Waiting For Godot

 

All day I've been waiting for Bill's hospice nurse for her weekly visit. 

Bill and I take a one to two hour nap in the afternoon, generally starting around 2 PM. I've asked her to visit in the morning or late afternoon after our naps. 

Unfortunately, she is so overloaded with patients she is visiting she can't always keep to this schedule. Today is one of those days.

It is now a few minutes after 4 PM. She texted me that she would call "in a bit."  "In a bit" can be anywhere from a few minutes to an hour or more.

I don't blame her, it is the nature of her job. Still, This will be another screwed up day for my rest. Yes, sometimes it is all about me.

There are a couple of other situations I've been waiting a long time to come to completion.

One of them is fixing that seal around the sewer pipe that goes out of our wall downstairs behind our finished wall to wall carpeted Media Room. A few years ago I discovered that water leaked down the wall to the floor and underneath the drywall to the Media Room. I only detected it by the smell of fungus that grew over time. How many months or years it was leaking on the floor I do not know but long enough to cause me to rip up the media room rug and replace it and some cost of time and expense. Actually the new rug is better so some good came of it. 

Bill fixed the leak and it lasted about three years but now it leaks again.  After a heavy rainstorm droplets leak down the wall to the basement floor behind the drywall to the Media Room. I contacted with a local leak specialist last November to repair it. He specializes in crawl spaces and leaks like we have here. Since then it's been one delay after another. The latest delay is that he has COVID and is in quarantined but I was assured by his office this morning that I'm "first on the list." Again, I'm trying to be patient and realize that in this Age of COVID life will not be normal. There will be delays and my basement wall leak is way down on the list. But Bill constantly asking me "When is he going to fix it?" is driving me crazy. I'm confident he will fix it.  He's already been out here and surveyed the situation and I have confidence in him and he has all excellent reviews on Yelp. But I await completion, hopefully by the end of January. We shall see. In the meantime the one thing for sure Bill will ask me again, sometimes several times a day "When is he going to fix the leak?"

Then there is my sunglass frame delay. I broke my excellent Timberland wrap around sunglasses some months back. I went to BJ's looking to replace the frame. They told me they didn't carry that designer frame any more but I could order it directly from Timberland. I did my Internet research and found a company where I could get this frame. I ordered it last November 30th and received a confirmation letter. Then nothing. Nada. I called their customer service number this morning (with my friend Larry as a witness on Zoom). The customer service rep told me the frames were on "backorder" and they expected it in at the end of January. That's TWO MONTHS folks. 

Be patient Ron. Don't be one of those difficult, unreasonable customer demanding the impossible. 

It's not all doom and gloom on the customer service front here at Casa Tipton-Kelly. When I called for my annual eye examination appointment and was told my doctor couldn't see me until May 24th I took matters in my own hands and scheduled an eye appointment with another doctor, who as luck would have it had a cancellation and took me in two days after my call and at 10 AM in the morning, my preferred appointment time. Late enough in the morning so I don't have any toilet issues and early enough so I could have lunch and my afternoon nap.

But here I wait for Bill's hospice nurse to call. It is now 4:20 PM. And here I rushed through lunch half expecting her to call just as I was placing a spoonful of that delicious homemade White bean potato kale soup into my hungry mouth. I made it through lunch without any interruptions to feeding my face. 

When I go on whining like this I always have to stop and put things into perspective. I'm alive, I'm (reasonably) well, I can move around (without too much pain) and I have a roof over my head and no mortgage. What's to complain about? But it's my nature. As Pat says, "Could always be worse. We could have third world problems." 

Indeed.