I have a bad habit of telling y’all stories, but never following up to give you the ending. To my perpetual surprise, some of you actually care enough to write and ask. You don’t know how that warms the cockles of my heart. So, I thought I’d tie up some of those loose ends this morning before I go battle the weeds in my yard.

I’ve been toiling non-stop in my poor neglected yard for a couple of days. I have ten bags of weed and bush trimmings, a bit of a suntan (on my feet, of all places), many mosquito bites, a few fire ant bites, and I thought I had poison ivy (but I don’t). On the “up” side, the yard is beginning to look as if someone lives here and I’ve lost four pounds.

So, if anyone needs to lose four pounds, I’ll be happy to let you work in my yard. So far, I’ve only worked on half of the front yard. There is still a lot to do!

Here are the loose ends:

#1:
A few days ago, I showed you my “Adopted Ancestor” and asked you to name her. The consensus seems to be that her name is Greta Meyers, but she wants to be rich and famous. So she thinks of herself as Baroness Greta von Bauhaus. Thanks Riley and Sheila for coming up with her name.

The only problem I have with it is that I’m Scots-Irish, and that sounds “Germanic.” Maybe she married into the family?

#2
Some time back, I whined to y’all that the storytelling business is getting harder to sustain in this uncertain economy. Many of you wrote encouraging words, and I “got on the stick,” as my Daddy would say. I don’t know why he said that, and it sounds painful. But, I knew what he meant: get motivated.

I did, and it was painful. I managed to book a couple of weeks of work next month. I was pretty darned excited. Then, Hurricane Ike came along. Tina Turner could have told me that anything named “Ike” was bad news. All of the work I booked is in Houston and Beaumont. My guess is that it’s going to get canceled. Anybody want to lay odds on it? That might be how I make some cash.

I’m still between a rock and a hard place.

#3
I’m also up in the air about my medical situation. I told you that I went to a gastroenterologist who promised me that the expensive tests she was ordering would tell me once and for all if I had Hepatitis C or a false positive.

She told me that the test results should be back in a couple of days. On the fourth day, I hadn’t heard from them, so naturally I called. They didn’t have a lab report and promised to call, but they had my telephone number wrong. Two days later, I called again. Nope. No test results and they promised to call, but they still had my telephone number wrong!

Minutes after I got off the phone, the doctor called, with an attitude. In a snit, she told me they would call me when the test results returned. Excuse me!

Many days later, a nurse called to tell me that the doctor said to tell me that I “don’t have the disease,” but to follow up with routine liver function tests every year. I asked, “But, was it a false positive?” She said, “I don’t know, the doctor didn’t say.” I said, “Do I have the antibodies?” She replied, “The doctor didn’t say.” I said, “Did I ever have the disease?” Her answer: “The doctor didn’t say.”

I said, “May I speak with the doctor?” The nurse said, “She’s with a patient.”

Well, what the heck was I? Chopped liver?

[Oh, Thunder, my humor is black sometimes.]

So, basically it boils down to this: I spent thousands of dollars and tons of angst and stress to discover what I’d already been told. I also found a doctor who has plenty of time to call and fuss at me for being naturally worried, but doesn’t have the time to call me to give me my test results. I’m not following up with another $250 appointment with her. I’ll wait to see my regular doctor and see if she can tell me anything more.

For right now I’m just going to assume that they don’t know diddly and keep on keeping on.

There you have it. Three is a “magic number,” the lucky charm.

As Paul Harvey would say, “Now you know….the rest of the story. Good day.”