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 |  Where am I going, and why am I in this handbasket? |
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Fair Warning: I've upped the rating on this blog. It is now set at GC. |
| Yesterday was educational . . . What did I learn? I'm glad you asked. 1. Non violent communication doesn't really have anything to do with not smacking people. I sat through a training yesterday morning, and violence never really came up. It was a very humanist-type training about not being judgmental. I hate to admit that I stopped listening about 1/3 of the way through it, and started writing haiku. Today's topic . . . non violent communication. Shut up and listen. Okay, so it isn't technically haiku, but if it amuses me, it shouldn't matter. 2. I'm too cynical to be swept up into the feel good world of Humanism. The take home message, after I watered it down and properly bastardized it, was this . . . if we love each other enough, the bad stuff won't matter. Now, I know that not getting enough love, attention, affection, care, and nurturing is a terrible thing. I've seen the damage done to children and adults alike. I don't believe you can fix the damage though by heaping on great big helpings of love topped with sprinkles and a shiny cherry. I think of it like a vitamin deficiency. If a person has suffered from scurvy long enough, giving that person mega doses of vitamin C might help, but it isn't going to make their teeth grow back. The damage is done. Likewise, when a person loses, or fails to develop the ability to trust, and empathize with other people, the is damage done that can not be reversed. 3. The presenter was French Canadian and at one point he said "shit." Afterwards, he looked a bit sheepish and added "Pardon my French." I'd never heard that expression from someone who spoke French, and it made me laugh (although I don't think he meant to be funny). Yeah, I also learned that I have a strange sense of humor. No one else thought it was funny either. I was going to make a list of five, but I guess the day wasn't that educational after all. Today has brought its own challenges. We had a client living in a group home who was diagnosed with cancer. We knew he didn't have long, and he was able to make all his end of life decisions. He wanted to die at home (in the group home), he wanted to be cremated, and he didn't want his ashes to be buried. He died before Christmas, and it recently was brought to our attention that his ashes are still in the group home. I suspect that maybe the group home folks have figured out a way to charge us for perpetual care. Regardless, licensing doesn't approve of ashes, the other residents of the house don't like it, and the case manager finds it very creepy. So, I've spent the better part of my morning talking to all the parties about what to do with the ashes. Some days my job veers off in strange directions. |
| What is it with my children and their homework this week. My daughter has an assignment where she has to write a poem using 20 assigned words. She is not allowed to alter the words or change their tense in anyway. She also can not add any words. The poem has to be 8 to 10 lines long. These are the words: Revive Shore Flee Duly Satisfied Fantasy Cinema Mind Dogged Guitar Red Blood Friendly Obsolete Tight Stealthy Deaden Pantomime Enforce Require What the heck! How would you do with this 7th grade assignment? Tight. Blood red fantasy, Obsolete. Enforce friendly pantomime Revive stealthy guitar Deaden mind Flee, require dogged cinema Duly satisfied Shore. WTF!  Okay, give it a try. Are you more creative than a seventh grader? |
| Today, both kids wore t-shirts that their Daddy brought back from Ohio. The shirts say, "Cincinnati, Nothing to do, and all day to do it." What kind of slogan is that? Well, it made me laugh anyway. Another strange thing . . . even though my husband has a shaved head, he still feels compelled to lift the little bottles of shampoo from the hotels. I was home sick from work today. My throat feels like I've been gargling glass shards. So far I don't have a fever though. I went to the store this evening and stocked up on yogurt and ice cream to see me through. I've fallen in love with Yoplait Whips. Lemon Meringue is my favorite. Mmmmmm. Oh! I forgot to mention, they made an arrest in the gruesome murder and dismembering of a woman whose body parts were scattered along the local interstate in plastic garbage bags. It looks like they have a strong case against the guy as the victims hands were found stashed in the bathroom of his residence. They were coated in detergent and stuffed in socks.  Disturbingly, the accused was a contract employee at the local Army Depot. He had a police record in Texas and Virginia for charges including sexual assault, robbery, and drug possession, but still managed to get the clearances he needed to work in a secure setting, as an electronics technician working on sensitive communication devices for soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Depot had no part in his hiring. It was all done through an independent contractor. The depot did not have access to the clearances raising many concerns over the increasing usage of contract employees in sensitive posts. Well on that grim note, I'm going to go eat some ice cream. |
