Wait, what?!

People. Seriously. If you have a communicable disease – or, heck, even just a potentially communicable disease – take it home and keep it at home.

“But Crissy,” you say, “I have a ton of work to do. My boss is going to kill me if I don’t come to the office to finish up Project X.”

OK, first of all, “Project X” was a really crappy movie. Secondly, if you think your boss is going to kill you now, wait until you infect the entire office and your boss loses more than half of his/her workforce for a week. Not likely? When I was in 7th grade, there was at least one day when only about 20 kids showed up for school, out of a class of over 100. I was not one of the 20; I was one of the 80 or so stuck at home with the same lymph node-swelling flu.

When you’re sick with a communicable disease, your health is no longer all about you. Your health becomes a public health issue. Not only do you potentially infect each person you come into contact with, you also have the potential to infect each person’s family, which may include pregnant women, babies and/or small children. One of your co-workers could be pregnant. You just don’t know, and it is beyond inconsiderate to be a vector.

It’s not complicated: If you’re sick, stay home.

Geez. There ought to be a law.

In the past, Tina and Kara had done papier mache masks, and that seemed to be the best approach to use, as Rex has a pretty memorable face and not just any buy-it-at-Walmart dino head would do. I did some research online and saw that some people have had a lot of success with papier mache on chicken wire sculptures. Chicken wire, OK, the hardware store sells that. Newspaper and flour for papier mache? Got that. No problem, right? Uhh, except for the fact that I haven’t done papier mache since elementary school. And, oh, yeah, chicken wire? NOT so easy to work with. But I persisted for a few days and came up with this:

Not bad, right?! Well, not horrible, anyway, especially when you consider that it was completely free form and that, towards the end, I was just trying to tuck the loose ends of the chicken wire anywhere so that they wouldn’t stick out and poke me. To be honest, I didn’t even have a plan for how this was going to work: I didn’t have the patience to sculpt enough chicken wire that I could fit my head inside without incurring dozens of lacerations. I figured that if I just kept working with it, I’d figure it out eventually.

The next step, of course, was to give it color and, therefore, life . . . because maybe if I gave Rex a face, he would @#*$ing tell me how the rest of this was supposed to come together. So I went to Fisher Hawai‘i and just started throwing things in a basket: forest green spray paint, some paint brushes of varying sizes and, for the first time in my life, acrylic paints. My brother had to school me on how to use spray paint . . .

. . . and eventually ended up spraying the whole head anyway:

And after that dried, I applied the acrylic paints.

Voila! Of course, then I was stuck again for a few days . . . but eventually, I came up with the idea of using a green sheet as the basis for a neck/body, painted over in various tones to create the textures of the undercarriage and also to match the shade of green from his head. Unfortunately, I had spent nearly all my creative energy on the head, so everything kind of went downhill from there in terms of quality, but the end result wasn’t too shabby:

Obviously, Tina, Kara and I didn’t plan our costumes to scale, so we were kind of out of proportion with each other, but at least it was kind of cute:

Super fun! Now if only I could recover and start thinking about next year . . .

The land that will soon house the Cancer Center is currently mostly a parking lot behind the med school, so since asphalt is kind of hard to “break” without a jackhammer, we turned some dirt on top of it.

The Kamehameha Schools children’s choir performs an opening song. These guys are always good.

Senior U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye delivers the keynote address.

The “groundbreakers” wait to turn the dirt using ‘o‘o, or traditional Hawaiian groundbreaking sticks, while the holy water is touched leadership. The lauhala basket in the middle of the dirt contains tribute cards (from faculty, staff and guests) that will eventually be lowered into the ground and become a permanent part of the foundation of the building.

Some girls from the Kamehameha chorus help tie ti leaves to stakes where the corners of the building will be, warding off evil spirits.

YAY for moving forward with the new building!

“Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold… brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it: nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds.”
- Victor Hugo, “Les Misérables”

I am SUPER tired, so this blog entry is going to be riddled with sentence fragments and other exemplars of bad grammar, but I just wanted to say that after the weeks from hell, things are finally starting to look up. Thus, I bring you the above quote, which has been a favorite of mine for decades (gulp) now, and the following bits of good news:

1. The work situation changed dramatically today. Dra. Matically. I know we are not completely out of the woods yet – in fact, now an entirely new set of challenges lies ahead – but as far as I’m concerned, things could not have gotten better without the recent strategic changes that have taken place. Sorry to be vague. There’s really no reason you need to know any details about this, especially now that things will be better, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention it at all, especially since work has been the cause of many a nightmare in recent months. Monday was a terrible day, and I drove home in silence. Today, I sang along to Switchfoot and even stopped to browse the farmer’s market in the rain. I’m still a little shaken up, but at least now I’m fairly confident that we’ll all come out of this alive.

