It’s 62 out right now! Feels amazing considering we just had flurries less than a week ago. I spent 1.5 hours walking around the lake and enjoying the air. I think I need to spend more time outdoors. Just in general. Shame I’m coming to this conclusion in late October :-/
I can’t believe both my computer and my gecko broke in the same day.
Of course my computer couldn’t break in the middle of July it had to start on the FIRST DAY OF CLASS! After a trip to best buy where the very geeky geek squad dude literally just laid his hands on it and it made it all the way through boot up allowing us to load the windows recovery disk. Hopefully it will be in working order soon. Because classes have started and I have many an online obligation to attend to.
Then tonight we noticed the girl gecko wasn’t moving quite right and was sluggish. I soaked her for a while helped get the shed off of her toes and then moved her to a private shoebox with some deep fresh warm bedding, Hubbins going to take her to the fancy reptile store tomorrow to see if they can offer insight. :-/. Here she is in a photo a few months ago showing off her pretty colors:
This week hubbin and I took a semi-spontaneous trip to NYC. My MIL has been wanting to go visit her sister in law (hubbins aunt) who is 80+ and sick with cancer (she actually looked pretty good to me) anyway she lives in Allentown which is about an hour from NYC so we turned it into a mini vacation. My MIL brought another crazy old lady with her for entertainment purposes. So on the full day in NYC we paired off and did our own thing.
After a nice visit with Hubbins aunt (and their 9lb rocket propelled yorkie puppy) we drove into the city and had dinner at one of Hubbins favorites: Bennys Burritos. Then had dessert at Planet Hollywood in times square. We spent sometime at toys r us where Hubbin lusted over the enormous transformers statue and pointed out all the toys he wanted to buy for himself our someday child. (we used no birth control this summer with no results, but that will be another post)
We all stayed at a nice hotel near Newark airport because it was, ohh about $100 cheaper.
On our full day the old ladies went to Coney Island and filled themselves with junk and remembered the good old days. Hubbin and I drove to long island where he showed me the school he used to teach at and the little house where he rented a room. Then hubbin was able to get ahold of some of his friends he used to hang out with all the time and we went to their house on the north shore near oyster bay (I had never been to long island before and that area was beautiful!!!) we sat on their back patio sipping iced tea and they reminiced. Hubbin loves their 
dog and still talks about her 
frequently even though he hasn’t seen her in 5years. The family’s daughter was walking up the street with the dog when we got out of the car and I would swear to you thr dog recognized
Hubbbin even after not seeing him for 5 years, ran straight to him all excited with copious dog kisses.
After their house we drove to Panna II on the lower east side. A little Indian restaurant filled with Christmas lights. We had been for lunch once before but it was much more clostraphobic feeling when it was packed for dinner. After dinner we decided to walk from there to times square. It was a long walk but we seem to walk a lot on vacations. About 6 blocks into our walk the weather apocolypse broke out with tons of thunder and lightening and strong wind (I saw later on the news that there were 80mph gusts in central park that knocked down trees.)
we of course had no umbrellas and I was wearing flipflops. I felt like I was walking bare feet on a slip n slide. We caught a cab to times square and took shelter in hard rock with all the other tourists until the rain stopped. After that we did walk all the way from 42nd to 7th. I’m estimating we walked about 54 blocks that day!
It was a nice spontaneous vacation, I wasn’t really excited to go because I have so much to finish at home before school starts Tuesday. 
. I’m back to work tonight– well last night and the next two nights, and Hubbin is back to work today. So our summer is offically over now.
Yesterday we had a big cookout for Stu… combo gradparty/bon voyage party. Because he technically doesn’t go home until the end of June but his time is rapidly drawing to a close with us and June is already packed full of his own social engagements with his friends. Stu’s father comes next week and will be staying with us through graduation and taking a few little roadtrips with Stu to see as much of the USA as possible before heading home.
Hubbin is really going to miss Stu, but we’re both looking forward to having our house back and for it to be just us again.
I feel like I spend most of my posts now apologizing for the lack of posts and offering up excuses, so I won’t bother.
School is stressing me out, I’m taking 7 credits this summer and even though online Sociology is a lot of “busy work” it’s still A LOT of busy work. I’ll be glad to finish up with the BSN program this fall so I can quit taking BS classes like sociology now and poly sci and global studies this fall. BLEH. I feel like it’s a serious waste of my time and money to take electives.
I’m also currently working on hammering out a plan for summer vacation the second week of August. I’m open to suggestions, got any? What are your summer vacation plans?
So essentially I’m very lame and have no very good excuses as to where I’ve been for the past few weeks. School has been totally kicking by butt time commitment wise (and therefore emotion wise) Today I spent no less than 10 straight hours on this beautiful sunny day hunkered down in Panera typing up THIRTEEN pages of notes for my midterm in Pathophysiology which is on Tuesday. Pathophysiology is a little overwhelming as I expected and I’d like to meet whoever had the bright idea to make this class into an “accelerated format” class and make the students responsible for 14 weeks worth of lessons, including 14 separate online tests, the mid-term, final, class presentation, and online discussion board questions in an 8 week time period. Our mid-term on Tuesday, 4 weeks into the class, covers the first 600 pages in our text book. Nice. And the final… 4 weeks from then our final will be covering the next 8 online tests and 800some pages in the book.
