A little cheat here... It's really Tuesday morning really early. I went to sleep as soon as I got home last night, didn't take time to write, or to even check my e-mail. I got called out at midnight Sunday night, and I was there until 03:00, and that about did me in. Karen took me to work yesterday, then she went to see the dentist at 11:00, after she'd worked a coupla hours. The dentist thought that she was chewing funny and that was the cause of her pain... but he'd told her to chew on her other side last week when he did the work on the other side of her mouth. That's all supposed to get fixed next week... Yesterday was busy again at work, but I'm starting to get into they rhythm of things there, and it's all starting to make sense to me... and that's kinda scary. In order to have a system work there has to be compensation for incompetence. There are many other departments that we're working with, and there will be mistakes made... so much time is spent trying to prevent mistakes and working around those mistakes that do get made. I'm not talking about *big* mistakes, ones that would really affect the patient's care, I'm talking about little mistakes that affect employee frustration levels. Most of these are about communications, it seems. For instance, we're waiting for an in-patient to come down for an exam, so we're holding the table open. We know that the transporter is getting the patient... but we don't know that the patient is going to cardiology first. And it takes us fifteen minutes to find this out... and our schedule is behind fifteen minutes. Multiply this by five or six times a day and we've really lost a lot of time, and affected other department's schedules too. So, when we send for a patient, we check and double-check, and they get tired of our constant calling... but it serves our purpose (and the patient's) even if they get frustrated with answering the phone. Anyways... I did accomplish something yesterday... I've got Wednesday, Thursday and Friday off. I might even take off early today, too. So hopefully, we can get a car bought. Last night after karen picked me up from work, we went to a car lot that's run by one of Andy's friends. We didn't meet his friend, but we did meet his friend's mother. We drove a Toyota Forerunner, and I wasn't impressed with it at all. I was way too tired to drive any more vehicles, but they did have some Camrys there that we'll probably go back and drive tonight. Anyway, we should have a car by this weekend, and with me not working, we shouldn't have any problems just having one vehicle until then. The truck, however, is experiencing more symptoms of clutch malfunction, heading toward demise of functionality thereof; I called a couple of shops yesterday about replacing it... $450. And it's worth about$600 if it was in excellent shape, which it's not. So, once we get another vehicle, I'll work on replacing the clutch. It'll probably take a whole day, at least, but it'll only cost the price of the clutch and throwout bearing, somewhere around $70. And then I can drive that little red truck for another coupla years. Well, it's getting late, so I need to get ready to take Karen to work.