eric135

Jury Duty

Crap. Jury Duty. I can not TELL you how much I hate jury duty. Ever since we did our civic duty and registered to vote in the state of Arizona, we have been stuck with jury duty every two years. It happens so often that I have a set routine of where I like to sit, and I have a list of all the crap I like to take with me in my roll-along luggage. The parking deck closest to the Superior Court building is in my Garmin Nuvi GPS as a "Favorite Place" (which is so wrong on so many levels).

I'm supposed to show up in the middle of July, but one nice thing about serving at Maricopa Superior Court is that I can go online and delay the date of service up to 90 days, which puts me down to middle October (which is better than mid July because at least I can walk the streets of the city without sweating like a farm animal).

 

NASCAR 1: Planned Parenthood 0, What if nurses got paid per patient instead of by the hour, Culling our Platys...

• I read on the internets that the House voted out Planned Parenthood, and is continuing to fund NASCAR. What's that all about? I've never been much for either -- parenthood or NASCAR -- but how have our priorities gotten so effed up? I personally don't consider NASCAR a "sport" per se, although yes it does take some skill -- right up until you run up against a RIGHT turn -- but, hell, the only way I'd get into it is if they required the drivers to txt while they drove, or if the audience got to throw obstacles randomly into the road.
• I wonder how much health care would get fixed if nurses got paid via capitation (per patient) rather than by the hour, or if physicians got paid by the hour instead of by capitation. I mean, let's just say a nurse is paid $30 bucks an hour for a 12 hour shift for taking care of five patients. That comes out to $72 bucks per patient. I wonder, as much as we nurses do belly-ache about patient safety and all that, how many of us would take another patient (or more) to get another $72 (or more) a shift. More interestingly, I wonder how many of us would choose to get $72 per shift less in order to be assigned one patient less? I'm totally not saying we should do this, but I wonder how the discussion would change, if it would change at all?
•  We just had to thin our population of platys in our 10-gallon fish tank. We started out with several species of fish, but over the past couple of years, everyone died out except for these Platys. They just kept breeding, and at this point there must have been 70 fish (most of them juvenile) in the tank (along with one bad-tempered Beta that probably hates kids). We looked it up on the internets, and it seems one of the more humane ways to euthanize tropical fish is to drop them into ice water (actually the most humane methods were clove oil or a fish anesthetic called MS-222 or alcohol -- we had none of these). But it still felt strange catching 10-15 baby fish and dropping them in a bucket of ice water. A bit traumatizing, considering how much heartache we go through when our goldfish die.
• I have been playing iTunes, and for whatever hellish reason, I keep playing the theme song from The Sound of Music over and over...

Recycling computer monitors and TVs...

We watched another episode of Hoarders, which led to another burst of cleaning and purging.

We finally got rid of two broken televisions (a 33" and a 27") and two broken computer monitors. None of these were the new sleek light models, they were heavy behemoths. Once again, I used my luggage cart to wheel them all down to the car.

We decided to take them to a recyling company downtown. If you are in Phoenix, the company is called Westech Recyclers, and is located in downtown Phoenix near the corner of Madison St. and 10th Ave.

I finally dismantled two of those black torchiere lamps that had been broken and gathering dust for a decade in my office.

That still leaves a flat screen computer monitor (broken), three old computer CPUs (once we wrench the hard drives out of them), and yet another TV.

Amazingly, even after this purge of broken TV sets, that still leaves us with four TV sets, one in each room.

An unexpected day off

Census at the hospital has been low, and I got canceled for my shift last night.

It's funny when nurses get canceled to work. Lower census happens periodically, but my philosophy is that the patients that don't come in tonight will just come tomorrow, and then it will be busy as hell. I always chuckle when employees worry about layoffs just because we have a few days of lower census. Without fail, the following week, everyone is on overtime and the staffing office is calling folks to work extra.

So tonight, we decided to make an evening of it.

We did a little bit of shopping.

We both got our hair cut.

We went to our favorite restaurant for dinner (The Golden Wok, near Cactus and Tatum). When we go out, this is where we usually go, and we pretty much get the same things every time.

We went to Target and bought an over-the-top star for our Christmas tree. It actually took us trips to two Targets to find one to our liking.

We went to Borders Books, where I bought some magazines, a book on drawing/sketching, and a fresh new Moleskine notebook (I like the small ones with the gridlines). Whilie we were there, we saw this for sale, sitting among the Science Fiction paperbacks:

 It's Pon Farr, the fragrance. We made spectacles of ourselves giggling geekily while reading the boxes.

OK off to bed... Doubt I'll get canceled two nights in a row...

In no particular order...

