What is it with all the Apple snobbery lately? ‘My ipod is better than your Zune,’ ‘My iphone is better than your Blackberry,’ etc? What are we, in third grade again? Who gives a rip? Personally, I think anything Apple is just over-priced trendy technology, and isn’t any better than anything else. I couldn’t rationalize the cost of an Apple if I tried. Granted, I know that for certain professionals, Apples probably do outperform PCs…I get that. What I don’t get is the layperson shelling out $1700+ for an imac or an ibook when all they do with it is email. I have an ipod nano that I got on super clearance because they were liquidating their old nanos in preparation for their new, smaller nanos. Not that I wanted one, but I felt peer pressured to get one. I remember getting comments like, ‘You don’t have an ipod??’ accompanied by an incredulous look of surprise. So I got the ipod…and I still don’t know how to work it. I’ve tried. You know what I think would help? A clearly marked on/off button. I can never figure out how to turn it on, so I just keep holding down buttons until the screen lights up…I know that there are only 5 buttons to choose from, but I still don’t know which one turns it on. Then, once it’s on, I again can’t figure out how to turn it off. The button holding commences once again, usually without success…so then in frustration I just leave the damn thing on and the battery eventually dies. My ipod is always dead. There’s always quite a lapse in time between usings of my ipod, because usually when I want to use it, it’s dead and I don’t want to take the time to charge it. If I had figured out with the previous use both how to turn it off and/or on, that knowledge has since been forgotten and I start the button pressing all over again, frustrated that I own a device that I don’t know how to operate. I know all you ipod users are scoffing and laughing at me…but seriously! Is there anything wrong with an on/off button?? I have issues with things that aren’t clearly marked…like watches…if there isn’t a tick mark for every hour on a watch face, I don’t know what time it is. I must have perceptual problems…or I just an idiot…maybe a little of both.
Since starting this new assignment in Arkansas, I’ve been on a weekend rotation, meaning that I only work Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I know, it sounds horrid when you first hear about it, but when you stop to think about it, it’s perfect. First off, I always work three shifts, and then have four off. This is the only schedule where I could always have this consistent of a rotation. It’s awesome! I go in, do my time, and then I’m off for longer than I was on. Second, it gives me all kinds of time to go places that I need to go and do things that I need to do without fighting the weekend crowds. I love my days off during the week. And with four days off in a row, it opens up lots of opportunity for going places without having to adjust my schedule. I would love to stay on this schedule for always, but the only reason it works here is because I don’t have any friends down here that work a 9-5 M-F schedule. It wouldn’t really make a whole lot of sense to work just weekends when living near friends who were always doing fun things on the weekends. So I’ll enjoy it for now. The sacrifices I make for my buddies…if they only knew!
Along with the travel nursing front, I hear pretty much everyday from permanent staff nurses that “now is the time to travel, before you get married and have kids and whatnot.” And I think to myself that that makes sense, but from a social standpoint, I have to wonder if this really is the right time to be traveling. I’ve been doing this for three years now, and at the end of this year I’m thinking about throwing in the towel (however, I say that every year…I think I have commitment issues when it comes to the idea of having a permanent job). But here’s the thing…for the past three years, all my friends have either been married or single, most of them had only one child or none at all. Now that we’re getting further up there in the age spectrum, everyone is having kids. My point is, once people start having kids, that doesn’t give them a whole of free time to do things with friends…namely, me. I know, that sounds selfish, but it’s really not…it’s just me coming to terms with the logistics of the situation. I got a taste of it when I was out in Denver doing an assignment…my friends Denice and David lived out there and have an 18-month old little darling named Braydon. It didn’t even occur to me how much coordinating it took for them to get out on a random weeknight to go out for a drink or something to eat. Either they had to find a baby-sitter last minute (and baby-sitting age kids these