There was a show on the Travel Channel, recently, about five twenty-somethings touring Amsterdam. It hit me that this September 1st, it will be exactly ten years since I was in Holland. That's the start of the piece I was writing last night for the upcoming Writers' Group. That's why there was no blog entry yesterday.

Earlier this week, Bruce the float and I were talking about the anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley, and how it's effected people. I remarked that I'm going to pretty depressed when Bob Dylan dies. It turned out that Bruce is also a huge Dylan fan. Yesterday, out of the blue, Bruce stopped by the clinic and surprised me with a CD he'd burned for me - a collection of MP3s of live Dylan performances. Bruce is like that.

Yesterday, Craig showed up at the front desk, and asked me if I was ready to go. I'd completely forgotten that it was the third Friday of the month. This meditation session was just him and me, and that was fine. We had a good talk about philosophies - death and yoga and randomness.

After I got back to work, I started thinking about yoga. I checked on the Seattle Yoga Arts web site and discovered that the new registration form was online. (The school is currently on summer break until September 5.) I faced a dilemma, and I emailed Phillip for advice. As much as I like Lisa, I also enjoyed that class I took with Denise. I had a strong urge to switch teachers. The first problem is that Denise teaches her level I-II classes on Mondays at 5:30 (which would mean I'd have to almost go directly from work to class), or Wednesdays at 7:00 (which would interfere with Gladden's Chicken Night), or Sunday mornings at 9:30 (which would interfere with church). (I wasn't even considering the early morning classes which would be impossible because of work.) The second problem was one of loyalty - is it bad form to stick with the same school, but switch teachers?

Phillip emailed me back and pointed out that the Monday evening class would interfere with Welcome & Nurture committee meetings. He then proposed a radical idea: Why don't I sign up for the Wednesday evening class with Denise and the Friday evening class with Lisa? He'd feed Gladden on Wednesdays.

This morning, I dropped my class registration in the mail. Yoga two nights a week. This should be interesting.

After being at work for almost a half-hour this morning, I learned that the front desk person at one of our satellite clinics, over at the other side of the hospital, had called in sick. Since I've been trained as the back-up person, I was sent over there. This was the first time I'd actually worked there, and I was jumping into it. My boss told me that the nurse was filling in until I got there, so there was no need for me to panic. "Stop and get yourself a latte on the way," she advised me.

This satellite clinic is very small. There's only one person at the front desk. (That was me this morning.) It's open from 8 to noon, five days a week. On a typical day, they have 5 to 15 patients scheduled. Today, for some reason, there were 20 patients on the schedule.

I did just fine, thanks to a helpful staff and excellent documentation given to me by the regular front desk person. My boss called me a few times, to make sure I was still OK and to ask if there was anything I needed. (I have a good boss.) All in all, though, it was the first day at a new job.

In-between closing the satellite clinic and returning to my clinic, I went to lunch. At lunch, I realized that I felt very, very good. I attributed it to an adrenaline high. I felt happy.

I'm not into "extreme sports," but maybe it does me good to do something that scares me every once in a while.

The Frye Art Museum opened in 1952. I was born in 1957. My family moved to Bellevue, Washington (just east of Seattle) in 1973. I moved to Seattle in 1984 and, except for a year in Kent, I have lived here ever since. For over a year, I have worked four blocks from Frye.

In all these years, I had never been to the Frye Art Museum. I have no idea why. I enjoy Art Museums, this one is nearby, and the admission is always free. Somehow, whenever Phillip and I are looking for something to do, neither one of us think, "Hey! Let's go to the Frye!"

This changed today. I have hour-long lunches now, which gives me enough time to venture to places other than the hospital cafeteria. This morning, I had the idea to try the cafe at the Frye Art Museum, and then tour the museum afterwards. I knew I was in for a bit of a splurge - art museum cafes are not typically known for cheap meals. I was shocked by how much of a splurge it would be. A curried chicken salad sandwich and an iced tea cost me $9.51.

As Phillip pointed out tonight, I went to a free museum and paid ten dollars for lunch.

But, I have finally been to the Frye Art Museum. I enjoyed it, and lunch was, I must admit, delicious.

