Category: Life

Sock It To Me

~ riggledo ~ 4 Comments

I’ve had a fairly uneventful couple of days.  And yet, I don’t know where the time went.  I feel like I don’t have a handle on things right now.  Not in a depressive, woah is me, kind of way exactly.  Just, time seems to run out all the time.  I don’t know where the time went and why I didn’t get more done with it.

Friday night I stayed up way too late working on my socks.  I finished them, except for the “grafting” at the end.  I didn’t know what that meant, or how it is done.  I mentioned that to Juana the other day and she said something about alternating knitting and purling and she threw out the name of some technique the name of which I can’t seem to remember, but makes me think of Kussmaul, which isn’t right because that’s the name of a type of breathing that relates to Insulin shock (excess sugar in the system) and has absolutely nothing to do with knitting – Clearly.

I brought the socks in today and Juana showed me how to finish them off.  I’m not sure I’ll be able to do it again, but at least I know who to ask next time, too.

But I stayed up until after 2:00 in the morning working on them and then slept until after noon on Saturday.  That’s a good way to lose valuable time right there.

On Saturday, I got up with a plan which very quickly fell by the wayside.  I ate some breakfast and watched TV while I worked on my menu for the week.  Well, I guess really I worked on my menu for the week while I ate breakfast and watched TV.  It was supposed to be a quick process but I was easily distracted and it took a few hours to complete the menu and my grocery list and head out to shop.  By the time I made the three stops I needed to make and came home with my loot it was after 8:00 and I still needed to take a shower.  My lofty plans of eating a healthy dinner of Salmon and Brown Rice were shot and I ended up eating left over pizza instead.

One of my stops on Saturday was at Bed, Bath and Beyond where I bought a flour sifter.  I had to go there because much to my surprise, I could not find one at Target.  I needed the flour sifter because Sunday morning I made scones.  I have been craving scones like my mother used to make, for years.  Not that there’s anything particularly special about the way my mother makes them, just that they were always hot and fresh and she put about fifteen times more sugar in them than the recipe calls for (which is only about one and half teaspoons.)

It’s not even a special recipe; it comes from the Betty Crocker cookbook.  The problem is, my Betty Crocker cookbook doesn’t have the scone recipe in it and my mother packed up all her cookbooks when she bought her house several years ago and they’re all stored in her attic where she can’t get to them and therefore couldn’t obtain the recipe for me.  Surprisingly it’s much harder to find on-line than you might think and I’ve been without a good scone recipe for years… until now.

You see, a couple of weeks ago, I had some bananas that were on their last leg and needed to be used or go to waste, so I made banana bread.  The recipe I have for banana bread calls for buttermilk.  I love buttermilk food products, but I detest buttermilk, go figure.  The smallest container I could buy of buttermilk was a quart and the banana bread calls for 1/2 cup.  Having a significant amount of left over buttermilk I needed to find some more recipes to use it in.  So I made biscuits.  They were pretty good.  A little denser and less flakey than I like.  I believe I over kneaded them.  I’ll know for next time.

I still had half a quart of buttermilk left and I needed to find something else to make.  I found an app on my iPhone for a recipe finder where you type in an ingredient and it gives you recipe options.  I found several recipes for blueberry muffins and I love blueberry muffins.  I lost track of which recipe was which and soon I ended up with a cream cheese muffin recipe that sounded really good but wasn’t a “blueberry” recipe.  I decided to take my chances and make it blueberry anyway, only not really knowing what I was doing and not wanting to get too far overboard I only used a 1/2 cup of blueberries for the whole recipe.  They did turn out pretty well but I wasn’t sure if there were enough blueberries so when I brought some into work the next day I offered my coworkers some “Theoretically Blueberry, Absolutely Cream Cheese Muffins.”  Theoretically blueberry, because there was a very real chance of someone getting a muffin with no actual blueberries in it.

While searching for buttermilk recipes and finding blueberry muffins, I also found a recipe for scones.  So I had to make them.  And I did.  And they were deeelishus.  And too many of them.  And too fattening.  I ate them while watching Winter Wipeout (which is not something I can crochet or knit while watching if I want to get the full effect) and while gearing up for my afternoon with Lil’B.

I wasn’t really sure what to do with him and I’m running low on creativity these days.  I started thinking about movies and thought he might like to see Tron: Legacy, but I wasn’t sure.  I don’t know that much about it and I never saw Tron so I didn’t really know if it was appropriate for him.  I put it out to Twitter because anytime you need a question answered you turn to Twitter, right? No?  Hmmm…  I asked “Any reason for a 9 yo to not see Tron?”  I got one answer, hours later, which simply said that if he has a short attention span he won’t be able to get through it.  I think the GI Joe fiasco last year proved that’s not a problem.