days have a lot of stuff going on in the evenings during the week…I can’t remember me having that many activities), or we brought the little guy with us. He was usually pretty well behaved, but every now and then he would have a bad day. Most of the time we just ended up staying in and getting a pizza and watching a movie…or catching the latest TiVo episodes of Oprah…hahaha! To be honest, I really enjoyed those evenings in a lot…probably more than I would have enjoyed going out. So the point I was trying to make is, there will be no more calling people at 5pm to meet up for drinks at 7pm. Volleyball will have to be a coordinated event where either each family gets their own babysitter, or a parent takes turns sitting out each week to watch the little ones. And people always say before the baby arrives, “We’re still going to go out and we’re still going to do this and we’re going to get babysitters…nothing will change.” But it does change. And in a way, I’m almost envious of the change. My friends that have become moms are so different now, but different in a good way. They seem so at peace with themselves and the lives that they now lead. They’re so happy being moms…it’s really a very extraordinary thing to see. They don’t miss a lot of the things they used to do before they had the kid…life took on a new meaning. And they still make an honest attempt to make it to all the get togethers, they just need a little prior notice to get a sitter or drop the tike off with grandma and grandpa. So is this the right time to travel? Will things really change all that much for me once I’m living around my friends and they’re all having kids? I guess time will tell. One thing is for sure, I will not be babysitting. I love it that people want to have kids, but kids scare the crap out of me. I’m finally getting to the point where I’m comfortable holding babies, but it’s taken me a long time to get there. I’m working on the toddler thing, but there just aren’t a whole lot in my life right now to practice on. And really, any self-respecting parent probably shouldn’t lend out the services of their toddler for me to practice on…that sounded dirty…I really didn’t mean it to be…hahaha!
The other night, Simon and I were all settled in for sleep when we heard a commotion out in the living room. I, of course, thought someone was either trying to get into our apartment or already had. I instantly cursed myself for leaving my pink bat out in the Jeep…what good is it going to do me out there anyway? I have no idea. So anyway, I’m lying there in the bed, being as motionless as possible, just listening. And then the noise happened again! Simon woke up this time, sprung out of the bed to investigate. It was just Lady, knocking something off the coffee table. So after we got back to bed and I was lying there in my bed, I got to thinking about what would happen if someone really broke in and decided to off me. What would happen to all my things? Who would take care of all my unfinished business? I started mentally coming up with a list for divvying out my things, making sure the right stuff went to the right people. And when I got up the next morning, I seriously thought about typing up a sheet and saving to the desktop of my computer so that it would be easy to find should something happen to me. Is that weird? Is it part of my anal organizing personality to have all my ducks in a row should I die tomorrow? It doesn’t feel that weird to me. Over the Christmas break I made out this big long list of all my internet banking sites, my social sites, my email addresses, and random others. I included all the passwords and gave it to my mom, in the off chance that something would happen on the 5-hour drive either to or from Simon’s mom’s house…that’s a long way to drive in the December when you don’t know what the weather is going to do. I just wanted to make sure that my finances would be taken care of in the event that something happened to me, and I wanted to make sure my mom had a way to get in touch with everyone that she needed to if something happened. What if I die and some of my friends don’t find out? That would be horrible…I think. Well, I won’t know because I’ll be dead, but I think it would be horrible. I would feel horrible if one of my friends died, and I didn’t find out until months afterwards because their family members either didn’t know about me at all or didn’t know how to go about contacting me. And, in the event of a death, I doubt family members are concerned with contacting that person that I met that one day on spring break that I still keep in touch with after all these years, you know? Hmmm…all this because my dog had to go and knock something off the coffee table in the middle of the night.
