Dear everyone,
It’s a sunny Saturday outside, although cool, and Cindy is
busy with autumnal gardening. Robbie is
sleeping indoors on a sun patch. Me? I
went to the gym this morning, then the library, and just finished my typically
unsatisfying Zoom aikido class (which I need to keep my head in the game).
Cindy went to Denver last weekend to visit Lucas. Flying with the plane under 2/3 full was
great. The airports are easy to
negotiate, even if there aren’t many concessions open. While there they did a loop at Roxborough
State Park, visited the Denver Zoo, and the Denver Nature and Science
museum. They also had some spicy tacos,
and had a gluten filled meal with Jacob.
Meanwhile, I cooked for myself - - I made a really easy pasta sauce with
tomato paste, some olive oil, water, Korean gochujang, capers,
and chopped Kalamata
olives. I cooked it with sardines (a
birthday gift from Cindy from a couple of years ago that I am only allowed to
use when she is out of town), but the sauce was fine without them. I also tried my hand at kimchee rice,
which impressed me less.
More importantly, I voted.
Monday was the first day of early voting in DuPage County. I drove 20
minutes west to Downers Grove with my mail-in ballot on hand. The line for early voting was at least a
block long, and I estimated at least a 60-90 minute wait. Luckily, I was able to bypass the line to
deposit my ballot in the collection box. I hope my vote gets counted! Yesterday I was listening to an NPR interview
of three voters in Pueblo, Colorado. One
man was a union organizer who unsurprisingly was a Biden supporter. The second man was a Mexican Jew, important
in his synagogue (I don’t remember if he was a rabbi), who voted for Trump, and
continued to support him because ‘he brought peace to the Middle East’. My eyes are rolling, but I get it. However, the third interviewee was a woman
who ran some sort of social services organization. In all of 2019 she had about 8000 client
families. This year, through September,
the number was already more than double.
Yet, she was a Trump supporter, because she didn’t want the US to become
a ‘socialist’ country. Can you say
cognitive dissonance? I guess she was
sticking to her beliefs, since I surmise a lot of people become Democrats when
they want something from government, and Republicans when they are afraid government
is going to take something (i.e. money or ‘rights’) away, or shove ‘burdensome’
regulations onto them, but I would imagine most of her budget comes from
Federal or State sources. If that’s not ‘socialism’,
I don’t know what is.
The hospital turned over to a new hospital information
system (EPIC) last week. I didn’t have
any issues, because I had already been using it for some months. It is much better than what we had before.
However, this Thursday, when I was on call, the whole system went down in the
early morning (probably because we had some massive thunderstorms during the
night before). Because of this, all of
the surgeries were delayed for about four hours (all of the anesthesia charting
runs through EPIC). Consequently, I was
at work until about 8 PM. Ugh. I won’t
miss that part of the job at all.
I haven’t read anything that I am very excited about over
the last couple of weeks except for the Glass
Hotel, by Emily St John Mandel. It
has many of the same characters as in Station Eleven, but in
a different (more ‘realistic’) world. I’m
looking forward to our book club meeting next Sunday!
Love, H
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