Good night, Irene

It is so totally bizarre to me that Florida was unaffected by Hurricane Irene while the eastern seaboard and the northeast were hit so hard. Millions of households are without power, my Connecticut sister among them. She has a large tree in her front yard that is creaking, and she fears that the high winds and soggy ground will cause it to fall. I sympathize with her and all the people that are living through this nightmare.

I'm on call this weekend and was called in twice for two cases early this morning. Sleep disruption and crawling out of bed for a STEMI alert is far better than sleep disruption due to weather emergencies. It's times like these that remind me how fortunate I am.

The first STEMI was cancelled not long after my arrival at MMH. The second STEMI wasn't a STEMI, but we didn't know that until after we did the cardiac cath. The EKG wasn't readily available, and the patient described his chest pain as 3/10. After speaking with the patient, it turns out he's constipated and suffered some issues while sitting on the toilet. Don't laugh. Remember Elvis Presley? I asked the doctor if he consulted someone to deal with this patient's problems. He didn't; nor did he order anything to relieve the problem. Oh well, life goes on...and I got to capture the sunrise on my way in.

You have to look hard to see the sun.

It's just to the left of the skinny palm tree below the lowest palm fronds.

In real life, the sun was a large beautiful red ball.

All this call time is interfering with by biking. Although Ralph and I have a plan that allows me to ride, it's still a tough decision to go when on call. To make things more interesting, my last three rides ended with me getting caught in the rain.

Once I decide to go riding, I can't decide to come back home in a timely manner, no matter how black and threatening the skies. I have a tendancy to think that I'll ride out of any storm. Or, I think the storm is much farther east when in fact it's right on top of me. Must be my do-rag is too tight on my head. It constricts the blood vessels to my brain preventing ozygenation and thwarting logical decision making.

I don't know. Would you ride with that sky overhead?

I don't like getting caught in the rain, but since it seems to be happening so often, I don't worry about it any more. I'm just not sure if it's good for my bike or my miniest of laptops, my handy dandy cyclocomputer. Time will tell.

We're having daily events at Carmella's Casa Italiana. And in the mist of all the event planning, our POS went down taking the ability to process credit cards with it. We have use of the back POS; unfortunately, processing credit cards can only be done on the front POS. We expect delivery of a new POS on Monday. The company who handles this equipment matter-of-factly informed Ralph on Wednesday, August 24, that our tech support ran out on July 31. Seems to me an email regarding this would have been nice. So, at the drop of a hat, we had to charge the yearly fee to get tech support with this problem. The alternative was $175.00 per hour for tech support. The hardware and software are so testy from this Naples company, that one doesn't dare NOT have tech support, so of course, I paid the yearly fee.

Our customers have been very understanding about cash only. There's an ATM machine at the convenience store next to us, and some customers have utilized it. We in turn gave them a ticket discount to overset the fees involved with getting cash.

It's funny, when the computer came, everyone had a fit. Then, when it dies, they have a fit. It seems the more things change, the more they stay the same. What do you think?