Less Waiting.

It was Wednesday morning (when I started this but it is now Thursday evening), the morning chores are done and I have just been phoning to try to figure out what happened to my credit card. Amazing to me, I was not put on hold. Two rings and straight through to a real person – well, two rings and typing in my credit card number twice. I have an older landline phone with no speaker facility. It has a club speaker/receiver that I tuck close to one ear and hold with my chin; I started doing this in the 1980’s while working at a job that required lots of telephone calls and the habit has stuck in spite of my stiff neck and a perfectly working iPhone with a speaker. “Turn on the speaker,” says my YD, more or less patiently, when she calls me on this marvellous device.

What is the most marvellous, really, is that I am chatting with her as she drives home from work or back from an assignment. In Brussels, or on the Autobahn in Germany, or ... wherever. We can also chat with her via video from her home, also in Brussels. The phone calls are crystal clear. The video is excellent. It is not the same as having her here and getting hugs and finding strange wrapped bags of things in the refrigerator. But it is a miracle of modern technology. Mind you, I thought that email was a marvel when I first acquired it. The ED was living in Scotland, and to be able to reach her on a daily basis and to know that she had managed that day -in a difficult period in her life – was priceless.

Earlier communication methods were not priceless – sending bulky letters across the Atlantic, trying (and failing) to keep phone calls from Africa economically short, paying for international cell phone coverage in an emergency – all came at a price and a high one by times. Worth it, though. It is an interesting, for me, comment on how life is that something you want starts out looking expensive but becomes routine. The switch from black and white film to colour film is a case in point. We had a good camera that took a roll of twenty-four shots but that made a film expensive to have printed. (I had a developer of my own for black and white for a while, also expensive to do but very interesting.) I started by being very careful when I had colour film, but ended up doing candid shots and paying for the rather mixed results. Lines of relatives, posed and resentful, are not good photography. I went looking for such a photo and found this. Terrible photograph, but it is funny, especially when you know the kidlets.

My Facebook friend, AC, just did a retrospective of his year in photographs, and it is worth a look. His comments are gold mines of teaching about good photography. He has a post here. It made me think about photos I have taken that I liked well enough that I remember something about them. I may just go and look for a few, although remembering about them and remembering where I put them are two very different things.

Report on the report: I had to trek into our medical facility and ask for a copy of the report to be found and printed from my master file. It was frustrating, but at least I now have that information. It has generated more tests, so I will probably be muttering about more reports here before too long. Both JG and I have reached the plateau of old/old and that seems to cause our doctors to want to know all about our insides. Me, I read the report, do a LOT of looking up of very big words and sort of shrug. Yeah, this, that and the other thing are Not Quite Right. Or, even, labelled with Latinate tags. I expect I shall be like the ‘wonderful one-hoss-shay.