I'm bored.

Sigh.

It's a nice Saturday afternoon. And I'm sitting in front of my computer. Bored off my socks. How pathetic, right? I'm obviously doing a great job on going out and getting a life like I suggested to myself in my last posting. I suck.

Anyway, another week done. In a way, today has been a pretty busy week. Let's ignore Monday and Tuesday, when I didn't do much but clean house and study a little bit. Oh wait!!! How can I forget?!? Tuesday was so awesome that it totally ruined Wednesday!

I woke up Tuesday morning to bright sun, warm air and no studying to do because I did it all over the weekend and Monday. So what did I do? I washed windows. Yeah!!!!!! Trunks, tank top and a bucket of suds and a sponge... at 8am. Washing windows has never been so rad. After that, I printed out practice math sheets and sat outside in the sun and did practice problems in prep for my dreaded math proficiency test. Every semester, we have these over-hyped math proficiency tests that we have to pass with an 80% or higher. Things like: your patient is ordered 1.2mg of Ativan (for those nervous, anxious types), and the pharmacy gives you the med as 0.5mg/milliliter. How many ml's will you give your patient? Easy. Now they've added crap like: You have heparin at a strength of 25,000units/1000ml. Your patient is to receive 800units an hour. With IV tubing that has a drop factor of 15 drops/ml, how many drops per minute will you give your patient? What the hell? Hence, why I sat in the sun with my Texas Instruments scientific calculator. And it's 8 drops/minute if you were wondering. And yes, I passed.

Wednesday was flipping cold, cloudy and breezy. Plus, I had class. At 7:30am. Zzzzzzzzzzz. How do you follow fun-day Tuesday with kidney, bladder and prostate cancer? What a downer.

Clinical this week was rad. I decided to be an overachiever (and suck-up) and try to take on two patients this week. I was pretty much a time-management disaster, but I got to do some cool stuff. Like start an IV for a patient, only to remove it 5 hours later when she was discharged. I stuck her for nothing!!! But she was a good sport and told me it didn't even hurt when I stuck her. Liar. I had to get stuck in IV therapy class and I know damn well it stings like holy hell. I'm getting to pass more meds by myself, so I'm feeling pretty hot these days. And now, for the last two weeks of the month I get to rotate out to other areas in the hospital- next week I'm on the outpatient surgery unit at Saddleback and then the next week I'm on the Acute Rehab Unit where you get all-day therapy learning to adapt to things/recover from things like strokes and major injuries. My instructor says it's about as exciting as watching cement sit, but I'll save my opinion for when it's done.

And yeah, Valentine's Day!!! Thhhppppttt. I got home from the hospital, threw my germ infested uniform in the laundry and we went out for a romantic dinner at Ichibiri's... in jeans and sweatshirts. And then came home and fell asleep to some LAME science-fiction movie. Sleep has never been so merciful.

Garden report! My round three radishes have appeared and are growing strong. Given the amount of rat poison that has disappeared over the last week, I think they stand a good chance. My arugula seeds (because 2 bushes aren't enough) are sprouting now too- good times!! The other seeds are taking a fricking long time and they better get germinating. Speaking of lettuce abundance- can I tell you how freaking awesome it was to go grocery shopping and just breeze right on past the lettuce? No thanks, I grow my own.... How's THAT for self-righteous gardner attitude!

Last but not least, I'm a partially employed woman. I will be the office assistant for Ms. Julie Gormick!!! Yeah Jules- thanks for hiring me!! Two days a week, I'll be entering orders, faxing, running reports and doing post office runs. I even got a signing bonus- a book called "Surprised by Hope: rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection and the Mission of the Church" by N.T. Wright. Because I don't do enough serious reading in school. Anyway, I'm pretty excited to read it, but it will have to wait about a month until spring break (yeeeaaaahhhh!) when I can focus for a few days.

Parting words of wisdom: Drink water, it keeps your kidneys happy. Love your kidneys, and they will love you.

Where to begin, where to start...

First of all, let me apologize to my legion of fans (like, all 8 of you) for being MIA. School started and next thing I knew, it was 4 weeks into the semester and I haven't gone on and on about how flipping AWESOME second semester is! It is the absolute best!!! I can chalk it up to nothing more than answered prayer, so if you happen to be one of those praying for me- thank you, thank you. So like I've stated, where do I start? I will attempt to summarize the last 4 weeks in quick 1-2 sentence fashion. Yeah, we'll see how THAT goes...

School.
Did I say that it is going AWESOME? I have way more confidence and feel so much more comfortable in the medical setting. I have been taking care of patients for the last 3 weeks and I've been blessed to have a great patient every week. I'm at Saddleback Hospital in Laguna Hills and it's big and crawling with Saddleback Nursing grads, so they remember exactly what we're going through. I've learned how to start IV's, and I've already had a community health rotation in which I spent a day on an outpatient unit, prepping people for surgery and pleasant procedures like colonoscopies. Ewww. But it was good times. And there's no drama! It's like I walked out of 1st semester and left the drama behind. Sigh. So nice.

Super Bowl.
Flipping Patriots, man. What the crap? I throw the first party of our married life, we had a huge turnout, and I even bought a Patriots balloon for the front door... and they freaking tanked! Is it bad that everytime the Eli Manning Disneyland commercial comes on, I curl up into a ball, pull the hood of my sweatshirt over my head and cover my ears until its over? I hate the Mannings. All of them. Grrr.

My sweet little garden.
It's so cute. Like I say, some people have kids or puppies, I have a garden. This past weekend, I had an experience that I can only describe as female caveman. I provided for the household. Since, Thanksgiving, I've assumed that I had 4 broccoli plants. Well, on Friday I discovered that two of the large BUSHES were not broccoli, but arugula lettuce. Two, ginormous bushes. We had so much lettuce, I've given some away. I've now added serrano peppers, lavendar, butternut squash, some more herbs and we're working on radishes, take 3. Once again, my sproutlings did not survive. Which leads me to...

The escalation of the rat situation.
I realize that most people do not want to read the detailed play-by-play of my tangles with vermin. But tensions are high and the situation has escalated. The rats have not abided by the no entry law I have established, so I have been forced to take things to Defcon 2. That's right. Rat poison. Little, black trays of turquoise , anti-coagulating death. And I don't even feel bad. During halftime of the Super Bowl we don't speak of, I noticed the missing sproutlings. By Tuesday, I had re-created the rat-trap minefield and put out the poison trays. By Wednesday, one of my snappy traps had done its job. Me-2, rats- 0. Damn rats.

That about sums up the highlights of my last few weeks. And looking back, I seriously need to get a life. I'm pathetic.