Sophie's Story

           It's Middle Eastern Festival time at the Eastern Orthodox church near our home. We've been going to this festival every year for most of the years we have lived here.          I have always enjoyed learning about different faiths especially when paired with other ethnic cultures.             We like to go when the festival opens and have lunch. They have Lebanese food: kabobs, kafta, kibby and my personal favourite falafel. They used to have a combination plate with a sample of most of the menu that C and I liked to share. Unfortunately they stopped offering it.           They play music while people are eating. The lyrics are in a language I don't understand, but the music is very rhythmic and loud. They have two dance groups made up of teenagers and preteens that perform ethnic dances at set times in the tent where people eat. I was surprised the first tim...

           A few weeks ago, one of my coworkers committed suicide by jumping off a bridge. I use the word coworker very loosely. He was not a part of the pharmacy staff so I didn't interact with him. I saw him a lot around the store. He was kind of hard to miss as he had the longest hair I have ever seen on a man along with facial hair to match.          What I do know is that he was a dependable and well liked by everyone. When he didn't call or show up to work, people were concerned. This lead to a search which found his car parked with his phone and ID in it. There was a note in his apartment.           He wasn't found right away. Some of the people who knew him thought that maybe he ran away. Maybe he was in Las Vegas or some where getting away from it all. They didn't want to believe that he was really gone and that he had killed himself. I don't blame them. It's a hard thing to process.   ...

           This morning I decided I could wait no longer. It was time for a serious session of weeding the garden.           I do enjoy gardening, but I'm not always as diligent about weeding as I should be. My only excuse this time is that I had to wait for the peas and carrots to get a bit bigger so I can weed around them. Also it had been raining on and off for the last week.           This morning I officially ran out of excuses. Time to go out and pull weeds. I dressed in some older clothes and a ratty pair of sandals, filled my water bottle, grabbed my phone and headed into the garage. I got a hand spade and a tool that I refer to as the claw. Since there were a lot of weeds, I was going to need both tools to get at the roots.           I started on the vegetable side of the garden as it was in the worst shape. The weeds had grown up so much that I could not see ...

           I'm trying to limit the amount of time that I spend on social media. I used to enjoy posting thoughts and pictures, but now I find I really don't have much I want to share anymore. One thing I still like doing is looking at the memories section every morning. A few days ago I noticed that I posted about taking a leap of faith. Sometimes when I see these cryptic posts, I'm not sure what I meant. This time I knew what prompted that post. Eight years ago I quit my full time job.          This isn't the first time I quit a job. It is the first time I quit before I had another job lined up.           I wasn't planning on quitting. My plan was to continue working full time until I got much older. Then maybe I'd back down to part time. I felt like I needed to stay with the company I was at. There weren't a lot of pharmacy jobs open plus the degree I have is somewhat obsolete. Since it is better to h...

           Artificial intelligence has been a hot topic for past few months. As with all new technology many people have jumped on the bandwagon touting how useful it is. Businesses are assessing how to use it possibly replacing human workers which will help the business be more profitable.          As much as some may want to believe that AI can replace any human in any job, there are a few jobs that really need to be done by a human. One of them is my job, pharmacist. I'd like to write about an encounter with a patient that I had last week.          He is a middle aged man who had a prescription for an albuterol inhaler and a spacer. Albuterol is a medication that is used to help open the lungs in people with asthma, COPD, pneumonia and bronchitis. A spacer is a plastic device that has a mouthpiece on one end and a place to put the end of the inhale on the other. It's used to hold the medication to help pe...

           One of pleasures I've recently discovered is watching seedlings sprout up from the ground. For many years, my gardening (using the term very loosely) has consisted of buying plants and planting them in my garden and tending to them throughout the summer. It is fun to watch them grow and produce vegetables or flowers, but there is something about planting small dry seeds and watering them carefully not knowing what if anything will happen.          I've had two successful carrot crops the past few years. This has given me the confidence to attempt to grow other vegetables from seeds. This year I decided to grow snow peas. I planted two rows carefully spacing the seeds. I misted the ground so it wouldn't be completely dry. A few days ago I thought I saw a line of seedlings where I had planted carrot seeds. Yesterday, I saw two pea seedlings above the ground. It made me so happy to see those little green plants poking up. I ...