On Saturday, the final day of the year, I arrived home and breathed a huge sigh of relief for making it through the snowstorm without incident. I found this in the letterbox:

December 31, 2005

Dear David:

I am pleased to inform you that your name has been drawn as one of our eight “Go for Gelt” winners in the Jewish Community Center’s 2005 Chanukah raffle.

I thank you for having participated in the Chanukah raffle and I, along with all the JCC staff and the Board of Directors, wish you a very happy Chanukah.

Enclosed is your check for $100.

Sincerely,

Edward M. Basan
Executive Director

I laughed. I could practically hear David guffawing along with me. This is so bizarre (and note the date of the letter is the same as the delivery date?). Not to mention I have no idea how David could’ve participated in such a raffle, since he stopped going to the JCC’s gym facilities years ago.

I did a double-take.
[photo by gail on the web]

It looked more like a system crash than a mileage reading!

Since David has radiation on a daily basis, the waiting room is part of my routine. Sometimes I read, sometimes I watch the “news” (I use that term loosely), sometimes I people-watch out of the corner of my eye.

I’ve started to rank the various facility waiting rooms by three criteria:

1. magazine selection
2. television programs
3. refreshments

It wouldn’t really be fair to include people, would it?

Mercy Hospital is a sad state of affairs on all counts. Every day it’s soap operas, the mags all get nicked (leaving real estate listings, ugh), and the vending machine selection is awful — or broken. Mind you, that’s the ER waiting room, the MRI waiting room has more magazines but not much of interest. I would sooner read laundry care labels than flip through Field & Stream again. When David and I perused an issue at the immigration doctor’s office in Tannersville, there was an ad for how to build a doghouse out of an oil drum. Am I missing something? Does America have an oil drum oversupply? Our city lacks recycling facilities, but oh wait — the family dog could use a petroleum-based shelter!

CMC’s ER waiting room is pretty standard as ER waiting rooms go — nerve-wrackingly empty, devoid of anything distracting. The surgery waiting rooms at least have televisions, but there’s an annoying central phone that rings endlessly. Everyone looks at each other, but no-one wants to answer it because then everyone stares expectantly at you while you shout out the name of whoever it’s for (because it’s never for you). It’s like a hospital mind game: take a room full of anxious people and put a telephone in the middle. It’s 2005 but the phone is a $5 Wal-Mart rotary-dial special — Bat Phone Red, of course — with a ring so demanding it jingles the handset. No volume control. Fun for the whole family! (Sometimes kids answer.)

The Hematology and Oncology Clinic, which is housed in the same building as the Radiation Clinic, has a similar waiting room but to a larger scale. Eerily, I have only ever seen “Oprah” and “Ellen” on their screens. We go there all different times of the day, too. How does this happen??? Oprah Winfrey and Ellen Degeneres — all day, all the time. Bizarre.

The clinic staff reserve nearly all the magazines for the chemotherapy patients who have to sit for hours as the drugs drip into their veins, so I don’t complain about the lack of reading material. Not at all. But I still went home the other day to fetch David’s book that he left on the counter because One Cannot Live By Magazine Alone.

Each of the chemotherapy stations has its own TV, but the average drug takes 45 minutes to enter the body, after half an hour of anti-nausea drug followed by a half-hour of saline. Nothing on television is that engaging. Before, when David was on combination chemotherapy, he’d fall asleep on the first bag and they’d wake him up hanging the second one. I didn’t hang around the waiting room those days, I’d just go home and wait for the call when the final bag was started. I don’t have enough patience for Oprah or Ellen.

The number one reason why I like the radiation clinic waiting room is because they have an espresso machine, conveniently located at the front entrance. I walk in, push three buttons, and voila! This was especially handy when radiation appointments were at the ghastly hour of 07:30. The magazines are rotated between the main reception area and the patients’ waiting area, so the selection varies wildly. I end up ferrying myself between the two places, depending on:

• how chatty the reception ladies are (“HEL-L-L-OOOO MISSUS FIELDING!!!”)
• what’s on TV (Oh please no! Not ‘The View’! *sob*)
• if I’m in the mood for trashy tabloid (the section “They’re Just Like Us!” in People magazine showing celebrities feeding parking meters or pushing a grocery cart is absurdly comical), or
• pseudo-journalism (CNN or Fox News).

