Very Busy

8 days to go. I have been on-call for the Christmas Holiday and it has been very busy at the hospitals with an early morning start (as in out the door by 6:30 am) every day. Leah and Dan came back from Maryland yesterday afternoon and we had a belated Christmas dinner joined by Gail and my great friend Ben Rounds who has just returned from his triumphal tour of Switzerland.We exchanged gifts and sat around the fire until Ben had to leave to drive down to Long Island for a wedding today.

Got up early (again) this morning, made rounds (I am starting to move a bit slowly now - trying to keep all the patients straight in my head), went to the Y and came home for a bit. Leah and Dan headed out for the afternoon. After straightening up a bit, I grabbed Zoey and we headed up to Kenco to check the status of my ugly work glasses. They may not be ready in time. Jim will let me know tomorrow. While there, I picked up a solar-heated shower, the last of my trip related purchases.
Came home and started packing. First thing to be finalized and loaded was the first aid kit. This is actually a very small, portable ER - the only thing missing is the CAT scan. Check it out.

What it does include is two IV sets, small bags of saline, suture kit, epi pens, basic first aid equipment, a host of oral meds (anitbiotics, antidiarrheals, anitemetics), rehydration salts and various topicals. We are pretty much set for most common emergencies. I have NOT been able to find Fer-De-Lance antivenom. None at Kenco, none at Walgreens, none at Amazon. Shucks...

The first aid bag is the first item into the big duffel. The rest of the space in that bag is pretty much occupied with camping gear: sleeping bag, thin air mattress, mosquito net, water filter/pump and tablets and solar shower with room left for the venison jerky and sundry clothes. The piece-de-resistance is my package of solar-utilizing devices. Check this stuff out!

The shiny black pad on the left is a triple fold out solar portable solar panel for charging accessories and can handle laptops, ipods, phones, Kindles and other items. The grey box in the center is a transfer battery that I can charge up during the day with the solar panel then use to recharge devices later when the sun is not available. Once fully charged it can charge a laptop twice, a Kindle 3-4 times and an iPod up to ten times. The big gold shimmery thing is the solar-heated shower.

One of the last things to be done has been to establish a Wi-Fi hotspot on my cell phone. In theory this should have been as easy as turning on the little "hotspot" switch in my phone settings. Nothing is ever easy. Fortunately, my good friend Rich Maletta, who had made me aware of this option on his phone, came up to the AT&T store with me as a Christmas present (I had wanted a pony...). we discovered that I could not HAVE a hotspot because I pay $100 dollars a month more for unlimited data and that AT&T doesn't want people with unlimited data (which we do pay for...)using all that data as an internet link (I suppose I understand - if you did that, you could drop your home internet service and just use your cell phone, which would pretty much cripple AT&T and others). So, I had to pay them LESS money for a new plan which gives me 2 and1/2 times MORE data than I use monthly on average so that I can use my cell phone as a hotspot. The last step was configuring my laptop and testing it out, which I just finished. With that piece in place, as long as I can get a cell signal I can access the web and keep the feed going here at this site.
Phew! That's enough for now. Tomorrow will be dedicated to banking and paying all bills and taxes in advance, and printing paper copies of all of my air travel reservations. When all is said and done this trip will involve 9 individual flights and take me to three countries outside of the US. What an adventure, huh?