Zak calls it the Accident Room.

I call it the Emergency room, and at Group Health, where I went for Medical care in Seattle, they called it Urgent Care.

Tonight I called my new doctor here in Boston. Her office closed at 5pm, so I get the choices of Urgent care or Medical advice. At Group Health, the Medical advice nurses could do triage and then make an appointment for you the next day because they keep their appointments in a database. At my new doctor, the woman on the phone couldn't make me an appointment, or tell me if any will be available because "They closed the book at 5." She said that tomorrow I could go to Urgent care. I told her my concern. Turns out, at this new hospital, "Urgent Care" means which ever doctor doesn't have an appointment will come and see you instead of your doctor OR the emergency room, or accident room, or whatever. It also turns out that they write appointments in a book instead of entering them into a spreadsheet which is really wierd. That only took a couple of minutes, but it sure was confusing.

Good Housekeeping

Today I finally continued the unpacking project known as the early part of November. I abandoned this project to celebrate some holidays and spend time with people and work at a newish job, and generally live in a day to day way. The entire time, though, Z and I were aware that certain parts of our lives were missing. Z had done a tremendous job designing systems to make our lives work beautifully, but many of the beautiful objects from our old home (photos, paintings, prints and rocks, mostly) hadn't made it onto the walls.

I've been knitting out of a box of needles and yarn... a huge cardboard box of yarn and needles all tangled up. That's still a mess, I'm afraid. But the plants were repotted. Important, fragile bits of decoration (like the well-wrapped Woodsie, here) were unpacked, and certain elements of our kitchen finalized. (Not that final Z, you still have a veto, here.) Here's a couple of snapshots of progress. I DO wish that I'd taken some before shots.

The pretty cabinet full of gorgeous dishes was similar before, only that bottom shelf had a been a "very important paper/object and coin depository since day one", so it was strewn with a laptop, and papers and an old burbon bottle full of change.

The pantry had housed a bunch of dishes and some food, but the food had lived over in the (very sunny) kitchen, so, that had to change.

There's two things in the bottom photo. One, I brought home this oak ivy as a house warming gift to Z, but it's been floating, homeless around the apartment ever since our first week here. We each wanted to suspend it in this (windowless) transom over the kitchen door, but couldn't find a way to get it there. You can see she's happy in her new home AND that the coffee/tea station has finally come to fruition. We thought it would be awesome to have all coffee/tea and associated aparatus in one part of the kitchen altogether, uncomplicated by other clutter, to preserve the sanctity of the first moments of morning. It's finally all together, there in the lower corner of the photo.

The last weeks have been filled with a terrible cold for both Z and me (he NEVER gets sick) and hurried, belated birthday knitting (sorry Pop). With any luck, the next photos on this blog will be my dad in his enormous scarf. (The weather has been cooperating with this project, and I have no doubt that it will still be cold enough when he gets it.)