• We're getting closer and closer to the Go Live date for our upgrade to the computer program that handles employee scheduling. It has meant a lot of meetings, in the middle of the day (which for those of us on night shift means the middle of the night). I'm one of two nurses that will spearhead the upgrade throughout two hospital campuses.
• I was off today, and with the meetings scheduled, I had been sleeping during the night so I could be awake during the day. We went out for pizza at Streets of New York Pizza, and then we went on an odd and rare shopping spree, where I bought Dan Brown's latest book, Lost Symbol, and a new router.
•   One of our other kitties, BoyKitty, has been sick. He's got some sort of infection in one of his hind paws, so we're giving him a 14-day run of antibiotics (Augmentin) and we're washing his paw with betadine every day. Between BoyKitty and LadyKitty, it's just like a vet clinic around here.
• Roomie's computer done up and died, and we're going through a re-format of his hard drive. I've seen labor for breech human twins go smoother.
• The Dow hit 10,000 for the first time in a year. It hit me that it has been a long time since I've checked my 401k balance, and a statement came in the mail today, and it is up 50% year to date.  Thank the Lord.
• I'm working for the next three days, and I ain't looking forward to it.
• I've been putting off getting my flu shot. As a nurse, they are provided to me free of charge, but it amazes me how much I absolutely hate shots, considering what I do.

Nothing more fun on a Saturday morning than a flat tire...

Well there's simply nothing more entertaining at 630 AM on a Saturday morning than...

A Flat Tire.

I just hate that. And for whatever reason, we get flat tires a lot. I don't think someone is purposely letting the air out but over the past 9 years this is our 4th or 5th flat tire.

We're big fans of Fix-a-Flat. That has pulled us out of trouble on at least three occasions that I remember. Usually one can of Fix-a-Flat gets us back on the road, at least enough to get to our repair place (which is a convenient five-minute walk from our apartment).

But it's been an expensive morning. A flat tire, rotation, alignment, an oil change, and a change in belts, new wiper blades, replacement brake light and hoses will cost us $299.

Going through old floppy disks... 2012: The War for Souls

// blogging since November 2002

Roomie and I found a whole stack of 3.5 floppies, and for whatever reason, I got the crazy idea in my head that I wanted to recover whatever was on those disks. The hard part was that none of our computers had a floppy drive. So I dug out the computer I had before the laptop, hooked it up to the monitor, keyboard and mouse, and started looking at really old files. And I found some original files for my first blog (back at easyjournal dot com). I'm amazed I've been blogging for more than six years. I also found some archived html files from my second blog (now defunct eric135 dot net). That was the blog that I totally coded by hand in Notepad. I'm pretty impressed with myself, that I had the ability to write all that in html, uploading all those files via FTP.

I couldn't do that now.

// I've been reading Whitley Strieber's book 2012: The War for Souls.

 I needed something a bit lighter than the book I was reading for work (more on that later). Pretty good read so far, if you are into SF/Thriller type novels.

// Gotta werk for the next three nights :-(

Star Trek Exhibit @ Arizona Science Center

 

Last weekend, we went to Star Trek The Exhibition at the Arizona Science Center, celebrating roomie's perpetual 25th birthday.

• The cost of admission was $20/adult, which included admission for the enter Science Center.
• Sadly, no cameras or cell phones were permitted, even though they had a full-size replica of the Enterprise-D bridge and you could sit in the Captain's, First Officer's and Counselor's chairs. I was going to try to sneak a cell phone pic but they had folks watching every room to be sure no pics were taken. I personally think they should have either let folks take pictures in the chairs, or even have a photographer take pictures that you could purchase.
• There were a lot of interesting artifacts, including lots of costumes and props. I could easily remember the episode of every costume except one.
• Oddly, there was a wall with photos of Shatner, Nimoy and Nichols, but no Koenig or Takei. We noticed there were definite spaces where they could have easily fit, so space was not an issue.
• They had a lot of models of the Star Trek ships (Enterprises 1701, 1701-A B C D E NX, Voyager, Deep Space Nine) but they were not actual models that could have been used in motion capture. They were all metalic and looked like plastic casts.
• There were several TV monitors that showed what looked like clips from various documentaries and possibly DVD tracks.
• There was one large/long wall that had the entire Star Trek time line with all of the shows integrated into it.
• They did have Captain Kirk's chair. There was a sign not to sit on it, and it had ropes around it, and I personally would have jumped them both but there were guards posted (well not really "guards" per se, more like folks that could have worked at Geek Squad, but we still didn't chance it).
• They had a replica of the Enterprise-D's sick bay.

All in all it was a really good day. Not only did we get me out of the apartment into the sunlight, we got the chance to explore downtown, had lunch at the Rainforest Cafe, took a look at the new (well, new to me at least) IKEA store in Tempe, and then had dinner at the Marie Calendars.

