As some of you know, several years ago I toyed with the idea of turning my collection of blog posts into a book. I certainly had plenty of content.
I was inspired by some of the people who told me that the posts have been something they counted on.
I organized my years worth of blog posts and wrote up a book proposition. That was as far as I got. The pandemic came along and I got caught up with the start-up world (Shout out to Oath Care; I miss you)
The inclination to put together a ‘Nurse Judy’ book simply got placed on the ‘back burner’.
But the urge to keep writing stayed with me and I am grateful to all of the readers out there who stuck with me.
My standard health related posts got peppered with more and more of the personal stories….and some of those stories are admittedly a bit bizarre.
I realized that those were the ones I wanted to write more of, so that’s exactly what I did.
I now have a completely different book that I am just about wrapping up.
The following is a random, tiny snippet:
Keep the repair man off the roof
Many buildings in San Francisco don’t have air conditioning. The hot days when it is really needed are generally limited. (That is one of the reasons I can never move.)
But some neighborhoods are warmer than others. Noe Valley, where I worked for so many years, is one of the sunnier neighborhoods and we were fortunate to have a building that actually had air conditioning. But it was an old building and the creaky heating and cooling system went on the fritz every so often.
In October 2009 (I know the date because I had jotted this anecdote down in my journal) the cooling system wasn’t working and the weather was HOT.
A repair man was called. When he finally showed up, he sought me out. My car was blocking his access to the roof. He needed to get up there in order to figure out exactly what was going on. He asked if I could quickly move my car to another spot.
“Sure”.
I finished up my call… which was likely giving phone advice about heat rash.
I got into my car, turned the key and found that the car wouldn’t start.
Of course the repairman had to try for himself. Then my boss needed to try but neither of them were able to get it started. It turned out that having a penis was not going to make a difference.
The repair man wasn’t going to wait around. He rescheduled for the following day. In the meantime, I had a dead car. Sandy volunteered to come after work to jump it in case it was the battery. In any case I was likely to need a ride home.
Shortly before I was done for the day Alana called to check in. At the time she was a student down in Santa Cruz. I mentioned the car situation.
There was a pause.
“Did the man make it onto the roof?”
“No, he is coming back tomorrow.”
“Good, he wasn’t supposed to get on the roof. The car should start now”
Excuse me?
I went out to the parking lot. Got into my car. I turned the key. The car started right up.
For the record, Alana has no idea why she said that.
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The book is full of odd stories like this.
The next step is figuring out what to do with it.