I had to buy dress pants recently to do hospital orientation at my latest job. Yeah, I was pretty irritated about it. When am I going to wear dress pants again? I decided that Simon and I will have to go out somewhere nice one of these days so I can wear them again, just to legitimize the purchase. I had the luck of getting them on clearance though, which helped. Where I was going with this is, when I bought the pants, I had to buy a size XS. I am not an XS. And what made me think about it even more, is that I have friends smaller than me. They wouldn’t be able to even shop in that store because the sizes are so bloated, yet they have little size tags on them. I’m continually amazed and slightly irritated by the whole thing. What it boils down to, is that clothing manufacturers realize that we’re getting bigger but we don’t really want accept that we’re bigger, are making clothes bigger but are putting smaller tags on them, thereby making us feel good about ourselves because after all these years, I for some reason can fit in a size I haven’t worn since 6th grade, despite the fact that I’m probably a good 50 pounds heavier now than I was then…not to mention 6 or 7 inches taller. I bought this book recently called the ‘9-ince plate “diet,”’ and it’s all about how our portions are much too big…and not just our portions…everything. There was one line in there that I just had to stop and say, ‘whoa’ to…it went something along the lines of this: one-third of Americans cannot comfortably fit in the average airline seat, and about one in twelve can’t fit at all. We’re huge!! We as Americans just keep getting bigger and bigger, and yet the industries and corporations keep making allowances for it, convincing us through subtle devices that we’re really not. Bigger movie theater seats, bigger plates, bigger bagels, bigger coffees. I think the book summed it up perfectly when it said, “the large became the medium, the medium became the small, and the small became the child’s cup.” It was a fabulous read…I highly recommend it. Don’t expect to learn a whole that you don’t already know though…it’s a pretty common-sense book, I just need things spelled out for me, you know? Like turning the ipod on and off…..
Simon and I went to four different grocery stores down here before we were able to locate bags of frozen peas and green beans. However, there seemed to be a surplus of frozen broccoli, which I found kind of strange. Do people really eat that much broccoli down here? I got a Sam’s club membership with the intention of buying a monster bag of peas and green beans, and my choices were broccoli or corn. Hmmm. I have since found peas and green beans, only to realize after a trip to Target that I could have gotten them cheaper there. Dammit. We’re finding that we get the runaround down here quite a bit when it comes to grocery shopping, probably due in part to my fickle grocery needs. To break it down, we have decided that we will go to Walmart for produce and cereal (well, just one kind of cereal…honey-nut shredded wheat…yum!), Target (it’s not a Super Target, which is the mother of all grocery stores) for dry goods and frozen stuff, and Kroger for my fancy cheese and flax bread. Three grocery stores for one grocery trip. This is why having days off during the week comes in handy…I would not be going to three different grocery stores on a Saturday…that’s just asking for a bad day.
There’s a little Pomeranian here at the complex whose owner thinks it’s appropriate to leave it outside for extended periods of time, allowing the damn thing to bark the entire time. Even if there’s nothing for it to bark at, it still barks. Simon has actually talked to the woman twice about it, and her response? He should get some ear plugs. All I have to say is, that woman is lucky she was talking to him and not me when she said that, because the rest of the conversation probably would have gone differently. EAR PLUGS??? How about you go outside with your dog instead of tying it out so that it doesn’t bark the entire time? Or maybe, when you hear it start to bark, you bring it back in right away. I think it’s incredibly rude for people that live in apartment complexes to allow their dogs to sit outside and bark like that. We’d like to say something about to the office, but we don’t want it to be found out that we have three dogs living here when we’re only supposed to have two. Oh, and it’s suffice to say that in three months my three dogs combined probably won’t bark as much as her dog does in one day. Completely ridiculous. Simon and I thought about ex-laxing the dog so that it would crap all over her apartment, but that’s a case of misplaced blame…even though the dog sucks, it’s the owner that is definitely at fault. If only we could find a way to ex-lax the owner. Simon wants to get a tape recorder and record her dog barking, and then set it up outside her apartment at 3am. Not a bad idea. Oh, and another thing she told Simon (this is priceless…and crazy), she told him that if he wanted to buy her a muzzle for her dog, she would use it. People might say I’m a crazy dog lady because I have three dogs, but I think I pale in comparison to this woman. Maybe we need a new term…how about “batshit crazy dog lady?” That has a nice ring to it.
In other dog related stuff…when my dogs are out of water, Brie jumps into the bathtub and makes all kinds of noise in there. She’s made the association that water can be found in the bathtub, and therefore we should make the association that if she’s in the tub, we need to fill her water dish. Making a commotion near her water dish would probably have the same effect and require considerably less effort on her part, but you can’t tell her that.
