Sunday, April 03, 2011

Astra Inclinant, Non Necessitant



Our sweet old Siamese cat died peacefully last night, snoozing off the running-boards of existence while in his favorite chair. We want to bury him on the property under a Meyer lemon tree we had planted there in honor of one of our neighors; a friend who died at his own hand. But we share this property with others.

There's a pool area out front with lawn and trees wrapping around it. That's where the lemon tree is. I don't want us to be caught burying a dead pet on the premises. I just don't want it to even come up for discussion with others. So we intend to do this under cover of night.

In the meantime, what do we do? Leave him in the chair? What if we have visitors?

"Wait wait! Don't sit there! That's where our dead cat is!" Do I want to have to deal with that?

*

In order to get a new patient onto our unit, another patient has to go. On rare enough occasion, a room opens up because a patient died. Then a new one gets the room.

I usually don't bring it up, for fear of how the conversation will go:

Me, "So I hear you were waiting all day in the Emergency Room."

Patient, "Yes, it was since I came in last night."

"Well it's a good thing that guy died when he did, or you might have ended up waiting down there for another few hours," I would answer. "But *I* wasn't that guy's nurse," I would quickly add.

*

This zero-after-the-nine thing I wrote about below is still bugging me. Yet now I have another problem to go along with it.

Suppose you write this:

(1-1)+(1-1)+(1-1)+... it ends up being =0. But suppose you write the same thing a slightly different way:

1+(-1+1)+(-1+1)+(-1+1)+... it ends up being =1.

You could substitute any number for the 1 (except zero... I think maybe,) and you'd still have the same conundrum. It's making me feel a bit paranoid, actually.

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