Ruminations

Ruminations:

A few weeks ago I received a bill from Meilahti Hospital in Helsinki for EUR 88609.73. I dutifully relayed that bill to Blue Cross through one of the Human Resources officers at Georgia Southern University. Day before yesterday I received a check made out to me for $67023.92, in dollars, approximately half of what I owe the hospital. I immediately deposited that check, shepherded it through the bank until it was truly deposited, and today, mailed a cashier’s check to the hospital for that sum ($67023.92). Only for a very few moments was I tempted to go out, buy an expensive car and tickets to Shangri-la. Soon I will find out if the hospital accepts this a full payment or if I have to begin selling those organs in my body that still work to raise the remainder of the money.

In September I sent pictures of a tree next to my house that had been struck by lightning. When we returned from Finland in mid November the tree was dead and my roof and yard were covered with pine-straw (to the non-southerners, you sometime call these pine needles, but in the southern long leaf yellow pine, these needles are eight to twelve inches long and have picked up the name pine straw). I muttered about the need to remove the tree, but in hope of selling my house to a commercial developer who was going to tear the house down anyway, I procrastinated a bit. Finally I contacted my insurance agent to see if the loss of the tree was covered, and was told to go get an estimate for its removal. I did this, found that two trees had been killed by lightning and that insurance would pay all but $500.00 of the cost of removal. I really needed another bill for $500 bucks, but the removal started last Thursday and continued through Monday (The trees were in a place where they had to be cut down bit by bit. Now they are gone. This morning the tree man came to pick up his check (and an axe that he discovered that he had left in my yard).

Janet has been attending our water aerobics class but has just walked or swam gently. Monday she went to her first real physical therapy session and the therapist told her that it was time to try the exercises in water aerobics. Today she did that, and as a result has been completely “stove up” all day today. I just put her to bed with liberal applications of muscle rub and a couple of darvoset tablets. She is in real pain.

As a sculptor of dolls and a maker of puppets, one of my great joys has been my little outdoor studio. I have spent many hours there, but none at all since our trip to Finland (and actually a couple of months before). Today I went out to try to work. It is amazing how a few months of disuse will mess up a really small place. The floor was covered with dead Palmetto bugs (read one to two inch cockroaches) My tools were scattered everywhere, when I finally got it cleaned up on one side, and got out clay to begin work, much of my polyclay was hard as a rock. Much of this can be reworked but I couldn’t sculpt at all today.

It may sound really stupid, but today was a wonderful day. I think a normal life is really beginning again.
(I am too tired tonight, but I will add pictures of the tree removal, the studio (still pretty cluttered) and sometime in the next few weeks I am going to begin to post the occasional piece of what I call my art. (The last time I did that, it was a script of a play improvised by my students in a theatre workshop two summers ago or my adventures as Scrooge.)