I arrived at Lil’B’s house to find a herd of people.  His uncle and his family, from Bakersfield, was visiting.  I wouldn’t have been surprised to have been sent away without Lil’B under the circumstances, but that thought never seemed to cross anyone’s mind.  While Lil’B was finishing getting ready some of his little cousins asked me what we were going to do.  I told them I wasn’t really sure and it depended on if Lil’B had something he wanted to do, and then I said, we might just go to a movie.  They started asking what movie and one of them suggested Tron: Legacy.  Lil’B came out of his room, ready to go and I asked him if he had anything specific he wanted to do.  He said, “I don’t know.” (Naturally)  I asked him if he had any interest in seeing Tron and he said, “I don’t know.” (Naturally) And then another of his cousins spoke up, “Ooo. Go see Little Fockers,” he said enthusiastically.  I missed bits and pieces of their conversation but I heard something about “shot in his penis” and this was funny, apparently.

Now I know what you’re thinking.  Little Fockers is rated PG-13 and Lil’B is only 9.  But his mother doesn’t care about such things and he has seen more than a few movies that were rated above his age bracket.  The movie was actually pretty good, though there were things about it that were a bit above his maturity level and I was a little uneasy from time to time.  After the movie I asked him what his favorite part of the movie was and he said it was when Jack and Greg got into a fight at the kids’ birthday party that had them thrashing about in a ball pit.  I asked him if he had any thoughts about or questions about anything that he heard or saw in the movie and he said he did not.  I hope that means he didn’t think much of the sexual innuendo and questionable moments and not that he was embarrassed to ask.

When I dropped him off his cousins and uncle were still at the house and the young boys came rushing up to ask what we had done.  Angel told them we saw Little Fockers and then he went into the bathroom.  The boys turned to me and asked “How do you get a big brother?”

I told them I didn’t really know.  “I know how to become a big brother.  I don’t know how to get a big brother.”

“I want a big brother!” one of them said.

And then the other said, “I want you to be my big brother!”

I was surprised.  “You do?” I asked.  “Why?”

He answered with a big grin on his face, “Because!  You’re cool!”

Amber Alert

~ riggledo ~ 3 Comments

I was running absurdly late for work yesterday, made all the more unreasonable by the fact that I decided not to take a shower in the morning.  I intended to restart my gym routine this week and I would, of course, take a shower after my workout.  I needed to get to work earlier so I could go to the gym.  I piddled around the house a little bit due to the “extra time” I thought I had allowed myself by not showering first.  And then a few minutes after I ate my breakfast, I started getting that feeling.  You know the one.  The one we don’t discuss in polite society…  woops.  The one that says, You are never going to make it out of the house without a stop by the porcelain throne, first. Dammit!

All the “extra time” I had allotted myself was suddenly gone, and I was very late!  Now I’m not even going to be able to justify time away from work to go to the gym! Major Planning Fail!

I was standing in front of the mirror, working on my now arduous oral hygiene regime when I got a text on my iPhone from a 918 phone number:

918 Phone Number, 9:45 AM: Hey Kevin!!!! Guess who?!

Waiting waiting waiting…..(Jeopardy Theme)

Clue: been friends since 1992

I had a feeling I already knew, only I thought I had a cell phone number for this person.  I thought I had a cell phone number for everyone in Tulsa that I cared to interact with.  There are other people in the 918 that I wish not to interact with ever again and so I didn’t want to reply blindly.

I texted the number to my mother to find out if it was a number she recognized.  Mom confirmed the identity and I realized the number I had for this person was one digit off.

I waited a while to reply.  I needed to finish getting ready and get to work and I didn’t need a conversation with anyone to slow me down.

Me, 11:28 AM: Hey Amber!  How’s it going?  Been a while!

Her: Hey!  Good!  Congragts on EMT!!

Me: How’d you know that?

Her: Haha…..I’m watching you…..don’t look over your shoulder…..

Me: That would be impressive.  There’s a 23rd floor window over my shoulder.  With closed blinds.

Her: Ha!  I had to e-mail your mother to see if you were still alive!!! Lol.

