I’ve been quiet lately and it’s not just on here. Sometimes there are days (or in this case, weeks) where no matter how much is going on, no matter how many thoughts are in my head, nothing comes out in words. The result is an extremely irritable me, so I’m going to try to talk now. I had an eventful Cinco de Mayo in which I got drunk enough to demand that I be allowed to sleep in my car while I sobered up. I lost a friend and co-worker to as-yet unexplained causes, largely suspected to be either an ischemic bowel or an abdominal aortic aneurysm. I received a drunk-dial from an ex-boyfriend who claims he is lonely and misses companionship. I sawed up a big chunk of the tree that fell on my fence in a windstorm last Friday. I read Yann Martel’s “The Facts About the Helsinki Roccamatios,” which was quite good. I finished four New York Times crosswords.

Well, maybe that’s something. I do like crosswords. E got me started on one a few weeks ago. He’d picked up the abandoned paper off the bar and started filling in blocks while he waited for me, then pushed it in my direction and asked me if I knew a four-letter word for Pindaric verses, starting with “o” (odes). We ended plodding through it for two more beers before we left, taking it with us and obsessing over the remaining blank squares for the rest of the evening.

We never did finish that one in its entirety and I cannot find the paper, but I did pick up a book of New York Times daily crosswords at Barnes and Noble that week. I’m not yet brave enough to tackle the Sundays yet. This particular book contains a selection of crosswords from the Times daily puzzles from 1951 to 2001. I logically decided to start at the beginning with 1951.

Well, holy bejeebus.

If you’ve ever done a Times crossword (or many others, I am sure) you will know how heavily they are based on current events, pop culture, and similar era-based references. 64 across: a 6-letter word for “part of Czechoslovakia” that begins with “MOR”? Is there a place called Moravia? Is there even a place called Czechoslovakia anymore? 3 down: second-generation Japanese-American, 5 letters, starts with “n” and ends with “eo,” although I am not certain about the “o.”

I left 20 blank squares on that one and turned right to page 51, a puzzle from 1992. Whee! I DO know the capital of Latvia (Riga, that was in high school global studies class) and “Henry or Jane of film” (Fonda). Puzzle done. On page 57, I breezed through “1995 Cage/Shue film” (Leaving Las Vegas) and “Mr. T’s family name” (Tero). This was more like it.

There really is no point to this post except to point out that older crosswords are hard and that it is easy to get obsessed with counting little bitty squares.

What’s a five letter word for “western lake,” in which the third letter is “h”?

Friday, April 18. Early morning. Too early. A conversation:

“What IS that noise?”

“Did you shut the cat in the closet again?”

“The cat is laying right here between our heads. And the house is moving.”

“Oh.”

Pause.

“I think it’s an earthquake.”

“What?”

“An earthquake.”

“I heard you, I just…”

“You know we’re practically right on the New Madrid fault line. Where do you think that river came from?”

“No, I did not know that.”

“I guess this is a good way to check and see if I installed that ceiling fan up there properly.”

Silence.

“Is it done?”

“I think so.”

“How big do you think it was?”

“Do you hear any sirens?”

Pause.

“Nope.”

“Guess it wasn’t too bad.”

“Do you want to check the house out?”

“The dog and cat are still asleep. It’s probably fine.”

“Okay.”

We sleep.

On the way to work, we turn on the radio and punch buttons until we find someone talking about what had happened… about 10 seconds too late to hear the where and how big of it. I have a thought.

“Grab my pager out of there, babe.” I gesture at my work bag.

“Where?”

“The big pocket.”

He rummages through my bag and hands it to me. The message light is blinking merrily.

“It was a 5.4,” I tell him. “The city has sustained no major damage at this time. Disaster protocol has not been initiated. The hospital structure is being thoroughly investigated. Come to work at your scheduled time if you value your job, etc.”

“I wonder where it started.”

“I guess around here. That fault line I told you about.”

