Home For a Day

Every once in awhile I have to get back to reality and present day life.  I seem to age 30 some years every time I do this though. 

I had my annual exam with my new doctor on Thursday.  He had told me to fast before the appointment – so I did, and after the exam, it was about 10 steps over to the lab where they took a bunch of blood and gave me an EKG.  Amazing – all in one appointment.  The next amazing thing is that I didn’t have to make an appointment to get the results!  He will call me if there are any problems.

This all seems so simple to me and I can’t understand why my doctor saga was so long and annoying last year – with 5 appointments to get my annual done.

So you don’t have to read  back for all 5 of my doctor saga posts from last year (unless you want to – LOL), here is a summary.

1st appointment – ooops – someone forgot to click save after entering my info and scheduling my appointment.  Hour and 1/2 of waiting before I found out that it would be at least another hour and 1/2 so re-scheduled.

2nd appointment – 1/2 hour in the waiting room for a 5 minute meet and greet.

3rd appointment – 1/2 hour in the waiting room, then examined and told to go any time after fasting for blood tests.  If anyone there had told me to fast, I would have and could have done it then.

4th appointment – not really an appointment, but another day for the blood tests

5th appointment – 1/2 hour in the waiting room for a 1 minute visit, so she could tell me that I was healthy.

Each visit cost me $3. for parking or $4.50 for bus fare and more than an hour of my time including travel.

This year

1st appointment – less than a minute in the waiting room for a 10 minute meet and greet.

2nd appointment – 5 minutes in the waiting room for exam, blood tests and EKG

Each visit had no cost (free parking) and about 15 minutes in travel plus the appointment times (10 minutes + 30 minutes).

Chester is doing fine again – his last seizure was January 27 and I’m hoping he will go at least the 5 weeks he went last time before having another one.

Believe it or not, I bought another camera.    If you had been following my camera posts, you will know I bought a Sony NEX-5N awhile ago – soon after booking my trip to Africa.  The main reason I bought it was that it would take additional lenses, which to me mean that I could get some powerful zoom lens.  Unfortunately, after buying it I found out that the most zoom I could get was 210 mm, which is approximately the same as the 15x camera I already had.  I do love the clarity of the pictures though, but lately had been thinking of getting one of the one piece cameras with a lot of zoom.

I found a Nikon Coolpix P500 on sale at Future Shop and ordered it a couple of weeks ago.  It came in and I picked it up Friday, along with an extra battery and card.  This camera has 36x zoom.  I tried it out a bit Friday and Saturday and have pictures (of course) to show you.  Some of Chester and some of the Red River.   Some of the pictures I had taken with the other 2 cameras were of the opposite bank of the river at the turn and you will see immediately that this camera brings this in much better.  I am anxious to try it out on some wildlife now.

Nikon zoomed, but not to the max

This is much closer than I could get with either of the other cameras, but I can still get closer.

Nikon zoomed all the way

We have our rink on the Red River now too.  Here is the warm up shack and part of the rink with people enjoying it.

Red River Rink

Got some wildlife on the walk yesterday too – he wasn’t moving though.

Crow Feb 11

And as promised – here is Chester with a Nikon lens.

Chester Feb 10

As you can see, we have the tail in motion and not blurred, but I have to admit that he was concentrating on something and it wasn’t going full speed.

Chester Feb 10

I took a couple of pictures of him racing towards me and those were very blurry.  I’m sure the Sony would have done a better job on them.