It's Been Quiet Around Here

You might have noticed (but maybe not, and that's okay) that I haven't been much of a presence on social media much these days. Or rather, not on Facebook specifically. These past few months have been hard for so many people for so many reasons, myself included. Navigating a pandemic while being a front-line worker is almost, almost starting to feel normal. I don't want it to feel normal, but at the same time, a bit of normalcy implies expectations with hopefully somewhat measurable goals, and during this time of things changing everyday, sometimes by the hour, it's helpful to have expectations and goals, fleeting though they may be. More on that later. I've also been pondering my position of being white during the largest period of civil unrest in my lifetime thus far. There have been lots of conversations, sad moments, angry moments, frustrating moments, helpless moments. I've been holding off on writing anything about it because I still don't know how I personally feel about it, what my role is, how I can help. More on that later too. But first (and at the end), the light-hearted updates, because I think we could all use some lighter hearts these days. 

Marshal Lake with the San Francisco Peaks in the background

Simon and I recently became the proud owners of not one, but TWO Amazon Alexa speakers. I am nothing if not a sucker for a deal, and SirusXM finally reeled me in with a deal of $5 per month satellite radio service with unlimited access anywhere on any of my devices, assuming of course I am in view of a satellite or have a decent wifi connection. To sweeten the deal, they added in a free Echo Dot speaker. And not only that, but a week after receiving my free Echo Dot, they offered me another Echo Dot for $10! You mean I can listen to the same music on different speakers in multiple rooms? Or I can listen to one station in one room, and Simon can simultaneously listen to another station in another room? And the options for stations are seemingly endless? What is this sorcery?? Seriously, my GenX roots are showing via my technological ineptitude. This technology has existed for years and here I am, so excited about my shiny new toy, too distracted to fully comprehend the fact that not one, but two speakers are now constantly listening to and ultimately spying on me 24/7. But with Alexa always listening, I'm never truly alone, right? It's okay to drink an entire bottle of wine by myself on a Tuesday night because as long as there's someone listening, I'm not actually drinking alone (not that there's anything wrong with that; I drink alone all the time), thereby bypassing this cultural judginess that would have us believe that drinking by oneself means that we have a problem controlling our liquor. What did I do last night? Oh, not too much; Alexa and I just shared a bottle of Rose and we ate an entire brick of cheddar whilst watching [insert current favorite TV show]...it was great. Nevermind that Alexa won't help me with that bottle of wine or that brick of cheese, nor will she help me with the hangover the next morning or have a poop later that next day (seriously, I eat so much cheese), but that can be my little secret. But wait, she can help! She can probably hook me up with a quick fitness routine and can order me some laxatives post haste! Free one-day shipping? Sounds like a plan. 

She's always listening...

All guile aside, Simon and I have been using our speakers spending our time listening to a lot of 89.3 The Current, our favorite radio station out of Minneapolis, and I tell you what, it's like falling in love all over again. With each other, with music, with the state we came from and the city where we met, and still love so very much. I hadn't actually heard of The Current until I met Simon back in 2007. He had been listening to that station for years when we met, and truth be told, I think he loved listening to that station almost as much as loved making art. When I met Simon (well, after he decided to start talking to me, which was actually months after we met...hahaha), he was one of the most interesting people I'd ever met. He was into this indie music scene listening to artists I'd never heard of, he was an artist using a medium (pastels) with which I was unfamiliar, he rode a Harley but also a fixed-gear bicycle (I'd also never heard of a bike like that...no gears? What does that even mean?), he kayaked, and he ate the weirdest food. Seriously, I was instantly curious about Simon not because I wanted to date him (that came later), but because I couldn't figure out what in the heck he was eating out of those little containers at work in the wee hours of the morning; that weird period of time when the patients are all asleep, there's a half-hour (or more, if you're lucky) where not a single IV pump is beeping or call light is chirping, when you can really get to know the person you're working with, because at that point, you're doing everything you can just to stay awake. It took me months of pestering to get Simon to talk to me during those moments of near cognitive collapse, where a standing-upright nap almost seemed plausible. One of the very first conversations we had that wasn't him answering my endless stream of questions with a clipped 'yes' or 'no' was about music. Glory be, he was capable of conversation, and turns out, he wasn't the angry gay man from rural Minnesota who had moved to Minneapolis to escape the scorn of his ultra-conservative and unaccepting family (this was the back-story I had made up for him in the months before he starting conversing with me like a normal human being). To be fair, he was dealing with some of his own things that had nothing to do with being angry or gay, and his lack of interest in befriending me had nothing to do with me at all. Unfortunately at 2am, it's easy to take literally anything personally. We laugh about it now, especially my back story for him, which couldn't have been more wrong. In March of 2007, I called out sick to work one night and we met up at the Happy Gnome (gone but never forgotten) in St. Paul where we indulged in Dead Guy Ales and for hours, talked about all the things. The rest, as they say, is history. Our history. And a big part of that history is to the tune of The Current, which we would listen to for hours. Check it out if you're unfamiliar with that station, it's seriously one of the best, and we've so been enjoying listening to it again.

