Bonjour and stuff
Yup, we are back. Having barely recovered from the jet lag, we are in full swing. We said goodbye to US friends for the season and hello to our French ones. We are in for some busy months ahead here this year but look forward to it. California is behind us for now and is but a distant memory.
Say hello to Vicky and Richard
In our first week we spent our time with the usual maintenance and repairs required after any 8 month absence, but we soon set out to visit some local sights. There is an American cemetery nearby as this immediate region was the landing area for operation Dragoon and the US Army VI corps in August 1944. Of course, this opened a second front to fight the German army. There are 860 men (and one woman) buried here, this being the smallest American cemetery, among the many, we have visited here in Europe.
The town of Draguignan is also the home of a large French infantry brigade so we stopped by to visit their museum.
Finally, we had our traditional Valentine day dinner at our favorite restaurant in the little medieval town of Ramatuelle. Over the years we have tried hard to create new memories, as in 1996 Janice was diagnosed with her first cancer on Valentines day.
So, Janice has been continuing with her ongoing cancer treatments and is aggressively researching all possible alternative treatments. No, not humming in the dark or bowing to crystals, but meeting with a world class immunologist and keeping up with other cutting edge new drugs about to be released.
Occasionally, she has another PET scan to check on the progress of her treatment. The latest one shows that her cancer is ... (drum roll please) ... diminishing! Yahoo! We were buoyed when her doctor told her that she would eventually die, but of something other than cancer. Meanwhile we had an oncologist lined up here in France, have met with him and her next treatment is in two days. All treatments in the 3 countries we live in are identical.
There was one fly in the ointment though, when she developed a blood clot in one arm a few days before we left. Her doctor called for a medication that had to be injected every 12 hours for a week. Having spent so much time in prison, he figured I would be as good as the best of them at stabbing, so I got to play doctor. With 14 subcutaneous* injections into my patient under my belt, I figure I am ready to teach the procedure. I even had to inject my patient during our flight to France, half way over the Atlantic. (*That is secret code we doctors use to describe under the skin.)
Oops! Phone's ringing, gotta go. Maybe its the Harvard medical school.
There was one fly in the ointment though, when she developed a blood clot in one arm a few days before we left. Her doctor called for a medication that had to be injected every 12 hours for a week. Having spent so much time in prison, he figured I would be as good as the best of them at stabbing, so I got to play doctor. With 14 subcutaneous* injections into my patient under my belt, I figure I am ready to teach the procedure. I even had to inject my patient during our flight to France, half way over the Atlantic. (*That is secret code we doctors use to describe under the skin.)
Oops! Phone's ringing, gotta go. Maybe its the Harvard medical school.
Just lollygagging around
We went out for a little fun one night before we left California when we were invited by a friend (and former employer for Janice) to a local club to watch his band perform. Great fun! It would be too easy to conclude that he is just a rocker but as we all know, you should never judge a book by its long haired cover.
He is actually our dentist here, a superb one at that, graduated a year early from dental school and at one time was the youngest dentist ever to be appointed to the dental board of examiners in California. I could just imagine the look on their faces when he walked into a dental practice to check on them.
ADVON /RECON
I came back from my 2 week deployment to the Bahamas with Team Rubicon in October. One of the things I really respect about the organization is that they take the training of their volunteers seriously and put their money where their mouth is. Most other organizations put the call out for folks to come help when a disaster happens, and when they show up they hand them a shovel or a hammer and have them 'go at it'.
Deployments always involve grunt work but the Team Rubicon (TR) culture calls for working smarter, not harder. As a result, they spend money on the front end to upgrade their volunteers skills and knowledge to make the time they are deployed much more efficient and GSD. (An official TR acronym for "Get shit done")
When TR shows up at a disaster site with heavy equipment (Earth movers, huge backhoes, skip loaders etc) they don't hand the keys to someone like me, a simple know it all. No, the operators are volunteers with a minimum of 10 years of professional experience with additional training from TR to work safely in a disaster environment.
Something as simple as operating a chain saw, a task many of us have done our whole lives, requires a week end of training from TR sawyer instructors on safety procedures before you can get 'trigger time'. Other courses are offered either online or in classroom training.
Our season here this year saw me attend some of these daylong classroom training sessions. One was "Stop the Bleed", a kind of advanced basic first aid class to deal with emergency trauma accidents in the field before our medics, nurses or doctors that are embedded with us arrive. Another was "Damage Assessment". This is something done out in the field when we first meet homeowners who request help, to determine what our strike teams will actually have to do.
Will they have to tarp the roof to prevent more water damage? Will they have to remove all the drywall and insulation soaked from floodwater? Are there downed trees blocking access to their car and preventing them to go to their dialysis appointments? Is there a hole in the roof or a breached wall that will need to be closed up with plywood? Once we know what we will need to do, we can assign a strike team with the proper equipment and materials to ... eh... GSD. (Refer to paragraph 2)
Every aspect of the work has a random way of doing it or a TR way. You would think that something as basic as tarping a roof would mean tossing tarps up there and tacking them down, right? TR trains its volunteers on the proper techniques to prevent water penetration and protecting it from having the wind rip the tarps off in the next storm.
The last class I took before our departure was ADVON / RECON. A cool TR acronym for advance reconnaissance. When we see a disaster unfold on TV, TR sends an advance team to meet with local authorities (Police, fire, city administrators, etc) sometimes as the disaster is unfolding, to assess how bad things are, and to determine how much and what kind of help they will need. The team locates and secures a place to set up the FOB (officially called a Forward Operating Base) or the place we will set up the equipment and supplies when they arrive, and determine where our people will stay. (School gym, vacant warehouse, bunk house trailers, etc.) In other words, everything that will need to be done before the national call for volunteers to come is sent out.
A TR mantra is that "My mother is a donor", a constant reminder that the donations that pay for everything that TR does, needs to be spent as though it was my money to get as much bang for the buck as possible.
OK, OK, yes we did work
on a project or two.
No, we did not spend all our time in night clubs and bars this past month. We did manage to do a little thing or two, among them stain our new back patio. I mentioned last month that we organized the concrete pour and after letting it cure for a month, we were ready to stain the raw grey surface.
Before
During
After
I have mentioned that with our arriving later than usual this season, there was a limited time frame to tackle any big project. So, I went on a aggressive maintenance and repair mode. I built the house 35 years ago and we are real persnickety about everything working well and looking fresh and new. The reality is that some of the deeply buried infrastructure can begin to show its age. Everything from coffee makers to water softeners and furnaces eventually get tired or give up the ghost.
In fact, I was in the bathroom when Janice walked in, pointed to the ceiling fan and said "enough!". "Its REALLY powerful" I shouted over the deafening roar of the 35 year old inexpensive jet engine sounding fan as it rattled, hoping that my BS explanation would appease her. The thing is, its always more fun to build something new and sexy than to tear out some old appliance to replace it. It had simply not occurred to me at the time of building the house that -some day- I would have to replace these things. The new one is as quiet as our fridge. That said, now when I do anything I keep in mind that I will have a do over 35 years from now.
As always, we have everything lined up for next years great ideas that Janice has come up with, so that when we arrive we can hit the ground running, building cool new stuff and in TR vernacular, GSD.
So, would you prefer a political joke?
OK, fine. Here you go.
