear; however, I have had to upgrade from the comfy chinos and corduroys to formal wool pants. Fortunately, I have  collected a few pairs over the years and yeah, one of them was formerly my funeral pants, but I am currently wearing the same 4 pairs of very professional slacks  over and over again. My favorite pairs are from J. Crew and Ann Taylor Loft and are almost 100% lined wool. I could really use more but according to retailers Spring is upon us – even in the tundra-like weather we’re currently enjoying up here in the Northeast – wool pants are not to be had at the Loft and are stupid expensive at JC.  Hoping to catch some sales…

9. Getting to decorate an entirely new space. My husband has a button – installed by moi – about putting stuff up on the walls and he’s right about sitting with a space until it tells you what should go on the walls, but he’s not getting the messages I am hearing loud and clear!  Apart from that, when money is a little more available, we must get a carpet and a coffee table for the front waiting room, and start up magazine subscriptions.

10. After two weeks, I am delighted to report we are doing far better than our wildest, most conservative projections. Hiring nurses is next on the agenda, and then some help at the front desk. The word is getting out, patients are delighted by our space and our energy, and there is a world of possibility before us. Not to get ahead of ourselves, but when we can, when we are in the black and securely so, we will set up a philanthropic foundation to help as many people as we can. It’s going to be glorious.

A Very Exciting Beginning

Apologies, but there are no photos of our wonderful new clinic in here because I do not have a working card reader (grr windows 7 and its incompatibility), and my eensy USB cable seems to have taken a leave of absence. A new card reader is on its way, and this post will be updated. Consider the colors posted above and use your imagination, please. The management apologizes again for the inconvenience…

Anyway. It’s been a very good first week for our medical practice, and we’re celebrating the beginning of something wonderful. We’re tired, but exhilarated.

The backstory is that my husband and and two other naturopathic doctors left another practice to go out on their own, and we opened our new clinic in a snowstorm this past Monday. Monday was supposed to be unpacking and chair, exam table, and equipment building day, but we actually saw a patient that afternoon, and it hasn’t stopped.

It’s been long hours, constant phone calls and scheduling, boxes arriving and being unpacked, patients coming for appointments, or wanting to tour our clinic – mostly after hearing about the place from other patients – and there has been a real and palpable sense of excitement.

The “other place,” as patients referred to it, was  – and still is – run badly and with no heart, flexibility or possibility of communication. Patients were unhappy at the bad energy and tension (and being given pills they didn’t need because the pills’ expiry date was approaching), and they had mostly stopped going;  most of them were only seeing Bob and his partner, and then when Bob and Jay “up and left” as it’s being described,  their patients starting searching on the internet. As of 6 PM on Bob’s last day, we had ads running on Google with their names, the name of the new practice, and messages started piling up in the phone system.  After they hear my greeting on the  phone, so many people practically shout, “I found you!”

My initial role has been that of the front desk; answering phone calls, scheduling appointments, confirming appointments, scanning in patient charts, setting up cleaning services, signing for and helping to unload deliveries, filling patients’ supplement orders, mastering quickbooks and taking payments, and  faxing over patient record transfer authorizations to Bob’s previous employer on behalf of scores of patients…

At some point when we get busy enough, we will hire on full time front desk staff, but until that time, I am holding down that part of the fort. We’ll soon hire much in demand therapy and colonic nurses – we’ve received applications and resumes from virtually everyone over at the “other” place – but our benefits/HR company will handle all the interviewing and resume assessment for those  positions (medicinary staff, nurses, FT front desk) we’ll be filling when we have the financial wherewithal.

I am happy to say that if things keep accelerating the way this first week has gone, that might be soon.

SO much yay.

Ten Exclamatory Things Wednesday

1. Our build site got its certificate of occupancy on Monday! After only 9 weeks of construction, our brand new, state of the art clinic is move-in ready and has passed all its inspections.

2. With walls painted low-VOC Natura Benjamin Moore Peach stone throughout, the clinic’s walls are soothing, cheery, and neutral enough to not have to learn to ignore. It’s the same color as my kitchen and it perfect in the clinic as it looks great in whatever light, from fluorescent to daylight. On two walls – one on the waiting area, and one behind the reception desk – we have natural clay from American Clay in a color they call maunaloa. It’s textured and vibrant, and it’s gorgeous! I am pretty sure I will regularly catch people feeling up the wall.

4. On Thursday morning, my kids get on the bus at 7, and  Bob will head over to Sphyrnatude’s house, and then they will go and get a 24 foot rental truck to do some MAJOR schlepping. With 2 waiting areas, a lounge and an IV therapy area, doctors’ offices, treatment rooms and a staff room, we’re talking chairs… like, 35! We also have pieces of equipment, towels, slippers, water bottles, supplements, an exercise bike for the oxygen therapy, and I am certain I have forgotten many things over the 4 months things have been accumulating both in my basement and over at ‘Tudes’ house.