How the story tracks from “to see if you were still alive” to “Congrats on EMT” I do not know.

~~~~~

Amber and I became friends in 1992 when we both worked in the grocery store in my mother’s back yard.  I’ve mentioned this before.  There used to be a big empty field behind our house and then they built a grocery store there.

I swore at the time that I had met Amber somewhere before, but neither of us could figure out where.  To this day, it seems like I had to have already known her (though, to be honest, my impression is that we weren’t friendly.  I thought she was a snob, and in fact didn’t talk to her for a while at work because of it) but who knows.

One summer evening, I had gone to the store to pick up my pay check and Amber was just getting off work.  I ran into her in the magazine aisle as she was heading back to the staff lockers to get her purse.  We chatted for a little while and it came up that we were both hungry.  Amber had a car and I had money burning a whole in my pocket (nothing new about that) so I convinced her that she should drive us to my favorite (no longer in existence) restaurant and I would buy her dinner.

We found that we had a lot in common at the time; at least enough to build a friendship on.  We started hanging out regularly on weekends.  She would drive and I would pay.  We became good friends.

Amber is two years older than I, and at the end of the summer she started classes at Oral Roberts University and I started my Junior Year at Broken Arrow Senior High School.  Our friendship continued and we hung out many week-ends and talked on the phone all the time.  It occurs to me now, Amber was probably the only person with whom my mother never rushed me off the phone.

Amber is beautiful and very flirtatious and never wanted for guys attention.  Eventually she told me about a guy who was asking her out.  She told me she really wasn’t all that into him but she was going to go anyway.  That seemed strange to me, but then what do I know about relationships.  I said nothing.  A while later, I was on the phone with Amber one day and she told me that she was “going steady” with this guy and that we couldn’t be friends anymore because he didn’t think it was right for her to spend time with another guy when she was “with” him.  I told her that was stupid, we had been friends for a while,  I was here first and she didn’t even like him all that much.  I told her it was her loss.

A couple of weeks later she called me and told me I had been right and that she wasn’t going to see him any more.  I told her this was the only time I was going to take her back after being dumped for a boyfriend.  She promised never to do it again, and she didn’t.

A while later Amber met Brian, a handsome, brilliant, multi-talented, disgustingly self-confident man who fell head over heals in love with her the minute he laid eyes on her.  Amber’s biggest complaint about Brian was that he wasn’t jealous of our relationship.  A few months before I moved to California, they were married, have been together ever since and have three children together.

In college Amber studied Physical Therapy and she was all about physical fitness and nutrition even though she never struggled with her weight a day in her life.  She even joined Weight Watchers even though she was thin.  I used to resent that attitude, but now I understand it better.  Despite getting her degree, she hasn’t worked a day in her adult life.  She’s a stay at home wife and mother and her brilliant husband makes more than enough money that she’ll never have to think twice about that lifestyle choice.

When I moved to California I used to communicate regularly with Amber by way of instant messenger programs.  I enjoyed implementing these tools to stay in touch with people I cared about while I was working.  Though there is only a two-hour time difference, by the time I get home from work and get settled in and have dinner, it is too late to call people back “home” even if I were so inclined, which I’m really not.  I’m not a phone person.  So using Instant Messenger to talk during the waking hours was a nice treat.

The problem was, Amber usually initiated our conversations and they were usually about nothing.  She would sit for hours typing messages to me while I was trying to work and they were about things like recipes and her workout that day and how she’d just found out there were x number of calories in y food item.  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk to her, I just didn’t have time for meaningless rambling while I was trying to work.  I started ignoring her messages and then pretending I had been away from my desk while she was typing and “Oh so sorry I didn’t see all that!” lying.

We drifted.  A few times I tried to have deep, personal conversations with her and she just blew them off and diffused them with her idea of humor.  We drifted more.

Several years ago I began having conflict with my mother.  Amber has known my mother for years, but she know’s the mother that outsiders are allowed to know, not the mother that her children know.  One day, Amber asked me if I had any plans to come back for a visit any time soon.  Up until then I had always made time for Amber and Brian when I came to town.  I told her I really didn’t have any plans and didn’t really know when I would because I was no longer on good terms with my mother and I couldn’t see myself coming to visit her, maybe never again.

The appropriate response to that would have been sympathy for a friend.  Curiosity about what could have gone so terribly wrong and why I might never want to visit my mother again.  Understanding for how hard parent-adult child relationships can be.

Her response?  “Don’t say that!  As a mother it hurts me to hear a child talk about not talking to their mother.  You don’t have kids so you can’t understand…”

Few things in this world piss me off more, or faster than, “You don’t have ____, so you can’t understand” or “You aren’t ____, so you can’t understand.”  It just belittle’s the person’s intelligence and it’s not a valid argument for anything.  We drifted some more.

A few years ago, an e-mail was making the rounds.  By today’s blogging terms I suppose it would be a “meme”.  It was one of those, replace-my-answers-to-these-questions-with-your-answers-and-forward-this-to-all-your-friends-and-back-to-me, blah, blah, blah e-mails.  One of the questions on the e-mail was about how many piercings you have.

When I left Oklahoma, I had one ear pierced.  Interestingly, right now, I can’t remember which one it was.  Several years ago now, my friend Heather begged, bullied, convinced me to get the other ear pierced stating that times had changed and it was no longer trendy to wear only one ear ring.  She promised that it was not a statement about one’s sexuality.  I hadn’t yet worked out my issues and I cared a great deal about that fact.  When I completed the e-mail and sent it out to my friends (and my sister) I simply answered the question honestly.

“How many piercings do you have?”

“Just my ears”.

I wondered if anyone would notice or comment.  Amber’s response?  “So what?!?  Are you gay now?”  Coming from the private school, good-little-Christian-girl background that I know she does, I automatically interpreted the tone as being derogatory and insulting (I still do).  We drifted completely.

In contrast to that, over the years Amber has asked me repeatedly, almost obsessively about my love life.  “Do you have a girlfriend yet?”  “Why don’t you have a girlfriend?”  “Don’t you want to have a girlfriend?”  “When are you going to get a girlfriend?”  “You need a woman.”  Somewhere inside me, every time she asked these questions I knew the answer, I just couldn’t face it and I sure as hell couldn’t tell her.  Her incessant prying combined with my own internalized shame only served to make me resent her for pushing.  I always answered her tersely and she just laughed it off as thought it were nothing.  She never could take the hint that this was something she ought not ask me about.

