Kelly I. Hitchcock Posts

It’s been difficult getting back into the groove of things at the office, since the holidays and being sick last week.  I had this nasty sore throat for several days, but I finally got healthy and ready to get back to work.

Unfortunately, something has been distracting me when I already have this motivation problem – the little dog upstairs has been barking.  All day, every day.  And it’s got this yip-yap whine that makes it sound like it’s in mortal danger.  At first, my dog would whine when she heard the dog upstairs, but after awhile, she’s just kind of learned to ignore it.

I wish I could do the same.  Typically, I just turn up the podcast or the song I’m listening to and try to drown him out, but then I have a meeting where the only background noise I have is YAP-YAP-YAP-YAP over and over and over.  Normally, I would call the apartment office, but I’m a little hesitant to do so.  You see, my dog is part chow, and the Texas Apartment Association expressly prohibits any mix of breed they want to call “aggressive”: Akitas, Pit bulls, German shepherds, Dobermans, Rottweilers, and Chows.  Never mind the fact that my dog is scared of her own shadow.  So I told them she’s a Retriever mix, which isn’t a complete lie, but I hate to invite complainer karma lest someone decides they want to complain about my dog.

When the owners are home, the dog doesn’t bark, but it runs from one end of the apartment to the other all the time, which would make me wonder if it were thundering outside if only it weren’t Texas, where it rains about two days a year.  If I write the dog into a story and then murder it violently, I hope you all won’t think less of me if it turns up dead the next day.  I would think it’d be barking itself hoarse by now.

I hope everyone had a fantastic holiday, filled with magic and wonder.  If nothing else, I hope it was preferable to mine, because mine was kind of a disaster.  But hey, I am home now, and we’ve begun a New Year.  And next year, I’m staying home for Christmas.

So without going into too much detail, let me just say my holiday was filled with a head cold, a stomach bug, a teething one-year-old, a blaring car alarm 12 hours away, and family that generally drives me crazy.

It was actually, seriously, comforting to celebrate with my boyfriend’s parents.  No one was vomiting, teething, showing up late, talking about the evils of microwaves, etc.  The first day we went over for a visit, I was just getting to where I felt somewhat normal again after my stomach bug.  No more vomiting or other rapid fluid loss (lovely).  We’re sitting around chatting when all of a sudden I start feeling a sharp pain in my upper belly.  It gets worse and worse, so I go lie down and finally decide I need to go to an Urgent Care.

Which brings me to my Wednesday Wrant. Urgent Care my ass.  We’re in Olathe, which is the Kansas City equivalent of no man’s land.  The closest place to us was a Walgreen’s Care Clinic, so we went over there, after waiting for what seemed like 15 minutes for a train. We get to the clinic, which has a sign up saying they won’t be accepting any new patients for the evening.

We Google the closest place, which takes us out to an empty parking lot.  We start calling Urgent Care places left and right, all of which are either closed or about to close in 20 minutes – at 7 pm.  What the crap is the point of an Urgent Care that closes at 5? That stops taking patients at 6:30? Luckily I got to feeling better before we resorted to the emergency room, but the unhelpfulness of the Urgent Care industry in Olathe, Kansas has pissed this nice Midwestern gal off.  And Google Maps, sometimes you really suck, too.