A Dog And A Naked Lady

This is T.J., short for Tug Boat, Jr. He belongs to my boyfriend, Lindsay. He doesn't usually wear clothes, but he got a bad spider bite on his chest and needs to keep it clean and dry. I think he looks cute in a t-shirt. This is a naked lady in my parent's backyard. It's called that because the flower stalk comes out of the ground first and not until it's finished blooming, do the leaves come out. If other plants aren't around, it looks naked all by itself in the dirt.

The Thin Blue Line

My second attempt at laying down the floor is going better this time, thanks to the thin blue line. The chalk line has saved me several thousand dollars to pay someone to install the floor for me, not to mention saving my pride.

It is still a ton of work and I'm sore and tired. How does anyone do this for a living? My right hand is covered with blisters from holding the hammer and my left hand is covered with open wounds from when I miss and hammer my left hand. My legs ache from all of the squatting and standing. Even my feet have wounds from tripping on stuff and from pieces of wood falling on them when I saw.

The Floor isn't perfect, but it is acceptable. That's going to have to be good enough. Anyway, twenty-two boxes have gone down and there are nine left to go. The end is finally in sight.

A Pukey Night

There was vomit in the sink, so I called housekeeping. I figured cleaning it was their job. I was wrong. Removing the chunks from the sink, according to them, is a nursing job. They would clean only the liquid stuff in the sink.

I wasn't happy about it, but I put on some gloves and scooped out the solids, being careful to leave the liquid behind. I wanted to make sure that they had something to clean too.

It's amazing how complicated things can be. Something as simple as vomit in a sink requires two separate departments in a hospital to clean it. I don't mind cleaning vomit off a patient, that's part of caring for patients, but why are they making registered nurses clean the sinks?

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The patient's urinal container was filled with brown liquid. My first thought was that he was bleeding from his penis. Approaching with caution, I saw chunks in it. That definitely didn't come from his penis. That left either his mouth or anus as the orifices of origin. A sniff proved it to be vomit.

Getting vomit in that narrow necked bottle must have been a challenge. He must have put his mouth around it like a bottle of beer. I appreciate the effort he made. It saved us the trouble of cleaning him up, but there is just one thing that bothers me. His penis had been inside that same bottle neck earlier. Isn't that just wrong?

Mystery Screws

The floor was almost finished when I decided to pull up large sections of it and start over. The planks weren't quite straight, the seams were opening up and it was becoming a mess.

I should hire someone to do the floor for me, but I'm not ready to concede defeat. I am going to figure out a way to get the boards straight if it's the last thing I ever do. I'm going to try using a chalk line and perhaps temporarily screwing a few key boards down so that they don't shift as they're hammered in place.

The floor is becoming an obsession. I have no life anymore. All I think about is the floor.

Still on the topic of the floor, a mysterious thing happened. When I put down the previous floor (which went in just fine, thank you very much) I glued all of the thresholds down. When I removed them for this project, one of the thresholds wouldn't budge. Upon investigation, I discovered big screws going through the threshold, the flooring and concrete slab. They were huge screws and they were stripped. With a crow bar I was able to remove some, the rest got pounded into the concrete.

The problem is that I did not screw any part of the floor down, so, who did this and why? Did a burglar break into the house and decide to secure the threshold better?

Later, I remembered that I had the door replaced. The door installers must have done the screwing. The story was more fun when it was still a mystery.

I Can't Wait To Go To Work

This is why I have been neglecting my Blog. I am not having fun. The new floor is not held in place with nails or glue. It is simply pounded into place. The problem is that once one seam is pounded straight, the hammering throws off the other seams. I then have to go back and hammer them straight which in turn thows off the other seams. I am going crazy. This is one of the few times I am looking forward to going to work, because even that is preferable to this madness.

Thank goodness for molding, wood putty and area rugs because I will be needing these to hide the flaws. I am so sorry that I didn't hire someone to do this for me.

Oh, this happened also. I don't know what I'm going to do about it other than keep a large container on the floor to collect the water.

Pushing Some Buttons, But Not All

I've never been so relieved to have the Sabbath over with. For a day of rest, it is sure a burden.