Phoenix Art Museum: Central Avenue & McDowell Road, Phoenix AZ USA

I took a trip to the Phoenix Art Museum today. It was a beautiful Sunday morning, and I got there a few minutes before it opened, and had the whole place to myself for about 10 minutes.  I didn't take very many pictures, just spent a couple of hours looking around and enjoying the art.

  One of the exhibits that I found amusing was the one on the jumpsuit. The picture on the brochure was of Michael Phelps wearing the futuristic suits they used in the Olympics, but I didn't see that one. Oddly, I walked in on a woman who happened to be wearing a jumpsuit-type outfit (all one color sort of thing) and I thought for a moment she was a part of the exhibit.

Up on the second floor of the Katz Wing, there was a small room off to the side that was surrounded by huge plate-glass windows from floor to ceiling. These are some shots from that room looking out onto the city of Phoenix. Click to embiggen.

  Some statues from either India or Indonesia.

 Five beautiful dolls depicting Samurai armor.

 A few pictures of the Dorrance Sculpture Garden.

 Perusing the gift shop, I found these really cool stone tablets. They are covered with some substance. When you get them wet, the crystals change from opaque to transparent allowing the color of the rock base to come through. You are provided a brush and water. You can "paint" to your heart's content, enjoy it for a few minutes, and then start all over again with a clean slate. In the picture above, that slate started off all white, then I painted some shapes, and this is the result after about 5 minutes of evaporation. By the time I left the store, the art had completely disappeared.

 After spending about 2 hours in the museum, I had planned to use the new Light Rail and ride it from the stop directly across the street from the Museum, down to ASU/Mill Ave. When I got on heading South, the trains were completely packed and I didn't even have a good place to hold on. So after one stop, I got off, crossed the platform, and boarded a train the other way (the second picture above). Hardly anyone on. The trains were very nice -- smooth, fast, quiet. My concern is that they are on the same level as the street, so there are trains traveling next to cars along the center median. I can already tell there are going to be problems at traffic lights. I'm planning on another attempt some time after all the excitement has died down. They look like they could be really great.

One fat piece of hell...

I've been reading this hilarious blog, supposedly written by two octogenarians.  They plan to vote for Barack Obama, and want you to do so also. Here's a tasty bit:

If I hear that McCain is a Maverick one more time I just might throw myself to the floor and break a hip.  A maverick is an independent individual who doesn’t go along with a group or party.  If John McCain’s a maverick I am one of those cheerleaders on the sidelines of Harold’s beloved Dallas Cowboys.  Nobody seems to dispute that the Republican party led by George W. Bush got us into this mess but what everybody seems to forget is that Sarah Palin and John McCain are Republicans.  Look, when the Religious Right came knocking at the door of the RNC Membership Round-Up, someone should have turned out the porch lights and told everyone inside to be quiet until they went away… the same thing I do when those nice looking boys on bicycles with bibles come to my door.  But the Republicans opened that door, invited them in and now they have to live with that decision.

The whole blog is like that.

It reminded me that my job as a nurse on a med/surg/tele floor doesn't expose me to a representative selection of this age group.

I am reminded of a recent phone conversation with my (septuagenarian) mother. She was relating a very scary day when she "couldn't get up out of bed" due to a sudden onset of pain in her back and leg. Then I asked her what she had been doing the 24 hours prior to the pain. "Your father and I had been ballroom-dancing for a few hours -- on a carpetted floor."

I mean well hell, no wonder she hurt. I told her, "Ma, you can't just decide to spend a few hours dancing, on top of all the hours of gardening and taking care of a huge house and a coy pond the size of a bus and not have pain... you're gonna have to take it easy sometimes."

We should be so active. Hell, we get winded when we get our mail, and we drive bags of trash to the trash compactor about 1/3 block away.

I went to our annual benefits fair a few days ago. There were representatives from LA Fitness and Pure Fitness, and they were doing caliper tests and calculating BMI's on the passers-by. Hilariously (and somewhat inexplicably), they were set up right next to the table where the cafeteria staff set up a hot dog stand (this is at 8am btw). I remember hobbling past the fitness center tables (I had hurt my foot somehow and was thus limping like Quasimoto). I was carrying a tote bag filled with all the pens and clips and goodies (but I was carrying it like Tinky Winky carrys his Magic Bag) and now I'm clutching a hot dog smothered with mustard and relish.

Wisely, they didn't offer to calulate my BMI.

One of the skinny anorexic bitches made a move to call me over, when her co-worker lightly touched her elbow and gave the skinny one that "just let this one go by" look. I wasn't hurt or mad, I gotta admit, after 12 hours of work and then a 90 minute meeting, I looked like one fat piece of Hell at that point.