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When the nurse held a gun up to my ear and pushed a button, I didn't feel a thing. Actually, it was just shaped like a pistol, and it was only loaded with some red lights.

I waited for something to come out my other ear. But she was only checking something in my left ear. She found it. My hearing aid.

She seemed satisfied. But then she wrapped my arm with a long band of cloth and pushed another button on a blinking machine with a slew of lights and red numbers on it.

The arm band tightened up on my flimsy bicep and the numbers changed and she seemed happy.

Then she took a plastic thingy and shoved it under my tongue to keep me from talking, looked at some more red numbers and told me I was 96.4.

I tried to tell her I was far from that old, but by then she was busy feeling my ankles. Probably trying to see if my fancy hospital socks were pulled up. Women are fussy about that. Elsbeth hates it when my shirt tail hangs out.

By the way, those hospital socks are great. They have a fancy design woven into the uppers and they keep your feet warm in case you have to run through snow on the way to the outhouse. They have little rubber nubs on the soles so you won't slide on the ice.

I didn't have far to go. There's a real nice bathroom right in your hospital room, but the socks looked so good on me I begged the nurse to let me wear them home just in case I need gray socks when I dress up for a cotillion.

There was no shortage of nurses. Over 24 hours, I must have had nine different ones. They take good care of you at Highline though.

I was only a short-term guest. They were checking me for a belly ache. They asked me to drink a gallon of go-go juice, then started looking down my gullet with a periscope. They found my liver, kidneys, upper umbriam, bladder, clavicle and an old pair of forceps.

And that was all I remember, because then I woke up.

I guess I should be delighted because they didn't find anything wrong. Oh, they unearthed a couple of hearing aids I thought were cashews, some cherry pits, and my favorite aggie, the one I swallowed while cleaning it when I was 9. It had lost some of its shiny finish.

Cyndi Upthegrove, the whip behind the drive to build a museum in Burien which will house the considerable collection of the Highline communities' memorabilia, is normally a whirling dervish.

But the past few weeks she has been turning up the rpms even higher.

She faced a tight deadline from the school district to move the collection. She got the Port to lease the historical society a rundown building that once housed a school in the flight path.

This meant she had to haul hundreds of boxes, tables, chairs, nearly 50 years of bound volumes of newspapers and thousands of pictures. Everything had to be located and identified for the day when it would be moved to a planned permanent location in Olde Burien.

With lean financial resources, most of the backbreaking tedious longshore work had to be done by many volunteers, including Cyndi's husband, John. It required hours and hours and scores of pickup loads of stuff, plus the welcome help of volunteer firemen from Burien and even a Boy Scout troop.

All this took place after Cyndi and her crew had to make the new temporary quarters suitable. That meant painting, assembling stacks of shelves, scrubbing grimy walls putting down hundreds of yards of carpet she got donated, and hauling tons of debris to the dump.

Now the collection is moved and stored where it is dry.

There is still the job of putting all the mountains of boxes in semi-permanent spaces. There are hundreds more hours of work ahead but the tight deadline has been met.

How fortunate this community is having people like Cyndi her husband, John, and their faithful volunteers doing this labor of love for their home town,

The long-time goals are far from met but I just thought they needed a pat on the back from the local newspaper.