Because it was the Sabbath, the patient could not push the buttons on her bed to raise and lower her head. Her husband couldn't either. So, she pushed the call light button instead. She would then direct us to raise or lower her bed. Of course, she just couldn't get comfortable, so she was pushing the call light button every couple of minutes to have another half-inch adjustment.

Now, why is it okay to push a button that summons the nurse, but not okay to push a button that controls the bed?

Oh, and one more thing, why is it okay for the devout to turn on the TV and change the channels on the Sabbath, but not okay to push the bed control buttons? Am I missing something here?

Thank God the day of rest is over, so that I can get a little rest.

The U.F.O.

Driving home late at night, a glowing red light in the sky caught my attention. It was a sort of spherical object hovering in place. The color turned whitish at times and the object kept changing shape. Sometimes it was round like a ball and other times it flattened out like a, well, flying saucer.

I don't give much thought to flying saucers. To be honest, I don't believe in them, but what could this thing be? It definitely wasn't a plane or helicopter. I was so transfixed that my driving was affected. Cars were starting to pass me because I wasn't maintaining a proper speed.

A hill blocked my view for a few minutes. When the object came back into view, it was huge and so bright red. It also clearly had the word "coffee" written on it. It was a blimp above a new coffee shop and as the wind hit it, it would spin around and appear to change shapes. I guess they wanted to attract attention. They got mine.

Scary Blob On The Floor

Our secretary was staring in shock, disbelief and horror at something on the floor. It was a plum-sized pile of reddish goo. Finding something like that on a hospital floor is not good. God only knows what orifice it might have slipped out of. The secretary had only been gone from the floor for a minute. She couldn't imagine what awful thing had happened in such a brief period of time.

I rushed over and picked it up with my bare hands. It was mine. I had taken a bite out of a plum earlier. It was rotten, so I had balled it up in some trash and threw it out. Only, the plum had slipped out and plopped on the floor without my noticing. Not all gooey red piles in a hospital involve bodily fluids or waste. Sometimes it's just a plum.

Fondled By A Nurse

Two male patients on the same night complained that a certain nurse fondled them. One said afterwards that he was old and diabetic. He couldn't get an erection, so why did she do that to him? Both patients were completely alert and oriented.

None of us believe that the nurse in question was trying to sexually arouse her patients. We just think that she has an obsessive cleaning problem. For reasons not understood, she washes her patient's private parts when there is no clear reason to do so. I, like my other coworkers, do that only when something awful happened and the patient isn't able to wash himself.

Both of these patients got washed twice on her shift and nothing involving incontinence happened. Management is going to talk to her about the complaints. This could be interesting.

Home Improvement

I've been working hard all week on my new floor and I haven't even opened the packages of wood yet. Once the carpet was gone, it occurred to me that the walls looked dingy and that this would be the perfect time to paint. So, I spent several days painting.

And once the walls were painted, the doors looked dingy, so they got painted as well. Doors, I've discovered are hard to paint. Glossy paint shows brush strokes. I'm wondering if I should just get new doors.

I might be done with the painting in that one room, but I won't know for sure until I see what the paint looks like in the morning once the sun hits it.

Removing the carpet padding is so far the worst job. The carpet installers used a ton of glue to hold down the pad and it's stuck to the floor. The floor scraping tool doesn't work very well on that gooey mess and I'm beginning to regret not just putting the wood on top of the carpet pad, but it's too late now.

Hopefully, by the end of the week I will be ready to start laying wood. That's when the real cursing will start.

Once the downstairs is done, I'll need to fix up the upstairs. Help! I've started renovating and I can't stop.

Carpet War

I hate my trash company. I pulled up my carpet and cut it up into pieces. I filled the trash can with as much as much as it would hold and set aside the rest to throw out next week, because the trash company will only take one can a week.

I came home to find a full trash can and a note that said, " We do not pick up carpet." Bastards. I would like to know why the hell not.

As long as it fits in the trash can, doesn't violate the weight rules and isn't a biohazard, why do they care what is in the can?

