I had gone to bed early last night, about 20:00 or so, and got a good night's sleep, anyway.

The PT tech at work is sick, so we were a person short in the morning, and one of the other FT techs left at 11:00 to got to Arkansas, so there were only two of us from 11:00 until 13:00. Obviously, a no-lunch day, heh.

I did get off on time, though, came home and sat around for a while and then went to Walgreens to get some cigars and furnace filters. While I was there, I stopped to look at pocket knives and I bought one for ten bucks... a "Swiss Army Knife". And I realized that I hadn't bought a pocket knife for myself since... well, never. The first knife that I remember was a barlow that my Uncle Earle gave me, and the second one was also an almost identical barlow given to me by a friend when I broke the first one. And the one that I've been carrying around for the last seven years, the one that I left in Oklahoma last time we visited Mom, I got from Karen's dad, and he'd evidently carried it for years.

And yeah, I've still got the original barlow in a drawer in the dresser. Sentimental value.

And on my way to Walgreens, the Camry turned over 111,111 miles. Neat, heh?

Anyway, I got a call from the hospital from the evening tech; the machine was acting up bad, and he was going to start doing patients on the Z while he did a slow tube burn (seasoning) on the main machine, the one that we *just* replaced the tube in.

He finally called back about 21:00 and I went in. Sure enough, the tube was still arcing, in spite of successfully completing the seasoning routine.

We decided to try to do a head on it, and it worked well enough for that, and then we got the patient that it had failed on earlier, a 350+ pound patient. Puts a heavy, heavy load on the tube and the table.

But we did get the exam done, with only a few failures.

We even did another patient after that, with no arcs at all. I will, as the other tech so succinctly put it, "Ride that pony until it's dead".

We finally got ahold of one of our engineers, and he listened to the story and asked haw many arcs we were getting and then ordered a tube. Hard telling when it'll be in, the company is supposed to keep one in KC, but when the last one went out there were none even in this part of the country.

I clocked out at 23:00 and came home after cleaning up everything that needed to be done. The other tech will take over call at 07:00 in the AM. With the ER doc that's on tonight, I'm pretty sure that I'll be going back in.

This is my two thousand eight hundred and fortieth entry. 2840. Sometimes I amaze me, I really never thought that I'd be doing this for so long.