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and last updated March 31st., 2001.
WELCOME TO MY DAY..
IT IS NICE TO HAVE YOU SHARE IT WITH ME...
The idea of March are come, said Caesar.
Ever since I first became a mother on a March 23rd., I have found March to be my "bad time of the year", an uneasy, unsettled month, as though my brain has somehow never managed to come to grips with the lifestyle changes that time wrought to my body and my life.
To put it simply, apart from growing out the layers in my hair, never an easy time, and trying to cope with a newly crowned tooth that made me think of Dracula every time I looked in the mirror, I had a terrible, accident-prone month, and I have done a lot of thinking about the WHY of it. I was never clumsy as a child, not even before eyetesting at 15 revealed gross astigmatism and myopia. No, I have always been fairly light on my feet and agile.
So I have come to the conclusion that the blame for my terrible month can be laid fairly and squarely at the foot of..COMPUTERS!!
Every car accident I have ever had has been in March. Every bad decision I have ever made has been in March.
But March 2001, will have to go down as my month for, as my grandmother would say, "Being in The Wars!"
And I CANNOT allow myself to consider the idea that my March travails could be in any way connected with that February birthday I described to you last month!
It began the first week of March, with the office computer, which I had been nursing along with a circa 1996, 28,800 bps modem determined to connect only at 14,400- which computer decided it had a hiccup somewhere in its registry digestive system and kept pulling blue screens for me, and finally deciding it would never PRINT again!. I worked on it one whole afternoon, and into the evening, between ICQ-hosted arguments with my New York Academic friend , and at last, after the doctors had kept us working late to fill after-hours prescriptions, I decided to take it home, where the working conditions are much less cramped and much less stressful.
But the husband chucked a wobbly! Since the landlord began turning the old shopping center into an upmarket mall, with subsequent loss of customer parking spaces, the husband has been parking well away from the shop, and of COURSE he didn't fancy dismantling a CPU and carrying it all the way to his car, even though I offered to use MY car, (which tends to have room in the boot/trunk, which his never does), which was parked close to the street door, and do all the dismantling and carrying , myself.
I did point out that I could do the work much easier and faster if not corkscrewed into a tiny angled office where one cannot get at the back of the computers, but he was fairly fixed in his need for his dinner and his relaxed evening, and quite sure there should be no more time expended on computers that particular evening.
So being a normally- reacting wife, albeit his employee, I took him at his word, picked up my bag and flounced off to my car, leaving him to shut up the shop..
And was driving home quite distressed, trying to work out how I was going to work on that computer, next day, when I already had a fairly full schedule of sales conferences and reps' calls. And I was driving the same way home I always go-- a route I travel ten times most weeks, but it was dark, and later than normal, and I was tired and hungry..and all the computer's fault.
And I cleaned up another car at the first city intersection, an oncoming car belonging to one of our customers, and laughed hysterically when I realised she had the Australianized version of the fairly unusual family name of that New York friend I had just finished arguing with. If I had to run into one woman in all of Australia it had to be a relative of HIS???
As car accidents go, it was minor, but the experience still shakes one up pretty badly, especially with the husband coming along later, to drive through the mangled bits of my car, and gloomily pronounce it a total loss.
And, aches and pains and necessary phonecalls notwithstanding, I still had to cook dinner that night and work on that computer next day, and did manage to get it working, after a fashion. But that day ,the computer we had given our daughter for her family broke down. So I brought them both home, and worked on them for three days and two nights, but the kids' one was quite, quite hopelessly inadequate for the jobs they were wanting it to do, and our guru to whom we finally took it said it couldn't really be upgraded any further, so Doug and I decided to hang the expense and get the kids a new one and say that was the daughter's birthday present.
But when we went to collect the new computer and printer, was found the CPU was bigger and faster than anything else we had, but that the husband had forgotten to include a zip drive or modem in his specifications, so we decided to do a bit more buying, and a lot of swapping around to produce four good, online computers from the five assorted sets of components. And so the computers took another week of my March as I formatted, configured and installed and copied and compared. And because I had no car, and no idea if mine was to be repaired or not, I was quite dependent on the husband for transport, and for the acquisition of any parts I needed, and with the guru 30 miles away, I tended to have to fall back on my own resources, and to have to OBEY a lot, even when when the husband refused to allow me to utilize master/slave disk copying , since he couldn't "see how it could work", and was sure I could manage to transfer 10gig of data using an external zip drive!
But I worked it all out, slowly and without too much screaming at each other at home or at work.
And which will leave the much-loved Astra the only "only child" in our family. Better do more for her than just read picture books, Chris!!
So I was really on the downward run next day , with fully loaded, software-ready working computers installed on the grandchildrens' desk, on the husband's desk, on MY desk, and with only the Email adddress book and folders list to be transferred to the up and running Centauri on my office desk but that one, having been the husband's(unused) private computer, was fighting me every step of the way!!