~~~~~

We exchanged text messages as conversation for about 15 minutes when she finally asked:

Her: OK- so- do you have a woman yet??

I waited several minutes to answer.  I wanted to tell her the truth, but– well, there is no but.  I was scared.  Plain and simple.

Me: What are you?  My grandmother?  Would you like to pinch my cheeks and talk about my punum too?  No.  No woman.

She waited nearly twenty minutes to respond.  I wondered if she’d finally gotten the message and was leaving the topic alone.  I wondered if she was considering the possibilities and going to ask me, again, if I was gay “now”.  I made up my mind to answer her honestly if she asked.  I wondered if she had gotten her feelings hurt and was pouting in silence as she was prone to do.  And then she replied.

Her: hee hee hee.  Oh well, just checking.

Christmas and New Years and Knitting, Oh My

~ riggledo ~ 5 Comments

I had planned to write again, sooner than this, but as usual I allowed many various distractions to prevent me from doing so… including working… I know!

My next planned post was going to be very clever.  It was going to be titled Brace Yourself and the first line of the post was going to be, “‘Cause I did.” and it was going to be followed by a picture of my smiling face in which you’d be able to see that I now have traditional braces on my still imperfect teeth.  The problem is, I’m about the least photogenic person you’ll ever meet.  And I’m not even calling myself ugly.  I mean, I’m not anything I would be interested in, but I’m not grotesque or anything.  Just, I can not take a good photograph.  As such, it proved impossible to take a photograph in which I looked neither horrible,  nor cheesy, and yet still showed my braces in a natural looking smile.  COULDN’T.  BE.  DONE.  So you’ll just have to be satisfied with my word that I now have traditional braces on my teeth to finish the process that Invisalign was unable to complete (possibly due to my own non-compliance with the process… maybe.)

~~~~~

Christmas came and went without much excitement.  I had lunch with Lori again and after further discussion about her family dynamic, which out of respect for her privacy, I will not repeat here, I decided to decline her invitation to go with her on Christmas Eve.  Sure, I was already leaning in that direction, but even if I had planned to attend, I would have opted out after that conversation.  We talked about getting together on Christmas Day after her children went to their father’s house, but when the time rolled around, the weather was terrible and neither of us felt like getting out in it.

I received exactly two gifts, a check from my father and cash from Michelle.  Both of which have been set aside for a specific purpose.  I’m going to buy a half sized deep freezer.  My refrigerator is not quite full-sized, because there’s not room for a full-sized unit in my kitchen.  For three years now I’ve been fighting with my too small freezer and struggling to keep the balance between economical “bulk” purchasing and having enough room to store stuff.  With the extra freezer space, I can keep “bulk” items and left overs in the deep freeze while keeping immediate use items (like ice cube trays – which I have no room for now) in the main freezer.  Now the only problem is, how to transport the freezer to my apartment, and how/where to plug it in.  I’m concerned about overloading circuits.

~~~~~

A friend of mine was in my office one day when the conversation somehow turned toward the fact that I crochet.

When I was a kid, my three-years-older sister, Erin, couldn’t sit still while the family watched television.  My mother taught her how to crochet so she’d have something to do with her hands.  My brother, Jonathan, and I never got along.  He’s five years older than I am and always resented me.  As a result I was always closer to Erin and wanted to do whatever she was doing, so I learned to crochet too.  Over the years, I would make something and then rip it out to make something else.  I had a collection of scrap yarn that I had tied end to end, until I had a huge ball of yarn.  Eventually, the ball grew to be about 18 inches in diameter.  I would make granny squares, and athgans and placemats and when I finished one thing I’d take it apart and make something else.  It was just for my own entertainment.

When I was about 18 I decided I wanted to actually make something real.  Something that would not be taken apart again.  Something that would endure.  So I bought a book of patterns and some yarn and I made my mother a really simple blanket.  It was supposed to be a “throw” but by the time I was finished it was a queen sized blanket that she put on her bed.