Last but not least, I learned the most amazing thing over the weekend! Here in Little Rock, they have a lot of nurses here from the Philippines. I was working with three Pilipino nurses the other night, and they were talking in their native language. I could tell they weren’t speaking English, so I just kind of zoned them out for a while. After a beat, I think they felt that bad that I was sitting there so silent, and they started to explain their language to me. There are a lot of different dialects in their language, but these three girls all spoke a dialect from the southern part of the country…and it’s Latin based! To be more specific, it’s a version of Spanish. Totally unexpected. They count in Spanish, a lot of their words are Spanish…after a while when they were talking to each other, I could pick out words that I knew or had heard before in Spanish. It was so crazy and I was so taken aback by it. I guess I had just assumed that their language would be closer to Japanese or Chinese or something of that sort. The things we learn. I’ve been telling everyone about it, just because I find it so fascinating and unexpected. So now you can tell people you know about it.
Since starting this new assignment in Arkansas, I’ve been on a weekend rotation, meaning that I only work Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I know, it sounds horrid when you first hear about it, but when you stop to think about it, it’s perfect. First off, I always work three shifts, and then have four off. This is the only schedule where I could always have this consistent of a rotation. It’s awesome! I go in, do my time, and then I’m off for longer than I was on. Second, it gives me all kinds of time to go places that I need to go and do things that I need to do without fighting the weekend crowds. I love my days off during the week. And with four days off in a row, it opens up lots of opportunity for going places without having to adjust my schedule. I would love to stay on this schedule for always, but the only reason it works here is because I don’t have any friends down here that work a 9-5 M-F schedule. It wouldn’t really make a whole lot of sense to work just weekends when living near friends who were always doing fun things on the weekends. So I’ll enjoy it for now. The sacrifices I make for my buddies…if they only knew!
Along with the travel nursing front, I hear pretty much everyday from permanent staff nurses that “now is the time to travel, before you get married and have kids and whatnot.” And I think to myself that that makes sense, but from a social standpoint, I have to wonder if this really is the right time to be traveling. I’ve been doing this for three years now, and at the end of this year I’m thinking about throwing in the towel (however, I say that every year…I think I have commitment issues when it comes to the idea of having a permanent job). But here’s the thing…for the past three years, all my friends have either been married or single, most of them had only one child or none at all. Now that we’re getting further up there in the age spectrum, everyone is having kids. My point is, once people start having kids, that doesn’t give them a whole of free time to do things with friends…namely, me. I know, that sounds selfish, but it’s really not…it’s just me coming to terms with the logistics of the situation. I got a taste of it when I was out in Denver doing an assignment…my friends Denice and David lived out there and have an 18-month old little darling named Braydon. It didn’t even occur to me how much coordinating it took for them to get out on a random weeknight to go out for a drink or something to eat. Either they had to find a baby-sitter last minute (and baby-sitting age kids these days have a lot of stuff going on in the evenings during the week…I can’t remember me having that many activities), or we brought the little guy with us. He was usually pretty well behaved, but every now and then he would have a bad day. Most of the time we just ended up staying in and getting a pizza and watching a movie…or catching the latest TiVo episodes of Oprah…hahaha! To be honest, I really enjoyed those evenings in a lot…probably more than I would have enjoyed going out. So the point I was trying to make is, there will be no more calling people at 5pm to meet up for drinks at 7pm. Volleyball will have to be a coordinated event where either each family gets their own babysitter, or a parent takes turns sitting out each week to watch the little ones. And people always say before the baby arrives, “We’re still going to go out and we’re still going to do this and we’re going to get babysitters…nothing will change.” But it does change. And in a way, I’m almost envious of the change. My friends that have become moms are so different now, but different in a good way. They seem so at peace with themselves and the lives that they now lead. They’re so happy being moms…it’s really a very extraordinary thing to see. They don’t miss a lot of the things they used to do before they had the kid…life took on a new meaning. And they still make an honest attempt to make it to all the get togethers, they just need a little prior notice to get a sitter or drop the tike off with grandma and grandpa. So is this the right time to travel? Will things really change all that much for me once I’m living around my friends and they’re all having kids? I guess time will tell. One thing is for sure, I will not be babysitting. I love it that people want to have kids, but kids scare the crap out of me. I’m finally getting to the point where I’m comfortable holding babies, but it’s taken me a long time to get there. I’m working on the toddler thing, but there just aren’t a whole lot in my life right now to practice on. And really, any self-respecting parent probably shouldn’t lend out the services of their toddler for me to practice on…that sounded dirty…I really didn’t mean it to be…hahaha!
