Catching Up
Last Thursday, my sister, Emily Kay May, arrived from Australia. She came in via a military transport hop to Travis AFB near Fairfield, then caught a BART bus to reach the Pleasant Hill BART station. At the time she telephoned me, I was at the Kaiser Permanente medical offices in Walnut Creek talking with my gastroenterologist about the abdominal pain I had about three weeks earlier. I told Emily I’d be there in about half an hour.
The doctor told me that the sort of pain I described was not uncommon in patients who have had an ileostomy, and was probably caused by either a partial or a short-term blockage of the small intestine. That was a bit surprising to me, because it had happened during my cold, and I wasn’t eating anything that should have been “challenging” to my gut at the time. There was no particular treatment to be given, though he entered a note into my medical record in case something like it happened again later.
It was actually about a half hour later when I got to the BART station and collected Emily. We went from there to the Pasta Primavera Italian restaurant on Treat Boulevard and had a nice dinner. But they had no creme brulee for dessert. We were told it was only available when the chef felt like it.
On Saturday, we met with Glenn Branch from work, his wife, Sujatha, and their son, Vikram to have lunch at the Left Bank restaurant in Pleasant Hill. After lunch, we browsed the nearby Borders bookstore.
On Sunday, we took Rusty on an outing to see if she would try for a jackrabbit, since those are in season all year round. We visited an area near I-80 that turned out to be popular with the dirt bike crowd, and while we did see a jackrabbit within about thirty feet of us, Rusty showed no inclination to chase it. We tried another place that Emily knew about from her earlier stint working in the Fairfield area, and that turned about to have an amazing concentration of jackrabbits. We saw nine of them at one time in a 120′ square area, and it turned out that there were a few more we couldn’t see in the grass as well. Rusty did make a flight on one jackrabbit in the grass, and later another flight. She didn’t do any chasing of any jackrabbit, though, and didn’t connect on either flight. I ended up calling her to the lure three times, and we called it a day. We rented three videos, and watched two that evening. Well, I watched two videos, and Emily got in some napping. Taking Rusty out can be physically taxing.
Emily left Monday evening from SFO. Because she had two large suitcases plus two carry-on items, I went with her on BART to the airport. She was able to check in her bags, and then we looked for somewhere to eat. That terminal only had a Subway and a Burger King outlet outside the security area, so we had Subway sandwiches and chatted until about 10 PM. Emily went through security and was off to her flight. I would learn later that her flight was delayed. I took a few pictures in the terminal and headed back to BART. I got home a little after midnight, and that was actually about the time Emily’s flight took off for the east coast.
