Diary Entries on Will Brady's website

postscript to 9-11 | 1st Anniversary of the Twin Towers Attack |
I spend most of the day on the wards | The patients I speak with are aware of the event but most seemed subdued and more attentive to issues more close at hand | And why not? There are a few, I'll note, who probably feel that events such as 9-11 are further incentive to stay at CVH¹
After work, I'd hoped to come home and work at stewing tomatoes to freeze and to work on an "Open Spaces" kiosk for the East Haddam Fair | That never happened | Work was keeping ma late | I started calling home around 7 pm only to get nothing but a busy signal on the phone | This continued until 830, when I stopped trying t' call | I couldn't figure it out | Bruce doesn't typically stay on the phone for hours at a time, even when calling his mother | East Haddam's Swing Bridge

     So when I crossed the bridge, it was not surprsing to discover the whole town [save for the Goodspeed Opera House and the Gelston House] was completely dark | Another tree down and transformer shot, it eventually turned out |
     My new chore of the evening ...still did the tomatoes... was to cook up and store other foods that I could save, move all freezer items to the big chest freezer to save | That, and to make a pen + ink entry into my land based journal (modified here, thanks very much) |
     I've gotta get off my duff and start experimenting in earnest with solar applications at least enough to keep the essentials operational; you know, freezer, well pump, water heater | Though, personally, the occasional absence of electrictiy is relaxing... and better it happens now than in the dead of winter |
     One other side benefit from losing power on 9-11 | I didn't have to watch teevee or listen to radio | was spared the incessant barrage of 9-11 propaganda on the part of career politicians and news pundits | Which brings me back to where I started this missive today, at the hospital | For asaide from a very dignified and muted tribute with agency police and fire fighters presenting colors, officiated by Fr. Rizal², and an occasional clipped out photo from the news ~ most of t he teevee set were not tuned to the stations doing memorial stuff and few people ~ patient nor staff ~ ever even went into the teevee rooms [an uncommon occasion, that] at all |
      Actually, there was more talk about Thelma Bishop's death [she was a 72 year old nurse who rather unceremoniously collapsed around 6 am last Sunday morning] that anything about the twin towers, terrorism, arabs, taliban or George double-ewe Bush | But then, where I work there are many folks dealing every passing moment with their own personal terrors and privations | Perhaps there is more likely a perspective maintained by folks asking "...what else is new ???" which more accurately reflects what's on their minds |
      Sad, but such would put the other 9-11 stuff ~ exterrnal to the hospital, and a bit more remote ~ in a less immediate, and less serious, light |
      And thus, at least for some parties, the world goes on nevertheless |

¹Connecticut Valley Hospital, where I work as a human rights advocate
²Fr. Rizal Dimandopolus came to the USA from the Philippines | He works at CVH and is quite dedicated to the patients there, to the Philippine community in Connecticut, and to the creative visual arts

e-mail changes | due to circumstances beyond my control, I have had to change one or two of my old e-mail addresses | New mail can continue to come to the @rondak.org address | A completely new address is now will-b@earthlink.net | Regrets for this inconvenience | |

weather the week, surprisingly pleasant