Monday, November 7, 2011

winter comes

Hi all
Well it is starting to get cold here and we are snuggled into our warm little house.
The geothermal system was installed last week, and we are just waiting for a few checks on the furnace before switching it over to full geothermal heat.
The heat will come through coils in the ground that circulate 8 feet down, where it is warmer.
They then go through some sort of compressor that, I do not totally understand, but that is how we "extract" the heat.
The big thing on this system is that it requires electricity to circulate the fluid, and to run the fans.
However the only source of heat in this area would either be a propane furnace, Or an electrical one, and if you are totally heating your house with electricity it is expensive.
We did not do this for the money, because it will take us years of electricity savings to pay for the rather expensive geothermal system, but the way we look at it, we can pay for the system when we are working and then when we are retired, we will not have to pay large electrical bills.
We are hoping to get a solar panel next year that ties into the grid. This area gets far more sun than Oregon and so that should also cover the costs of electricity, and eventually we will have no bills, and no dependance on "outside" sources.
I just glanced outside and it is snowing.

I would love to post pictures but lack a part to the camera, hope to rectify that soon, in fact hope to write more soon. Life is really settling down. We have a new computer system in our office which was a huge step, and one that I really had not planned on making given that Ken and I both work part time, but for a variety of reasons it had to be done now. The BC government reimburses us for part of the costs, since they want everyone to be on electronic medical charts.
It has been a huge expense and we have had to shut down the office for a few days and pay for the staff to be there, for training sessions.
Anyways it is working and we are all learning quickly about how to use it and so life should soon settle from that perspective.
We came up to Canada with the plan of working "for" someone else, so that things like employees, payroll, ordering supplies, dealing with computers, we thought.... would all be taken care of by someone else. Turns out when you work for someone else you lose any level of control over your situation and we started to feel that we had jumped out of the pan and into the fire.
We left Bandon because the hospital situation, we had battled, for years. We could see what administration was doing and no matter what we did we could not change it.
The years of stress over that situation, we felt, perhaps, might have had an effect on me getting cancer, and so decided that whatever it took we were NOT going to stay in such a "poison" environment.
We got here and immediately started to see that being employed by Interior Health was in many ways, the same situation. Only difference was that we left an issue with ONE administrator out of control, and came to a new situation with MANY administrators out of control. We decided that we just could not go on and deal with these stressors on a day to day basis. The only way we could carry on in medicine is if we could be in a situation where we could just practice medicine, and in order to do that we needed to have our own clinic.

So here we are at "this stage of life" basically starting up a clinic, learning how to do payroll, how to order supplies, etc etc, and once we are past this setting up stage, we WILL have a situation where we do not have to deal with politics anymore. We figure we will live a lot longer and happier if we can just go to work every day and not even have to think about really bad administration.
So the idea is to QUIT complaining about all the work at the new clinic and just be glad we do not have to deal with any of the Wathen's of the world, or the Interior Health's of the world.

It has been extremely sad to read about the Bandon hospital. Dr McClave recently showed me a a letter I sent to the board, in 2003, in effect, predicting all of this. While I read about all of the "excuses" given for why the hospital is doing so poorly I would have to say it is really really bad administration, that has not only NOT dealt with issues as they came up, but he has created many of them as well. He has been running that hospital on a personal level for years, making decisions based totally on his own personal biases, which inevitably have always been wrong.
He has not had any one seeing over him as he has always made sure that board members are elected who will just believe everything he says no questions asked.
The sad thing is that several people are losing their jobs, but I see no evidence that he will be.

Mad world, its a mad world.

I had my appt at the cancer centre last Friday and got the thumbs up, CA 125 is low, and no evidence of recurrence. I go every 3-4 months.
I am still having a lot of the effects of the radiation, but I guess I am working with it, trying to balance what I eat etc. I am beginning to lose weight, as I just cannot eat full meals, and some days am so nauseated I just cannot eat much. I guess that is not such a big deal at this time, to lose 20 lbs would be great, not sure after that.

We have been living in our house for about a month, it is not finished, however most of the unfinished "bits" are things we just have not decided what we are going to do. For example we have two bathrooms with showers tub etc, but we do not have bathroom sinks yet
Basically because we wanted to do something clever and have not sorted out all the details yet.
Our main bathroom I have decided to use an antique sewing machine, tile the top of it and place the sink on the tiles.
it has all these cute little drawers.....
the master bath we have not sorted out yet.

I will write soon love janet