Observations

On Working In a Communicable-Disease Cesspit:

If there is a tummy bug going around work, even if it's confined to the basement and only hits the guys who do landscaping, I will get it.

Any tummy bug I get will have the following symptoms: constant, low-grade nausea, exhaustion, and cold sweats. Anything more than that is unusual.

Any time I get a tummy bug, some wag opines that I *must* be pregnant. The Dedicated Wag Lime Pit in the back yard is getting full.

On Extremities:

This week I took care of a dancer and a professional chef. Chef Boy is also, if you hadn't noticed, a chef. I noticed something that the two lines of work have in common: extremities.

A dancer's feet--especially ballet dancers, which this person was--look like nothing human. They're callused and scarred and lumpy and there are bits missing from them.

Same with chefs' hands. If you work with fire, knives, and corpses all day, your hands begin to look like something Rodin might've sculpted in the grip of a really bad hangover. Chef Boy has been a construction worker as well as a chef, so you can imagine the state of his paws.

On New Cars:

I've been having dreams in which I scar the New Car irreversibly somehow, or the upholstery is torn beyond repair, or the damned thing suddenly changes color to distress orange.

I also worry constantly that I'm going to do something stupid, like reach for a button on the stereo, and hit a button that either sets off a panic alarm or the ejector seat or the thing that spits tacks out of the exhaust pipe.

And yet I haven't read the owner's manual. If finding out that I can unroll the windows remotely (who thought that up?) by mistake is fun, imagine how much fun I'll have trying to figure out cruise control on the fly!

Edited to add one thing of which Shrimplate's latest post reminded me:

Today I was standing in line at the cafeteria to get some nice dry toast and tea, and I heard two anesthesiologist attendings singing Ramones songs.

I chimed in at "I wanna be sedated" and got shocked looks. One doc then smiled and said, "We didn't think anybody else here would know the Ramones."

Pretty soon half the breakfast line was singing along with "Beat On The Brat."

Welcome to my hospital, home of the weird and famous.