Make my statistics class accelerated — we’ve learned nothing in that class!
I’ve also been working nights because they’ve decided we should work 6 offshifts each month now. Out of a total of 12. I also had a traumatic shift one of those nights where I made my first major med-error as a nurse. Hopefully last, although a few people have assured me that’s just wishful thinking. I had a patient who was being boarded in the ER for the night because there were no beds. She was a sick cancer patient who was in for pain control. Very sweet, I tried to take good care of her and everytime I walked in asking her how her pain was an reinforcing that I had her narcotics in my pocket and could give them whenever she needed them (probably better for her than being admitted to a floor room because she was my only patient for most of the night). Anyway. The floor doc came down and wrote orders for her sometime around 3/330am. I looked them over, morning labs, regular diet, PRN (as needed) med, Daily med, Daily med, patch to get changed each sunday. She was assigned a bed about 630am so she left before change of shift.
I was driving home about 8am and I got a call from the daylight charge nurse asking if I had given her metformin in the middle of the night because the floor was “all fired up” about this med not having been given. I said “nooo, I only saw daily meds” – anyway long story short, apparently one of the meds was ordered “daily with a dose now” and I totally missed it. And to make matters worse I found out the next week that it wasn’t metformin (oral diabetes medication) but atenolol (blood pressure medication). I felt like the worst person alive. Her pressure had been up through the night but the ER doc had finally written for some nitropaste which brought it down, plus she was in pain which can elevate pressure too. I mean nothing bad happened, when she went to the floor her pressure was about 130/80… but I still felt just AWEFUL. It’s totally inexcusable regardless… but it’s not even like I was busy or doing something else. I just didn’t see it? I looked through the list and just never saw it. Oh god, I was in tears for days. Plus I was convinced I was going to be fired.
I had a long talk about it with my preceptor, which I think was good for her too because she was having a lot of guilt about that cardiac arrest patient from the other week, but the summary of her advice was “You have to look at how your patient was, what was her pressure when she went to the floor?” I said 130/80, and she said “well then it doesn’t matter, shit happens and no one died” and my mother kept telling me “it’s bad, but it’s a learning experience, it would have been worse if you had given her the WRONG med, or too much of something… nothing bad happened to the patient”. Ugh, I hope to never go through that again! The guilt was terrible… for weeks! Everyone has assured me I won’t be fired. The charge nurse that day said she was pretty sure our boss was most upset that the floor called him at home, on his day off, at 730am. It’s been a few weeks, and I haven’t got a pink slip yet, so hopefully I’m okay.
I also totally fell off the shrinking-jeans wagon for ahem, all of March… which is now spilling over into April. I’ve just been too busy to go to the gym, and have been induldging my food wants just a LITTLE too much. A little because I want to, but I’m sure a little has to do with stress… I need to get back on that. Of course, then there’s this mid-term.
I’m working 4 12s his week so I haven’t made it to the gym for a weighin this week, I don’t really want to either tho… I’ve definitely gained this week.
I tried to stick to my diet this week but hubbin suggested dairy queen on night (and I have no willpower) and I’ve just been so hungry this week, that even if I do okay during the day I get home and just can’t take it!
My goal over spring break was to have a glass of wine every night, so far I’m doing pretty well, but I think last night I had a shade too much because this morning… my head is pounding.
Today is my last of 3 days off in a row and I was really hoping to accomplish some chores around the house so I could have that productive feeling tonight by the time I sat down to dinner… my progress has been greatly slowed by my pounding head. Blast.
I did however make to the gym the past two days and have some aching thigh muscles which is a great feeling 
Spring break began at 7:30pm tonight and I have the next three days off work. Excellent planning on my part! I got 100% on my graduate statistics midterm (nerd I know, but she also totally spoon feeds us) and I presented my final project for my 1/2 semester community health nursing class -on teens and caffeine- and got an A, woohoo! That was 20% on my grade. I hope I got an A, that would be awesome because I hated that class. Then I went to walmart and bought groceries to cook for the rest of the week on my days off, so I’m feeling exceptionally accomplished. Tonight Stu is staying with a family in another school district so he can give a speech at their school tomorrow. So we are without child also. This is how I’m celebrating: glass of wine on the couch next to Hubbin (He’s prepping for work tomorrow – teacher with lots of jazzy powerpoints).
Hubbin and I had sort of an emotional week, so this makes a nice ending/break for me and us.
So we can all stop wondering my late, 10 full days actually, period finally came. I’m so relieved now there is finally an end to the depressed bloatedness that’s been weighing me down for the past week and a half. I wish I could tell you I haven’t been blogging because I’ve been up to something amazing and fun…. unfortunately unless you include work or homework that’s not the case.
Hubbin and I had a lovely Valentine’s day together yesterday where we all but kicked the kid out of the house for the weekend. I went to the gym before Hubbin woke up, then we went out to get dessert first and I had an enormous piece of chocolate cake and Hubbin had chocolate mousse pie and THEN we went home to have wine and hoagies from our favorite pizza place. My request.
Today I’ve spent the whole day working on this damn community health project… which if I NEVER take another community health class again it will be FAR too soon!
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