Working on Friday.

Ellen Bonde’s brother Ralph painted this.

The house cooled off in the night so I’m up now, at 4:41 a.m., waiting for some acetaminophen (paracetamol for you Canadians) to kick in.  Where does it hurt, Penny sometimes asks.  I list them:  my left knee, my neck, my right shoulder.  I don’t know why, they just do.  Okay, so does my right elbow.  I was going to skip that, but I don’t know why.

I plan to work at Omnicare today, filling in for someone.  Perhaps it’s Dave Fisher.  Funny how, in Montana’s largest city, I know pharmacists in almost every pharmacy in town.  Not true.  No.  I know a lot of pharmacists, though.  That’s not true either.  I know about a dozen.

At Omnicare I work with Steve Normand and I’ve worked with him in various pharmacies over the past 44 years.

Then there’s the youngsters, the brilliant, the smart.  Here’s the deal.  Pharmacists are much smarter and better trained than they used to be.  I hear that you have to have close to an “A” average coming out of high school.  For that reason, most of today’s pharmacists are women and ultra smart men.  I work with a tall beautiful woman who reminds me of my daughter.  She is a young mother too.  The young man, also quite tall and slender, was a biochemist before he went to pharmacy school.  He is damned resourceful and smart.

Then there’s Steve and me.  Two kind of old guys who laugh a great deal, mostly at ourselves.