We punch radio buttons again and come to the news. It turns out that the quake originated a state away, on the New Salem faultline near Mt. Carmel, Illinois. Chicago felt it and skyscrapers swayed in Indianapolis. Several overpasses nearby are closed for inspection, expect aftershocks all day.

Satisfied, E hits another button to bring up my favorite station.

“And it’s an Aftershock Winners Weekend!” the morning host booms. “Win a pair of front-row Rascal Flatts tickets and a ‘Quake 08′ t-shirt by listening this morning and calling in when-”

I laugh. He switches to the iPod. As we drive and listen to Red Hot Chili Peppers, I tell E about living here in 1990, when it was predicted that a 7.8 would hit the New Madrid Fault on December 3, at 4:56 pm. People were making earthquake kits, stockpiling water jugs, and dusting off generators.

“Were the plates beginning to shift or something? How did they pick a date and a time, even if they were suspecting something would happen?”

“1,2 – twelfth month,” I say. “3rd day, 4:56 pm, 7.8 Richter, 90. 1990.”

“That’s retarded.”

“Some people believed it.”

“What were you doing at 4:56? Hiding under a table?”

“Are you calling me retarded?”

“No.”

“My mom was driving me to choir practice.”

“Were you scared?”

“I forgot to look at the clock.”

We pull up to The Restaurant so I can drop E off for morning prep. As soon as he’s out of the car, I ditch the Red Hot Chili Peppers and punch back to my favorite station so I can find out when to call in and win that ‘Quake 08′ t-shirt.

Well, it’s a good thing E kept the restaurant job, because the one he went to training for the other day was a huge waste of time. Too many loopholes and commissions and strange people about… he stayed a day and a half in training and decided to keep on the hunt. Thank God

We opened a new set of operating rooms.

Now, these operating rooms are something special, I’ll admit. They are some of the few intraoperative MRI (iMRI) suites in the country, neurosurgical operating rooms with an MRI scanner built into the room. It’s quite exciting, in a nerdy sort of way. The giant magnet had to be moved in on a Saturday several months ago, requiring the removal of a large section of wall to allow the crane to maneuver it inside. This magnet, when turned on, will not only help provide some cutting edge imagery while someone’s head is sawed open, it will also turn any ferro-magnetic things in the room into projectile weapons. We had to watch a lovely educational video to truly understand this point. A brainy looking fellow with a bad suit demonstrated not only what happens if someone carelessly leaves a scalpel on a cart or if we ladies wander in with metal barrettes, but also what could occur if someone left, say, an oxygen tank or forklift within the Gauss lines.

A forklift?

CLANG!

Never mind what the forklift was doing in the OR, or how it got within the Gauss lines with no one driving it there and realizing something was amiss… but okay, that was COOL.

In the event that something does go flying about and manages to injure someone or attach them to the machine, the magnet must be extinguished. This is another fun thing on the video. Turning off the magnet is apparently quite an ordeal, involving the tug of an emergency cord causing white froth to spill from every crevice, and smoke to billow out the roof vent. From the outside of the building, you half expect to see the walls start to crumble and sink into the earth.

We now have many new shiny toys – non-magnetic oxygen canisters, metal detector wands, copper-plated this and that. We’ve all been screened for pacemakers and shrapnel and tattoos older than 1972, we’ve all been warned and warned and warned some more that if we have tissue expanders, our chests will explode if we go near the MRI. But I can’t even tell you how thrilled I am to have spent 30 minutes of my life getting paid to watch a magnet turn everything within 5-10 feet into a deadly projectile, and then go up in a puff of smoke. The video could have been much improved, however, if they had put that annoying man between the machine and the forklift.

We use an IV machine called a SmartPump at The Hospital. It fastens onto an IV pole and has a bunch of little devices that you hook up bags to and they regulate the dosing of the medication into the patient’s line. This thing is called the brain.

Since they are detachable from the IV poles, people tend to “lose” the SmartPumps. It seems fitting, then, that I should receive one of the mass text pages that went out to all pagers in house today:

Please return all unused brains to distribution desk.

Well, since I wasn’t using mine anyway…