2. We finally booked our trip to Japan for Thanksgiving. You have no idea how every force in the travel world was working against us on this one. I seriously had an entirely different itinerary planned that would’ve taken us to Tokyo and Fukuoka and even on the shinkansen with a rail pass, and I was right up to the point where I had entered my credit card number and clicked the Pay Now button, and right then, the fallout from the Japan Airlines bankruptcy hit us smack in the face for at least the second time. And we weren’t even going to fly JAL! And that’s not even all the drama. I was about ready to give up and just to go to NU Homecoming for our 10-year reunion instead (although, seriously, Noreen, how could I go without you?). But now I’ve got us booked roundtrip to Tokyo Narita, and we’re staying at the Hilton Tokyo Bay, right outside Tokyo Disney. If things continue to look up, the dollar-yen ratio will also improve now. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to pray for that.

3. “Les Misérables” the musical turns 25 this fall, and some really cool video has been added to the show’s website. Since “Les Mis” is no longer playing on Broadway, I had no idea that they had made some really neat changes to the show in celebration of the anniversary, until I saw the videos. Wow, super cool. “Les Mis” was my first stage love. I have a huge framed poster hanging on my office wall. Todd practically has it memorized because I listen to my cast albums (I have it in at least three foreign languages and like four versions in English) all the time. I am geeking out RIGHT NOW. While I am typing this. It is a bit ridic, I know, but you have no idea how geeked out I am. OK, well, this paragraph probably gives you a pretty good idea.

My office. No joke. And that “Les Mis” poster is super heavy.

4. The Cubs swept a series this week. Seriously. Talk about ridic. I miss Sweet Lou and Derrek Lee, but wow, three wins, that’s practically a record this season. Now if only they would hire Greg Maddux as the next club manager. Yes, I said Maddux. I know I have said bad things about Maddux in the past, but that was out of anger and frustration. And you cannot hold baseball season anger against me.

5. Kona next weekend for a work thing! Todd and I are staying an extra day. We’re (ha ha) I’m hoping we’ll get to see the lava flow. Not entirely optimistic about that one, but you know how crazy I am. I will try any means possible. If you have any suggestions, send them this way! I’m not sure whether they’ve re-opened the air space, so I have no idea whether helicopter is a possibility at this point.

6. I didn’t need to take a Relpax today! At work, May Rose jokingly referred to this as “drug-free Hawai‘i.” Not exactly, MR. Don’t be j just because I hoard my six pills a month.

I should probably get to bed before Todd wakes up and notices that (a) I am still up (he tried to get me to go to sleep a half-hour ago, and I told him that I was writing and that he should stop judging, whatever the heck I meant by that) and (b) I am still listening to “Les Mis.” Things are looking up, friends! And the weekend is near . . .

The Pau Hana was the brain child of my former CIS co-worker, Paula, who now works part-time as a community liaison for CRCH. She drafted a couple of us (Anne from Epidemiology, and me) to help out with the planning/implementation, and we drafted some other people from CRCH to play some live music, and somehow, through weeks of planning and bargaining and Pricebuster-ing, it all came together with lots of food, wine, beer and entertainment – and, oh, yeah, more than two dozen door prizes. Here’s how it looked:

Healthy pupu? Why, yes, of course. ;o)

Our Center director reads the name of a door prize winner.

Happy partygoers!

The planning committee.

From all accounts so far, everyone had a great time! Now if only everyone was scrambling to be on the next planning committee . . . ;o)

What did Tina get out of this, you ask?

“Wait, what?” she interrupted. “You shower in the morning?”

“Uhhh, yeah. And then?”

“What kind of Japanese are you?! Were you raised that way???”

“Uhhh . . . ”

“Is it because you went to college in Chicago?”

