Blood, Soccer and a Real Date

This week was my fifth instance of hemarthrosis. I had my knee drained on Thursday. This time it was the woman DO that took care of me. She and the RN did a great job—much better than any of the men. The RN would smoosh the blood pockets around so the doctor could suck it up with needle. They got a world record 72cc’s out of there. This is the best I’ve felt after one of these incidents all year. I will meet with the surgeon next week to set a date for arthroscopic surgery in June. I was thinking I would wait until later in the summer, but I don’t want to go through this again. My own doctor is afraid of infection, and the more often they stick me, the more likely it is that I’ll get an infection. So, I hope the surgery clears all this up.

Today I had the honor of attending our grandson’s first soccer game. We got sprinkled on a little bit, but soccer goes on regardless of the weather. Max’s approach to the game was much like his attitude toward t-ball last summer. He always seemed to be facing in the wrong direction, was not interested in “hustling” anywhere, and would converse with the opposing team at odd moments. If they kept score, his team won 9-0. Max made contact with the ball at least twice. One time their leading scorer got close to the goal and then let Max have a go, though to no avail. Max played alternating quarters, today it was the first and third. He spent his sideline time curled up on his mom’s lap under her umbrella.

At work, I’ve been training a new person who we thought had some experience in the sort of thing we do, but she just looks so puzzled every time I explain things. Finally a little light went on this past week, so maybe I managed to break through. This Social Work professor sent me 45 resumes to review before I speak to two of his classes next week, so I gave the new person a healthy stack and showed her what I wanted her to do. We’ll see how she did next week.

It looks like we will be able to hire two more people finally, though they are not the ones we originally wanted. One is the wife of a political science professor that I see in the locker room all the time. The other is a woman who did an internship in our office working for the director, and I never did interview her—for some reason I was out of the office the day she came in. I still have to train these two, but they may be arriving when we are gone in Ireland. We should have been able to fill these vacancies back in January, so I thought we would be well on our way by now.

Kathy and I went out on a date today to celebrate our 37th wedding anniversary that happened on April 24th. We went to Ruby Tuesday since we liked the takeout we had had from there, but going inside the restaurant did not work out. I had some chicken and crab meat, but there was something “fishy” about the crab meat and I wound up sending it back, thanks to Kathy who agreed that something was wrong. Guess I’ll stick to hamburgers. After we left the restaurant we stopped in a new park/reservation area that we had not seen before. A few years ago some people stopped the area from being developed and got the city to keep the wetlands and build hiking trails in the woods. It’s really a great refuge for people and animals—a little bit of country in the middle of the city. We sat for a while and listened to the birds and watched them swoop around a pond—better than HD TV.