Photo dump

Happy holidays!  After three days of working at the hospital, I got to enjoy Christmas with the family.  I probably only got about two hours of sleep for the next day following Christmas, but it was worth it to see Max, Kate, Chance, and Quinn.  I also got to meet Evan, Megan's fiance (congratulations to you guys).  I uploaded a bunch of pictures, including adding ones to the slideshow of our house, so be sure to check them out!

Snow Woes

On Thursday, a friend of mine from work and I traveled to Bellevue to attend a Forensic Nursing seminar that we'd signed up for back in October.  As fans of shows like CSI and First 48, how could we resist?  The only problem was it was snowing that day.  Crazy snowing.  When I left the house at 0530, there was snow on the ground (on top of some frost from the previous week's snow) and thunder and lightning lighting the skies.  I've never seen that before.  I picked up Joanne near Lakewood and drove her Nissan Pathfinder to the seminar.  The roads were clear until Bellevue, and by the time we hit I-405 it was like BAM!, white snow everywhere and traffic came to a 2 mph crawl.  People were spinning out, pulling off to the side of the road, and putting on chains.  It eventually became a four-hour trip to Bellevue, and we were 1.5 hours late for the seminar.

The seminar itself was about 8 hours long and pretty interesting.  The speaker was Paul Clements, Ph.D., APRN, BC, DF-IAFNP.  (I don't remember what most of those titles mean, but he had a doctorate in psych nursing, helped out with profiling in criminal cases, and did a lot of work with the Virginia Tech shootings.)  The seminar was very interesting to me.  He talked about how to properly document physical abuse/trauma, child molesters, gangs (and teased that I was the "resident gang expert"), and the difference between sociopaths and psychopaths.  Joanne decided she was the sociopath and that I was the more dangerous psychopath since I knew a lot of weird, morbid stuff.  Perhaps we're a little of both -- the other night on our lunch break, we watched an autopsy on TV.

The snow kept coming off and on during the seminar until it ended at 3:30 pm.  The snow was probably up to 6 inches by my estimation, but we tried to make it home instead of staying in Bellevue and getting a hotel (as both of our parents suggested) because we didn't want it to freeze over and then have to deal with driving on ice.  We made it okay all the way to 167 and were promptly stopped by a sea of parked cars.  We'd move about 50 feet, wait for 15 minutes, lather, rinse, repeat.  Eventually we were trapped on 167 until 11 pm.  That's right, we spent almost 7 hours getting home, most of it muttering and cursing under our breath at why everything surrounding 167 (512, 410) was closed.  I even called KOMO AM 1000 to vent my frustration, but of course when I was on the air the sanding trucks and snow plows finally came, so I didn't come off as frustrated as I wanted.

I ended up spending the night at Joanne's place since the radio said I-5 and the 16 were all "treacherous", icy, and cars were having a hard time staying on the road.  It was already dark and since I drive a Barbie car Toyota Echo, I didn't want to chance it.  We went to Wal-Mart the next day to pick up a pair of scrubs and other essentials for me so I could go to work that night, so I now own my very first pair of holiday scrubs -- Frosty the Snowman, but I was neither a jolly nor happy soul wearing them.

Fast forward to now, where it is snowing again, and the news says we are supposed to get another 8-13 inches of snow.  We were planning on going to Poulsbo to see Guy's family and Megan, but I don't know if we can make it there safely.  Grr.

December!

It's 1 in the morning, and Miguel and I are still awake.  He's taking pictures of paper cranes and spray painted leaves for his photography class, and I'm being the dutiful wife and staying up with him, ironing sheets for backdrops and giving the occasional "good job, looks good" type of comments.  My parents are asleep in the living room (their choice of bedroom these days) and will be off to Kona, Hawaii in a few hot hours.  They'll visit my Tita Nenet Nona, cousin Jakob, black sand beaches, volcanos and eat fresh fruit and seafood for a week, while Michael and I will be here in the big cold house, working non-stop and feeding various animals more times per day than we eat ourselves.  I might be a tinge jealous.

One month to go until the completion of our house.  Due to the economy or some problem with Gig Harbor, the builder of our community decided to pull out.  The nine homes that were started will be completed, and as far as I know, everyone will remain living there.  We tried looking for another place to live in the area with our money, but all that would buy us would be some trailer built in the 1980s with one bathroom.  Until a new builder comes in (or the old one returns), we will be living in an awesome empty development.  Quadrant Homes will maintain the community playground and we still have to pay HOA dues (lame), but the developer will be responsible for maintaining the grounds.  I hope s/he hires goats, like the empty community behind Target.  At least they're fun to look at, especially better looking than some guy on a tractor.  Despite the setback, we're still excited to move into our first home.  

In employment news, I was offered a dayshift position in the critical care unit at the new St. Anthony Hospital.  The hospital is about a two minute drive from our house and is set to open up in March.  I'm pretty excited about opening up a new hospital with all the new equipment and modern facilities.  The architecture of the hospital is very pretty and serene, with views from every bed.  Speaking of beds, the ones in the critical care unit are like magic and unicorns -- they're all weigh beds, with built-in bed alarms, a cassette slot for x-rays, and language interpretation services.  Amazing!  I wonder if they have an automatic bedpan feature as well, that would make my job a lot easier.  I'll transition over to the new hospital in early to mid-January.  It's kind of a bummer because I had two weeks of vacation all set up for moving, getting my wisdom teeth out, or visiting California, but now all that's up in the air.  I hope we get to have some fun before starting the new job!