Something Wild and Unruly

A Week of "Getting to Know Me"

2010-08-24T23:46:00.000-05:00

In class today I spent my entire afternoon painting a watercolor mandala. All I could think about was all of the things I could be getting done at home. I am a creature of logic and reason. I appreciate art - in my spare time. I don't consider class time to be "spare time."

I should have just painted a woman in a house with about a thousand things to do, but she can't - because someone has chained her to a mandala.

Two Things.

2010-08-16T11:21:00.002-05:00

Item 1:
"It's a scheduled disbursement day!" says the woman on the other end of the line when I call to inquire why my financial aid has not been deposited. Well shit. I guess you probably realize that people count on the schedule that you provided then don't you?

You know what lady? You have no right to sound irritated at me for very simply, very nicely inquiring about why I don't have my money when you said I would have it. I have jumped through all your hoops, crossed my T's and dotted my I's. Today was your turn, okay? And by the way, it IS MY money. You're not doing me a favor or giving me some kind of gift so hand it over already.

Item 2:
A summer cold in my last week off? Really? How cruel.

Not that Maru Kitteh!

2010-08-14T00:32:00.000-05:00

I scoured the merchants of this dot on the plains, vainly hoping to find a LitterMaid litterbox that would accommodate my crew of kittehs. I have four (they all made me take them home, I swear) and two of them are... um... jolly-sized? Nobody in town has the jumbo model of mechanized cat crap removal I desire, so it's off to Amazon.

This is my Maru. He was a big guy when this was taken, and now there's even more of him to love. My daughter named him before we stumbled onto the famous Maru of YouTube fame. Except for the ears and a couple of extra pounds, they look alot alike!

I found my Maru as a very tiny kitten, crouched behind the rear wheels of a vehicle that was getting ready to back out of a driveway on a very dark, -5F night. I dove out of my car and scooped him up. The poor little guy was completely blind in both eyes from a rather severe bilateral infection of the conjunctivae and he had a deep gash on his left side. He was freezing, and starving. He was instantly mine. Maru gets whatever he wants.

The other substantial cat citizen of the house is Buddy. Should have called him Buddha I guess, but his previous benefactor called him Buddy, and it seemed to fit. We rescued Buddy from a houseful of five small kids who seemed to have mistaken him for a large kinetic/windup monkey. He was safe no hour of the day from becoming an action hero, or a tiny pack animal, or whatever the game of the hour might be.

Buddy was SO grateful when he came to live with us.

In the featherweight category we have Jack (the stripped one) and Chessie. Jack was a shelter cat. He's the only cat we have ever purposefully sought out. Although he was pretty young when we got him, he had already been neutered and he was very familiar with what a can of cat food was for, so we figure wherever he was - he was loved. He had been hit by a car though, and he had a broken rib, and a broken tooth, and his mandible had been snapped in two. That is why you need to keep your pets inside.

Chessie wandered into our lives as a lost kitten. Dehydrated and subsisting only on bugs, she became my personal body guard the day I found her and gave her some cool water and a dish of 5-star cat cuisine. That was 12 years ago, and she's been no more than a breath away from me when I'm at home every since. I think she would love it if I just carried her in a papoose all day.

Four is a generous number of cats, by any measure. With school coming up rapidly on the horizon, I'd like for my house not to smell like cat ass. We'll see how the LitterMaid does when it gets here.

Too much empty space.

2010-08-12T10:56:00.002-05:00

There are still things I'd like to get done before the semester starts. I would like to finish painting the bathroom and do a thorough clean of the upstairs. I would like to get our badly neglected patio back into shape. A half a dozen smaller projects like ordering some artwork for the office, cleaning the kitchen cupboards and other such undone tasks clutter my to do list as well.

I won't have time to get all of these done, more than likely, and still it feels like too much space between here and the beginning of classes.

It's not that I don't have things to do - I'm just bored of them. I'm a terrible domestic, and I'm perfectly content with that.

$9,278.00 in scholarships and grants. YAY!

2010-08-06T00:34:00.003-05:00

Of course I have access to none of it yet. All I can do is sit here and sniff it through my computer monitor.

← Did I mention my books are expected to run about 8¹/₂ of these?

Other things I will need:

Shoes
Another set of scrubs. (Those run $110 a set)
A nursing bag. I'm pretty sure my POS $15 bookbag is not going to cut it anymore.
About 75 lbs. of coffee.

A wife would be nice.

Someone to do the shopping, pay the bills and make dinner. Sounds lovely. Too bad I already went and married a man.

My Hips Hate Me

2010-08-04T21:32:00.000-05:00

I battle chronic pain in both of my hips. I frequently blame it on a really bad decision I made concerning a garage sale, an entertainment center and my mom's basement but really I'm pretty sure that was just the straw the broke the camel's hips.

I dream of the day I take a few weeks off and wake up with shiny, new, resurfaced hips.

I am going to take some trazodone and call it a day.

I am in LOVE with my new office.

2010-08-03T20:04:00.000-05:00

I feel like the queen of everything in here. It's awesome.

I have a houseful of people that I dearly love more than anything in the world. But. They are so needy!

After spending the last couple of semesters setting up ad-hoc study areas around the house (none of them comfortable) and then spending my summer 16-day statistics marathon at the kitchen table with the noise and the questions, and the chatter, all the while glaring at my family with violence in my eyes, I finally have a real home office!

One of the best features? A door - so I can close it and thus reduce the incidence of glaring at my family with violence in my eyes.