I’ve always enjoyed doing things that show tangible results.  I much prefer to dust after many weeks when I can actually see the difference, rather than doing it regularly.  (Don’t get me wrong, I’d much rather have a dust free home – I just want someone else to do it.)  So once I got “a taste” of making the blanket, I decided to keep doing it.  I don’t make them all the time because the yarn is not cheap, but when I get the urge, or a reason to make something for someone, I pick out a pattern and buy some yarn and go to work.  I’ve made quite a few blankets, over the years, for both adults and children, but I never really found anything else I could make by crocheting.  I always wished I could knit because I felt like knitting was a far more flexible medium.  My mother doesn’t know how to knit.  I only recently found out that my father knitted when he was young (he was on the front page of an Australian newspaper once with the caption “American boy knits on plane”.  He doesn’t remember why) however, he says he doesn’t really remember how to do it and wouldn’t have been able to teach me if he did, what with us being 2000 miles apart and all.

A few years ago, I made a baby blanket for K to send to her brand new nephew and as “payment” (which I didn’t request) she bought me a “Teach yourself to knit” kit.  I tried to teach myself but it really didn’t go very well.  I found it very stressful and as I would sit in my recliner trying to make the needles and the yarn do what my mind was clearly telling them to do, my feet would move and point and cross with the intended motion of the needles.  I gave up after a few tries, figuring that knitting was just something I’d never be able to do.

I mentioned to my friend, Juana, that I wished I knew how to knit and while it wasn’t a request, or even an inquiry, she walked away from that statement thinking that she needed to teach me to knit.  I’m not really complaining.  I wanted to know.  But she showed up at my office two days later with a small roll of cotton yarn and a couple of knitting needles and began teaching me to knit… whether I liked it or not.  She taught me the basic stitches, Knit and Purl and sent me home with an assignment.  “Cast on 40 stitches, knit two rows, purl two rows and repeat until you have a square.”  So I did.  Or at least I tried.  It was the first thing I’d ever done and I really didn’t yet see the delineation between rows.  I’d get confused or lose track and as a result the pattern of the finished product is inconsistent, but she said it was pretty good for a “newbie”.

A couple of days later she came back with another roll of cotton yarn and the first 20 lines of a pattern.  She told me I’d only get the pattern in pieces and she wouldn’t tell me what I was making.  I wouldn’t know until I got into it.  It turned out to be another wash cloth with an Eiffel Tower in the pattern.  I made one or two errors but nothing major and I was still learning.    A few days after I finished that, she came back with another pattern, a couple circular needles and a full skein of wool yarn.  It proved to be a cap which I made in a few days and with not too many errors.  I’m not really the knit cap kind of guy and I’m not sure if I’ll ever wear it out of the house but I might.  I decided if I was ever going to wear it, I’d need a matching scarf.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough left over yarn to make it and I couldn’t easily get more of the same yarn so I compromised.  I’m using a nice light tan yarn with the purple at the ends of the scarf as a coordinating accent color.

Juana came back a few days later and told me “My husband says, when you learn a new skill you have to keep going or you’ll forget what you learned.”  Makes sense.  She guided me to a website where we downloaded a pattern for a relatively simple pair of socks using larger needles and thicker yarn than is traditionally used for socks, but which is supposed to be good for beginners.  This time I was on my own for yarn and needles but that was bound to happen sooner or later.

