moominmuppet

So my "weekend" was actually pretty awesome. Wednesday started ridiculously early (for someone who normally works second shift), but the first real day of SANE training went really well, with some lessons for fine-tuning next week. I'm very pleased about all that, and it consumed most of Wednesday for me. Also, happy news about the stray dog the nurses found last week! He found his home; he'd been missing for two weeks, they'd given up hope. His owner was about 16, had him since she was 3, it was apparently a wonderful and tearful reunion. So yay for that! Also, apparently my folks have been adopted by a puppy. I'm pretty pleased about this; I think it's really good for Dad to have a dog, even if he's been hemming and hawing about taking on the responsibility again. Typical Dad, he slipped it into the end of an almost totally unrelated email forward from one of his favorite theologian bloggers. Her postscript was
"I would add:
If you can love unconditionally,
If you can greet your loved ones with joy everyday without fail,
If you can find Christmas happiness every time you take a walk...
Dogs do teach us a great deal if we will observe them..."

His bit at the end:
Your addition seems almost prescient for me.
Went for my daily walk yesterday morning and a puppy came bounding after me.
After the usual search for the owner, we have come to the conclusion this pup was "dropped by the side of the road".
So I am observing her: eat the cat's food, chew my slippers, and work her way into our hearts and home.

Hee! Had to call him immediately to find out what the hell was going on!

The rest of the weekend was mostly household project work. I did some cleaning, some yard work, reterminated all the network cables Cat had chewed through, and repaired the bathroom doorknob. I'm feeling moderately accomplished but very tired. I've been almost entirely offline the past couple of days (I often am on my weekends), and am doing some catching up today. I'm also working on some project stuff, though, since we're rolling out some new helpdesk software in the next weeks, so I don't know what I'll get through in terms of Linketies.

Also, currently reading Evolution's Darling, and enjoying it quite a bit. It's a recommendation/loan from serpentseye, and she doesn't generally steer me wrong.

Still really, really physically exhausted today, and also still definitely hypomanic (which makes it really hard to get the sleep I need to recuperate). Leaving for Preterm in a couple hours, after a friend drops by. It's payday, so lots of errands, but since Tarma decided I needed to be up at 6:30, I've gotten a decent amount done already. I'm still catching up on Linketies; some stuff I'm posting I haven't actually gotten a chance to read yet (sometimes Linketies serve as much as a reading list for me as for others). Be aware there may be some stinkers and some duplicates in here.

Last night was really excellent, despite being so tired. Got a bit of a nap before patient-instructing, and had a great session with some nursing students. Being somewhat manic makes it much easier to be really "on" as a teacher, and I do enjoy that. Then had an awesome meeting back here on planning the new SANE program, and I'm so excited about it, and how it looks like we're going to be able to shape it to be the best possible program. We're all passionate about it, and I think things are coming together really well so far. Also it means working with/for Casey, which is all sorts of awesome. Hoorah for feminist sociologists who "get it"! It also looks like we'll have a lot of support for fine-tuning our own skillsets for this, and I'm very pleased about that. I've been patient-instructing for a decade now, and I still keep learning more about how to teach better, more clearly, more efficiently, more memorably. This is where a great deal of my passion lives, and I'm always interested in figuring out new ways to use my particular skills and comfort to do more forms of education. It was also a fun social night, lots of intoxicated yelling at the TV (RuPaul's Drag U), and lots of conversation. Grafton's heading out for Frostburn tomorrow, so he's all busy packing and planning. I'm making notes everywhere so I don't forget to handle the stuff he normally does, like picking up the CSA delivery on Saturday. Can't wait! Last time's was nom-licious.

Lots of stuff I want to write about, but the rest of today's going to be pretty full, I think. Grace stopping by (now that I know two Graces, I need to figure out a clear distinction), then Preterm, maybe with a bit of Farkas shopping on my way in, then home and Erin date-night, then my friend Nikki is in town, and she and Casey and I and some others are getting together.

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LaunchPad: Huntsville, AL
I will provide independent living services to otherwise homeless young people who may be gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered.

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Reflected glory (astronomy)

So excited! Had a really good meeting today with Casey and folks from the SANE program at Metro. We're designing a new element for their training program, and I'm really excited about it; I've been interested in working with the SANE program for years. It's a great chance to make use of the skills I've learned in the past decade of patient-instructing in order to support a program I really believe in (I love patient-instructing, but this is a great chance to do something additional). It'll be quite different from patient-instructing; we'll be role-playing through the whole sexual assault kit exam, from interviews to sample collection, but there are a lot of skills I already have that will apply well, especially in terms of handling the spec exam. So, yes, very excited!


