Varrqnuht.net

Today is a sad day - MarrowPeteIIIIIII just died. I can’t recall the day that MarrowPete (the first) was born, but I know it was before the 13^th of November, 2000. That’s the day that he fell pregnant with his first child. Today is the 27^th of July, 2001, making an incredible record of over 256 days that this family survived in the Technosphere.

Yeah, I know. These sound like the ravings of a madman.

A few years ago Matt pointed me at a groovy little site that allows you to create virtual creatures. They run around in an imaginary world simulated by a computer sitting somewhere (probably in a broom closet) at a university in the UK.

Unlike Tamagotchi, they don’t need any attention. You just create them and leave them. We had lots of fun creating our creatures and seeing how long they could survive in the wild. Unfortunately after a while the site went offline, presumably because they found something more important to do with their computing resources than entertain people on the other side of the world who should have been working anyway.

Last year we discovered that the site was back online, and a new batch of creature creations took place. Most creatures only live for a few days, and are lucky to have any children at all. For those that do, the direct descendents who take most after your parent (and inherit your family name) tend to die out after a few generations.

However, one creature I created named MarrowPete survived long enough to pop out a few children, then they had children of their own, and my family tree just got bigger and bigger. The numbering system for descendents seems a bit screwy, but there were a LOT more than seven.

I think I’ll try and compile a genealogy of MarrowPete’s family in tribute to him..

Earlier this year Louise and I finally decided to get private health cover. We’d been meaning to do it for ages, but it was just one of those things that we felt could wait until we had more money. You know how it is.

This year however, we’ve had a few dealings with the Royal Hobart Hospital that motivated us to finally bite the bullet and get private cover. One of those incidents was fairly minor, but perfectly illustrates my point.

Sometime before the end of February (yeah, I’d be a hopeless witness in court) I woke up in the middle of the night with a nasty earache. I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and read a book for a while. It just got worse though, and having had burst ear drums before I thought I’d better try and do something about it before it happened again.

I woke Louise up and got her to take me to the hospital. She’s a very nice girl, and a lot more understanding than I’d have been if I was woken in the middle of the night like that - in fact it only took me a few days to make it up to her.

At the hospital they kept me waiting for about two hours before letting a doctor see me. Her verdict was that, yes, my eardrum was probably going to burst; no, they couldn’t do anything about, and here, take some pain-killers and go away. Oh, you might want to put an old pillow-cover on tonight, as well.

They managed to squeeze me in to see a specialist at the Ear, Nose & Throat clinic in only two weeks time before sending me home.

This is a pretty good example of the level of service to be expected from the Royal. Another example from earlier this year is when my fiancee collapsed, lost muscle function in the left side of her face and was taken to hospital in an ambulance only to be told (several hours later of course) that she probably had a nasty flu.

Anyway, the ear infection went down slowly of its own accord, but at the end of two weeks my hearing was still a bit dodgy so I went in for my appointment. They’d given me a very specific appointment time (something like 2:03pm) so I turned up a few minutes early to make sure.

I’d arranged to take a late lunch and walked to the hospital about a block away from my office. On arrival I was told that the specialist was running a bit late, and that I’d have to wait. The receptionist couldn’t tell me how long, and on further questioning refused to give me even a rough estimate. Eventually she admitted that I’d have time to go downstairs and have a cup of coffee first. Do they make "Understatement of the century" greeting cards? I’d love to send her one.

I came back upstairs after my coffee, and she said there was still no progress so I moved to the waiting room. I shared this tiny waiting room (probably about three and a half metres square) with several other patients for almost four hours. One lady with a young kid, and a guy with enough metal rods stuck through him to be a human antenna (I’d have suggested it to him as a conversation starter except that his tatoos outnumbered the metal rods, and even looking like a pincushion he seemed the sort that could kill me before I reached the door) had been waiting there since noon, and went in only just before me.

When I finally got in to see the specialist, he turned out to be an intern. His advice was that I should try holding my nose and blowing hard. I expressed my displeasure at his explanation as politely as I could manage, and he responded by pulling out an illustrated book and explaining (in the most patronising tone possible) the marvels of the inner ear.

After 4 hours trapped in a tiny room with uncomfortable chairs and old issues of trashy tabloid magazines, I just wanted to get out. So I asked him to organise a hearing test and left.

Fast forward to July 20th, six months later, and I find a letter waiting for me in the mail when I get home from work. To be honest, I’d forgotten about the appointment; I think I’d blocked it from my mind as being too traumatic an experience to repeat. But the hospital hadn’t forgotten, and sent me a notice informing me of a change to my appointment details (for the appointment that hadn’t yet notified me of).

This letter reads (in part):

We regret to advise that your clinic appointment for the Ear Nose & Throat clinic on 20 DEC 2011 at 02:01PM has been changed. Your new appointment details are as follows:

CLINIC: Ear Nose & Throat
NAME: Mr (name deleted)
NEW DATE: 20 DEC 2011
NEW TIME: 02:00PM

Wow, that’s quite a waiting list.

I really have to wonder what’s going on here. I mean, I can imagine there was some human error in entering the appointment. I HOPE there was some human error, because this seems a long time to wait for a hearing test.

But I can’t imagine why my appointment in ten-and-a-half years time needed to be rescheduled by one minute. I mean, did my appointment clash with someone else on the same afternoon? Is the specialist leaving early that day? I’m a little worried that he’s listed as Mr - another intern? Perhaps they’ve scheduled me a guy who’s currently in high school and shows an interest in medicine.

I feel like ringing them up and asking them to move my appointment back fifteen minutes, as I have a business meeting that afternoon.

I should probably ring and cancel it, really. Our waiting period will soon be up, and we’ll be able to choose which hospital we want to be treated in. I’m fairly certain I won’t be choosing the Royal for any future complaints unless I have four minutes to live and every other hospital is five minutes away.

Then again, perhaps I should keep the appointment in reserve in case I have another problem with my ears in ten years time, and I want to skip the waiting list.

We went shopping last week. Before we left I thought we should clean out the fridge, as I knew there were some things in there that were definitely past their useby date. As it turned out, nearly everything in the fridge was past its useby date.

There were half a dozen one-and-a-half month old eggs, a casserole dish covered in gladwrap with some scary looking leftovers in it, a quarter of a tin of fruit that look like it was disolving on the inside, various left over bits of meat and cheese that looked a bit too colourful, and some rather smushy vegetables.

We took away half a garbage bag of food. I always feel bad when food goes off like that.

It’s not the worst I’ve seen by a long shot, though. At a previous house, I had to throw out a casserole dish when I moved. It contained leftovers from a housewarming party we threw when we first moved in, and it was still sitting in the fridge when I moved out 12 months later. At first I had been intending to fix it, but just hadn’t gotten around to it. But after a while I was scared of opening it, firstly because of the smell, and later because of the risk of breathing in whatever bacteria had grown and evolved inside it. Before I eventually threw it away, I breathed in, covered my nose and lifted the lid. There was nothing inside except some dried out powdery stuff. It had no odour, either. I probably shouldn’t have smelt it to determine that, but I was curious. I guess whatever was in there was either dead or harmless.

At a friends place just the other day, I saw a bowl of dried out brown crumbly stuff at the back of the fridge. They told me it used to be pasta sauce, and they were just waiting to see what it would turn into.

Hmm… I had nothing to write when I started this, and now I have heaps more.. But I have to head off.