Day 114: Scheduling a Doctor's Appointment

Ted and I both slept poorly last night. We don’t know why. It could be that the air was too heavy or we just could not find that “right” spot.

And it’s still raining and cloudy. It’s hard to be motivated when it’s rainy and cool…although it’s great sleeping weather.

After fixing Ted his morning drink and sending him off to work, I go back to bed to catch an hour or so of sleep. I need to call the doctor this morning and I don’t want sleep too late.

I wake up at about 8:30. I wanted to get my medicine and look for the letters from the clinic (they do that here…write you a letter for your family doctor every time you visit the clinic). I also wanted to translate a few words if the person on the other end didn’t understand what I wanted. I used my handy-dandy translator that my daughter Ailene gave me for my birthday. It works very well…especially since I don’t have Internet right now to utilize the online translation!

After sitting down with my questions and my translator, I dialed the number. At first I dialed the number as it was written, and it didn’t go through. Then I realized that I have to enter the 0711 before the number to get it to work. Hooray! It went through!

After speaking with the receptionist, I found out she and the doctor both speak English. Wonderful! And he is accepting new patients. Great! Now for the appointment: the soonest he could see me was tomorrow afternoon at 3:30pm. I’ll take that appointment!

I think I’ll bring my camera tomorrow and take a few photos of the area on my way to the doctor’s office. There are some lovely old buildings here but I’ve been too busy either painting, cleaning or unpacking to think about taking photos.

After getting that appointment organized, I really didn’t want to clean and the trash bin was full yesterday so I can’t take packing paper out to the trash so I decided to work on finances until it’s time to go over to the Library and send an email to work. This is SO frustrating not having Internet connectivity. Oh well, this will be resolved next Tuesday, thank goodness!

I worked all afternoon sorting through mail and getting receipts in order as well as balancing accounts and researching various issues with our insurance. Finally, it was about 3pm when I knew I had to get over to the Library before they close at 17:00 (or 5pm). Europeans use military time and I’ve become used to using it.

Surprisingly, the weather cleared up and it’s sunny and blue skies with puffy white clouds! It’s warm outside, but wonderfully cool inside the apartment.

Before heading over to the Library, I checked the trash to see if it had been picked up. No, it hadn’t. This is frustrating because I have all this paper to throw away and cannot get rid of it…so it’s hanging out in our second bedroom until I can throw it away.

I wanted to use the back entrance but it’s locked. So I walk around to the front of the building and go inside. I checked the computer but it appears I need to log on. So I wait my turn in line to speak to someone. The woman behind the counter is a gruff older woman…what I would call a typical German woman. She’s not mean…it’s just that guttural German speech makes her sound that way. She was taking care of two children and another person came up. I let her go before me because I didn’t feel like I should be there in the first place….but I needed to get an email off to my boss and upload a file.

When it was my turn, the woman didn’t speak a lick of English. Great. But she tells me the other woman does and to wait a moment…at least that’s the impression I got. The other woman was even older than the first but she seemed younger and sprightlier somehow.

She asked me what I wanted and I told I came in last week and asked about Internet access. She asked if I wanted to go on right now. I said, “Yes”. She signed me in with a log in and password.

Thank goodness I have a Yahoo account but I couldn’t sign on because it was in German. Then I remembered how to get the page in English. After having difficulty figuring out how to get the @ sign in my account name, I finally signed on to my email account and read the dozen or so emails that came in since last night, most of them from my boss.

I started to respond using the touch key method of typing but I realized that the keyboard was a German keyboard was a German keyboard and the keys were in different places. I had to look at the keyboard (something I’m totally not used to doing) to ensure I had the correct keys! And I wanted to use contractions but of course, I couldn’t find the apostrophe. It is enormously frustrating not having connectivity!

I sent out a few emails to my boss and realized my thumb drive didn’t fit the USB port on the machine. Another source of total frustration! I thought the ports were all standard. It appears they are not! UGH! I will have to go to the base to email this file and I don’t know how I’m going to accomplish that since Ted has an appointment this evening that will keep him out until 10pm! And since he does not want to eat dinner tonight, I get my chicken salad with crackers for dinner.

I’m thinking I might drop him off, zip on over to the base, do what I have to do and then go back and pick him up. We’ll see what he has to say about that. As it turned out, he wanted to come along and so we went over to the base around 10:15 and checked email then came home and went to bed.

Wednesday 07/15/09