And also, just a couple of random followup thoughts from my previous ramblings:

I tend toward definitions that err on the side of inclusiveness

Intimate personal activism something I learned from feminism and especially queerness (out as political)

Oddly, I'd say evangelism is a form of activism. Weird that I have such a squick about it.

I'm really tired, or I'd expand on those (they're the notes I sent myself when the thoughts crossed my mind).

So, apparently Mom's in the hospital with dangerously high lithium levels. They found this out because she took a bad spill the other day (she may have a broken nose, as well as generally being rather beaten up and battered all over), and when she went to the doctor to get checked out, they tested her blood levels to see if that was the cause of the instability at the root of the problem. Good thing, too. Dad says if they'd been any higher, they'd be talking dialysis. Just talked to her, and she's frustrated, but doing ok.

Patient-instructing tonight was good; I always enjoy when we get the residents through, since it means working more on the medical history side of things, as well as running through the actual exam. Both residents were really engaged and interested, and it was a good, if long, session as a result.

Just waiting for Casey to get here now, and still trying to hide from the heat as well as possible.

Life's going pretty well, I'm just in a low-energy mode. The weather's been going all over the place, which always messes with me, and a good deal of the past week has revolved around sleep and more sleep. We did get our weekly hang-out with Casey and Bill, which is always fun, although a bit odd when combined with a plumbing emergency.

Thursday I was finally back at patient-instructing after months and months, which was a good feeling, although a touch nerve-wracking in the usual "do I remember how to ride a bike" sort of way. It was a great session, though. 3rd-years, who already have some experience, and are basically getting evaluated and fine-tuned, most of the time. It was a good first night back, and a good reminder of how much teaching changes my mood.

Then I got a chance to see serpentseye and calialleykat and we played Ticket to Ride with Grafton, which was a nice, mellow evening. Oh, and Mom almost ended up coming up for a brief, poorly timed, potentially stress-inducing visit, and there were lots of calls back and forth sorting all that out. I really do empathize with her frustrations about the limitations her psychiatric unpredictability puts on her life, especially given how much functionality she's regained in recent years. But she still scares all of us behind the wheel, and even the most moderate travel plans often end in her getting overstressed and having additional issues for a while, so it blows to have to gang up on her and say "no, driving six hours to Mississippi solo and spending four days there alone while Dad goes to IN for the hockey games with James is not a good idea". I think she's still pretty pissed at me for having to say it to her and explicitly back up Dad on the point. Mom and I connect really well in general, which does mean that I'm the one most likely to be able to say hard stuff to her without a major blowup occluding the original point. So that's all been a bit exhausting, and just generally sad, because I do so wish for her to be able to have that level of functionality back, and it's unlikely to happen again in her life, I suspect.

Also, the short-term scraping for change brokeness of the household was at its peak this week, adding a lot of stress. Thankfully, that's been mostly eliminated by a combination of household members kicking in in various ways, friends being awesome and generous, and as of last night, the replacement SSI check we covered for J showing up. Huge relief, and should get us through ok 'til the refund gets here and we can handle all the big stuff that's been waiting.

It's also been a Coco week, and that continues to go well, although we've hit a plateau in terms of progress with her, at least for the moment. She still acts like the floor inside is Hot Lava, and just freezes when she's set down on it, although she'll comfortably run around in the yard with Tarma and Leroy now, and she's fine with having them on the couch with her. It's just going to take time; we're a radically different environment than her home next door, and it's a lot of new stuff to adjust to. I'm happy she's already this happy and comfortable hanging out with us, even if she insists on staying on the couch the entire visit. LovelyNeighbor continues to be lovely, though. This week, along with the pet-sitting cash, and the cash she insists on paying us for use of our wireless, she dropped off a box of tasty european chocolates, and helped us out with water when we had the plumbing issues Wednesday.