The other night, Simon and I were all settled in for sleep when we heard a commotion out in the living room. I, of course, thought someone was either trying to get into our apartment or already had. I instantly cursed myself for leaving my pink bat out in the Jeep…what good is it going to do me out there anyway? I have no idea. So anyway, I’m lying there in the bed, being as motionless as possible, just listening. And then the noise happened again! Simon woke up this time, sprung out of the bed to investigate. It was just Lady, knocking something off the coffee table. So after we got back to bed and I was lying there in my bed, I got to thinking about what would happen if someone really broke in and decided to off me. What would happen to all my things? Who would take care of all my unfinished business? I started mentally coming up with a list for divvying out my things, making sure the right stuff went to the right people. And when I got up the next morning, I seriously thought about typing up a sheet and saving to the desktop of my computer so that it would be easy to find should something happen to me. Is that weird? Is it part of my anal organizing personality to have all my ducks in a row should I die tomorrow? It doesn’t feel that weird to me. Over the Christmas break I made out this big long list of all my internet banking sites, my social sites, my email addresses, and random others. I included all the passwords and gave it to my mom, in the off chance that something would happen on the 5-hour drive either to or from Simon’s mom’s house…that’s a long way to drive in the December when you don’t know what the weather is going to do. I just wanted to make sure that my finances would be taken care of in the event that something happened to me, and I wanted to make sure my mom had a way to get in touch with everyone that she needed to if something happened. What if I die and some of my friends don’t find out? That would be horrible…I think. Well, I won’t know because I’ll be dead, but I think it would be horrible. I would feel horrible if one of my friends died, and I didn’t find out until months afterwards because their family members either didn’t know about me at all or didn’t know how to go about contacting me. And, in the event of a death, I doubt family members are concerned with contacting that person that I met that one day on spring break that I still keep in touch with after all these years, you know? Hmmm…all this because my dog had to go and knock something off the coffee table in the middle of the night.
I had to buy dress pants recently to do hospital orientation at my latest job. Yeah, I was pretty irritated about it. When am I going to wear dress pants again? I decided that Simon and I will have to go out somewhere nice one of these days so I can wear them again, just to legitimize the purchase. I had the luck of getting them on clearance though, which helped. Where I was going with this is, when I bought the pants, I had to buy a size XS. I am not an XS. And what made me think about it even more, is that I have friends smaller than me. They wouldn’t be able to even shop in that store because the sizes are so bloated, yet they have little size tags on them. I’m continually amazed and slightly irritated by the whole thing. What it boils down to, is that clothing manufacturers realize that we’re getting bigger but we don’t really want accept that we’re bigger, are making clothes bigger but are putting smaller tags on them, thereby making us feel good about ourselves because after all these years, I for some reason can fit in a size I haven’t worn since 6th grade, despite the fact that I’m probably a good 50 pounds heavier now than I was then…not to mention 6 or 7 inches taller. I bought this book recently called the ‘9-ince plate “diet,”’ and it’s all about how our portions are much too big…and not just our portions…everything. There was one line in there that I just had to stop and say, ‘whoa’ to…it went something along the lines of this: one-third of Americans cannot comfortably fit in the average airline seat, and about one in twelve can’t fit at all. We’re huge!! We as Americans just keep getting bigger and bigger, and yet the industries and corporations keep making allowances for it, convincing us through subtle devices that we’re really not. Bigger movie theater seats, bigger plates, bigger bagels, bigger coffees. I think the book summed it up perfectly when it said, “the large became the medium, the medium became the small, and the small became the child’s cup.” It was a fabulous read…I highly recommend it. Don’t expect to learn a whole that you don’t already know though…it’s a pretty common-sense book, I just need things spelled out for me, you know? Like turning the ipod on and off…..