Back at work, late in the afternoon, a patient with an African-sounding name and accent arrived in our clinic. She brought a young girl (I'm guessing 2 or 3 years old) with her. The girl threw a temper-tantrum, and burst into tears, when she thought the free condoms were candy and wanted some. When the woman came to the front desk, she was holding the girl in her arms, and the girl had stopped crying. The young girl was, however, staring at me. I smiled at the girl and said hello. The girl didn't respond.

"Say hello to Uncle," the mother gently encouraged the girl.

I had never heard that expression before.

When a patient starts off by saying, "You've changed everything around," it's a pretty good clue that they're on the wrong floor.

Armed with the additional hints emailed to us, I made another solo attempt at finding that Interlaken cache.

The hints were sent to us by a geocacher named nteclpr, who was the last person to find the cache, and the owner of the Dorothy Gale travel bug (which we had big plans for). They were very well written hints - they didn't give the location away, but narrowed down the search area considerably. Given our intimate knowledge of the area, I knew it had to be in one of three or four locations.

(There was another geocacher, named jonwilliams who logged a "Did Not Find" on Friday.)

After more than a half-hour of searching, I still did not find it. I figure there are three possibilities: 1) This cache has been muggled (stolen or disturbed by non-geocachers, intentionally or not) 2) This is one the more well-hidden "difficulty 2" regular-sized cache in the history of geocaching, or 3) We are total losers.

Given that, together and singularly, Phillip and I have spent over two hours looking for this cache, I am inclined to believe possibility 1 more than the other two. Given that we have found Bison Tubes (about the size of half a pencil) under railings of overpasses and inside trees, and we have found a fake rock hidden in a rock garden, I am not inclined to believe possibility 3.

The last sentence of nteclpr's email read: "We probably re-covered it too well." I'm worried that they didn't re-cover it well enough.

After giving up on the Interlaken cache, I made another attempt at the Lake Union cache which we didn't find on Saturday. I found it. It was merely a matter of looking in the right direction.

Today was the annual Writers' Group picnic in Volunteer Park. I read a piece about observations I've made about clinic patient behavior. It got a good reaction, but I didn't have much faith in it. It was really out of obligation that I went to Writers' Group, and it was only because of Writers' Group that I went to church today. Neither Phillip nor I have been to church since the Sunday before the disappointing CAP mini-golf Saturday (except for Church Council). Are the two events related? Possibly. Am I getting disappointed in our church? I'm not sure.

We rented Team America: World Police this weekend. I loved it so much that I've watched it twice, including all the DVD extras.

Last Thursday evening, I went out alone to find a geocache hidden in the densely wooded Interlaken greenbelt, not very far from "I can see the Dawghouse from here!" It was partly for the travel bug in the cache that I went looking for it. I came home frustrated. Satellite reception was poor, when it existed at all, and seemed to lead me to a spot that contradicted the hints.

Friday night, Phillip joined me in the search for the Interlaken geocache. We waited until about 11:00 - it was pitch black in the woods, and we never picked up any more than one satellite at any one time. Most of the time, we had no satellite reception at all. We searched around with flashlights, and went home frustrated.

We tried the Interlaken geocache again on Saturday afternoon. We got better satellite reception. We searched the area we thought the hints were leading us to first. Then we searched the area our GPS receiver led us to. Eventually, we put away the GPSr, ignored the hints, and just searched. After more than an hour of searching, we gave up. Geocaching can be a very frustrating sport at times. I'd logged a "Did Not Find" on Thursday, we didn't bother with a log on Friday, and in our "Did Not Find" log entry on Saturday, we wrote that we were giving up on this one unless someone gives us another hint. This evening, we got an email from the last finder of the geocache. She or he gave us a hint. Apparently, it's closer to where the GPSr had led us than to where we thought the hints put it.

We looked for two other geocaches on Saturday, after Interlaken. Both were geocaches we'd logged "Did Not Find"s before. The first one, at Lynn Park, was one of the first geocaches we'd looked for. Lynn Park had eluded us several times in the past, because the satellite reception was so poor that our GPSr kept leading us away from the very small park. On Saturday, we finally found it (I found it, in case anyone's keeping track) rather quickly by deciding to go where the GPSr led us. We should learn to trust our GPS receiver more often. We are, however, more experienced at using our GPSr - Lynn Park was our 94th find. On April 24th, on our first attempt, we made newbie assumptions.

On the third geocache we sought, we trusted the GPSr and still didn't find it. Three caches sought - one found.