13 years later and he's still my favorite 

Man, it feels good to write. I sometimes forget how much I enjoy writing. It's so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day rush of life, the news, the political climate, the social unrest, the hospital environment, and the seemingly endless online shopping. Yep, still got that problem. I wish I could say that it's better, and I guess in some ways it is, but I still buy all these things that I don't need because shopping, for me, is self-soothing (it's part of the American Dream, is it not? Buy buy buy...). I've been making better choices (in my opinion, of course) about what I'm buying. I've been trying really hard to support small and local businesses, now more than ever as they've been the ones hit hardest by the pandemic. My jewelry collection has exploded these past few months after discovering that my yoga teacher Sarah is also an incredibly talented craftsperson of all things dangly and sparkly. Check out her shop here. Don't say I didn't warn you, her stuff is incredibly beautiful. I have all my earrings and such displayed on a wall hanger, and sometimes I'll just sit there and look at them...they're so pretty! It's ironic that after all these years I have the motivation to dress up and accessorize, and I've no where to go because either everywhere I'd like to go is still mostly shut down, or I've just lost interest in being around the general public. The other day Simon and I ran some mundane errands in town and I wore a dress, dressy sandals, and dangly earrings; just because I wanted to feel like a normal human being doing normal human being things and looking cute while doing it. It was brief, but it was nice. For a moment there things felt like they used to...and then I sneezed into my mask and was instantly brought back to our pandemic reality. I try to wear normal-people clothes as much as I can, but some days (ahem, Tuesday) the bathrobe stays on well into the afternoon. I refuse to feel bad about it. And also, I had just worked four night shifts in a row...I'd earned that bathrobe time.

Some of my pretty things

So let's talk about the pandemic and where it's at for me. Like I said earlier, it's starting to feel almost normal, which is a love-hate situation for me. Knowing it's out there, knowing that we're doing more testing, knowing that our healthcare providers are better equipped to treat patients with coronavirus is all very well and good, but I'm exhausted. I'm not even treating the sickest of the sick and I'm exhausted. I'm also incredibly disappointed in the way the so-called leaders of our country have been handling this situation. They've managed to politicize a health crisis, which is absolutely disgusting. They seem to think that pandering to a very vocal minority will get them re-elected this fall...I guess we'll see about that, won't we? Some of them (far too many of them, in my opinion) seem to be under the impression that if we just carry on as usual and pretend that the virus doesn't exist, that it'll fade away into obscurity and things will just go back to the way they were. Try telling that to some of my patients who have lost multiple family members, who have spent weeks alone in the hospital, some of those weeks lost and gone forever because they were sedated and on a ventilator, riding the wave of 'Will they make it? Will they not?' Imagine waking up from something like that, in the throes of hospital-induced delirium, and being told that while you were sleeping, your entire family died. There's no one left to take care of you when you're ready to be discharged, so you'll have to go to a nursing home or a rehab center. In the meantime your house has fallen into disrepair, you've defaulted on your loans, your pets have died, and you have no one to contact regarding getting your affairs in order because you don't even know where to begin. You don't even have the ability to grieve with those family members who are left because visitors aren't allowed in the hospital. How fucking tragic. These are the things that are exhausting for me. Yes, there's physical exhaustion there, but it's nothing compared to the mental and emotional exhaustion that comes along with helping my patients understand and cope with some of the biggest losses of their lives.

Modern day nursing feels like...