Caleb and Grafton have been getting hugely motivated on the house, and all of the rest of us have been getting a bit more energetic about things too, as a result (me least of all, probably -- I spent a lot of time sleeping while they were working this week). It has resulted in a lot of minor and major improvements in the house, which makes it progressively more enjoyable to be here, so that's awesome. The basement lounge project is moving fast, and the kitchen is finally not scary for the first time in months. On the downside, we got a citation delivered, by bailiff even, for having put our trash out wrong back in October. So I apparently have to go down to the court about that, and I assume there's a fine involved. That's when we were stripping out the back apartment, though, and the problem was with how things were and weren't properly bundled. I don't doubt they're in the right. I'm just baffled at the delay.

So, anyway, that's what's up in life. Oh, and as we all figured would eventually happen, Netflix streaming no longer works from work. Ah well. I've moved the rest of Farscape into my mail queue, and it'll be along shortly. OK, I think that's actually all. Back to sleep now, it's the middle of my night.

bec76 caught a couple of good shots of Shroom asleep on my head (her normal position, especially during winter). I'm very pleased. This is my cranky old lady cat; she's about 15 or so, and sleeping with her reminds me frequently of one of the most awe-inspiring aspects of interspecies friendship -- the trust. That we (and they) are capable of developing true trust between species never ceases to amaze me. I sleep with her claws right on my face, head, and throat, and it's ok. I trust her that much. She frequently sleeps with my face nestled in her belly. She trusts me that much. Seriously mindblowing, when one stops taking it for granted for a moment.

In other news, guess what I got for my 35th birthday?

A CPAP. Joy. Had my followup appt for my sleep study today. No actual apnea, but a whole lot of hypopnea (which is breathing too shallow to oxygenate properly), so it's worth treating and seeing how it goes. Another 2 months before I know about provigil, which is frustrating. We have to let me acclimate to the CPAP, see how I'm doing, and then do another full sleep study with the CPAP, and an MSLT after that, in order to know if there's definitely narcolepsy going on aside from the apnea/hypopnea. Frustrating result, but the NP was awesome (one of the NPs I worked with through patient-instructing, actually, back when she was in women's health), and I still really like
my neuro, too. They apologized for the crap with the last study, and no one telling me what was going on.

So I'm not thrilled, but especially since the hypopnea was so severe, I'm willing to give it a try and see if it improves my fatigue problems.

On the other hand, I am developing a serious loathing for those automated blood pressure machines. They cause me intense pain, and that sends my BP up, as well as being, well, friggin' painful. Today I had petechiae bruising over my upper arms from it, which at least gave me something to show them to demonstrate how much the machines suck. Anyone else have negative experiences with those things? I don't know if it's a body size thing; I wonder if it's just not capable of dealing with the fat on my upper arms, and I'm curious whether people with complaints come from across the size spectrum, or are clustered toward my end.

Talking to the NP really made me miss patient-instructing, though. As did the Around Noon today about the mammography/BSE recommendation changes. I'm curious how that'll affect our teaching, and I'm frustrated not to be able to be at work talking about it. Thank maude I live with Liv and Grafton, at least (they both teach, and I get a vicarious fix from their work-related chatter).

Also, Terry Jones' Medieval Lives just gave me a minor epiphany. He was explaining the purpose of heraldic devices, and one of those obvious facts that we totally overlook by being immersed in the modern world really clicked finally. Heraldic devices were so you knew who famous people were, because unless you'd met someone face to face, you didn't fucking know what anyone looked like! Once he said it, it was obvious, but it had somehow never really sunk in before. Now I'm wondering how our commonly used vocabulary for physical description compares to that of medieval times (there are all sorts of descriptive "physical feature" words that I never hear outside books anymore), and whether access to image reproduction has been a factor in how much less regimented costume is these days.

I found this out because I'm watching Medieval Lives (on grf's recommendation) on Netflix. From work. Oh, hell yeah! Just discovered last week that although almost every other type of streaming media is blocked, Netflix viewing works just dandy! I've been mostly watching things I know well enough to enjoy as "radio plays" (Doctor Who is great for this), since I'm usually working on things in other windows, but it's a definitely perk of second shift.

And in other work-related news, the Clinic's ergonomics guy came in today. I didn't know we _had_ an ergonomics guy. I'm pleased. Proactivity is nice, and he had some useful suggestions as he went desk to desk working with us. Given how long we spend sitting in front of computers typing, that's seriously handy. Also, awesome boss continues to be awesome. Yay!