Simon and I went to four different grocery stores down here before we were able to locate bags of frozen peas and green beans. However, there seemed to be a surplus of frozen broccoli, which I found kind of strange. Do people really eat that much broccoli down here? I got a Sam’s club membership with the intention of buying a monster bag of peas and green beans, and my choices were broccoli or corn. Hmmm. I have since found peas and green beans, only to realize after a trip to Target that I could have gotten them cheaper there. Dammit. We’re finding that we get the runaround down here quite a bit when it comes to grocery shopping, probably due in part to my fickle grocery needs. To break it down, we have decided that we will go to Walmart for produce and cereal (well, just one kind of cereal…honey-nut shredded wheat…yum!), Target (it’s not a Super Target, which is the mother of all grocery stores) for dry goods and frozen stuff, and Kroger for my fancy cheese and flax bread. Three grocery stores for one grocery trip. This is why having days off during the week comes in handy…I would not be going to three different grocery stores on a Saturday…that’s just asking for a bad day.
There’s a little Pomeranian here at the complex whose owner thinks it’s appropriate to leave it outside for extended periods of time, allowing the damn thing to bark the entire time. Even if there’s nothing for it to bark at, it still barks. Simon has actually talked to the woman twice about it, and her response? He should get some ear plugs. All I have to say is, that woman is lucky she was talking to him and not me when she said that, because the rest of the conversation probably would have gone differently. EAR PLUGS??? How about you go outside with your dog instead of tying it out so that it doesn’t bark the entire time? Or maybe, when you hear it start to bark, you bring it back in right away. I think it’s incredibly rude for people that live in apartment complexes to allow their dogs to sit outside and bark like that. We’d like to say something about to the office, but we don’t want it to be found out that we have three dogs living here when we’re only supposed to have two. Oh, and it’s suffice to say that in three months my three dogs combined probably won’t bark as much as her dog does in one day. Completely ridiculous. Simon and I thought about ex-laxing the dog so that it would crap all over her apartment, but that’s a case of misplaced blame…even though the dog sucks, it’s the owner that is definitely at fault. If only we could find a way to ex-lax the owner. Simon wants to get a tape recorder and record her dog barking, and then set it up outside her apartment at 3am. Not a bad idea. Oh, and another thing she told Simon (this is priceless…and crazy), she told him that if he wanted to buy her a muzzle for her dog, she would use it. People might say I’m a crazy dog lady because I have three dogs, but I think I pale in comparison to this woman. Maybe we need a new term…how about “batshit crazy dog lady?” That has a nice ring to it.
In other dog related stuff…when my dogs are out of water, Brie jumps into the bathtub and makes all kinds of noise in there. She’s made the association that water can be found in the bathtub, and therefore we should make the association that if she’s in the tub, we need to fill her water dish. Making a commotion near her water dish would probably have the same effect and require considerably less effort on her part, but you can’t tell her that.
Last but not least, I learned the most amazing thing over the weekend! Here in Little Rock, they have a lot of nurses here from the Philippines. I was working with three Pilipino nurses the other night, and they were talking in their native language. I could tell they weren’t speaking English, so I just kind of zoned them out for a while. After a beat, I think they felt that bad that I was sitting there so silent, and they started to explain their language to me. There are a lot of different dialects in their language, but these three girls all spoke a dialect from the southern part of the country…and it’s Latin based! To be more specific, it’s a version of Spanish. Totally unexpected. They count in Spanish, a lot of their words are Spanish…after a while when they were talking to each other, I could pick out words that I knew or had heard before in Spanish. It was so crazy and I was so taken aback by it. I guess I had just assumed that their language would be closer to Japanese or Chinese or something of that sort. The things we learn. I’ve been telling everyone about it, just because I find it so fascinating and unexpected. So now you can tell people you know about it.