Back in May, I stepped down from being a core charge nurse. What does that mean, exactly? What it means is that rather than being a leader on my nursing unit, I've gone back to working side-by-side on the floor with my coworkers. Faced with some grim numbers, our administrators made some changes to our staffing that greatly affected the way I had grown accustomed to doing my job. I had reservations about making such changes in the midst of a pandemic, but I thought I could handle it. In the end, it turns out that I couldn't. It was too much stress, too much change, too far a departure from the nurse I want to be, the nurse I'm proud to be. The changes didn't play to my strengths, which is a person with almost two decades of nursing experience, a person with the ability to support and educate those who are less experienced. The changes took me away from my patients, and it also took me away from my staff, and that's just not who I am as a nurse. I want to be involved, I want to be in the thick of it, working together for the better of our patients, our staff, and our hospital. The changes that were made caused me to feel vulnerable, helpless, abandoned, and betrayed, and they were causing me to hate the very profession that has been so important to me for so long. That's not a good place to be, and truth be told, I just don't have the right personality to truly be a leader; I'm too sensitive and I'm too emotionally reactive. People who are good at their jobs are not necessarily good at being leaders; going through this has definitely shown me that. Leaving the charge role was a bit of an ugly exit, to be honest. Fits were thrown, tears were shed, emotionally charged text messages and emails were sent. I honestly felt like a crazy person. Thank goodness this didn't all coincide with my period or I might have just burned the place to the ground (think Heath Ledger as the Joker in the Dark Knight, walking away from the burning down hospital in a nurse's uniform...that's what I picture in my head when I think about it...funny not funny). I was left feeling that for the good of my working relationships and my own personal mental health, I needed to step down. Overwhelmingly, I was supported by my peers, which left me feeling so grateful, and helped me to feel like I was making the right decision, for me and for them. In the end I think it worked out. I think I'm more suited to be a helper; and I really like being a helper. I'm still able to be a resource for my coworkers, and I'm back to working directly with patients, which is something that I mostly enjoy; the reality is that nursing isn't always an enjoyable profession, but for the most part it's good for me and it's something I feel I'm good at. I still fill in as a charge nurse from time to time, but only on my terms; I've definitely had to learn to set some boundaries with my employer, which is something that has always been a struggle for me. Sometimes it's hard to say no, but sometimes you have to.

Wildflowers in the garden

Ready for more light stuff? Yeah, me too. I got two more orchids on Tuesday. Call it hubris, call it stupidity, call it a misunderstanding of reality, but a friend of mine approached me wanting to re-home two of her struggling orchids, and I immediately jumped at the opportunity. Apparently having one orchid survive for almost an entire year (with a lot of help from my friend Jesse, who I call my orchid guru) has given me the confidence to take on a couple strugglers. We'll see how it goes. Orchids are tough. Oddly enough, it appears that I'm better at keeping orchids alive than I am at keeping my outside plants alive. To date, the death count of my outdoor plants is as follows: 1 lavender plant, 2 Icelandic poppies, 3 creeping thyme, and 1 oriental poppy. Doesn't sound like much, but I tried so hard to keep those buggers alive, and it was heart-breaking to watch them die. Also worth mentioning but maybe not my fault, 4 of our little aspen trees got the fungus and had to be cut down. Sad. We still have one aspen left, and I haven't found any fungus on it yet, so maybe that one will live. Currently on death watch: 1 basil, 3 columbines, 2 snow on the mountain, 1 peony, and 2-3 periwinkles. It's a good thing I'm not reliant on my gardening abilities to survive or I would have starved to death long ago. I do have a decent amount of perennials that the previous owner of the house had planted, and those are all doing really well. I have some lamb's ear that are tall and beautiful and typically covered in bees. My Russian sage bushes are getting big and are so very fragrant. I had a can of wildflower mix that I bought a couple years ago at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix when they were having their plant sale, and those are doing really well. So many pink and purple blooms! I was expecting mostly orange and yellow, since those seem to be the colors of the desert, so the pinks and purples have been a nice surprise. It seems like there's always something new blooming in the wildflower bed, with oh so many bee butts sticking out of them. I also recently planted (albeit relatively late in the growing season) 2 hot pepper plants, 1 sage plant, and 1 rosemary plant. Those four are all still alive, but I'm not getting attached. My indoor plants are currently crowding out all my east-facing windows, since those are the two windows that are best suited for plants at the moment. 3 aloe, 2 cactus, 4 orchids, 1 bromeliad, 1 jade, 4 miscellaneous succulents, 1 amaryllis which refuses to bloom (maybe next year?), 1 crown of thorns without the thorns (which desperately needs to be repotted...it's huge!), 1 persian cyclamen, and an impulse-buy Plumeria which will probably not survive because it's an outdoor plant and it won't survive the winter here, so I'll have to bring it inside when it gets cold, which it probably won't like. This morning I wandered down the hill to my friend Sadie's house, and together we repotted two of my orchids and one of hers. It was great to be out together in the sunshine, drinking coffee, and getting our hands dirty. She sent me home with yet another orchid, so now I've got 5. Well, maybe 4.5...upon repotting, I discovered that one of my newly acquired orchids had almost completely rotted roots, so that one is on death watch. Sadie's husband Andy, who is also quite the orchid whisperer, helped me repot it and told me it's got about a 1 in 3 chance of surviving; it's survival completely dependent on its ability to grow an entirely new root system. Yikes.

