fall

It is equinox eve, and they are forecasting snow. I knew fall was over yesterday morning when, with a crisp 33 degrees on the car thermometer, I drove past a dog-team pulling a four-wheeler over the washboarded dirt road to our house. The dogs were hot and panting with the unaccustomed work in the relative heat of a late fall dawn, but they were pulling hard with tails wagging, happy to be at it again after a long summer of smoke and rain and mud, sprawled on top of their dog-houses in the awful sub-arctic summer haze.

Dar Williams is coming to the Blue Loon on Friday, an unexpected and delightful treat to end my little hiatus between interviewing for and starting a job. In August, I saw Tim Easton there with Michelle and it was a perfect show even though I didn't know his music enough to shout the choruses with the rest of the packed house. I hope Dar gets as good a reception, although Tim gathers what amounts to a hometown crowd after so many years passing through in the near-dead of winter.

With no viable paramedic opportunities on the horizon, I'm going to be working as a medical assistant at a local community clinic. I'm a little weirded out about working a regular five-day-a-week full time job for the first time in a very, very long time but I am glad to have work of any type even if it's not in an Ambulance. I was entirely surprised by the job offer, since the Nurse Manager who interviewed me seemed rather hostile towards EMS-trained applicants. I guess what it probably came down to is that I can give shots and draw blood and obtain EKGs, and they needed more than a vitals-and-history taker. And I must have managed to come across a lot more confidant than I actually feel.

After facing my fears in Fire class for two weeks, I had to pull out. My ankle, badly sprained this summer but nearly healed, deteriorated rapidly with all the hauling and climbing and jumping and pulling and turning and had me limping as if I was fresh off crutches. An orthopedist took more x-rays last week, and determined that the calcification around an old fracture on the lateral malleolus may be irritating the injury and making the healing slow and a little tricky. Wrapped tight and laced in 10 inch wildland boots, with no tall fire engines to climb around and tons of hose to haul across parking lots, the twinges of pain are fading into a general soreness. I am home tonight and not hauling hose and climbing ladders and there is a great deal of relief, although this only means it will have to go through it all again next fall. The upside to being down for the count, however, is the ability to hold a camera.