I now have three separate projects in the works.  Since Variety is the spice of life, I like to rotate between them.  One day I work on the scarf, the next day I work on the socks and the next day I work on this very intricate blanket I’ve been crocheting for a very long time but I keep putting down.  It’s going to be beautiful when it’s finished, but it’s the most intricate thing I’ve ever made and I needed breaks from it from time to time.  I’m determined to finish it this time, though.

~~~~~

New Year’s Eve, this year, was fairly low-key, compared to past years.  I have an unreasonable hang-up about New Year’s Eve.  When I was a kid we usually spent New Year’s Eve at home, doing nothing, half the time, already in bed before midnight even rolled around.  I always felt like I was missing out on something; like it said something derogatory about me not to be out and celebrating with the rest of the world.

As a growed-up person I know that’s not really true, and yet, I can’t help it.  I have this almost desperate need to be somewhere and do something for New Year’s Eve.  It’s bad too.  Over the years it has escalated.  When I first moved to California, I was perfectly content to go to Fisherman’s Wharf with Michelle and have dinner and drinks and watch the Fireworks and go home and go to bed.  Michelle, being the lightweight that she is, would usually be too drunk to drive back home and she’d spend the night at my apartment.

After I got laid off and moved in with her and then got a new job, we had to find a new way to celebrate that didn’t involve a lot of driving on the day of.  One year we drove to Reno, Nevada for a couple of nights.  It’s in the mountains, there’s actual snow on the ground, there are casinos and shows and fireworks at midnight.  It cost more than dinner and fireworks in town, but it was fun and we were out and about and we didn’t have to drive after partying.

Two years in a row we went on a Hornblower Cruise for New Year’s Eve.  The package we bought was a five-hour cruise, five-course gourmet meal with open bar and lovely views.  Just before midnight, they’d “park” near the Bay Bridge where we had “front row seats” for the fire works display.  We only did it two years because they had the exact same menu both years.  There were other reasons as well.  We stayed at home those years, because the apartment we lived in at the time was only six blocks from the BART station and we could walk to and from.

After we moved from that apartment new plans would have to be made.  We have gone to Las Vegas, Los Angeles and finally last year back to Reno.  Reno is dead.  There is nothing going on there anymore.  We want to go on a cruise, but they’re expensive and neither of us can really afford it.  These trips have gotten progressively more expensive and while we have the best of intentions when we schedule it, November and December always seem to be fiscally challenging for me.

Mischa is very old now and he spends all his time, when I’m not home or when I’m in bed, locked in a cage because he can not be trusted to potty exclusively in his litter box.  It is no longer reasonable for me to look to someone else to take care of him so I can go away, so a trip out of town for a few days is no longer possible.  We decided to scale back our plans for once.  We planned to get a hotel room in San Francisco, so there’d be no driving-after-partying involved and we were going to have a reasonable dinner and watch the fireworks.  I’d feed Mischa a full can of food before leaving and then I’d come back early the next day.

We ended up staying at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco.   It’s a four star hotel and they deserve every one of those stars.  The cavernous lobby was beautifully decorated for the holidays.  The room was beautiful (I did not take this picture. I just happen to have found it on Google images.  But unless they have multiple rooms with the exact same finishes (pictures, lamps, linens, carpets, etc.) this happens to be the room I stayed in.) and had an awesome view. See:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(I did take this picture.)

This was one of the nicest rooms I have had in quite a while.  As part of the package we bought we had a room on the second from the top floor with exclusive card key access.  We also had access to “The Regency Club”.  The Regency Club is a lounge on the very top floor of the hotel.  Until last year this space was occupied by a revolving restaurant with beautiful views of downtown San Francisco, and the bay. I was disappointed to find out that the restaurant had closed, but the regency club (which no longer revolves) is an exclusive lounge that only people who purchased the package we did could go to.  They had complimentary soft drinks and coffee, tea and juice, as well as complimentary deserts.  There was also an “honor bar” where you write down what you drank and leave it in their drop box and they charge it to your room.

Because the lounge is circular shaped, we walked around to find the best place to sit.  We arrived around 9:00 and were lucky enough to find a table facing out toward the San Francisco Ferry Building which was between us and the barge from which the fire works would be launched. Short of being on a boat on the water, this was possibly the best place from which to see the show.  In fact, this year at least, it was probably better.  It was bitterly cold that night and rained off and on.  It even started to rain right after the fireworks.  Meanwhile we were warm and dry inside.

When the fireworks started, I whipped out my iPhone and set my camera to “video” and began to record the display.  Thirteen minutes of really cool fireworks.  I wondered if my phone would actually record it all and whether I had enough room for that much media but it showed no signs of giving up.  When the display was finally over, I touched the icon that represents the “record” button on the screen to discontinue the recording.  When I did, a counter appeared in the top right corner of the screen and began counting seconds.  I couldn’t believe it!  Thirteen minutes of NOT recording really spectacular fireworks!

Our “scaled back”, less adventurous, less expensive New Year’s Eve plans ended up costing as much as a three day trip to Las Vegas by the time we added the package for the hotel and dinner to the mix, but I’m not complaining.  It was a really great experience and I didn’t spend New Year’s Eve at home, or alone.  Since I couldn’t leave the cat alone this year, this was a pretty decent way to celebrate!

Finally

~ riggledo ~ 2 Comments

Read part 3 here.

