Day 50

Today is day 50 of my contract (but who's counting) and I am ready to not be here. I am ready to be blissfully unemployed, walk my dog, put my dishes in a dishwasher, go on my planned vacations and generally empty my brain of all things work related until 2014. I don't want to be thinking of the photo to the right as a Hallowe'en photo. Only three more sleeps (should I be so fortunate as to actually sleep through the night tomorrow night which is my last day of first call. This evening I have been packing up the dry foods, winter clothes and northern equipment which will await my return as well as packing the artifacts and very few things I am actually taking south. 

I am getting a few things accomplished as I've been under the weather and mostly just lying on the couch until I go to bed at 8 pm which is extremely unlike my nite owl habits. I was suffering with tonsillitis which I haven't had for years, but certainly remembered from my teenaged days. Couldn't swallow, fever, had a huge lump in my throat  and couldn't even move my tongue to the side. By the time Friday came I got Nellie to look in my throat and she said "start yourself on an antibiotic" so by Sunday (as I tell patients, it'll take 48 hrs to work) I was finally thinking I was going to live. In the meantime I'd watched Men in Black 3 and attempted to watch To Rome With Love (a Woody Allen remake of the classic) but I had downloaded it in French!!! so instead watched Flight (Denzel Washington) which was excellent but likely not the greatest choice as I set out on two days of flights to get home. 

The word of the day today has been…..moose. The shore captain and his two buddies were off on Sunday to Cape Breton moose hunting where the season for his tag began today. The wife of one of the hunters having made a statement on FB something like "I'd rather pack up the entire family for a trip to Disney World than one man to go moose hunting" on Saturday evening. As I chatted online with her, she was waiting for the bread to come out of the oven and listed off a large cache of baked goods, so they were well provisioned. I breathed a huge sigh of relief to have missed that circus at my house. A friend in CB mentioned rain on the weekend but a bit cooler with a skiff of snow today in the hunting area so it sounded like a good first day for them. By the time I checked FB this evening there were multiple postings of MOOSE!!! Apparently the shore captain's employee had shot a large (1200 lb or so) animal with 24 points on a 56 inch set of horns. The shore captain who wasn't concerned about antlers (can't eat those) is quoted as saying that "likely the horns were the only tender part of him" but by all accounts there was much excitement. As I chatted again tonight with the employee's wife she said as her husband was talking to her he said he was sitting in the dark at the camp and  the other two (shore captain and more senior employee) were in bed and sound asleep at 7:30 pm. I told her that's what he got for taking old people with him, a lengthy drive the day before, all that walking in the fresh air and the excitement of the trophy well… what did he expect? I asked which vehicle they'd taken with them (the ton truck?) and she said "the half ton with an insulated grey wharf box" which made me laugh out loud. That will be quite the load getting back. She said they'd be going in with the pack horses tomorrow am and might have to make two trips but would likely be home late tomorrow night. So much for her week of solitude for her and the kids. Very efficient hunting mind you. 

I had a FB chat with my travel buddy over the weekend and we were discussing some plans for Atlanta. Would we see a Christmas show? Maybe a movie would be opening? She asked if I was a fan of Sinbad? I thought she meant the classic and agreed that I'd enjoyed it "back in the day" as a kid. Apparently I'm quite out of the loop as Sinbad is a comedian, so apparently I'm not a fan if I don't know who he is eh?

I was tasked with picking up the physician in to do his community clinic this week so on Sunday I found myself at the airport. I snapped a shot of Chuck who manages Canadian

North here in this community, and the C.A.R.S. (community aerodrome radio station) operator which is the local version of air traffic control at work. The only problem was that in the first photo I snapped, Chuck was bent over in a big sneeze just as I pressed the shutter so I took a second of him upright on the phone but by then the C.A.R.S operator had gotten up to check a screen somewhere so….I needed to combine the two pictures. Without taking a post graduate course in photoshop (and my hats off to all who can use this wonderfully large program) I found a link online which suited my needs - the website is called merge images:

mergeimages.com

You just plug in the first photo, then crop out what you don't want from the second and line it

up and…merge images. You couldn't tell I was doing magic unless I'd disclosed likely. And speaking of putting things together, the work on the new health centre continues despite flesh numbing temperatures with the rush on to enclose before the really bad weather visits. 

Today I asked the physician what he'd like to do about something on a prescription I was ordering and he said "what I'd like to do is retire early, in fact right now with a lot of money, but in fact I'm going to continue to keep on looking after people because that's not happening". I hear ya brother. Mind you, working one week a month and on call during the day for the other three weeks isn't a bad gig. 

I'm thinking of my little co-worker who is heading off to meet up with her brother in Italy tomorrow and tells me that she'll visit the vatican and light a candle so that all my flights will connect. I told her I thought a chapel in one of the airports she'll be hanging out in would likely work as well but I appreciated her support. This little jaunt of hers is pre- Antarctica in December so she obviously follows the advice to the left. 

So, hopefully the workload will remain manageable and the only frantic calls are something like the one from a mother asking if her three year old would be okay as he'd eaten some Ivory soap. Clearly she had never washed his mouth out for swearing with it! Since I'm getting to the end of the data on my internet, this will likely be the last posting until I'm in the maritimes which will be an almost tropical in itself type of weather for me.