Day 9, Wednesday, February 6th, 2013

Today, it must be said, I was grumpy for no apparent reason.

This was then compounded by a 9am meeting with a nurse for a recap of my tests and developments, like we hadn't just had one the day before (wherein I also got my hoop-swabbed, if you'll recall). I'm not sure what she thought the point was, because, in direct contrast to all of the other lovely, friendly, efficient people that I have dealt with so far, it was pretty clear that this lady gave approximately zero fucks about what she was telling me. Dead eyes, the entire time; her mouth moved and smiled and made the right noises, but her eyes did nothing and her pitch remained flat. It was like she had stopped caring about her job years ago, but had learned to fake the appearance of interest enough that it fooled most people.

After that fiasco of a meeting, we returned to the 6th floor waiting room for about five minutes before being called again. I was to do an ESRA, or Electronic Self-Reporting Assessment. This was computer based, and was a series of multiple-choice questions. Read and click, read and click. That only took about ten minutes, and since my MEGO scan had been cancelled, in favour of an EKG scheduled for Thursday, we were free for the rest of the day.

We obtained a free pass to the Space Needle, intending to visit it that afternoon, but I was still a grumplestiltskin, so I requested that we visit it the following afternoon. Instead, we took a very nice fellow resident of the SCCA up on her offer of a ride to obtain groceries. We went to Uwajimaya, an Asian grocery and gift shop in Seattle's Chinatown, and then to the exotic lands of Safeway.

Buying groceries went off without a hitch. It's just buying groceries, neither challenging nor exciting. The car ride there and back, on the other hand, was both of those.

I'd never been so nervous as a passenger in a car in my entire life.

Navigation was handed over to a drunken GPS, stories were told with both hands in the air, near the steering wheel but not touching it; this resulted in frequent and jarring jerks of the wheel when our path was about to intersect with a stationary object, like the wall of an underpass, or a non-stationary object, like other cars. Braking was left the last possible second, and sudden multiple-lane lane changes occurred with little warning. We blew through at least one stop sign. Statistically speaking, I'm impressed that I'm still alive.

It was like being in the car of someone who had learned to drive from the Grand Theft Auto video game series. I resisted the impulse to get out at a stop sign and jack a nicer car.

Seriously.

We made it home, alive, and with all of our extremities still properly connected to our torsos, and decided that tonight would be a good night to try out the shared kitchen facilities here at the SCCA House.

It is a large room with four double-sided banks of countertops, each with a full range, double sink, microwave, coffee pot, and blender, as well as supplies of pots, pans, cutlery, flatware and stemware. There are also several large community fridges down one wall, and a couple of sterilizers to be used on cookware, after you've washed the preparatory remnants from it all. The opposite wall is floor to ceiling windows, which look out onto the second floor terrace.

There is a spacious dining room adjunct, with many tables, all of which are for the small groups of people - two, three, or four - as you would be likely to find staying here. It even has decent artwork on the walls.

We cooked, we ate, we chatted with residents, including the lady who drove us for groceries, who, I must stress, is really, really nice, driving aside, and then we retired to the sanctity of our room for the evening. Well, I did. Mom worked on her puzzle for a while. It is not of Big Ben, but rather, that is the brand of the puzzle.

"I got into an argument with my rice krispies this morning. I distinctly heard 'snap, crackle, fuck him.'" - George Carlin