Blog silence

Sorry, folks. The blogging well is a bit dry at the moment here. I'm on a steep learning curve at work sorting out all the oldies going home from hospital, and I'm also busy revising bed mobility and hoist transfers for this round of teaching the first year students.

I have also been distracted by the discovery of a rather addictive game called Bejeweled. One of my patients at work (95 years old, with a stroke that has knocked off a reasonable amount of her language and cognition) used to play it in her pre-stroke days. When her daughter showed me the game on their laptop, I thought I should download it myself. To investigate its therapeutic potential, of course. Now I can't seem to stop playing it.... And when I tried to use it with her at work, I realised how much damage the stroke had done. Her processing speed was too slow for it to really be useful or even enjoyable for her anymore.

So now I am going to have to cure myself of this annoying addiction. Thank goodness the kids have the iPad at school during the day so I can get a few other things done....

I'm sitting here at my computer....

....watching a rather large cockroach crawling across the wall in front of me. He's made one trip across and back, and now he's just sitting there on the wall.

I'm trying to decide whether going upstairs to get the insect spray is worth the effort. He's not moving too quickly. Sometimes the spray can make them fly around really fast and in crazy unpredictable circles. That freaks me out a bit.

He's still not moving. We get our house sprayed for cockroaches once a year. It's been a few months since that happened. It would be nice to think that this might be his death throes that I'm watching. Although I think that the death staggers might look a bit more unco-ordinated than what I've been watching so far.

Can you all tell that I'm really scraping the bottom of the blogging barrel here? I was wondering whether I should illustrate this post with a picture, and then I just thought...umm...no, probably not required. I'm sure you can all visualise what's happening well enough.

Why oh why...

Do they have six customer service points in our local Medicare office, but there are only ever two of them that seem to be staffed at any single moment in time??

I ask the same question about checkouts in supermarkets, although at least there they will make some effort to open one if the lines at the already-open ones become too long.

This morning at Medicare, I was in a queue of at least ten people. Old people, women with small children, heavily pregnant woman (me). And four unoccupied customer service points. Which remained steadfastly unopened.

Is it just to create an illusion that fast and efficient processing of customer's claims might be able to happen in some utopian world?