Saturday, January 31, 2009

Now you know when I'm working!

I don't know if I'll keep this forever, but for now, you can see my work schedule on the blog. I played around to try to find the best setup and I think this is it - it's an agenda view so that if you scroll through and don't see a date listed - there is nothing scheduled that day (i.e. I'm not working that day). Hopefully this will be helpful, but I'm thinking that if this gets to be bigger, I may take this off since not everyone in the world needs to know exactly when I'm working. Let me know what you think about it though!

Still learning

OK, so one week = one post, right? Well, I'm getting there - and soon I'll be better about posting more. For now, I'm enjoying reading my sister's blog about getting ready for Baby Ellis. I'm actually going to visit for 2 weeks after the baby is born and I cannot wait! I hope that I'll be able to help out and give Jenni and Jon some time to relax but at the same time not be too overwhelming for them. The nice thing about Atlanta is that if they are having too many people or the new family just wants some time to themselves, there are about 100 other places I could go stay. The whole trip is about seeing them, helping out, and helping with the transition of life with a new baby. I'm so excited to be able to take part in that!

On a less exciting note, we have been incredibly slow at work since Christmas. The unit actually closed December 23rd because we had no patients at all. The slow spell is also very unusual because in winter (i.e. starting in January through March/April - depending on the year), pediatric units across the country are bombarded with respiratory season. You see a lot of kids end up in the hospital with flu or RSV. The odd thing with this year is up to today we have had 2 cases of RSV and one case of flu - that is unheard of! So I was taken off all clinical shifts this week to do project work so that I would not be cost-contained (when there are too many nurses scheduled and not enough patients so you have to stay home - you don't get paid unless you use your vacation time). I got a call tonight, however, saying that we now have at least 3 patients with breathing tubes and one or two more coming in as I type. It's not that nurses want people to be sick, but as a rule, it's helpful to have patients so you can work. And in my line of work, patients just happen to be kiddos who are very sick. So with any luck, the dry spell of patients will be over and I'll be back to normal work weeks... and I'll still have this project to work on when the unit slows down again in the spring.

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Getting started with blogging...

Well here goes - my sister has convinced me to blog so I'm going to give it a try. I know it's been useful for keeping up with what she's doing, but really Mike and I don't have that exciting of a life right now - no pregnancy, no kids, just house stuff.

Right now we are working on trim all around the house. As I'm typing, Mike is in the bathroom installing trim. And we put up all our window treatments this week, too! And I keep saying that we don't have much left but seriously, if the trim gets all done, we really won't have anything on the inside left to do! I'm very excited though, because it makes such a difference. And then it's back to things I can help with - like painting and staining and the likes. Mike's parents are coming out some time in the spring or summer to help with the last few big things and we'll do landscaping and paint the outside of the house this spring, too, but other than that, we'll have to find more things to keep us busy. Go to picasaweb.google.com/kenorris and look for the albums titled "Before Renovations" and "During and After Renovations" to see where we have come from. And now that we have more things to show off, I'll post more pictures soon.