I think my mom still secretly beleives we'll all come back and live near her, although we're all in our 40s now and it will NEVER HAPPEN.

Heh. I live within an hour and a half of my folks, and they're hoping I'll move somewhere cool. 'Cause then they can come visit me and explore said cool place from my apartment. Although I still get the impression that they'll be expecting me to come home from, say, Victoria BC and change their airfilters every four months.

Life's full of disappointments.

That's tough, beth. Other people's fears are hard to deal with. I hope you're feeling better.

I don't like living as far away from my family as I do, not to mention that I'd rather live in California than Louisiana. My MiL will probably follow us if/when we move., unless the guy she's dating gets a whole lot more serious.

Life's full of disappointments.

"Who are you?"
"No one of consequence."
"I must know."
"Get used to disappointment."

I love that movie, P-C!

There are people who don't?

(Actually, I think there are. These people are wrong.)

Oh, beth, that all sounds stressy and ugh.

My own rant:

Here's what I just had to transcribe from Doctor Wordy (I'm fairly sure I'm not violating HIPAA, since there's no way anyone could make sense of the following, let alone glean any information from it that could identify the patient:

We performed an echocardiogram just to assess her diaphragm function, and while she was not breathing very strongly, both diaphragms seemed to move in the right direction, which is not a significant amount as she was not taking a significant inspiratory effort, and she had a small left pleural effusion.

Endless run-on sentences. Thickets of whiches, thats, ands, buts and althoughs. Filler words galore. And I have something like three hours of this to slog through today. I am so going to the division chief about this, because what's the point of it? It conveys no useful information to any other doctors, it complicates billing, and it's killing my wrists.

both diaphragms seemed to move in the right direction, which is not a significant amount

That "which" has no antecedent. Lamer.

What's particularly lame is that he's using all those words to say, "We performed an echocardiogram just to assess her diaphragm function. It was okay."

And, on replaying the tape three or four more times, I realize that she actually said:

...seemed to move in the right direction, but just not a significant amount...

which fixes the antecedent-lacking "which" problem but still doesn't exactly make the sentence a sterling example of crystalline concision.

And tense drift. Did I mention the tense drift? In a single paragraph on a patient exam, she wanders from past to present and back again over and over, often within the same (run-on) sentence. And the un-cute habit of rattling off either the drugs the patient is on with no doses or the doses without the drugs.

{{beej}} and {{beth}}

My parents want me to move back near them. So near, in fact, that my dad keeps telling me that my room in their house is still available any time I want it. Since his strokes, he does this just about every time I talk to him.

Is it bad that I've spent all morning working on homework while at work and not doing any actual work work? I'm about halfway (more like 2/3 actually) through writing a paper that's due tonight I needs to finish it.