The struggler

The van is coming along splendidly. To date we've installed the fan, all the electric, reupholstered the headliner, built the bed platform, installed two large drawers under the bed, put in the subfloor, and installed pine board on the ceiling and one of the walls. Still left to install is the cubbie wall, which will be in the back of the van on the wall opposite the bed. We also need to install the cabinets that we got from the scratch-and-dent section from IKEA, and the counter top that we still have yet to purchase...there's still time for that. It'll probably be butcher block or something like that. We elected to skip the sink this time around, as we found that we rarely used the sink in the Sprinter. We're also not planning at this time to have a fridge, as they suck way too much battery juice. Maybe in the future we can add a second battery if we feel like we absolutely need a fridge (which would most likely be a situation where we're traveling for an extended period of time without access to freezers to re-freeze our water bottles), but for now we're just planning to bring a couple coolers and call it good. We've got the van set up to add solar if we feel that's something we'll want/need in the future. We're also planning to paint it, put a small lift on it, and get some off-road tires to tackle some of those hard-to-reach camping spots off of dirt roads. The roof rack is back-ordered, so that will hopefully be installed sometime later this summer. Simon and our friend Efren have been doing such an amazing job building out the van. I haven't been much help outside of paying for half of the build, and ordering the things that Simon tells me to order. I did pick out the fabric for the headliner and reupholstered that, and I also painted some of the interior wood yesterday afternoon. It felt nice to help. 

Simon and Efren building a drawer

 

Last month I completely changed up my hair care routine. Ever since moving to Flagstaff my hair has been a bit of a mess. It's naturally wavy, kind of dry, and hates both the climate (dry and arid) and altitude (7,000 feet) here. I had to get my hair trimmed every 8-12 weeks just to keep the split ends from taking over my entire head. I've literally tried almost everything you can try as far as hair care products...Redken, Aveda, Trader Joe's, Burt's Bees, Jason, Bead Head, Moroccan Oil, Alba, Aveda, Pantene, O Way, Paul Mitchell, Nexxus, about every natural hair care line you can get at Sprouts...the list goes on and on. I'd really rather not know how much money I've spent on my head in the past 7 years. If my hair had its way, we'd be moving back to Minnesota or Florida where humidity was its best friend. I thoroughly enjoy traveling to humid climates, because my hair is huge and curly and soft and so shiny. So that's what I've been trying to replicate here in Arizona via hair products. A couple years ago my cousin told me about a hair product line called Monat. It's not sold in stores or salons, and you can only get it online. The caveat is that you need to initially go through someone to get started. Yes, it's a multi-level marketing (MLM) company, much like Amway, Tupperware, or Pampered Chef. The reason I waited so long to try Monat was because of the MLM aspect, which in the past felt a little scammy to me. My thought had always been that if their products are so great, why can't you just get them anywhere? So my skepticism about the MLM business practices kept me from giving Monat a chance. Earlier this summer, out of desperation, I decided to give it a try; my hair was dull, dry, had split ends for days, and to be honest, I was just tired of spending so much money getting my hair cut all the time. What's the harm in trying something new, right? If it works, awesome, if it doesn't, it'll just get added to the list of products that my hair has refused to accept as a suitable substitute for the humidity that it craves so much. I was still skeptical of the MLM aspect, but then I thought about the fact that I have been using Pampered Chef for years and I love their kitchen products. I still have my original garlic press that I've had for 15+ years and it's still the very best garlic press I've ever used. I've bought similar kitchen products from Target and such, and none of their equivalent counter parts have ever measured up to my Pampered Chef ones. So, I did a bunch of research, talked to some people I know who use Monat, read a bunch of third-party reviews, and decided to try Monat with that same mind set. You guys, I don't know what's in this stuff, but my hair has never looked or felt so good. I don't want to sound like I'm drinking the Kool-Aid, but it's been like a miracle for me. I have finally found a way to have Minnesota hair in Arizona. I should also mention that I'm picky about my products...I try to buy products that not only are free of the chemicals on this list, but it's also important to me that the products that I use are cruelty free. If the test version of a product isn't suitable for human testing, I'm not interested; animals shouldn't have to suffer for my cosmetological well-being. And honestly, animal hair and skin is so different from human hair and skin...I don't understand how the results of animal testing are even accurate or relevant for humans. Is this product line for everyone? Probably not. If your hair is rocking it with your current products, by all means stick with them. I'm not here to influence anyone into trying this stuff if you've already got a regimen that works for you, nor do I benefit in any way from sharing my experience with these products with you. I just wanted to share because after several years of frustration with my hair, I'm finally super happy with it. :)

