Downtime

I'm at Evanston Hospital in -- guess where -- Evanston IL. I have downtime. I love it. I did an hour long inservice at 8:00 am which necessitated an earlier-than-usual waketime (our new clock does not understand the meaning of the term OFF when it comes to the alarm....) and getting lost because I followed the map instead of following my nifty GPS system (gift of the first DD & SIL). For those of you who are interested, there IS no exit off I294 on Golf Rd, which is most probably why both Mapquest and the GPS system advised me to take Dempster. Sigh.

Anyway, I've been ensconsed in their "business center" where someone kindly loaned me a cord so I could get on the web, and I've had nearly four hours to myself. I've played with my talks for the next conference (Thursday and Friday), done my e-mails, and gotten some lunch in a lovely little cafe where I couldn't decide which of the yummy meals to get. I now have just under two hours left. Yummy meals in a hospital used to be an oxymoron, but no longer. They are finally realizing that we are paying customers here, and need to be treated as such.

This is always a treat -- no phones (well, one call so far on the cell), limited numbers of things I can do on the laptop, a good book -- (The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd....subtitled "A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine") and a sense of nothing I HAVE to do...but just some things I want to do.

Someone just introduced me to a new blogger -- I've put it on my favorites as she seems to be my kind of person: http://christinemoers.blogspot.com/ AKA Welcome to my brain.

Here's hoping I can figure out how to get home -- Evanston is about 40 miles away, and there is no good northern east-west expressway from here to there.

Or even from there to here.

Tomorrow I head up to Appleton WI for a two day conference which is going to be great fun -- lots of wonderful people -- some of whom I've not seen in a long time. I'm looking forward to it!