2006-10-23

Monday is always a bit of a challenge for me, as I am conditioned by a lifetime of working weekdays to relishing the weekends and wishing they would not end! I slept deliciously late and barely got my Camelot Journal entry written before time to awaken Mick.

After our Morning Offering, Jim bundled up in the cold morning air and set off to mow. I made some telephone calls – accountant, lawyer, doctor and yet another doctor – and met Gary downstairs. It was my morning to get a new cel phone. I have had my old one so long that they are discontinuing not only the phone but the kind of net from which it works. I received a threatening letter from the Cingular people indicating that I MUST buy a new telephone. Am I to be esteemed for my thrift or regarded with pity for having one phone long enough for it to become obsolete?

The morning was spent on sifting through a welter of plans and telephone models and this's and that’s. When we had settled on a new phone, a new plan and the accessories of charger and ear piece, a whole new challenge awaited. Gary and I sat through an irritating, brash, in-your-face presentation that lasted so long my hair grew seven inches, on bundling. You can bundle your telephone, DSL and cel phone charges together. It sounds so cozy, but so useless!

It took perseverance to resist the salesman’s onslaught, but I kept saying that without seeing our billing details, we could not discuss changing BellSouth plans. Eventually, the representative yielded to Gary and me, and retrieved all our billing details from a computer terminal somewhere in the ethers. By lunchtime, we had managed to agree to a bundling plan that looked to be cheaper than our present, disconnected plans. We shall see, on that one!

As we left, the rep discovered that we had a satellite dish, and he wished to bundle that too! However he did not have access to the details of our dish billing, so we managed to walk out of the store, free at last! I never met a more aggressive salesman. This is not intended as a compliment!

I was just finished with lunch and I’d just said to Gary that I was finally going to get some work done upstairs when we got visitors – Jim’s old neighbor from his time in Marion County, KY, in the seventies, his mother and his daughter had come in for a rare trip to the big city. And Jim, of course, was off working, so I was the designated hostess. Work went begging while I practiced the homely art of hospitality.

They left for a Mexican feast just as I needed to leave for a trip to the Hubbard Clinic, where they are treating my tummy woes. I was again tested for nitrites and again found to have too many – whatever that is and whatever that means – and was given yet another prescription to take until Thursday, when I go back to the clinic for my pre-operative lab tests. I will have a hospital procedure on November 2nd to confirm the diagnosis of interstitial cystitis.

Gads! In between glomerulo-nephritis and interstitial cystitis, both of which conditions I have had in my time, I think there’s a song in it.

I got the multisyllabic blues,
Down to my shoes!
With the interstitial cystitis
And glomerulo-nephritis,
My tongue is tied in lots of knots,
My nouns are stuck in chimney pots
And as for my ills I choose
Them right now to lose!
Yeah, yeah!

Well, maybe not such a great song! But it has sole.

Wending my way through the sober autumn mist and chill, not to mention the rush hour traffic which makes driving such a joy, I got home in time to sit down with the books and enter a bit of data – which felt great as it was my only legitimate work of the day – and got L/L Research and Jim’s Lawn Service up to date before time to interview our first two bookkeeping candidates. We had two good ones.

The first, Marianne, was a crackerjack bookkeeper who did books for her and her husband’s small business and two other businesses as well. Her kids are in high school and college and she is looking for a few more weekly hours of work as the nest empties.

The second, Cheryl, was a grandmother who had been doing books since 1981 and QuickBooks since the early nineties. Her qualifications were the best. Her personality was delightful. However, her husband is minister of music at a Baptist church and Jim and I both felt that there may be a problem with our channeling. We are in the Bible belt here, and in some quarters what we do is considered “of the devil”. I imagine we will pass up Cheryl despite her stellar record. The subtler energies of judgment and fear are vibrations we would like to keep far from L/L Research!

With our working day over at last, we enjoyed supper, conversation, the kitties and the Gaia Meditation, with Jim offering the prayer at the ending. We greeted Carmen as she came in late from work and all of us sought an early bed.