Tales of Near Death Experiences

Greetings everyone. We've had an interesting week since returning from our Lubbock trip on Monday afternoon. I met with a new headhunter who was recommended by a former Transocean colleague. This lady and her organization were very professional and I was quite impressed with them. She asked me quite a few questions about myself and my experience, and she seemed to have a good grasp of the current market (which still ain't too good). I was also very impressed that she had actually taken the time to read my resume before our meeting, which was a first among all of my other recruiter contacts.

On Thursday Vicki and I did our usual gigs down at Second Mile Mission Center. I could barely contain my excitement when Tom gave me my latest assignment - to organize the medical equipment/supply area of the warehouse! I'm not being facetious here, this was a dream come true. I have been eyeing that area for the last three months. It has been a jumble of walkers, wheelchairs, bandages, expired drugs and all sorts of other medical stuff. The driver behind the clean up is that we'll soon be needing as much space as possible to handle the donations that will arrive for the Christmas toy drive. In the past Second Mile has been able to utilize some offsite warehouse space, but none will be available this year. I jumped into my clean up role unsupervised, which meant I was free to make my own decisions regarding what got to stay and what had to go. I filled up the dumpster with stuff that had been there for a long time. There was some kind of old piece of dental equipment that had at least two inches of dust and cobwebs on it. There were also about 1,000 bottles (not an exaggeration) of expired vitamins, several boxes old shoe insoles, 100's of fliers about how to use a Sonicare electric toothbrush (I'm sure most Second Mile clients have $100 electric toothbrushes), and bunches of other miscellaneous stuff.

Vicki and I returned to Second Mile on Friday for a rare second appearance of the week. The son of one of the ladies who works there died a few days ago and they had a memorial service for him on Friday. Because the entire staff was attending the service they asked if Vicki and I could come in and help mind the store for a few hours. Vicki took care of the food pantry and the clothing room and I was in charge of the warehouse. Friday was a slow day for clients, so I of course was drawn back to my reorganization project in the medical section. Unfortunately, while working on the top of a ladder placing items on the upper level of shelves the ladder slipped and I managed to fall about ten feet to the concrete floor below, landing on my hands and knees. It was like a very short roller coaster ride with a very abrupt stop. After making a perfect four-point landing I lay semi-stunned on the floor for a minute or so, hoping that if I didn't move I wouldn't discover any broken body parts. After finally moving everything at least once and determining that nothing seemed to be broken, I managed to get to my feet. I was panicked to discover that everything was blur and that my vision had been affected by the fall. And then I realized that I had lost my glasses. I returned to the floor and crawled around for a minute or so until I located them. As of today it seems that my only injury is a non-functioning left knee. Based on her Internet research, Vicki has diagnosed my problem as a torn meniscus. Tomorrow morning I'll try to get an appointment to see someone for a second opinion.

Speaking of Second Mile, below is the new leader for the most worthless donation of all time. Many thanks to the generous person who dropped off this piece of junk.

Remember - Friends don't let friends drop off this kind of junk to well meaning faith-based community service organizations.