Today was the day we'd planned on going to The Lavender Festival on Vashon Island. We'd also picked out four or five geocaches on the island we could hunt as well. Today was also the day amazon.com would be shipping our copy of Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince. That was a conflict, since we'd have to be home to sign for the UPS shipment. But, we decided, if the book arrived early enough, we'd still have time to enjoy the festival - and maybe even find a few caches.

At 10:10 this morning, an email arrived confirming that the order had been shipped. A visit to the UPS tracking website showed our shipment as "In Transit."

Phillip got up around noon, and the book had not arrived.

As 2:00 passed by, we decided that we weren't going to be going to The Lavender Festival. By that time, we were both wondering about the wisdom of pre-ordering the book. This was the third Harry Potter book we've pre-ordered with amazon.com. Books 4 and 5 came early in the morning, and it seemed to make a lot of sense. We'd pre-ordered book 6 last January. And there we were, waiting around all day for our order to arrive. We could have pre-ordered at Barnes & Noble, we agreed, and picked it up after midnight last night. With this book, we could have even pre-ordered it at QFC, of all places, and walked over and picked it up early this morning. But we were sitting around, waiting, on a nice Saturday.

At 3:10, the intercom buzzed. "I have a package," said the female voice. I went to the lobby and was surprised that the woman handed me the Amazon box without asking me to sign for it. "One less person worrying about their shipment," she said to me, with a smile. I didn't understand what she meant. "Enjoy it," she said to me as she left. It was then that it occurred to me that she was wearing a US Post Office uniform, not a United Parcel Service uniform. I looked at the box. The UPS tracking label had the Broadway Post Office as the delivery address, with instructions for USPS to deliver it to me. (The rest of our mail had arrived before 1:00.)

What on earth?

Do you want to know the nature of the clinic I work in? A semi-permanent float observed today: "I can tell when a person walks in here because they're lost. They're the ones clutching their purses to their chests." And we all laughed knowingly.

I skipped yoga class this evening. I wasn't feeling physically up to it. I'll try to make it up on Sunday.

Cause & Effect. I blame my recent "under the weather" feeling on my starting a new job. This is my theory: I've been exposed to a different environment - different air, different people with different histories - and my body has been building up immunities. Combine that with the stresses that come with a new job. My body has been weakened. I have been sleepy for days. Last night, I went to bed at 9:00 (two hours earlier than normal) and fell asleep right away. I dragged myself out of bed this morning, and couldn't quite wake up completely. I went to work.

I visited the salad bar for lunch, and had a bottle of apple juice. Nothing unusual in that. I still had some free time after I'd eaten, so I decided to sit outside in the sun in the park behind the hospital. I was still thirsty, though, so I stopped off at a vending machine and bought a Coca-Cola with Lime. (We're boycotting Coke products, but the vending machines don't sell Pepsi. I don't do this often.) I think it was the lime that did it - that and my weakened system. I started getting a stomach ache after I returned to the front desk. I took a Tums, and that helped, but I was left weak and sweaty. I went home sick at 1:30, and slept the rest of the day.

On a different, better, subject, my friend Pet has re-started her blog again. I'm very happy to see it back.

With less than 10 days until tee off time, only two people have signed up for our CAP mini golf day. Hmm...

Often, all it takes is the smallest act of kindness to derail a potential confrontation. Often, all people are looking for is some dignity.

There is a patient I've come to know in the short time I've been in this clinic. He can become pretty angry (but not violent) pretty easily. The first time I met him, he became upset because I asked him his name when he asked me to page his social worker. (He's been a patient there for a long time, and everyone should know his name by now.)

He came into the clinic this morning, angry and scared. He'd injured himself a few weeks ago, falling down some stairs. Now, he said, the hospital is trying to get him to stay overnight, and he was worried that he'd get kicked out of his apartment if he stays away from home too long. He was screaming at that point. I paged his social worker, who took him aside and eventually calmed him down a little.

After the patient left, the social worker told me that he (the patient) had a doctor's appointment later that afternoon, and if I needed to, page him (the social worker). I asked the social worker if the patient always acted like that, or was he just going through a rough time. The patient acts like that most of the time - mostly because he refuses to take his medications.

The patient returned to the clinic and, instead of checking in at the front desk, he sat down in the waiting room and starting talking to another patient. (This is a clinic where a lot of patients know each other.) I checked him in, and got the paperwork completed.

The patient ran up the front desk - "Oh my gosh! I forgot to check in!"

"Don't worry about it, Tim," (Not his real name) I said, "I saw you over there, and took care of it."

He put the palms of his hands together like a Buddhist monk, smiled, and said, "Oh bless you! You are the best."

I suspect that the patient is going to be coming to my side of the front desk from now on.

We put an announcement in today's church bulletin, and I made an announcement in front of the congregation, about the CAP mini-golf day Phillip and I are planning on the 23rd. We are limiting the outing to 24 people (the minimum number we need to get a group discount). Mike and Dana approached me after church and signed up. They were the only two to sign up today. Several people approached me during Coffee Hour and said they'd love to go, but they're going to be out of town.

When Phillip and I first started talking about mini-golf, we were worried that we'd get too many people, and the outing would become overwhelming and unmanageable. This morning, I had a feeling - and this was only a feeling - that we won't have that problem at all.

The piece I read in Writers' Group is a psuedo-blog style story about the events that lead up to my present job. It features my favorite themes: How reactions to events lead to other events, what motivates actions, how mysteries solve themselves, and how life cycles. It's a piece that I started writing when I found out I got the job, about four weeks ago. It's a piece that I was sometimes inspired to write, and that I felt sometimes was not very good. I had a burst of inspiration Friday night, which continued through yesterday. I finished it at midnight last night. When Writers' Group started, I was back to thinking it was not so good. I read it, though, and it got a good reaction.

Yesterday, Phillip and I took the bus to the International District to go to a cultural festival. I should say 'buses,' because we discovered that with the split of route 7, it's no longer possible to take a bus directly from Broadway to the International District - except at night. We took the 49 to Third Avenue, and transferred to a 7. (The bus tunnel would have been a better option, ordinarily, but it's currently closed on weekends.) Still, it was a whole lot easier than parking would have been.

The festival was a little disappointing. We were expecting more local crafts and food booths. There were some of those, but mostly it was booths from Toyota, Sprint, McDonalds, various government agencies, and so on.

We did some geocaching after the festival. We picked out three nearby caches - two in Pioneer Square, and one in the southern end of Downtown. All three caches were micros. All three cache descriptions warned us that satellite reception was terrible, and they were right. Our GPS receiver was useless. We ended up logging "Did Not Find"s on the first two caches - the ones in Pioneer Square. We found the third one by guesswork, with a little logic thrown in.

Across the street from the third cache was the Public Safety Building, which is currently being demolished. The demolition had exposed the parking garage, and several 6 MPH speed limit signs. I remembered that there is a Locationless Cache looking for speed limit signs, posted in the local units (MPH or km/hr) that do not end in the traditional 0 or 5. So I took a couple of photographs and recorded the coordinates. I got lucky enough to mark the waypoint just as our GPSr had an accuracy of 15 feet. No one had logged this location before, and, soon, no one will be able to log it again.

We walked down to Third Avenue to catch a bus back home. It used to be that we could have caught either a 14 or a 7 from that particular stop. Now, it's a choice of the 14 or the 49, except that the 49 stops on Fourth Avenue - except at night. So our choice was the 14, or walk several blocks to Pike Street. Fortunately, we didn't have to wait long for the next 14.