more normal than not

I had another weird dream last night.

We were at the hospital and Jenny was having another baby.

Or maybe she was having one of the other babies.

She just has each of the babies once…so it was confusing….but dreams flip back and forth some, so there’s no telling what was really going on.

In the dream, the staff was hurrying us out of the hospital….like they’d do at the Chinese Buffet when they were getting ready to switch over to the dinner menu.

They kept saying, “You better hurry…you’ll be charged for another day if you don’t get out of here in half an hour…”

We were hurrying.

In the meantime, I heard a skuffle and went out into the hall.

In the hallway, there was the older man with the shaky hands and the bad attitude who’d given Jenny her epidural, and he was fighting off this “secret agenty” looking guy who was pulling a big knife out of his sock.

I yelled, “HEY!!! YOU CAN’T DO THAT!!! THIS IS A HOSPITAL!!!”….and I grabbed the assassin and started swinging him against the wall until he stopped attacking.

Then I made the mistake of asking the crotchety old dude, “Where’s the best place to get a vasectomy?”

I don’t know why that was on my mind.

He said, “come on….” and soon we were on a bus to Columbia, SC.

“This doesn’t seem right…” I said. “We shouldn’t leave Jenny so soon…we need to go back…”

“She won’t miss you” he said…and then went back to trimming his fingernails.

When we got to Columbia, we all got off the full bus and shuffled into a clinic that looked like something out of a science fiction movie, all white and brightly lit, the staff all in brilliant white, endless rooms and total silence.

“I would have taken a better shower if I knew that I was going to…” I said.

“Shhhhhhhh.” said the staff “There will be time for questions later…”

They began hooking us up to a bunch of sensors that came down out of the ceiling like tentacles from the bottom of an octopus….and started getting us ready for the procedure.

“You know why I’m here, right!??!” I asked.

“Shhhhhhhh…there’ll be a time for that later…for now, just relax…you’re in good hands…”

“I really do need to get back to Jenny…I think that this was a mistake…”

“Shhhhhhhh…there’ll be a time for that later…for now, just relax…you’re in good hands…” they said again.

This was feeling more and more like a mistake. I wished that I’d never talked to that old dude. This was a lot scarier than I ever imagined the “V” word being…even in my wildest dreams.

I woke up before they started really getting into the meat of the situation.

Thank goodness that I can wake up from some of this weirdness.

No wonder Jenny tries to avoid hearing my weird dreams if she can.

I must have some anxieties somewhere deep in my psyche that come out in my dreams?

Who am I kidding? It’s all a pretty shallow pond…anxiety scum just floating on top….ready to skim off if I need some good material next time I fall asleep and feel like dreaming.

I still don’t know about these brightly lit clinics…that seemed pretty scary.

Maybe that’s how the aliens take over?!!! Mass “V” clinics?!!! Maybe that’s what the “V” stood for in that scary old miniseries about the aliens?!!!

Maybe I should dream less?

Jenny took Nate to the doctor yesterday.

She’d taken him to the “doctor” doctor last week for a checkup….but they apparently didn’t have time to check his ears after making her wait for 1 1/2 hours…..so she took him to the doctor at the CVS clinic this time.

We’d never gone to the CVS clinic before…so we didn’t know what to expect.

It was a young doctor…fresh out of Yale Medical School…wearing, what Jenny described as being, “the nicest shoes I’ve ever seen anyone wear”.

A young doctor, fresh out of Yale Medical School….working at the CVS clinic.

That’s not what they show you on the medical dramas…high powered doctors running around the clinic, helping people find the aisle with the root beer barrel candy in between patients.

But you know…that was one of the most satisfying doctor’s visits Jenny has had with Nate.

At the pediatrician’s office, she makes appointments that take 2 hours because they never honor the appointment time.

When you have a new baby along for the ride when you make an appointment for your 4-year-old with a bad ear infection, 2 hours is too long to wait.

When the doctor finally does come in, he or she is usually so far behind that they make you feel like they’re playing catch-up…and you don’t get the “service” you probably deserve.

This guy was different.

Maybe it was that he was so young and fresh out of Medical School.

Jenny said, “Do you ever see that show ‘The Doctors’? Remember that young male doctor on that show? That’s what this guy looked like…”

“Oh…the good looking one…I remember….”

So…it was a young doctor fresh out of Yale Medical School….a good looking young doctor fresh out of Yale Medical School…who was working at the CVS clinic…and doing a really good job.

No wonder it was a pleasant experience.

I don’t know what we expected when she said she was taking Nate to the clinic….maybe some retired Nurse Practitioner in bad Costco shoes.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Costco shoes. I looked at them and thought, “Man…19.98 for a pair of shoes!!! I’m getting some of those next time I need shoes!! That’s so cheap!!!”

But this guy had some really expensive nice shoes…and he was working at the CVS.

I guess that there must be a glut of doctors…or maybe I should stop making judgements about what it means to be working at a CVS.

It’s not a bad thing to be working at a CVS…it’s just that I’d suspect that a dude like that might be working in some kind of big fancy practice somewhere…seeing patients in a beautiful office…raking in the big bucks, living the life of Reilly.

I guess it must go to show you that maybe all my “man grooming” might not be worth the time after all….

(That’s a joke….sometimes I feel like the dog who’s a little too proud of himself for rolling in the roadkill…scruffy to the max.  I’m not really into much of the metro sexual lifestyle…I don’t do a lot of grooming or preening. I’d be the one with the worn out Costco shoes…)

Nate got his ears checked out, got some amoxicillin…and feels a lot better already.

That guy at the CVS really was a well dressed, highly educated….ANGEL!!

Hooray for CVS!!! Hooray for a glut of doctors in a pretty mountain town!!

