valeriesbookofme

  First I must defend my using the term "guinea pig". I have great respect for guinea pigs. I took care of one for several months many years ago. He came, along with a solitary goldfish in a huge tank, with the house that I was renting/housesitting while the owners were away on sabbatical. His name was Squeak and he lived in his very own bedroom in a two storey house in Westdale, which is a suburb of Hamilton. When I had said I would look after their house, the owners were a bit nervous because I had a cat, a large white cat named Princess. I promised that I would keep the door to Squeak's room closed unless I was in there, feeding him or changing his shavings. I actually spent a few hours with him from time to time because my very new, very mysterious loaned computer from McMaster University was in there. It was DOS and the only thing I ever learned to do on it was play PacMan. But we won't go down that road of my antipathy toward all things DOS and why I was so thri...

  Yesterday was the final day of my 8-day assignment in a 4th grade class; I’ve written something about that assignment in a previous post, “Revolt of the Guinea Pig,” It’s been a challenging 8 days which, as Dickens might have said, brought out the best in me and probably the worst in me as well. But yesterday morning I had that experience that every teacher dreads—shelter in place, also known as possible shooter situation. I had arrived at the school at 7:20 thinking how wonderful it was that our heat had broken a bit. The skies were overcast, we’d had rain the day before, there was a cool breeze. As I walked to my classroom (photos below of what the buildings look like), I waved to the students already gathered on the other side of the gate, who were waiting to rush in, some to the cafeteria for their breakfast, some to the playground to run and hopefully get some of that energy out before the bell rang at 7:55. I unlocked the outside door to our building, walked down the corrid...

  I re-read what I had written about a month ago about the miracle of modern medicine. Today I am chewing on my words, wanting to spit them out. As I wrote in my previous post (I see it was actually only two weeks ago) the NP in my GP's office (this is like Morse code or something) had said I should see a cardiologist, mostly based on my saying that I became very tired in the afternoon, was occasionally short of breath and that my mother and grandfather had both had heart disease. I was a good little patient, duly calling up for appointments, nodding at tests, forking over the co-pays, all the while wondering, as I monitored my blood pressure day and night, if this wasn't a giant waste of time. In a month's monitoring my morning/evening blood pressure has never gone higher than 116/74 or lower than 86/68. And those are singular scores, most of the time the amounts have clustered near to the 112/73 zone. Perfectly, absolutely normal. I had my heart sonograph on July 27th and...