Thankfully, David’s radiation treatments are very short, so no matter how trashy or trivial the entertainment, I’m never subjected to it for long. And I always have my compensatory hot drink. That bought my vote.

Today, though, I flipped through a Time magazine and found this week’s cartoons pretty funny. I tried looking for them online, but the online cartoons must be a different set from the published ones. Anyhow, Time’s online cartoons can be found here. This week’s can be accessed by clicking on the cartoon below.

Oh, one other thing I saw today. I couldn’t help but notice this older fellow in the patients’ waiting area, wearing a baseball cap that proclaimed loudly “Bass Pro Shop”. But the real neon light was his belt, partially obscured by a fold in his protruding belly. The top part said JESUS in big, bold letters. I kid you not. The rest of it… well, I didn’t want to go there, you know?

ADDITION: an ulterior motive for me to write is to prompt David to write, and write he did –

Dave’s Logbook: The Waiting Game

Cross-marketing gone weird.

I was about to make a salad, and did a double-take on the cellophane. NASCAR? Why would NASCAR put their branding on produce? Is there a product tie-in between vegetables and car racing? Did I buy into a subliminal message that the glamorous lifestyle of race car driving is just a tomato away?

Here’s what I found:

Courier Post Online - February 21, 2005
Maybe NASCAR is looking for Mr. Goodwrite

no, really?
[photo by gail on the web]

We saw this on the side of a truck at the gas station yesterday and I had David take the picture as I drove by.

Click on the pic to enlarge — there are also lots of comments.

What we didn’t know until afterwards was that it’s part of a jokey ad campaign that Budget is showing on the sides of their moving trucks.

This is Moving Tip #24, which begs the question — what other advice is Budget giving?? One of my Flickr contacts, thelastminute, gave me some links:

Moving Tip #48
Moving Tip #12
Moving Tip #28

On their website, Budget also has a little driving game that you can play — with more tips, of course.

On Saturday Eliza and I went shopping at Pacific Centre and encountered our very first collagen-injection victim. It was a scary, scary sight to behold.

It took us by surprise, really. Our elevator mistakenly went up to street level at Pacific Centre rather than down to the parkade. A woman who had most likely emerged from Holt Renfrew stepped in, a tad startled to see us.

“Why did you come up instead of down?” she asked, puzzled.

I thought there was something odd about her face, but I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was. I tried not to stare at her while the elevator made its way down, picking up some others on the floor we just came from. The first impression that came to mind was: high-maintenance lady. She just had that…. high-maintenance look about her.

I took a glimpse at Eliza, who was looking down. I snuck in a sidelong glance at the woman’s mouth. It was puffy, inflated to the point where it was smooth and swollen at the edges instead of gathered (for lack of a better word), with tiny lines. When she spoke, she looked strange. I thought her speech was affected. Then it dawned on me.

Collagen injection! *violin screeches from a Grade B horror movie* Eeeeeeeeeeek!!!!!!!

Seriously, if someone who has NEVER seen the effects of a collagen injection can recognise it on sight, then it’s probably TOO MUCH.

And if it looks like someone punched you in the mouth, it’s TOO MUCH.

And if it affects your speech? It’s TOO MUCH.

And if it makes other people in the elevator want to reach out and poke it to see if it squishes over to the other side? It’s TOO MUCH.

If you want people to look at your lips, then this is certainly one expensive way to do it.

Yesterday I saw an Ontario license plate that just said “CAR”. Go figure!

obviously a construction term that went right over my head

Knowing what a ‘vibrator’ is used for in — ostensibly — construction might stop me from making awful puns about this sign I spotted today on the back of a truck. Click on the photo to enlarge.

So, there’s this weekly radio show on NPR called “Car Talk” with these two brothers, Tom and Ray Magliozzi. I’d never heard of them before moving to PA, but according to their website they’ve been on the air since the ’70s, with 4.4 million listeners on 588 stations. Anyway, David mentioned them once, and I tuned in for about half a show during dinner.

When we went to the Museum of American History last Saturday, I recognised them on one of the monitors in the transportation exhibit. Being a bit of a typo Nazi, what did I notice right away?

Click on the photo and see…

It’s the SMITHSONIAN, for the love of mary! I’m not the first person to notice this, am I?? I e-mailed Car Talk’s producer, Doug Berman, to see if anyone’s told them. Maybe he’ll get the radio guys to mention it on the show.