I made the curtains from some really decadent fabric I bought at Hobby Lobby and then used that iron-on fabric glue to make the hems and seams. I don't sew. It's not that I can't sew. It's that I don't. I love the fabric so much, I couldn't bring myself to discard the last of it, and instead made it into a chair-back coverlet. Here I will work out the last of the bills, loose ends, and other headaches before school begins. After school is underway, this will be the CNS of my academic life.

Bliss. :-)

A Prayer to the Gods of Financial Aid

2010-08-03T00:39:00.000-05:00

Lay it on me baby. Mama needs . . . well, Mama needs pretty much just about everything. It's looking pretty lean in the old refrigerator.

Congratulations! You have been properly titered, tested and immunized.

2010-07-30T16:17:00.001-05:00

I'd like to take this opportunity to tell all the anti-vaccine "cuz it like totally causes autism because Jenny McCarthy said so" nutters to go ahead and die slowly in a barrel of fire ants under a latrine pit, please. You are causing innocent babies to die incredibly painful and totally unnecessary and preventable deaths. You are responsible for this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuvn-vp5InE&NR=1 and you should be banished from civilized society right after your children are placed with loving, SANE human beings who will love and care for them enough to protect them with proper vaccinations.

OK. I feel better now!

DANCE PARTY!

I awoke to find this in my inbox this morning:

Hi Wanda,

Congratulations! You have been released to register for classes by the Student Health Office. If you have any questions please feel free to give us a call.

Yippeeeeee! Now I just have to figure out how to round up $850.00 for this semester's books.

Things I should be getting done today.

2010-07-28T14:37:00.001-05:00

I tried to spray the patio and driveway today. I really did. Unfortunately the sprayer is not charged up so it will have to wait until tomorrow. It' a shame too. Today's high is a relatively tolerable if not muggy 84Fand there is no wind at all. Oh well.

We have a huge property, about 1/6 of a block so spraying to keep the weeds down is a big deal. If you have to spray more than once a year or your yard is any bigger than a postage stamp I cannot recommend one of these highly enough. It will save your back.

We don't have one of those lawns that you see in Perfect Homes and the Well-To-Do People Who Own Them Magazine, We don't have that kind of house either. We purchased an old Victorian that had been converted first to housing for nuns and later 5 apartment units for drunken college students. It's been an adventure, to say the least. It's also been time-consuming, expensive and at times, painful. We've ripped out 3 full kitchens, 7 doorways, and countless false walls. We've remodeled 3 bathrooms, 2 kitchens, 4 bedrooms and we are nowhere near done. That's just the inside.

So you see, there is always something to do. A broken down Victorian will teach you humility and it will teach you how to manage guilt. Which brings me to the other things I should be doing today. My kids taxes, my mom's shopping, and diving into the big pile of financial doo-doo I'd like to take care of before school hits the fan.

We'll see.

Where I visit student health four times for one little TB skin test.

2010-07-28T00:08:00.000-05:00

One of the last things on my shopping list is to complete my required vaccinations for admittance. For most incoming students, I imagine this is a simple matter of asking their mom for a copy of their childhood shots.

I called the local clinic where I got my shots as a small child, (Lookie there! It's still standing!) and they informed me that the stone tablets that once bore my vital information were ground into ashtray sand sometime in the 20th century.

On to the backup plan. This involved piecing together titer and shot records spread across several institutions and about 2.5 decades or 1/4 of a hundred years.

In order to enter med school you need: (you can skip to the end of this paragraph, it's pretty boring)

Chicken Pox (Varicella): Documentation of two immunizations or a positive Varicella titer.
Hepatitis B: Documentation of three immunizations & a positive Hepatitis B surface antibody titer to show immunity.
If your titer is negative you must repeat the series and titer within the next 2 semesters.
Polio: Documentation of last date of series.
Measles/Mumps/Rubella : Documentation of receiving two MMRs or positive titers.
Tetanus/Diphtheria/Pertussis: Students should have received a vaccination with Tdap.
If Tdap has not been previously administered to the student, an interval of 2 years since the last TD booster
is suggested.
Tuberculosis (TB skin testing):
Documentation of a 2-step PPD which must be administered at least 7 days apart or a negative
QuanteFERON gold within the 6 months prior to registration or documentation of treatment if tested
positive.
All students are required to have
documented proof of a yearly influenza immunization
before December 1.

So after extensive efforts, excessive mileage and many levels of voice-mail hell, today was the day appointed to take my final TB skin test.

08:30 am - Not here yet.
11:00 am - Meeting!
02:00 pm - Try after four please? (starting to wonder if I should take this personally)
04:30 pm - Finally.

(TB bacilli)

Nursing School. Finally.

2010-07-26T23:41:00.002-05:00

Some unmarked day in the early to mid spring of 2007 sitting at the stoplight on highway 30 and 5th Avenue I had an epiphany. I just couldn't take it any more. It was 6:40 am and I was on the way to what was unquestionably the shittiest job I've ever had in my life - working for "environmental services" a.k.a. housekeeping at a local healthcare facility. I won't bore you with the details, but suffice it to say I'd had enough of being spoken to like I was developmentally disabled by pretty much everyone and being treated like a sneaky child by my so-called superiors.

Through the years I've had my own photography business, driven a truck, and done all kinds of work for paltry sums of money, but along the way, I always wanted to be in the medical profession. I just didn't know how to make it happen. At that stoplight, I determined to find out.

A little over 3 years and some 86 credit hours later, here I am, trying to finish up the last few odds and ends so I can roll on in to UNMC properly papered and punched.

I thought it might be a nice idea to journal my experience in nursing school as a way of connecting to others, maybe, but also as a record for myself and my family. I hope it will be occasionally of interest or use to someone other than just myself.

Next entry: Hit me with your best shot - or - Thank you sir, may I have another?