Post from work

Amazingly, I really can't think of anything I desperately need to be doing at work right now. Thanks to a couple of cancellations earlier this week I've had plenty of time to catch up on things, and now I've got two hours while I'm waiting for my next meeting. Unfortunately I'm also not feeling so well today-- I've had some vertigo for the past few days, which I've never had before, so I went to the doctor yesterday. They said it's nothing serious, just a condition that people sometimes experience which goes away mostly on it's own, but which may last for several weeks. Which actually really sucks, because I've been pretty nauseous today because of it, and "lost my breakfast" as you might say. I hope it goes away quickly...

The other thing about this condition? It mostly occurs in people over 60. Which has gotten me thinking about turning 30. Which is happening in two weeks (!) and I'm not quite sure I'm prepared. I know that there is no qualitative shift that occurs at 30, but I think other people do view 30-somethings as different from 20-somethings. Sometime last week I was reading an intake report on a client I was about to see, and this person was described by the assessor as "middle-aged." And do you know what that person's age was? 34 years old. I just about had a heart attack. I cannot be 4 years away from middle-aged. I am clearly a young adult, and will clearly be a young adult for the rest of my life. Right?

Also, I have a client who has three children and one more on the way, and I really think of her as a grown-up, like a real grown-up, not a young-adult faking being a real adult. I must have known this at some point and blocked it out, but I was reminded this week that she is (drumroll) 28 years old. I'm not sure I can handle this "getting older" thing. I will not turn into one of those people who lies about their age, but I can see myself being genuinely confused at some point, and checking the wrong box for age category on the census...

The good news? My strong, able-bodied, young-adult, 30-year-old husband will be visiting me this weekend, and can take care of my invalid self for a while. I actually genuinely believe right now that as soon as he arrives I'm going to feel 100% better, because I think us being apart ages me, a lot. So I have the vertigo of a 60-year-old right now, but once Jeff arrives it will take 30+ years off my age, and I'll be back to normal. The doctor might not agree, but I'd be willing to bet that a good hug will knock my vestibular system right back into balance.

Postdoc

So the rumors are true-- I have a postdoc. I will be working in rehabilitation psychology, on the psychology consult service at Harborview medical center in Seattle, which is a regional level-1 trauma center. So I'll be doing inpatient work with people who have serious injuries, working with the patients, their families, and their treatment teams. It is totally different from anything I've done before, but should be really interesting, exciting, and challenging. I'm looking forward to it! I will start sometime around the end of July or early August.

My internship ends on June 30th, so we are officially on the downward slope of this year Jeff and I are spending apart. And now I know what I'll be doing when it's over, so we can really start planning for my move up to Seattle! It's super exciting!

Tonight, unfortunately, is not an exciting Friday night, because I'm home sick with a bad cold. But soon I'll try to do a catch-up post about things that happened in the past few weeks besides travel difficulties :)

5:30pm airport post

I believe that in general, travel luck is normally distributed in the population of travelers, and among trips within each traveler. Ever since moving to San Diego, I have had nothing but good luck on my flights to Seattle to visit Jeff. On more than one occasion, I've ended up with an empty seat next to me on a "very full flight," and once they announced that there was only one open seat on the entire plane, and it turned out it was next to me. My flights have been on time, my seat-mates have been quiet and uninteresting (when I have them at all), and I've had smooth travels all around. I've been saying for a while that all this good luck makes me nervous because this much luck seems highly improbable, and it seems that with increasing trips, some regression to the mean should occur, possibly with a vengeance.

Well, I think payment for my good fortune has come due. After last weekend's shenanigans I thought I might be in the clear, but this afternoon as I was prepping to leave to go back to SD, I got an automated call announcing that my flight had been canceled. I immediately called to try to get re-booked, and the person I spoke with made some extremely incompetent mistakes (first trying to book me on a flight that had already departed, then trying to book me on a flight that would give me a 13 hour layover in PDX, then on a flight where my connection left 30 minutes before I would arrive to catch it, then finally, trying to re-book me on my canceled flight), before getting me booked on a flight with *2 connections* to travel a total distance of 900 miles.

I arrived at the airport, checked in, went to the gate, and then noticed that my original flight had suddenly popped back up on the departures board. They have uncanceled it (did you know that was possible? I didn't), but now it is delayed. So now I'm back on that flight, but I have an hour before departure, and I'll miss my original connection in SFO, so I'll be taking the next later flight, which gets me in around midnight assuming everything goes as it is supposed to at this point. The probability of that is anybody's guess.