Yellow
Well, the tour I did yesterday went well. At least, I think it did. Nobody complained, and that’s at least a 90% success rating in my book. One unfortunate problem I ran into had to do with the facemask I now need to wear in many areas of the company I work for.
I’m immunosuppressed, so I have to be a little aware of what I’m exposing myself to. It’s mostly a matter of washing my hands after everything, something I cab hardly refer to as a “hardship”. I also need to be aware of dust and droplets in the air, though. My lungs will not clean themselves out as efficiently as they once did now that I’m on immunosuppressants, and so there are many areas of my company that I have to wear a simple mask-type respirator in. The same areas of the company that have the most dust and spray have the loudest equipment in them (big surprise, I know). It means that I can be very hard to hear when I’m talking to someone in those rooms. Between the noise and my facemask, people often have no clue what I’m saying.
Hell, they often don’t have a clue what I’m saying when I’m perfectly audible.
That did pose problems on the tour, and at one point our Very Distinguished Tourist asked if I could take the mask off. This led to a discussion of immunosuppression, transplants, and drug related stuff. He was fascinated, more so than by the tour itself, ironically. He also hadn’t been told I was the company veterinarian when they said I was going to lead this part of the tour, and that rather floored him a bit. He had a hard time wrapping his mind around the “VMD” thing.
Very Distinguished Tourist: Oh! So you’re a DVM!
Me: Well, almost. I’m a VMD. Same thing, really.
VDT: Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, isn’t it? [insert quizzicle expression]
Me: Yup, for the DVM types. I went to Penn, and Penn always has to be different for some reason. They give it out in Latin – Veterinariae Medicinae Doctoris. (I actually said “veterinarius medicinus doctorus” as a joke, but in retrospect that may have been wasted on the audience).
VDT: So why do they do that?
Me: It’s a point of pride with them. One of those Ivy League, distinguished, more like a “real doctor” type thing. Other vets tease us for that, and call Penn grads “Pennwees”, because we have a reputation for saying “At Penn we always …” .
VDT: Oh. (You can see at this point he’s considering whether or not to take a step back from the madwoman)
Me: Don’t worry. Even with the VMD thing, I’m mostly harmless.
What can I say? They told us to defend our VMD with pride when we graduated. They even gave us a big pep talk during graduation on what having a VMD really meant. So I defended my school’s honor and VMD. I really must see if I can’t find better validation as to why I’m a VMD though, rather than a DVM.
Last night’s dinner came out wonderfully, in my humble opinion. I’d forgotten how much I liked corned beef; it had been so long since I’d last made any. Rather than slice it down, The Socialist showed me how to tease the meat apart, something I’ve since learned is called “pulling” the meat. It made for a nice, homey looking meal on the plate. I had forgotten that I’d run out of the brown mustard with horseradish that I’m so fond of, so the meal wasn’t technically complete, but the meat was so good that I really didn’t miss the condiment that much. I’d steamed the cabbage above the beef in the crock-pot, and that came out really good as well.
Corned beef: It’s not just for St. Paddy’s Day anymore.
I woke up to a thin layer of snow covering my car this morning. It was unexpected, and a real mood wrecker. Not that my mood was worth preserving, to be honest. I work up short of sleep and grumpy at the cats, who I have to now baby-sit while they eat their morning gruel. The Grey Menace has decided she likes Warrior Princess’s food better, so she wanders off after a few bites to try and horn into her dish. While GM lives in hope, Clueless attempts to sneak over and steal GM’s more high-powered meal. Clueless is living on Senior Diet, and resents it.
This musical-dinner-bowl thing seems only to happen at breakfast time. I think the cats are simply too hungry at other feeding times to worry about taste and consistency. But felid efficiency seems to be down in the am hours, and they’re more content to jockey for position, turning me into the cat food equivalent of the Soup Nazi.
But I digress. I was writing about snow. Which fell Tuesday, fell again last night, and will apparently fall again later today. Helping me through some of this are the flowers that arrived on Tuesday, care of my company’s annual Daffodil Days fundraiser for cancer research. This year I purchased two bunches, which arrived Tuesday in full, not-quite-ready-to-burst bud. Wednesday morning I came into my office to be greeted by the fulsome odor of freshly opened daffodils. Huge, vibrant yellow, cheery in the too-bright-sunlight-reflecting-off-the-snow-coming-in-through-the-window daffodils.
When my flowers arrived, the Minion was in my office with me, droning on about his current project of house hunting, and how his wife had fallen in love with a house that they can’t buy because it has major problems. I’d mostly tuned him out, and was managing to get things done with only one ear point in his general direction. When I unpacked the first stems and put them into a cobalt blue vase I keep in my office for such occasions, I tuned into his monologue again, and heard telling me yet again how he has to listen to her go on about how she’d arrange her furniture in this house that they aren’t going to buy, and how he’s having a hard time getting through to her. On impulse, I gave him one of my two bunches of daffodils. “Here,” I said. “Give this to your wife. It sounds like she’s going to be a little depressed, and everybody needs daffodils when it snows.”
I heard she liked them.