Now, I'm going to have to cut it into smaller pieces, hide it in the bottom of the can and cover it with dog poop. Whether they like it or not, they are going to get that carpet.

Flooring Fool

I did something stupid. I tried using bleach to remove dog urine stains from the carpet. The stains are still there, plus, the carpet now has orangish splotches all over it. I tried to fix that problem by spritzing bleach all over the entire carpet to make it even. Guess what, that made it even worse.

I considered all of the options and decided to remove all of the floor coverings downstairs and start over. About half of the floor is currently wall to wall carpeting and the other half is laminate Pergo crap. It's all going to be hard wood flooring, although I might keep the laminate in the kitchen. We'll see.

Shopping for the wood was not fun. The stuff I like best is expensive, plus it would have to be professionally installed. For one quarter of the price, I was able to get something acceptable that I can put in myself. I don't love it the way I do the good stuff, but we should be comfortable together.

The last time I put down a floor, I swore that I would never do that again, but I'm cheap and don't want to pay someone two thousand dollars to do what I can do in a couple of days. I'm not looking forward to those couple of days, though.

I am off to a good start. The piano needed to be moved. Normally, I pay piano movers to do that for me, but I had an idea. There is a sheet of Plexiglas leaning against the side of my house. I don't know why or where it came from; it's just one of those things. I slid it under the piano and was able to move the piano out of the way. That saved me a couple of hundred bucks.

I ended up buying the flooring at the Home Depot. Once the cart was loaded with several hundred pounds of wood, I couldn't push the cart. My shoes just slid across the floor like I was on ice and I couldn't get any traction to push. I hate to ask for help, but there was no choice.

I found a big employee to help me. As I started to help him him move the cart, he said, "Sweetheart, get out of the way. I'll push it for you." I don't like being addressed in a patronizing manner like that, but I said nothing and just let him push it by himself.

After a minute of watching him grunt, pant and sweat, I took an end of the cart and started helping again. This time he said nothing. Even with both of us pushing, it was a long hard trip to the check-out.

He offered to load my car for me, but this time he didn't argue when I said I would help. Working together, the loading went quickly. Afterwards, I thanked him profusely and he smiled and waved as I drove off. Why is it so hard for a man to let a woman help?

Noodle Checks, Specimens And A Squeal

A coworker asked where the noodle check forms were.

"Noodle check forms," I replied?

"Yes," she answered.

"Noodle check forms,"I repeated?

Slowly, she said, "Noo wall checks."

Then, I understood what she wanted, neural check forms. It didn't make sense why or how we would measure noodles, but checking neural functioning makes sense.

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The patient didn't speak much English and the nurse was trying to make the patient understand that we needed a stool specimen. The nurse acted out pooping in a little cup.

That's not quite how it's done. The bottle only has a two inch wide opening, but the nurse was hoping that the patient would understand what we wanted in the cup. We'll just have to wait and see what we get back in the cup. This could be interesting.

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With only five easy patients and four nurses, there wasn't much to do tonight. I didn't get any patients and no one needed any help, so I mainly hit the mute button on the negative pressure alarm all evening.

The patient was here to rule out a disease that is spread by breathing the same air, so we had her in a special room that sucks the air out to a vent on top of the roof. The only problem was that our room doesn't work, so the alarm squeals until someone hits the mute button. That buys a few minutes of quiet. So, that was my job tonight. It was a very long evening.

A Covered Bottom

Since I'm going to Hawaii in a couple on months, I decided to buy some new swimsuits. I really wish that I had looked in my swimsuit drawers before I went shopping. One of the suits I bought was nearly identical to one I already own.

With so many swimsuits that I rarely wear, it's tough to remember what I already have. Don't ask me why I have close to thirty swimsuits. I don't know why.

The biggest challenge was finding suits with the correct amount of coverage. That immediately ruled out the Junior's, not that I didn't try. If I pulled the bottoms up high enough to cover my crack, then the rest of my butt hung out the bottom of the suit. There simply wasn't enough fabric to get the job done.

I'm not sure that any age I would have looked good with my bare bottom hanging out of a swimsuit, but at age 51, bottom coverage is a must.