The class ended last Wednesday; went out with a bang.  I was pretty worried about the final exam really.  I was basically all studied out and I didn’t really know how much I remembered of the material we had covered.  I didn’t know what to expect.  The three classes prior to the final, we had played a weird, not quite right, version of Jeopardy with questions that were based on but supposedly not directly off of the test.  (Some of them really were.)  I made note of some things that came up during that time that I wasn’t so confident on and I took the day of the final off work so I could prepare.  I spent the day reviewing the subject matter I had noted, which proved to be helpful because I’m sure I’d have missed more questions on the test if I hadn’t done so.

The final was 167 questions long, and about 2/3 of it were scenarios and not black and white questions I could’ve answered in my sleep.  It took some time to get through it all and I realized immediately on the 4th question that very careful and detailed reading of every word of the test questions was going to be necessary.  Question number four asked something about delivery of a baby being the expulsion of the fetus from what internal female sexual organ.  One of the answers was the cervix and another answer was the vagina.  I was stumped for a minute realizing that both were correct answers and being unsure of what was the “more true” answer he was looking for.  And then I re-read the question and this time “what internal female sexual organ” stood out.  I had completely missed the word internal the first time I read it.  After seeing that, the answer was clear and obvious.

One hundred sixty-seven questions carefully read and answered took a while to do, and still I was only the third person to finish the test.  It took me just under two hours.  I handed the paper to my teacher and started to walk away and he asked me, “Don’t you want to see how you did?”

I said, “Yeah, but I have to go the bathroom.  Grade it while I do that and I’ll be right back.”

When I walked back in a couple of minutes later he had a big grin on his face and he said, “I wouldn’t have expected anything less.  Ninety percent!”

“Exactly?” I asked somewhat surprised.

“Yeah!” he told me.  Now I’m no math whiz, but 90% of 167 questions tells me I missed 16.7 questions (how you miss .7 of a question I don’t know)  I’d say 16 or 17 questions out of 167 is pretty damn good!

“So, next semester,” I told him, “I’d like to come back and just sit in on the class.”

“Just sit in?” he asked surprised.

“Well, I guess I can do more than that, if you like,” I answered.

“Good!” he said.  So I guess I’m doing more than just sitting in.  Does the fun ever end?

I know this probably comes as a surprise to anyone who read some of my earlier posts toward the beginning of the semester.  My teacher was a bit of an ass hole early on and I still don’t really agree with his attitude and some of his methods, but as the class progressed and as the student body dwindled (we started with 45 and 15 people took the final) his attitude and demeanor softened quite a bit.  I have no doubt that it was all by design (which is the part I don’t agree with) but I made it through to the end and I passed, possibly at the top of my class.

I probably said to more than one person early on that I would never come back to help out next semester, but I’m realizing now, that can only benefit me and if I refuse to do it, I’ll just be depriving myself of a learning opportunity, and a chance to get more experience.  I’d have to be stupid not to take advantage of that.

Trauma

~ riggledo ~ 3 Comments

Read Part two here.

 

On Thursday, December 9, not that exact dates are important, I spent twelve hours working in the emergency room in the county hospital.  You may recall that I was a wee bit anxious about that.  We’ve all seen the televised drama of hospital emergency rooms and we all know that they are hustling, bustling masses of controlled chaos; blood everywhere, people maimed and disfigured, writhing in pain and crying out for help.  In short, barely contained hysteria.

Before this I had only ever been in an emergency room three times, two times accompanying the patient and once a hardly-even-qualifies-as-an-emergency recipient of mediocre at best care.  In each of those instances, things were so calm and serene in the working areas of the emergency room I felt sure the real traumas were brought to a different and isolated section of the hospital, protecting those of us with weak constitutions and weaker stomachs from the sights and sounds of such mayhem one could only imagine.

I was pretty worried about what I was going to encounter in this twelve hours working “in the county trauma center” as I was told over and over again, I would be doing.  The hospital in question is the County Hospital, the County Trauma Center, the County Teaching Hospital.  “You see everything there,” I was told more than a few times, and while I knew I needed to test myself and prepare myself for what I might encounter in a career as an EMT, I was still worried about what the day held in store.

When I arrived at 6:55 in the morning, the registration area was packed with people but it seemed to be the entry point for all who had business with the hospital.  There is no way I saw all those people pass through in my time on duty.  After a couple of missteps I found my way to the appropriate area where I was directed to one of the staff who would give me my assignment for the day.  The nurse I would be working with had not yet arrived and I was told to just hang out for a few minutes until she checked in.

I took the opportunity to get the lay of the land and understand, as best I was able, what was going on around me.  I was at Nurses Station 1, which amounted to a big open counter top ringed workspace with computers and chairs inside, and three computer terminals on the counter at one end.  Surrounding the Nurses Station were rooms and alcoves with hospital beds and various equipment inside.  On one wall was a white board which had each of the patient rooms and assigned staff scribed on it.

When Johnna, the nurse I worked with, arrived I found out we were assigned to three rooms, ten, eleven and twelve, and she set about showing me the ropes.  I followed Johnna around much of the time, observing her work, helping out where I could.  As an EMT, I am not capable or legally allowed to start an IV or administer any medications, but I was able to check and monitor vital signs and document them, I was able to provide comfort where possible both with my bedside manner and by providing pillows and blankets, food and beverages.  I watched as the over night nurse explained to Johnna what was going on with each of our patients at shift change and then we went about checking on and caring for each of our three patients.

I was surprised by how calm and serene everything was.  No crying or screaming in pain, no blood on the floors and walls, no severed limbs lying around or entrails dangling from eviscerated abdomens (abdomi?).  In fact, there were no trauma patients at all.  Well, that’s not true.  When you hear the word “trauma” you tend to think of violently injured patients in dramatic situations, or anyway I do.  The truth is, a trauma is any injury that is the result of outside forces, as opposed to a medical condition that becomes an emergency.  So knowing that, there were plenty of traumas, but nothing dramatic