4. My DH has been planning, designing, obsessing, and dreaming about this now dream come true clinical space for many months. and while I recognize how effusive I am being, when I publish photos of the clinic AFTER the big move, you will see what I mean!

4. Within a five-minute drive of the new clinic, there is a Lowe’s and a Target; we anticipate setting up the furniture, and then popping over to get lists and lists of essentials. These include trays for tea containers, baskets for the sundry feminine items each bathroom will stock, plants, garbage cans, toilet brushes, mops, cleaning supplies, etc.

5. I have answering phones when patients call to make appointments and am thrilled to say we are booked starting next Tuesday afternoon onward a few weeks.

6. This means patients will begin showing up for all sorts of therapies and treatments in a mere 5 days. Guess what we will all be doing all weekend, through MLK day!?

7. It’s been a lot of fun to speak with patients, and have particularly enjoyed the conversational calisthenics involved in NOT comparing Bob’s previous employer and their institute with ours. Everything is framed positively, looking forward, with emphasis on our philosophy and our care for patients. I do listen as patients vent – and they vent a LOT – but I demur, active listen, and if asked directly, mostly respond with a variety of things on the lines of how wonderful fresh starts are, how it was time for these three doctors to go out on their own, how excited they all are to help patients in the best, fully congruent way they know how. It’s that dance between what I am saying and carefully NOT saying that I find so exhilarating.

8. Exhausting, too. I must have spoken to upwards of fifty patients over the last few days, but I love talking with people, so it’s been great fun. Some are more fragile cancer patients, so I have to be mindful of speaking slower, calmer, in the most soothing tones I have. Others are peppy, humour-filled folks who just want to get on the books with the doctors they love, who just want to chat. I am getting the feel for directing a conversation, making sure I stay in control, and using some of the same patter, the same phrases to keep things moving. I now have new appreciation for the level of skills involved in good customer service! We’re fortunate that some of the excellent front desk personnel that were employees and trained by the other place years ago are coming onbard to help train me, and to work alongside me.  I’m very excited!

9. I warned you about the exclamations! Hope they’re not crazymaking, but I am unable to think in anything but exclamatory superlatives at the moment. My face hurts from all the smiling I’m doing. Holy crap, eh?

10. It’s been years – somewhere on the lines of 13 – since I worked full time, and I anticipate some frustrations and resentment with not having as much time to myself as I have grown accustomed to having. My kids are used to my being home at or very near to the time they come home from school, so it will be an adjustment to having them as they learn to be more self-disciplined and more proactive with me not there.  That said, we anticipate organizing shifts as soon as we can, so I can be home by at least 4:30. Boo is ready to step up and help prepare dinner, and while Monkey isn’t really keen on the idea, she has grudgingly agreed to get over her indolent twelveness, and help out. I am quite certain this will be a growth curve for them as well!

New Year’s Benediction

I know I am a little late with this, but my sister sent this to me and I absolutely love it. It’s by the writer Neil Gaiman.

“May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art – write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. May your coming year be a wonderful thing in which you dream both dangerously and outrageously. I hope it’ll make something that didn’t exist before you made it, that you will be loved and you will be liked and you will have people to love and to like in return. And most importantly, because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now – I hope that you will, when you need to be, be wise and that you will always be kind. And I hope that somewhere in the next year you surprise yourself.”

I think it’s going to be a marvelous year. Let’s make sure that it IS.

Tissue Archeology

Over the course of our 17 years together, my beloved and I have shared many things.

The cold that is currently plaguing me, that has me devising ways to have tissue in a sort of holster so I don’t have to constantly go back to wherever the box happens to be, is one of those things.  His time with this cold was just following his resignation from him job (so not a surprise), and he got whalloped by this thing, with fever, insomnia, exhaustion, sneezing, coughing, etc. During this time, he of course, breathed all over me. He even sneezed on me in his sleep.  Darling man.

Now that this snotvirus has taken up residence in ME, I have begun layering my tissues in the office garbage can over his. So far, his layer is much bigger but then again, I am only on day 3 of this thing.  Feh.

As I blow my nose, I try not to think about the Kleenex controversy: they are chopping down Canada’s Boreal forests for the right woods to make their tissues… So, I use them sparingly, and am trying to retrain myself to use hankies, but it’s going to take time. Meanwhile, pass the pretty blue box of nose shredders, will you?

Atchooooooooooooo.

Ten Things I can FINALLY talk about

For a very long time, I have been sitting on a secret, and on the stress and excitement associated with the long-term (18 months) start-up endeavours of a new business. It is now full steam ahead.

1. As of 6 PM on Friday, my darling husband will cease to be employed at the naturopathic clinic where he has worked as an ND/Acupuncturist for nearly 11 years.