“No, Tina. In Chicago, I just didn’t shower.”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

I didn’t realize that this was a cultural issue. In fact, I was pretty sure that when Tina broached the ethnic aspect, she was totally off-base, so I jokingly suggested that she use our kitchen white board to poll the office on the issue. (The white board is usually “reserved” for polls, puzzles and miscellaneous forms of entertainment. As of yesterday, it had been wiped clean and was waiting for a new idea.) She marched off to do just that. A few minutes later, the board was marked up with several questions:

• Do you shower in the morning or at night?
• If you shower in the morning, were you raised in Hawai‘i?
• If you usually shower in the morning but go to the gym at night, do you still shower only in the morning?
• Why do you shower when you do?

The gym thing: I live 7.6 miles from my gym. My car has air conditioning. By the time I get back from the gym, I’m no longer sweaty, and it’s not like I go to bed as soon as I get home, anyway. The point is, I’m not super gross by the time I go to bed – I’m sure that, if I were, my husband would be more than happy to let me know, just as he is always certain to point out when I have garlic breath.

Anyway. I still thought the whole thing was ridic. But an hour or so later, I asked my office neighbor, Jessica, whether she had voted in the poll. I told her the story behind it. Jess paused, then said that it was, indeed, strange that I would shower in the morning.

“Showering in the morning is kind of a haole thing,” affirmed Jess, who is half Japanese and half Caucasian.

What? First I sound like a haole (according to a total moke on the phone the other week), and now I shower like one? Not that I have anything against having common characteristics with white people, but wow, lau lau.

So anyway (again) . . . what say you? When do you shower, and why? If you’re from Hawai‘i, say so, and I’ll take your input back to the office. Leave your responses in the comments!

Of course, even this drawer was slightly overstuffed, so when I inserted the key and tugged on the handle, #25 provided some resistance. Not one to give up, I reached my right hand into the drawer from the top and pulled.

OUCH.

The blood was flowing to the surface of my right index finger as I snatched it out of the drawer. I looked in to find the culprit: a very sharp, slightly hook-shaped curve that seemed to serve no function but was, nonetheless, melded to the rest of the lock mechanism. It was slightly rusted . . . but I wasn’t too concerned, as I was fairly certain that all my shots were up to date. So I grabbed the mail, dropped the Drawer #25 key into the drawer before sliding it back shut and headed upstairs before I bled all over the department’s mail (including my own, thank you very much). While I sorted through the mail, I nonchalantly called the doctor’s office to confirm the date of my last tetanus booster.

July 2000. And they’re only good for about 10 years.

Greeeeaaaat.

I consulted the family “doctors” (a.k.a. my husband and my mother, who never cease to have opinions about these things), who naturally recommended aggressive treatment. Doubting their ability to remain objective in the face of a 1-cm wide, 3mm-deep gash on my fingertip, I consulted Wikipedia. (Let’s be honest here: I use Wikipedia for everything.) The incubation period for tetanus, per The Source of All Sources, can be eight days to several months.

Holy moly.

So I could be fine today . . . and tomorrow . . . and even next week . . . and then like, six weeks from now, when I’m at Wrigley Field cussing out Zambrano, my jaw could lock up? No thanks.

So that was that. I called the doctor’s office back and told them I would be by in a couple of hours to get a tetanus booster.

My doctor’s office is just two miles from my office. But of course, thanks to the sheer genius of the City & County of Honolulu’s transportation people, I spent over an hour on the road, round trip. All for a tiny cut on my finger. All because the postal carrier overstuffed the freaking mail drawer. All because – what the hell was a sharp metal piece DOING in that drawer anyway.

But at least I can rest assured that, unless the vaccine is defective, my jaw won’t lock up on me while I play armchair manager at the Cubs games next month.

Now former employees of the CIS Pacific Partnership Program, after the last contract work day.

January 14, 2010 has finally rolled around – the last day of the contract period nationwide for the National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Information Service Partnership Program. It’s a sad day for the 70+ federal contract employees who have been a part of the program (I left the program four months ago for another job in cancer research because the program was ending, after having a year-and-a-half as a partnership program coordinator), but really, it’s more of a loss for the cancer community as a whole. The CIS Partnership Program was the link between NCI and its community partners. It’s hard to explain what we did on a daily basis, but the partners know, and many of them wrote letters, made calls and otherwise tried hard to save the program. Unfortunately, the decision to end it was an executive one, and the executive who made that decision – well, let’s just say he still gets to report to his same job in the D.C. area tomorrow.

Rest in peace, CIS Partnership Program.