| Over the weekend I did a lot of running around. I had all the regular weekend stuff to accomplish, plus Tony was gone, plus it was a holiday weekend, plus my brother and his family were visiting at Mom's. I would leave the house with a plan and a sense of purpose, but it would quickly dissolve. "I forgot about all the idiots," I muttered at my daughter as the car in front of me attempted a left hand turn from the right hand turn lane. "I don't know where these people come from, but they really mess up my plans." Okay, so in truth, I do know where they come from. New Jersey. When I filled out the application to refinance the house, we had to sign a statement for the Department of Homeland Security agreeing that I wouldn't use the money to fund any acts of terrorism. I'm always amazed by these types of signed statements. Who does this deter? "I'm really sorry. I'd really like to contribute to your terrorist cell again this year, but I promised I wouldn't." Yeah well, sometimes I don't know when to be quiet, so I told the mortgage broker that I wasn't plotting any terrorism, but if I were, I'd blow up the I-80 toll bridge between Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Apparently our Mortgage broker doesn't have much of a sense of humor. Either that, or he's from Jersey. Back to my point . . . every time I go out, I get frustrated about the idiots out there, and I am beginning to realize that the fault is my own. The world is full of these people. It is about time I accept this obvious fact and start planning accordingly. This is a theme really. I need to make plans that don't hinge on everything going perfectly, or even smoothly. I use the bumps on the road as an excuse to turn back or stop short of my destination. I'll never get anywhere that way. There are too many idiots out there, and some days it seems that I've married their King.  Oh yeah, I have a working iPod again. Max fixed it without even opening the case. How did he accomplish that? I'd certainly tried all the tricks described on-line. Or so I thought. Nope, Max smacked it hard a couple of times and it lives again. Go figure. No bionic iPod for me. |
| Turns out my iPod can be saved! Maybe. Probably. My brother is going to take a crack at it anyway. The hard drive is fried, and I would have written that off as a terminal diagnosis, but my brother is visiting from Virginia for the weekend and when the topic came up he said "I don't think that's very hard to fix." "You don't? Really?" "It's just a matter of installing a new hard drive. I think I have two of them up in my bag that might work." Yep, that statement just confirms that Max is a tech geek. But tech geeks are very handy when your iPod is making the sad face. "Wow! Okay. It's not like I have anything to lose. I'll bring it over tomorrow." Max taps away on the laptop awhile longer and then announces "It would be better to go with a flash drive. If you get a flash drive it will be faster, and there won't be any moving parts, so there'll be less to go wrong in the future." He will build it better . . . faster . . . stronger than it was before.  |
| Tony is in Ohio until Sunday night. Normally I sleep better when he isn't here. I happen to like having the whole bed to myself. And he snores. I'm not sleeping well though. We are having some very blustery weather here, and the Rhododendron scraps against the siding under my bedroom window, and wind whips around the house shuddering the windows, and filling me with some strange anxiety. In other news, Tony had a job interview last Friday and feels pretty positive about it. I'm less thrilled because it involves a long commute, but it is full time, pays decently, and is at a place where he already works part time, so he knows what he's getting into. Breaking news . . . Tony got the job! He just called to tell me he had an official job offer. We got the appraisal back on our house and will close on the refinanced mortgage on Monday or Tuesday. I'm pretty eager to get going on the long neglected home improvement projects. Also, the appraiser told Tony exactly what I've been telling him for the past 9 years. We would be ahead to add a shower to our half bath. Yep, predictably Tony latched onto the idea when someone else said it. So the to do list grows a little longer . . . Finally, I started working on my NaNo novel again. I really want to get it finished up. I pushed through a couple scenes, and now I'm gaining some momentum. I've got a lot of ideas for the rewrite, so I need to get this draft finished and get on with it. I'm taking the kids out to lunch, and then Katie is getting a hair cut and then we'll run over to Pet Smart to buy a 40 lb bad of dog food that my husband wasn't thoughtful enough to pick up before he blew out of town. The kids like to go to Pet Smart to look at all the furry little rodents. Not my favorite way to spend a day, but the Pet Store is only a few doors down from Borders and maybe I'll stop in there too. I think I might even have a coupon. |