I was also surprised to find how quickly it all became run of the mill.  No sooner had the patients left our care than I forgot their names.  The moment I walked out the door at the end of the day, I forgot most of the conditions we treated.  And the truth is, we didn’t treat all that many patients.  In fact, on two separate occasions the third of our three rooms, room 12, sat empty for more than an hour between patients.

When I arrived, the young woman in room ten had been there since 8:00 the night before, hooked up to monitors and with an IV in her arm.  She was complaining  of severe pain in her neck that worsened when she moved.  The nurse would give her an IV pain-killer and the pain would go away for a while and then it would come back again.  There were no obvious, outward signs of illness, but then there often aren’t.  Her vitals were unremarkable, she just periodically asked for more pain medication.  Being the cynic that I am, I considered, more than once, that she was just there for the drugs, but she didn’t look the type.  She was released without any definitive diagnosis and directed to follow-up with her Primary Care Provider (PCP).

The not young woman in room eleven was in early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease and lived in an assisted living facility with her husband who is apparently confined to a wheel chair and insists that she be the one to push him around.  She, apparently, fell while trying to help him in or out of his wheel chair and hit her head on the corner of the coffee table.  She was slow to respond, but we were told by the care facility that this was normal behavior for her (this is called “baseline”.)  I helped clean up her wounds and held her neck in place while the doctor rolled her onto her side to examine her back.  I observed while a technician conducted and Echocardiogram.  There was no benefit to my seeing this, but it’s not something one gets to see everyday (and it got me out of Johnna’s hair for about 15 minutes.)  A CT scan revealed that she had a subdural hematoma, which we learn in class is a serious problem worthy of priority transport to the hospital, (a subdural hematoma is what killed Natasha Richardson)  but no one seemed too concerned about it and she wasn’t showing any signs of being in serious jeopardy.  We monitored her condition while waiting for a room to open up and after a couple of hours of cooling her heals in the ER she was transferred to the ICU.

I was asked to assist one of the other nurses as he was about to clean a patient and change the bedding after he (the patient, not the nurse) had defecated on himself.  The patient had an open head wound and was in a cervical collar which needed to be supported while he was rolled from one side to the other for this procedure.  I was standing at the head of the bed, gloved hands holding his head and neck, ready to give the count to roll the patient when the Doctor walked in.  The nurse explained what we were doing and asked if the Doctor wanted us to wait till he stitched up the wound.  The Doctor wanted to examine the wound and see what needed to happen.  While I was standing there holding the man’s head, the doctor removed the bandage that was taped over the wound and started “digging around” in the wound to see what the situation was.  I was pleased to find that I was not bothered by this and had no inclination to pass out or vomit.  I didn’t voluntarily stand there and watch the whole procedure, (which frankly I don’t think makes me a wimp – like I told my teacher, “I’m not going to volunteer to look at things ‘for fun’.  I look at what I have to look at.”)  Also, I was in the way.  Twenty minutes later they called me back in and I held the patients C-spine while the nurse cleaned the patient and changed the bedding.    When we were finished and I let go of his head again, I had blood on the palm of my gloved hand.  My first time having someone elses blood on my hands…  Wait, that doesn’t sound right.

We had another patient, a 24-year-old, developmentally disabled woman accompanied by her mother.  She’d been seen the Saturday prior at another local hospital and diagnosed with Bronchitis, but she wasn’t getting any better.  Interesting the correlation between not taking the medication prescribed and not improving.  Anyway, this young woman had had her fill of needles and poking and prodding and she wouldn’t allow the nurse or myself to come near her.  She wouldn’t get fully on the gurney and every time Johnna walked in with an IV kit the young woman went into hysterics.  Johnna told the mother that we couldn’t treat her daughter until she was properly seated on the bed and that we had to put in the IV because the Doctor was going to require blood tests and there may be some medications to be administered.  She told the mother we’d come back when the daughter was properly seated on the bed.  For two hours we check back and the patient was sitting on the side of the gurney with her feet on the floor and every time we walked in she watched us warily to see what we might do.  Ultimately, it took four of us including the patients mother to forcibly hold her down and get the IV port into her arm.  She wasn’t happy, but once the port was in she was OK.

There were three “Level 2 traumas” that came in that day.  I assume “Level 2” means more dramatic as previously discussed.  The irony is not lost on me that two of those traumas came in while I was eating lunch in the Hospital cafeteria and the third came in while I was holding the C-spine of the head injured, soiled man.  I have no idea what those traumas were, what condition the patients were in, or what I might have seen had I been in the corridor at the time, but as luck would have it, I missed all three.

I observed a couple of EKGs, something else an EMT does not do.  I cleaned and prepped a handful of rooms, well, three rooms a handful of times.  The fact is, the experience is not the same as EMT work, at all, but it still exposed me to some of what I can expect.  While it was a long day, the first ten and a half hours seemed to go by fairly quickly for me.  It wasn’t until about 5:30 PM when there was a lull in activity and I stopped wandering around that the fatigue hit and my legs started to ache.  I would have given just about anything to sit down, but I didn’t want anyone to think I was being lazy and I was afraid if I sat down, I might never stand up again.  That last hour and a half dragged on and I was elated when 7:00 rolled around.  Elated that I got to go home, but even more so that I had made it through the day without incident and got a little more proof that I am cut out for this job.

~~~~~

Read Part 4 here.