The Women's section went to the other extreme. So many of the suits had built-in girdles, underwires, hard cup bras and skirts half-way down the thighs. That wasn't what I wanted. I wanted bikinis, dammit, not something that my grandmother would have worn.

It took some searching and a ridiculous number of trying things on, but I managed to find three suits I liked, one of which I already owned. I'm only going to Hawaii for five days. If I wear five different suits a day, I still won't be able to wear all of my swimsuits. How silly is that?

This is an untitled post. Why is that, you ask? It's because Blogger won't let me type in a title in the title box.

Last night, I wrote a post about bikini shopping and when the post was finished, I tried to add a title. It wouldn't let me. I decided to save it and wait until morning to see if the problem would go away by itself. It didn't.

I'm tired of looking at the poop-like substance on a plate from the previous post, I have another post ready to go, so I decided to publish it as is, without a proper title. Blogger wouldn't let me. There is no longer a "publish post" button for saved posts. What good is it to save a work in progress if it's not possible to later post it?

Is anyone else having this problem?

Poop-Like Substance On A Plate

I found this in the refrigerator at work. I couldn't just ignore it; the temptation was too great. I plopped it down on a desk in front of a coworker. Instinctively, she jumped back.

I asked, "What does this look like?"

"Poop", she replied.

Another coworker walked by and said, "That looks like poop."

It did look like someone pooped on a plate, but it was just something that dietary had sent us. I'm guessing it was meant to be food, but who really knows?

On the same evening that I found that little treasure, one of my patients said that our food was so good that he was almost tempted to have more surgery just to be able to enjoy our food again. At first I assumed that he was being sarcastic, but he assured me that he was sincere. It causes me to wonder about his wife's cooking.

An Indiscrete Photo

My brother is absolutely mortified over a mistake he made. I don't mean to laugh at my brother's expense, but it is amusing.

While looking through wedding photos to choose some to send to all of his friends, he came across some photos from his daughter's bachelorette party. It was just a bunch of girls having fun in some one's house, but one of the photos was a little racy. The beautiful bride in jeans and a veil was posing in a somewhat lewd manner with an inflated condom.

My brother meant to delete the photo, but instead, accidentally e-mailed it to everyone on his mailing list, including me.

I thought it was a bit odd that my brother would send me that photo, but it was just a bunch of girls being silly and slightly naughty. Isn't that what girls are supposed to do at bachelorette parties?

Later that day my brother realized what he had done. He left a rambling message on my answering machine and with a quivering voice, apologized and asked me to please delete the photo. There was also an e-mail, again apologizing and asking me to please delete the photo. He had to do that with everyone.

I wonder what he is going to say to his daughter when she gets back from her honeymoon. It's hard to say who is going to be more embarrassed, my brother or my niece.

It's great to be able to send photos with the click of a button, but it can also be risky, depending on what else has been downloaded. The e-mail and delete button are quite close together.

The Wedding

My niece got married over the weekend. She looked like Cinderella, only prettier. Her equally pretty sister, dressed in hot pink, is on the left. My brother and his wife are facing the bride and groom.

The wedding was at U.C. Irvine, which, although a long drive, beat the alternative. The bride lives in Minnesota where she is attending pharmacy school. I once drove from Minnesota and it was something like a 5 day drive through millions of miles of corn fields. The boredom nearly killed me.

This is my parents and me. They have been married almost 62 years. Don't they look great? My mother never ceases to amaze me. She out-danced me. I had to sit down and rest while she kept rocking the night away. Not bad for someone 80 plus years old.

A Shift To The Right

Everything on my computer screen has shifted to the right, leaving a two inch black space on the left side. Unfortunately, with so many boxes that need to be clicked out of view, it's extremely difficult to use the computer. I can guess where the boxes are and if I'm right, it's great. If I'm wrong, then new unwanted pages open up and there is no easy way to close them.

It may be a coincidence, but I let my boyfriend clean up my computer because it had become extremely slow. It's now working fast again, but has shifted to the right. Help!

Note: My computer shifted to the left all by itself and is fine now. I'm delighted, but what happened?