It hasn’t been a good year so far. Now I have a really bad cold/cough/laryngitis and I was up until 3am last night coughing a lung up. Today I feel a bit better now that I have gotten some rest and cough syrup.
An interesting observation about Germany: Meals of the day are traditionally set up so that there is usually some bread topped with jelly/butter/cheese/coldcuts/ and maybe muesli for breakfast, something warm- meat and potatoes usually- for lunch and Abendbrot in the evening. Abendbrot means “evening bread”. For some Germans it is a low key affair. This usually consists of a couple slabs of bread or breadrolls with often the same toppings that were had on the bread at breakfast and not much more. This is not by any means the same for every family or person in Germany but it is quite common. Maybe it is different in the part of Germany you live in or have visited. It is definitely the way mealtimes are set up in the 3 German hospitals I have been in. So what I am trying to get at is that the same thing will often be eaten at breakfast and at dinner. The main difference is that at breakfast the bread will almost always be eaten with the hands and at dinner the bread will be eaten with a fork and knife. Even though it is the same thing. Does anybody else think that it weird? Oh well.
When I had my heart catheter done on New Year’s, I asked the doctor to burn copies of the heart x-rays on a CD for me. How geeky is that? Unfortunately, the image files are a proprietary format from Siemens for an interface called ACOM.PC. I found this small program for the PC that may help me view the files.
There is one thing unsettling about this ACOM.PC stuff though. According to the readme file on the CD, it only runs on Windows95. What? If I have a long skinny hose jammed up into and poking around inside my heart, I don’t want the words “Windows95” to be anywhere in the equation. Maybe it is just the software used to store the images and burn the CD, but it’s just a deeply-rooted psychological thing that anybody who has done tech-support will understand. On the other hand, I’m grateful they had the technology there at their disposal.