Having a good hair day. :)

I don't know if I have the mental or emotional energy to delve too deeply into the current civil rights climate in this blog session. I'm still processing how to feel, how I can help, and ways that we can all affect change together to make this world a better place for everyone. I'm going to ruminate on it for just a little bit longer, and trust me, you'll be the first to know when I'm ready to share my thoughts about it. I will share that one of my friends on Facebook recently called me a racist because I wasn't being active enough in the pursuit of social justice. It left me feeling like I needed to document every single interaction I've ever had with a person of color, just to prove that I don't exclusively surround myself with entitled white people. And the thing is, I know for a fact this person never would have said that to my face, but the impersonal barrier provided by the internet and Facebook encourages people to engage online in ways that they never would in person. Just know this...I have, and will continue to have, a safe place in my home, my workplace, my life, and my heart for people of color...and not just people of color, for all people. And just because I'm not blowing up my Facebook page with all the ways I'm promoting change, doesn't mean I'm sitting here doing nothing about it. Before you go calling someone a racist simply because they didn't black out their Instagram page on #BlackoutTuesday, get off your screen and look around you at all the ways people are out there promoting change. You'll see it. 

Sunset at Lake Mary

In the meantime, I'll probably continue to stay a little distant from Facebook. I hate their algorithms, which exist solely to promote division and to promote negative emotional responses. Have you guys noticed that? I'll get blasted with article after article about Trump and all of his tomfoolery, but all I really want to see are Tasty videos, pug photos, pictures of my friends and family doing awesome things (awesome being a relative term...scaling a cliff wall or enjoying a cold drink on your deck...all awesome in my book), people doing good in the world, and articles about cool places to travel. Unfortunately, I more frequently see posts from friends and family members whose mindsets are completely opposite of mine, which causes us to negatively engage over it. And let's be honest, I'm happy to sit down with anyone whose mindset differs from mine and have a conversation about it, but Facebook just isn't the place for those discussions. So, I'm kind of done. I'm unfollowing people who don't positively or intelligently engage with me. And before this gets labeled as 'cancel culture,' I realize that not all my online interactions have to be all roses and puppy dogs (wouldn't that be nice?), but if mutual respect and compassion isn't something that I can find on Facebook anymore, then maybe I don't need to spend so much time there. It's a struggle, because for me, Facebook has always been such a great way to keep up with my friends and family who live all over the place, and I would miss that if I were to stay away for too long. So I'll continue to check in from time to time, but I'm definitely setting boundaries. Life is too short and time is too precious to be wasted on negative online interactions. And maybe we can all try to do better to make Facebook a better place for all of us to interact. Maybe we can apply these three rules of interaction to our Facebook posts: 1) is it true? 2) is it necessary? 3) is it kind? Imagine what a different place Facebook would be. I get that those three criteria don't leave a lot of room for social awareness...that's definitely something to work towards, for sure. Right now, I just need balance. I need to be reminded that the world isn't burning down, that not everyone is dying in a pandemic, that people are still living their lives, having fun, and treating others well. I know that isn't reality all of the time, but it's reality most of the time, and I think we need to remind ourselves of that from time to time.

Goofing with this goofball

And last but not least, Cooper is thriving! And by thriving, I mean not dead. Okay, that was a little dramatic, but recently he had a little event where he collapsed in the yard and I thought he was dead. I mean, the poor dude turned 16 yesterday (shit, I forgot his birthday...whoops), so it's completely logical to expect that he will continue to decline. And truth be told, I'm ready. Not ready as in "ready and waiting with baited breath," but ready in the sense that if I wake up one day and he's passed on in the night, or if he goes outside some morning and doesn't come back in, I know that he's lived a good life and he's passed on having been loved and cherished for the time that he was here. Life is definitely more of a struggle for him these days...he's got arthritis and a chronic cough; sometimes he coughs and farts at the same time which is simultaneously gross yet funny. But he still loves to eat treats and sit next to me (but not touching) on the couch. He enjoys no less than 8 naps a day and a full night's sleep. I love taking pictures of him while he's sleeping...he's so cute and squishy and I'll miss that little bugger like crazy when he goes.

The little dude

Anyway, I think that's it from me. Again, it's a lot. I need to work on writing less more often, so my posts aren't so long. I hope you all are enjoying this beautiful Thursday.