At Least There's A Bagel Later

     Well, that was fun.  There wasn't a line at the phlebotomist's office/lab cubby and I was in the chair looking away from being stuck (I flinch if I watch) about as soon as I had my coat and zip-up sweatshirt off.

     She took three vials of blood and had me verify my name and birthdate was on each one once they were all full, having already had me hold a folded square of gauze over the puncture.  She put the vials in the outgoing stack, stuck a Band-Aid over the gauze, and that was that.

     There's a decent bagel joint wedged into one corner of the parking lot for the strip mall housing the doctorplex I go to.   It's a short stroll, despite a mean little wall that prevents walking directly from the big parking lot to the smaller one around the bagel shop.  What's fifty feet of sidewalk when a nice toasted, buttered poppyseed bagel is on the line?

     The lack of breakfast and coffee was gnawing at me pretty good by the time I sat down with coffee, bagel and a nice collection of the vitamins, supplements and analgesics I'd skipped earlier.  I was even missing the cranberry juice a little, but there's usually a bottle in the vend-o-bots at work, or at least "cran-grape."

     Few things taste better than a freshly toasted bagel on an empty stomach, especially with a decent cup of coffee. I darned near called in "human" and took the rest of the day off, but duty won out.

     P. S.: There wasn't any cranberry-grape juice in the machine at work.  Two dozen rows of sugary (or artifical-sweetenery) pop, one row of ghastly energy drinks that added extra caffeine, taurine and probably Ovaltine, betadyne or thiotimoline somewhere in the fine print, half a row of iced tea and no juice at all.