Gained 4 pounds since my last visit. She is unhappy with my blood pressure. She has now set an even lower standard for me: 120 as the high number. Trending over that, she says, is as  bad as 160 at my age. I’m actually not sure I totally buy this. She asked me to lose some weight and refrained from upping my meds. I was looking over my last few months of BP readings. Of 79 readings, 19 are 120 or lower for the upper number and 42 are 130 or higher, so I guess I am trending higher. It was low this morning.

She also ordered a bone density test for me.

She thinks I have lost height,

but this stems from a measurement of 5 feet 10 inches her office once took.

I’m pretty sure I’ve never been that tall, but will obviously get the test. She asked me to start taking Calcium and Vitamin D, so I started doing that today (Eileen has a lot of this laying around).

Went from the doctor to a piano trio rehearsal, then a meeting with my boss. The arrangement I did yesterday sounded pretty cool with violin, cello and piano. I showed my boss several possibilities of service music for the future as she requested.  Came home and exercised then picked up Eileen and we went to the pub. A good day but a bit tiring.

Today I have an even fuller schedule. Class at 8:30,

then a veteran’s day service at my Mom’s nursing home, a wedding at 3 and then Eileen and I have tickets to a jazz concert this evening. She is meeting some family and friends in Muskegon today for lunch.

I will need to pace myself a bit today even though all my gigs are pretty easy.

The people fixing our bathroom ran into problems yesterday. Our old fashioned claw foot bath tub didn’t go back together easily.

It had a broken part. Also at one point a valve they were working with gave way and started leaking. They looked pretty harried. It’s still not quite done and at least one of them will back this morning to finish the job, hopefully. They have been every morning this week since Tuesday. I am surprised how much this intruded into my solitude. The workers are friendly and seem competent. I just like having some down time alone I guess.

I finished reading Playing the Jesus Game by Alden Nowlan. I don’t usually read books of poetry straight through. I tend to savor a poem when I find one I like. But I have enjoyed Nowlan.

Here’s a poem from this collection I liked.

CHRIST

Aloft in a balsam fir I watched Christ go,
two crows in that same tree made human laughter.

He clambered over the log fence and crossed
the orange-yellow field, his purple skirts

swishing the grain and I could hear that sound,
so close he was, and separate the hairs

in his red beard. He passed beneath me, never
once looking up, and having reached the gate

to the hill pasture shrank smaller and smaller
becoming first a fist and then a finger

and then a fleck of purple on the hillside.
At last, at the edge of the wood, he vanished altogether.

from Playing the Jesus Game by Alden Nowlan

I inter-library loaned 3 volumes of his work.

I sat reading The  Mysterious Naked Man by him while I waited at the doctor’s office yesterday. Here’s a poem from it I liked.

ABSOLUTION

father it seems
I am condemned
to forgive

you,
having looked
into my own mirror
so many times
and seen your face.

When I like this many poems by a poet, I like to have a volume of his work handy so I can remember him and read him from time to time.

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Brain Exam Detects Awareness in 3 ‘Vegetative’ Patients – NYTimes.com

This is fascinating to me. When I was a child in Tennessee, one of my fellow students was hit by a car and never regained consciousness. She eventually went home in a twilight state half way between wakefulness and full coma. I remember her well. I’m sure I visited her. Eventually I wrote songs and poems about her.

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Girls Just Want to Go to School – NYTimes.com

Another story of courage, this time of a young girl. I love it that Kristoff points out how we can learn from her.

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