My birthday itself was fun; I declared Saturday to be my unofficial bday, got yummy food from the West Side Market (including some excellent delmonico steaks and baklava), dropped some acid, and spent the day getting nothing productive done. The hot tub was great. Monday (my real bday) I happened to be on a shift where I could get a ride with a coworker, so I didn't have to bus it, and it was a ridiculously quiet day at work, and Bec and Grafton made me tasties for when I got home (steak and raspberries and pound cake), and Caleb got me a copy of a book I really dig, and wanted to have in the house (Your Inner Fish), because it's got great diagrams and reference material, and I keep wanting to reference it. And Bec and Jer got me a Eureka comic that turned up just the day after I was lamenting the wait for new Eureka episodes!

In house news, I'm still loving having the houses, but I'm also struggling with the typical new home-owner "Damn, everything is so expensive" stress. I'm getting better and better at finding things inexpensively, though. This weekend we're getting a delivery of five 55-gallon plastic food-grade barrels, suitable for conversion to water barrels, for $50 total. So much better than paying $80-$300 a piece for premade. Now we'll be able to reuse our rainwater for the garden, and minimize some of our water runoff concerns (there's concrete very close to the houses, and non-ideal grading -- the more we collect, the less gets down around the foundation).

Our relationship with our one real neighbor continues to develop, though! She may be working longer hours soon, and she's asked about petsitting for her little pom Coco. I'm pleased about this both because of the bridge-building it reinforces, and because it'll mean another critter around the house to get to know. I was missing Spike earlier today, and I was horribly tempted to get overly friendly with the stray(?) cat in our parking lot. Do not need more pets. Do not. Have promised not to adopt anything new until at least next August. Must satisfy cravings for new-critter interaction in other ways. That is something really specific that I very much enjoy, though... Getting to know a new animal and winning them over. It's part of what makes me a total sucker.

And because I'm a sucker, here's another ShroomHead pic, this time from right after we both woke up.

Shroom sleeps on my head. After we both woke up.

And here ends my belated and now seriously overlong post.

I'm... I'm... out of puzzles!

My recent jigsaw habit has gotten positively ludicrous. I just finished a shipment of ten puzzles (about 1/2 500-piece and 1/2 1000 piece) that came in less than a month ago. I'm going back to Sudoku until my budget can handle more...

This weekend is going to be Spring Cleaning time in the house. The weather's been great this week, and it's a good feeling. I'm starting to get mentally prepared for better weather and more energy. I'm also finally back to patient-instructing; I had a session last week and one this week, after being MIA since October. It's a great reminder of my passions, and gets my life feeling more "back in line" -- even when the extra hours in my day exhaust me, the psychological rewards are immediate and dramatic. The nurse prac students I got these past two sessions were especially awesome, too. Interested, and clueful, and fun to work with. One woman actually hugged me before I left, she was so excited about everything she'd learned, and how much less nervous she was. I'm a damned good teacher, and I love doing it, and doing something that I think is so necessary to better women's health care. And I get immediate positive feedback almost every time. How many jobs offer that? No wonder I can't imagine giving it up, and feel the psychological effects when I'm away for long. I'm also back to clinic escorting this month, after having only handled the schedules for the past six months or so, first because of the flare-from-hell, and then out of worries of triggering a new one, since winter escorting is particularly hard on my fibro in the best of times. That's a passion in a similar way to patient-instructing, although also similarly in conflict with my energy levels at times, so knowing I'll be back out there this month is psychologically refreshing.

Work is really going pretty well at the moment; the collective mood in the office (and especially in my own head, given my personal conflicts with him) is as close to beatific as it ever is. I've been really enjoying the merger with the other helpdesks, and I'm liking the new folks around me in the office a good deal. C and I are both loudmouth troublemakers, and we hit it off pretty immediately, and were quickly wondering if they'd end up regretting seating us next to each other. One of the reasons I stay in this job is that I really do love most of my coworkers. After 8 years there, they're a sort of "work-family", and it results in me getting a kick out of doing things to make their lives easier, and I've been able to do more and more of that recently, which is fun, and suits my generally communal nature.

