If a bennie=medicine, neutral=food, and avoid=poison, I now realize how the meal I just prepared tasted more like medicine than food!

OK, I took some Eden Organic Twisted Pair Gemelli pasta (70% whole kamut and 30% quinoa) and mixed it with walnut pesto (walnuts, basil, olive oil, parsley, garlic, and sea salt).

It smelled wonderful. It tasted too "dark". Hard to describe, but the flavors did not mesh. I think if i were to use a different pasta base, it may have come out OK, but something was missing.

I could have used some lentil pasta, but I've done lentils all week from the Misser Watt all the way back to the Apricot Lentil soup (delicious BTW), so I kind of want to take a hiatus from lentil so that I don't become a human methane factory, haha.

Before I ate lunch today, we had a patient who continues to tell us what a bad job we're doing in the pharmacy. You can't please everyone, I know, and most of the time when you have someone that comes in and starts a temper tantrum and shouts insults, you brush it off realizing that their anger is just hidden fear, sadness, pain, etc. Not this one. I've been working at this location for almost one year. There are many well-to-do patrons, but most are decent people. This patient has been coming for ten years. The insults and demand for special treatment attitude were there from the beginning, before we (the mainly new staff) even got there. When someone tells you your team is doing a bad job because according to that person, "Every time I come in there is a problem! Where are the people who used to work here?", you question yourself, "am I really doing a bad job?" You take it to heart.

But then a fellow staff member once saw this person at a department store, throwing the same type of dramatic fit, speaking condescendingly to the salesperson. That's when you know, while no one is perfect and mistakes are made, the behavior of this person is not a reflection of your work performance; it's a reflection of the person's character.

Nevertheless, this person came in and immediately my blood began to boil as I listened to the person making demands and insults at my intern. Why did my blood boil? Because instead of realizing that this is a free country and you can take your prescriptions elsewhere if you don't like the service, this person continues to verbally abuse the pharmacy staff, coming in, trying to make our lives miserable, before my intern had even spoken a full sentence. It's getting to the point where I might refuse to fill the prescriptions. Let somene else deal with them. There's only so much abuse one should take. If this person says even one cuss word at us, I'm kicking them out of the store. I won't take that. No one should.

So, I needed to cool off after listening to the soap opera on the other end of the pharmacy. I took a lunch break and walked over to a nice zen place called the Tea Garden. I ate a caesar salad focaccia sandwich, a cup of iced jasmine soy latte, and a "passionberry duo" (some sort of yummy torte).

There I began reading the paper and my eyes zeroed in on the crashes in Russia. And knowing I've flown out of that airport before, it gives me one more reason to fear flying. I hope that fear ends. It's not that I'm afraid to die, it's that this seems like such a crappy way to go and I don't want to take the chance of being on board when it happens. OK, enough negativity in this blog, wouldn't ya say?

Leads me back to my walk back to corporate indentured servitude. I started to hack up mucous and was trying to figure out why. Was it the air pollution, the food I just ate? Or was it the beginning of ragweed season? It only lasted for about ten minutes which makes me guess that it's probably the exhausted filled air I was breathing. Oh well. That's what you get for living in the city, I guess.

Well, went to my chiropractor. He's got two new partners on board with him and I'm really excited to work with them, too. One of them I know is really cool. Haven't met the other person. If you get migraines, I strongly recommend seeing a chiropractor. You won't necessarily notice what you're missing right away and you'll think that it's not that helpful, but when you stop going for two months, you realize how important it is to keep your body in physical balance.

That's all for now. Till next episode entitled, "pharmacist's job threatened by psycho patient's talks of calling the corporate office and having her fired due to pharmacist's refusal of service". Nah, I hope it doesn't go that far. But it just amazes me how someone twice my age acts like they are half my age. OK, done venting! Really!