Old Friends.

 When I recently said my father in law was an ex-marine I was sternly told- "there is no such thing as an ex-marine, there are only marines". I stand corrected. So I guess the same is true for friends, once your friend always a friend. I met Nancy on my wedding day - my friend Richard insisted on inviting her. We had a three second argument over it since I didn't know her, but he persisted and I'm glad he did. We have been friends for 31 years, she was in high school when I met her - her senior year I believe. Through the years we've gone long periods without physically seeing each other - we haven't laid eyes on each other in fifteen years. But we have always kept in touch. Letters and calls before, now emails and Facebook. She recently moved back to the US after years of living in England - and enduring my various greetings of Cheerio and Pip Pip, not to mention I insisted on occasion her address was Hole In The Wall, Frog Bottom, Silly Wigs England. She came up to do a run through,she visited with her cousin and his partner Thursday,  we had Friday afternoon all day Saturday and this morning. she's off visiting her nearby family today and then back home to Vermont tomorrow. Friday was awful - I had gotten an early start and called all my patients the night before figuring I could bang them out and be home a little early for once. No such luck - after repeated calls from the office and so forth they added three patients to my schedule and better yet since they were add ons I had to stop and call, rearrange and then ended up driving TWICE to the same area because I could not squeeze the patient in without completely rearranging everything. Yes I am a little mad, thank you for asking. I didn't get home til 6 pm and I was exhausted, so we visited while I did paperwork - I could have left it but I wanted Saturday to at least be free for visiting. Saturday was fun though - I took Nancy on the Grand Tour On All Things Interesting. We took the back roads to the Krisha compound and  started taking pictures of her in the main hall and a crabby -no - pants came up and snippy told me No Pictures!. This is news to me since I've been there before and no one has ever said anything, plus there's no sign saying that. Whatever - I already got a couple good shots so I apologized as not to get his tunic in a twist and put the camera away. This was not good enough apparently as he gave me the Stink Eye a couple of times - I was super traumatized! Nancy said he's probably coming back as a roach and move on. After that we did the tour of the Palace - then off to prison. The group was huge - over 30 people including a softball team in town for an away game. They were very funny and well behaved, I wish we could have said the same as some of the adults. There were about 3 of them that kept trying to sneak off and go where the guide told them repeatedly not to go - there's a lot of dangerous areas - and we had to wait for him so it was annoying. But the tour itself was very fun. We had lunch at the ice cream parlor and ice cream for dessert, then across the road to the Indian Burial mound that we climbed so Nancy could see Ohio. We stopped at the book store and Cabala's on the way home. David BBQed and we set outside as best we could - it started pouring of course. But we had fun. Today we did a short run through Morgantown and then Nancy went off to see her family that she hasn't seen in close to 30 years, since her senior year in high school. Back to reality tomorrow.