Yesterday I read partyof5  's blog about his son visiting New York City. It made me want to go. I don't live far from the city. I am within the distance that is considered a "reasonable commute" which at two hours, seems anything but reasonable, but I digress. I haven't gone into NYC in a number of years, and I've got the itch now. Turns out there is a conference coming up in early May, that I've attended in the past. It is in a great hotel right near Time Square, so I'm going to start working on the boss to send me and my friend Bonnie. I was fourteen the first time I visited New York City. I was living in Maryland at the time. My mother had a childhood friend visiting from Idaho, and they decided they wanted to go to New York. I was allowed to tag along. We caught the train in Baltimore and took it right into Grand Central Station. It was early fall and when we stepped out of the Grand Central, their was a hot wind sucking through the streets carrying the scents of pretzels and hot dogs from the street vendors. We stood there on the sidewalk with our bags looking up. In New York you can tell the tourists because they are the only ones looking up. This was New York of the 1980's. This was before the cleaning and sprucing, before the city had it's Renaissance, back when Time Square was still thick with adult stores and theaters, addicts, and panhandlers. It was back when Koch was mayor and Crack was King. So there I was with Mom and her friend Barb, and they are approached by a fast talking man in a shiny black track suit. "You need a cab? I'll get you a cab. Where youse headed?" "The Marriott Marquis on Broadway." The man led us over to the yellow stream of New York cabs, and thumped twice on the trunk of the nearest waiting cab. The driver opened the trunk and Slick loaded our bags into the trunk. New York is all about service. He closed the trunk and opened the door calling in to the driver our destination. He came back to Mom and Barb and told them what the trip would cost. He worked them smoothly, creating confussion and keeping them separate. I groaned as they each fished into their purses for money. Each produced a twenty, and neither had anything smalled. Slick took both twenties and said he would get change from the driver. Slick turned to walk away and on the third step he broke into a run (hence the track suit). Mom and Barb shouted and swore, but I just slid into the cab, mortified in the way only a fourteen year old can be mortified. We'd been in New York for 15 minutes and we'd already been conned . . . robbed! It didn't bode well for the weekend. Sheesh, hadn't these people watched TV? Everyone knows that you pay according to the meter at the END of the cab ride. Everyone except Mom and Barb. The driver spent the entire trip shaking his head, and scolding Mom and Barb for being foolish. We did have a good weekend, but continued to show a complete lack of good sense. We ended up walking from the Empire State Building to Greenwich Village, down through China Town, and all the way down to the World Trade Center. We watched the sun go down from the top of the World Trade Center. We watched the City light up. It was amazing, but it was night and we had to get back uptown, so we took the subway. But that's another story, and I have to go back to work now. I'm just home on lunch, but I wanted to stop in and say hi. Things are okay on my end, I've just been preoccupied with other things that have kept me away. |
| Why did this suddenly become so difficult? I was blogging along, chatting with folks and feeling very much a part of things. Then suddenly I wasn't. I have no explanation, but here are some of the prevailing theories I've conjured up . . . 1. I'm reading a lot. By a lot, I mean I'm nearly through my second book this week. A.) That takes up considerable time, and B.) It fills my head with other people's words and that causes a sort of disconnect with my own thoughts and words. You know how I was boxing up old books to donate to the library for their annual book sale? Well, that was the original plan. I made the mistake of mentioning that I had a trunk full of books to run to the library at lunchtime. Someone asked if they could look to see if there was anything they might like to read. Someone else asked if I'd run her books over if she brought them in. Next thing I knew I was organizing the first annual Agency Book Swap / Drive. Everyone brings in their old books between now and Friday and leaves them in a vacant office. Readers are welcome to peruse the books and take any that interest them. Whatever is still their on Friday will be donated to the library. It started off as a simple idea amongst three or four readers. I didn't realize how avid the readers were, or how quickly the books would add up! It has been fun learning about the literary preferences of my coworkers, but it is not doing much to reduce the number of books in my home. I keep bringing more home! I have no idea how many trips I'm going to have to make to the library to clear