And I was printing out the rosters while trying to get help with the Address Book problem from my New York friend, usually able to assist, but who has been so very often unavailable of late, and so I wasn't as careful about putting the guillotine back up in its (new) spot on the shelves as I might have been had I not been anxious to make use of his available time. And so the guillotine fell down onto my left arm and VERY badly bruised it!
But then the husband phoned the repair shop and they said they HAD been instructed to repair the car and that it was almost finished. So I figured the worst of March was behind me!
And the next day was Friday, a day I used not to have to work after 2pm since we had a locum in for Friday afternoons, but since she is now working on London for a spell, I , without independent wheels , had to cool my heels the whole day, and I was so enjoying playing with the new, faster machine, and chatting to a friend on ICQ, that I was later reminding the husband about calling the repair shop than I should have been, and they said it was ready for me to collect on payment of the $400 excess but they would only be there to receive me for another three quarters of an hour. And it is a twentyfive minute drive. And I had to walk all the way to the husband's precious car, work out how to undo his strange steering lock assembly, and then negotiate the city approaches at peak period, not having driven since my accident. ! And I had to HURRY!
So I guess I was a bit stressed when I finally cleared the bumper-to-bumper, first-gear only lines of traffic and parked the car and ran across the road with fifteen minutes to spare!.....
And FELL into their steel and stone doorway...fell UP an old bluestone step and INTO their foyer, and tried to save myself but failed dismally, and hit everything within reach as I went down!
I managed to get up by myself, and dissuade their office staff from brushing me down, (Ouch!!), and convince them I wasn't going to sue, but I was hurting a LOT, and I knew I had done some damage. But I was wearing long trousers and long-sleeved red uniform shirt, and figured it couldn't LOOK too bad, so I worked at maintaining some dignity and composure, and when they brought the car around I thanked them, and took their advice that where I had parked Doug's car was not a good place to leave it after dark, so I decided to drive IT back to Bannockburn, and have him bring me back to collect MY car, later, since if one were to be stolen, better to be mine, being older and now much-repaired
So I drove back very carefully and VERY painfully, to the shop, and tended to those abrasions we could decently handle in semi-public, and we tried to work out how I could manage to cut, graze and bruise the right hip, the right forearem, (that made BOTH arms, now), the right cheekbone and the left knee!!
But at least I now looked as though I had been in a car accident!
And I figured, with March now almost over, that had to be ALL!
When I climbed out of Doug's car and into my car to drive it home from the now-deserted streetside park outside the repairshop, I found I had no taillights and no dashboard lights, and though Doug worked manfully, on all fours, on the road in the dark, to replace fuses, each blew again at once, and that happened, too, to the Roadside Service mechanic, who finally located the under-bonnet wires touching in an unfinished plugging and taped them free of each other and put in yet another fuse so I could drive painfully home . And I still had dinner to cook!
And I was so very sore and stiff after standing around on the roadside for an hour and a half that I ignored the RICE method of treating soft tissue injuries and I ran myself my first hot bath since last April in New Orleans and soaked in it. But it was still a long and painful night with the supplied analgesics not helping much.
And that still wasn't the end of it, for of course I could not really take possession of the car in that condition, those repairs being guaranteed for two years. I had to phone the repair shop before work next morning, and it all had to start again after the weekend, with the car back in the workshop and transport being a problem!
What April holds for me I honestly hate to imagine!
But maybe, I'm thinking now, I was just not meant to fly, this April. I mean, someone who cannot bend her left knee happily, and who screams whenever anything touches her right or left forearm has no place in economy class on a LONG flight, especially when partial to the aisle seat!!
But on a cheerful note, our new pharmacy uniforms are proving a real hit and we all feel and look very cheerful in our red shirts.
But by then it would be April, April Fool's Day, in fact, with the horrible March month being gone for ever!
I HAD been upset when my New York friend had gone into overdrive injured protest- mode about my plans to attend the same April conference as he. I had gone to some trouble to organize a new travel-wardrobe, great new clothes I was looking forward to wearing, as much as to the break overseas, and it had been with GREAT reluctance and a good deal of bitterness that I had cancelled my bargain-priced flight to Los Angeles, and the free, hardwon Seattle accommodation!
And with my track record for March, I am not really sure the Airlines would welcome me! Or that I should even venture out of doors at all!
Hmm. I must make VERY sure not to go, dressed for work, near any CATTLE while I am accident-prone, hey?
Though I'm inclined to think that after fighting a strongwilled New York friend, five computers , a bigger car than mine, and a hostile doorway, facing up to a bull might an easier option.
Love to everyone ,and everyone on our side!
-from
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January 2nd., 2001. December 23rd ., 2000: December 3rd ., 2000: November 20th ., 2000: November 7th ., 2000: October 23rd ., 2000: October 6th ., 2000: September 19th ., 2000: September 5th ., 2000: August 14th ., 2000: July 30th., 2000: July 8th., 2000: June 12th., 2000: May 19th., 2000:
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©Robin Knight, 2001.
