Took my van in to the dealership on Monday to get two new tires. (Yes, I know better than to take a car to a dealership for tires. BUT the tires on the Touring version of the Honda Odyssey are special "run flat" things that can only be purchased through Honda....trust me I have looked everwhere else. In addition, this is the only dealership around that has the "special" equipment needed to take the tires off the wheels so that I am not forced to buy all new wheels with the new tires. I HATE THESE TIRES.)
Anyway, got a call halfway through the morning from Honda telling me that they were having the Michelin people come over to help them change the tires and that it would be another day. So they had rented a car for me. That is good. What is not good is that it turns out they bent two wheels trying to get the tires off, Michelin bent a third one when they tried, and I am still in the rental car. And I will be in the rental car all weekend. It is a smaller car without anti-lock brakes, and STINKS of cigarrette smoke. It stinks less now that I have been spraying it with febreeze, lysol and leaving the windows open every night but it still has the whiff of cigarrettes. Yuck.


Also this week, have been working my tail off seeing lots and lots and lots of influenza and the beginnings of RSV. Throw in some strep, a motor vehicle accident in one of my teenage patients, a battered wife, 5 new babies and it has been Crazy Busy.


Husband is having snit fits because I haven't done anything with the Christmas cards. Hmm.


We have neighbors who have over the past 17 years become our family. Jake, who is 80, and his wife, who died two years ago, have treated as us their children and our children as their grandchildren. We helped nurse Janelle through her extended fight with kidney cancer and were there when she had a horrible, painful, suffocating death. Jake and his daughter Susan spent the second half of the storm in our house and took our children to Texas after the storm. Susan now lives with her father because her apartment was destroyed in the storm and rents have risen so much in New Orleans that she can not afford a place of her own.

Yesterday Susan went in for what was suppossed to be some minor surgery and came out with the diagnosis of anal cancer. I don't cry when people are diagnosed with bad things, I cry when they die. Yesterday, I cried.


I think that it is time for an infusion of humor. This is my plan.....this weekend I will take my sister 20 minutes up the road to Picayune, Mississippi and help her Christmas shop. Picayune is the town that has a highway sign that says "Jesus Is Lord Over Picayune". I've picked out my outfit to wear. Jeans and a t-shirt. A very special t-shirt. Wearing it in fundamentalville ought to be good for some laughs. The t-shirt with a manger scene (it is "that" season). The caption above the manger scene says "It's A Girl".