We went yesterday and looked at some land we might buy that’s a couple of miles from our current home.

We took the whole family this time…our daughter, home from college…our two boys and the new baby, Sparrow.

It was raining some…and may not have been the best day to walk around 7 acres.

It’s a big project to buy a piece of property and remodel an old farmhouse.

I don’t know if we’re really willing to take on another project like that.

Thinking about any changes in our lives takes up a lot of our energy and attention.  When you’re not used to borrowing money, it’s stressful to think about taking on a big loan.

I guess that we’re on a roll, though…new baby and all. Why not really shake it up and buy a big chunk of land with a couple of derelict buildings needing refurbishment? That would help maintain the momentum we seem to be working up….

But today it’s Easter…and all of the small concerns should feel even smaller in the perspective of this miracle and gift.

Thinking about resurrection should be a little more captivating than wondering why the furnace was up in the attic in this old house we looked at.

A miracle is more thought provoking than holes in the roof.

We are distractible. There are things that draw our attention…that hold our attention..that might not be worthy of a second thought.

It’s Easter.

That’s something worth concentrating on…for a while, at least.

One of my co-workers bought a “new” used Jeep a short while back, and when she got to the Post Office on Wednesday, coolant was pouring out of the bottom of the radiator.

Luckily, they were able to tow it to the garage and replace the radiator before she had to run the route.

Unfortunately, one of the hoses that runs from the transmission to the radiator…and then back to the transmission…must not have been put on correctly…or maybe it was just old and it burst…anyway, something happened…and most of her transmission fluid ended up somewhere out on the road about half way into the mail route.

Car trouble can make something that’s pretty consistently routine into a very stressful situation.

My other co-worker went out and helped her finish the route…and she got her Jeep repaired on her day off.

For the most part, I do all my own work on my Jeep…unless it’s really cold, I’ll try and get out and fix it myself. Lately, it’s been cold…so I’ve had someone else do the work…but usually I’ll try and fix stuff myself.

I don’t think it’s a matter of thinking that I can do it better …I think it’s a situation where I just think that I can do it cheaper.

I know that I can do it cheaper.

I’m cheap.

The thing about doing it myself is that I only have myself to blame when something goes wrong.

I’ve had enough things go wrong that I second check all my hose connections and other repairs that I do. I go over my work.

I don’t trust myself.

I know what kind of work I do…so I spend a good amount of time asking myself, “Are you sure? Really?! Remember last time….??”

And that’s its own kind of stress. It can be stressful when you do something that the “experts” are paid to do.

It’s stressful to wonder, no matter how much experience you have or how much research you’ve done, whether you’re “doing it right”…whether you’re doing it like the “pros” (I.E. the guys getting paid to get greasy) would do it.

I listened to “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” a couple of times out on the route…and Robert Pirsig, the author of the book, is a big fan of doing your own “mechanic-ing”.

From what I remember, his take on the situation is that the bulk of mechanics don’t have the right attitude to really do the work the way it should be done…if you were going to have it done “correctly”.

They don’t “focus”.

When you wind up with a big greasy puddle under your car somewhere out on a country road, you have to wonder if that isn’t kind of true.

We’re, for the most part, a pretty distracted bunch of people these days.

We multitask …we hurry from one task to another, sideways glances all the way while we try to see and then cover all our bases.

We don’t slow down.

I’ve got to remember to check all my hose connections next time I’m taking another greasy selfie.

When I learn what an Instagram is, I’ll chronicle my efforts to focus.

Good grief….there’s some crazy stuff out there in the world.

Here’s a video of a group of houses that are inside the Great Smokies that were abandoned.

Reading the comments on YouTube, it looks like the houses were in use up until the early 1990’s, when the leases with the park service were not renewed.

And since the leases were not renewed, the houses were left empty and allowed to degrade.

This is not the house we’re considering buying.

But “left empty and allowed to degrade” sounds familiar.

I think that I must either be naïve enough…or optimistic without reason…to believe that when I see a video like this that I’m looking at something that could be reclaimed.

You can get into a lot of trouble if you have enough optimism without some good solid experience to go along with it.

You can get yourself into some crazy projects if you don’t know enough to quit while you’re ahead.

But I guess that’s how you get experience…you make wacky decisions and then deal with all the consequences of those decisions as you go along.

That’s a picture of the house we’re going to buy….

a smaller house on a bigger piece of land.

That’s the way you do it with a growing family!

I watch videos like this and I realized this morning that it’s kind of like visiting the animal shelter…I always meet animals that I want to bring home with me.

When I watch a video like this, I always see something that I feel would make a great house with a lot of work…and probably a lot of money.

“A lot of money” is the key phrase…it’s key. That’s the part where inexperience is going to get you every time.

It’s like going to the home improvement center and buying four times as many plumbing supplies as you need because you just don’t really know what you need…and you know that you can return what didn’t get used.

You slog through this stuff and the next time you do a project, you only buy twice what you need because you have a new found confidence that you might be getting closer to understanding any of what’s going on.

And then, 20 years on down the line, you remember how much of the process you’ve forgotten so when you go to buy supplies, you’re back at close to square one…buying four times what you need again because you never can tell…

Actually, I’m hyping this stuff up…it’ll be alright, we’ll keep our heads above water…we’ll figure this all out.

This video is not my house.

“My house” is not “my house”…it’s just a house that I want to buy.

I think it sounds like I’m getting ahead of myself.

Maybe your dreams help pull you along….maybe you need something to keep you moving forward? I don’t really know.

I know that I’m a lot less tired at the end of the day when these dreams stay up in my head.

I get a lot less fatigued when my dreams only happen when I’m sleeping.