The Speed of Life

One doesn't post as much when there's so much living to do.  Of course, there's a danger in having a life without reflection.  However, as much as I value the act of writing and reflecting on my experiences, I value the act of having them even greater.  Hence, there hasn't been as much posting lately--even absent the rising flood of academic papers that accompany my life for nine months of the year.

Everything is going rather smoothly in the desert.  The clinic has been steadily improving its intake numbers.  I'm continually amazed at how the Doctor comes home with financial reports that meet our expectations, yet when I ask her what the next day looks like, she invariably says, "slow, not many people."  What this suggests is either that she is lying to me or that our business model is working.  Assuming that the Doctor isn't just toying with me, our notion that people will pay for quality care seems to be justified.  Strong per capita spending indicates that we are attracting people willing to give their cats good medicine.

The above paragraph is also an indication of how split my personality has become.  For brief moments in the morning and after SkyGirl has gone to sleep, I plunge deep into contemporary literature, expository pedagogy, and passionate creative work.  Then SkyGirl wakes up, the Doctor goes into work, and I start contemplating spread sheets, ROI's, marketing strategies, and management of employees.  Strangely, I'm not disheartened by this.  I find that I really enjoy working with the accounting software--although this may be largely due to my responsibilities as the guy who tallies up the deposits.  I get to see the money add up.  

I'm also the de facto tech support for the clinic, which allows me to play around with the road not taken.  Early on in my graduate career, I toyed with the idea of dropping out to become some sort of computer support person.  I did that as part of a graduate assistantship and found that not only was I good at it, I really liked working with the systems.  Back then, my job of keeping the English department servers and computers running smoothly felt like one big puzzle.  I liked the challenge of finding ways to make one machine talk to another, figure out how one professor managed to reconfigure a computer so that it only wrote Chinese characters, finely tune the balance of caffeinated and de-caffeinated coffee.  

Now I'm back doing that as well.  Yesterday, I installed the upgrade on the ProImage digital x-ray software, reconfigured our Windows XP that runs as a virtual machine on a MacBook, and then transferred all the digital radiographs from one database to another.  And it was fun (except for SkyGirl constantly drawing me away from the computer to stop her from torturing cats).  My favorite moment was figuring out how to create an automated back-up of the database that linked Automater with iCal and our veterinary practice management software so that only thing the Doctor has to do is walk in the door and swap out portable hard drives.  That was a good day.