2. Bob’s leaving was a long time coming, with his work environment  made toxic and untenable, with a side of the complete lack of any kind of opportunity to grow professionally. He’s been dreadfully unhappy and unfulfilled professionally for years.

3. In March, Bob was cut down a day and 20% of his salary because he refused to compromise himself ethically by supporting the management’s implementation of policies intended to financially gouge the patients, not support their health.

4. This was the final straw. Bob then began investigating a variety of avenues for funding to forge out on his own, and the Universe smiled. There is of course risk, but we’re confident of our success based on our knowledge, integrity, flexibility and the relationships we have with current patients, and the ones we’ll forge with future patients. Bob has been keeping this all a secret – never breathed a word of it to anyone, patient or staff  – for the 8 months since the word go.

5. We will be officially opening on the 25th of January in a new, 4500 square foot clinic. The build out is nearly complete, and I’ve been fielding calls from vendors about the delivery of large appliances, desks, medical supplies, etc..

6. I’ll be the front desk/receptionist for the first while, and then I will be the office manager/outreach/patient education/everything person afterward. We’ve got 3 docs, a massage therapist, and a ton of therapies. It’s all going to be fantastic.

7. We have stainless steel water bottles for patients to use, reverse osmosis water available with house blends of herbal teas, public wifi and a whole office air filtration system that can kill 99% of all biological and chemical contaminants.

8. What kinds of magazines do you like to read in docs’ offices? I am thinking of the standards: Time, Newsweek, People (gah), Body and Soul, Home and Garden, Yoga?  and I need suggestions! Help a girl out, will you?

9. Some of the parties involved – the leasing company keen on attracting other tenants, and the builders keen to showcase their talents – and we are going to throw a huge open house in March. To that end, I will be working on marketing materials, and yeah, English teacher, but I have some great partners and we have so much going on.

10. We are so excited. For now, it’s start up time, with boxes to unpack, chairs and tables to assemble, and lists and lists of things to do.  It’s a brand new day.

Have a happy Tuesday!

But Mom, why NOT the dark and depressing one?

My ninth grader has to memorize a poem for a national freshman poetry contest. She and the rest of her grade nationwide will then recite them in class, compete within the school and then potentially participate in a national contest.

Boo likes to write poetry and is drawn, therefore, to similar angsty stuff. Most of the poetry to which she was drawn for possible recitation material was the sort that appeared to be -like the one below – written full of loquacious and lurid loneliness by a man apparently on the way to kill himself  …

I intervened.

THIS is the one she had chosen:

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades

in love and death’s oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
And e’en the dearest–that I loved the best–
Are strange–nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil’d or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below–above the vaulted sky.

John Clare

I wielded my maternal prerogative and decided that she was missing something; this was a perfect opportunity to introduce a poet she would not otherwise have known. One who isn’t necessarily bound to rhyming lines and dreadful pain. How about one who has some fun. How about Billy Collins? How, specifically, about something that would amuse, educate AND inspire?

How about this one?

The Death of Allegory

I am wondering what became of all those tall abstractions
that used to pose, robed and statuesque, in paintings
and parade about on the pages of the Renaissance
displaying their capital letters like license plates.

Truth cantering on a powerful horse,
Chastity, eyes downcast, fluttering with veils.
Each one was marble come to life, a thought in a coat,
Courtesy bowing with one hand always extended,

Villainy sharpening an instrument behind a wall,
Reason with her crown and Constancy alert behind a helm.
They are all retired now, consigned to a Florida for tropes.
Justice is there standing by an open refrigerator.

Valor lies in bed listening to the rain.
Even Death has nothing to do but mend his cloak and hood,
and all their props are locked away in a warehouse,
hourglasses, globes, blindfolds and shackles.

Even if you called them back, there are no places left
for them to go, no Garden of Mirth or Bower of Bliss.
The Valley of Forgiveness is lined with condominiums
and chain saws are howling in the Forest of Despair.

Here on the table near the window is a vase of peonies
and next to it black binoculars and a money clip,
exactly the kind of thing we now prefer,
objects that sit quietly on a line in lower case,

themselves and nothing more, a wheelbarrow,
an empty mailbox, a razor blade resting in a glass ashtray.
As for the others, the great ideas on horseback
and the long-haired virtues in embroidered gowns,

it looks as though they have traveled down
that road you see on the final page of storybooks,
the one that winds up a green hillside and disappears
into an unseen valley where everyone must be fast asleep.

Boo loved it, loveS it, and is now reasonably hard at work memorizing and figuring out how best to recite it. I will help her when she’s got the poem in her head firmly, but I am so excited that she’s enjoying this poem. I am also thrilled she’s enjoying the poet; I have an anthology of his works and I delighted to report she’s been reading through and smiling to herself.