Things with the new system are slowly getting the bugs worked out, with Boss leaving by the end of the month, and his self-protective "Don't ever talk to Grandboss without my permission, even though she specifically asks you to" attitude no longer affecting us. Sent Grandboss email about something that'd smooth things out in the transition almost immediately, and although it was ignored by boss last week, Grandboss had a reply back next day, and had started taking action immediately. I have a lot more hope for improvement in the processes with the new app now that we'll be dealing with her directly, and not with his stumbling blocks of incompetence and total cluelessness and paranoid self-protection. And although work is still pretty wall-to-wall busy most days, we're nowhere near as underwater as we were, and I'm starting to get back a bit of mental energy for attention to other things. I'm still not reading LJ regularly, but I'm caught up on email, and catching more LJ intermittently, at least. I'm hoping I might actually have the brain-power and focus for a book! Ooh! Seriously, that's been driving me nuts. I've been coming home from work so mentally exhausted that I can barely put words together coherently, let alone focus on reading, and I'm missing the font of new ideas to play with and talk about. I was saying to Mom that I've been having a hard time calling folks or making contact recently (more so than usual, even), because there's just been so little to talk about -- it's been mostly work and health for months. Hell, I've barely been able to handle movies more intellectually challenging than SciFi Channel critter schlockfests.

And after being relationally introverted for so long, I'm coming out of that, too. I think it's a conflation of some cool things coming up and the normal effects of Spring. I'm hoping to make it to Chicago some weekend this month (thank god for cheap bus tickets and available crash space) to see jokervalentine, whom I haven't seen since end of summer, although we'd stayed in pretty close touch, and I've really been enjoying how that friendship has been evolving. And a local mutual interest that got derailed in the process of developing last fall has surprisingly reappeared, and I'm very psyched about that, and where it may go. Thanks to the suggestion of poly-friendly family (thanks, jajy1979, I'm also going to get at least a bit of time with lunatickle and fabulousmisst in May, on either end of a D.C. trip to hang out with my family, and I've rescheduled my tattoo appt and visit with forestfire for the weekend of June 20th. grf has his big show coming up in April, and I definitely intend to be in Michigan for that (cjdoyle and jenx, it'd be great to see you then, too!). limbicquestion is in town this coming week, and I'm psyched to see her and catch up. And syrinx_77 is almost completely moved in down the street, which makes me inexpressibly happy.

And it was great to be down at Kenyon last weekend for the Peep Alumni Meeting. Although it was the beginning of Spring Break for the students, we did get to meet a decent number of the current actives, trade stories of scandals past, and plot our overthrow of the Kenyon administration *grin*. I especially got a lot of time to hang out with leveldeaded, who I see much too rarely. And I love the intergenerational connection in the Peeps. We had folks from class of '76 to class of '12, and although we have a lot of different experiences, there really is a common thread that makes connecting comfortably so much easier than it often is across generations, at least among those of us who all have enough in common that we all chose to stay at least somewhat connected to the group for the long haul.

I might have another post or two in me, but I think this is enough for one...

Training today, so nothing to much, but wanted to say again how much I love www.couchsurfing.com. We've got a couchsurfer today and tomorrow, and she's utterly awesome. Just finished nursing school, in town for a nursing conference, we geeked about patient-instructing (I had awesome NP students last night). She's even familiar with the At Your Cervix documentary!. Bec and I gave her the Cleveland tourism talk (about why we love it here), so she should be out exploring today, and hopefully having a good time.

Feel free to pass this along to any interested locals; I'm posting it around some local communities as well.

________________________________________________________________

Interested in women's and men's reproductive health?

Would you like to help teach medical and advanced practice nursing students how to provide the best possible reproductive health care to their patients?

Consider training as a patient-instructor, a specialized form of standardized patient. Learn to guide students through well-woman or male genitourinary exams, as both the model and the instructor. No previous experience necessary, full training provided as part of the program.


Help make a difference in the health care we all receive!

Work is very part-time, weekday evenings, $20/hr.

For more information, contact:

Stephanie Berger

Cleveland Free Clinic

216 721 4010 voice mail only: x1613

No, really!

I just discovered that there's quite an assortment of medical videos on Youtube. How handy -- I should point Steph toward these. I haven't watched these in detail yet, but the bits I caught all seemed pretty standard. These are just a semi-random sample:
Recto-vaginal exam

male genital exam
I also found a bunch of other sex ed stuff. I'll have to start wandering around and checking it out. I hadn't really thought about Youtube as an educational resource in that regard (it's been blocked from work for ages, so I generally hadn't wandered it too much), but that's cheering (although most of the comment threads are not *eyeroll*). I wonder if I look hard enough I can find a copy of the video we use before the second-year sessions.


OK, fucking random. As I was still in the process of writing this, the movie Grafton's watching, All Over a Guy suddenly had a bit about testicular self-exam.