out all the books by the end of the week, but we are having fun and I have lots of "new" novels to lose myself in. 2. My thoughts are all jumbled. I'm thrilled Tony passed his exam, so I'm riding high on that. It is a good thing we found out after only a week. If the uncertainty had dragged out any longer, I'm sure we'd both have started fantasizing about murder. One of us may have already started, but the arrival of good news went a long way to restoring good will. 3. I love the spring, but I despise springing forward. I can't seem to reset my clock (literally in the case of the clock in my car) and everything is pure chaos. I don't know when to eat, or sleep let alone blog. I'm not sure I slept last night. It seems that I spent most of the night looking at the clock and thinking "I can't believe I'm still awake." Well, three is enough, anything else would just be restating or elaborating on the above reasons. No need. It just isn't that interesting. Amidst the chaos I'm trying to create little pockets of order. For whatever reason I decided my daughters room looked to be a likely candidate for pocketdom. Now, my daughter has a sock fetish. I'm not sure how that came to be, but she has an amazing number of socks, and always wants more. I've been trying for sometime to convince her that if she grow a dozen more feet she'd still be at the point of overkill in the sock department. Not surprisingly, the room cleaning process turned up many, many socks strewn about the layers of litter. I took to rolling found socks into balls and lobbing them softly at the girl child. I think it illustrated the point nicely. At the end of the room cleaning session she told me "I never realized how many socks I had until you started throwing them at my head." I think I might try the same subtle approach on her father next. |
HE PASSED!!!    The letter came today. Tony passed his licensing exam! He is a licensed psychologist now. |
| Nada blogged recently about her intense aversion to needles. It got me thinking about a time and place when I was expected to stick needles into people. It still boggles my mind that everyone came through that experience intact. I was working at one of the major area hospitals while they were cycling through a "Jack of all trades" phase of health care. Rather than continuing to employ phlebotomists, they decided to train all of us Tech folk to draw blood. We were required to take a shockingly brief phlebotomy course, followed by 5 supervised sticks (they didn't even have to be successful draws . . . just 5 supervised sticks!). I dodged this requirement for awhile. I worked days, and anyone who has been in a hospital knows that the vampires usually circulate in the pre-dawn hours collecting blood from half awake patients. So, I didn't have much opportunity to practice, but the clock was ticking. I had to get in 5 sticks within 3 months of competing the classroom training. One nurse was determined to push the training along. Unfortunately, she had an abrupt manner that only made me more nervous. As if sticking a needle into a person's arm isn't nerve racking enough! When I get nervous, my hands tend to shake. Something that is probably compounded by my copious consumption of caffeinated colas. But there I was . . . facing my first victim patient. Under the nurses watchful eye, I looked at the order carefully and selected the tubes I needed to fill along with the appropriate gauge needle. I tied the elastic band around her arm, and poked around at her arm feeling for a promising vein. I prepped the area breathing in the astringent tang of alcohol, and snapped my hands into the latex gloves. I poked around at her arm again. Okay, nothing left but to do it. I reached for the syringe and my hand trembled. Not a subtle sort of tremble that might be overlooked. Oh no! We had patient on the unit who'd been taking thorazine for twenty years who had steadier hands than I did at that moment. I took a deep meditative breath and forced my brain to a soothing mantra "I can't do this, I can't do this, I can't do this, I can't do this, I can't do this, I can't do this, I can't do this, I can't do this." As I drew near to the patient's arm, I heard a soft sob escape, and wondered for a moment if it might have come from me. I looked up at my patient and saw the tears slipping down her pale cheeks. "I can't do this!" she cried. It startled me to hear the words that had been running through my head coming out of her mouth. "I'm really sorry, but I can't. Could someone else please take my blood." Yep, I made the poor woman cry. The nurse was irritated, but she took over and completed the blood draw with minimal fuss. I was off the hook for a week or so while they tried to figure out what to do about my latest bout of incompetence. In the end, they sent me down to the outpatient lab. The lady in the outpatient lab was great, and she knew her trade well. She steered me toward the "easy" sticks and the hearty souls, and I returned to my unit fully certified. And I never had to draw another vile of blood ever again. |
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