Archive for August, 2006

August 29, 2006 | Filed under: loves, misadventures

You can also click here to play in Quicktime in a new window, if you are so inclined.

And if you are Dawn, you can click here for the Flash version hosted by blip.tv!

I never was a pot-girl. I always preferred booze. Still do. Cocktails have cool names and come in pretty colors and sometimes have little paper umbrellas in them! Ever see a paper umbrella sticking out of a spliff? I doubt it. I’ve never smoked tobacco, either, so back in the day (aka “College: The Early Years”) it just made logical sense to smoke nothing at all, so I never picked it up. I have always considered myself lucky to have a non-addictive personality.

Some aren’t so lucky.

sidenote: looking back at this footage (taken in a hotel room last week in Hudson, NY on our Great American House Search From Hell) I’m amazed that I had no reaction to My fiancee’s decision to reach into the toilet and splash around. No squealing, no “eeeeeeeeeewww!!!”, no nothing. Should I be concerned that I am so accepting of his personality quirks that his reaching into a hotel toilet seems to be such a typical Brian manoeuvre that I don’t give it a second thought? Is that gross, or is that love?

August 25, 2006 | Filed under: country mouse, loves, misadventures

Click the picture of my would-be backyard or here for Quicktime–works best with Firefox!

You can also watch in Flash here at blip.tv!

If owning a home is the American Dream then looking for a home must surely be the American Nightmare. Great house? Bad street. Bad house? Great land! Nice yard but no porch. Big lot but no fence. Good house, good land, but no town. We’ve seen all manner of house/land/town combinations and we’ve only been at this for two weeks. We’re exhausted and drained, our heads hurt and we squabble constantly. He wants acres and I want to be able to walk to get a cup of coffee and a newspaper. We still have a lot to figure out.That lovely parcel of land you see in that photo was nestled by a small creek in Catskill, NY. The drawback? The house was a total re-do, and not just the insanely painted rooms and scuzzy 70’s carpet, either! Both the bathroom and kitchen would need to be completely replaced, the second floor wasn’t heated properly, the pink insulation had been installed upside-down and there was a half-assed joist in the basement that may or may not have been holding up the whole house. To top it all off Brian noticed a man surveying the creek as our realtor gave us the grand tour. Apparantly he was gathering information for the condos that were being built there. So much for that. The other House of Horrors featured in the video had more skylights than you could possibly want–it was almost as if the whole roof was transparent. In August? Oppressively hot. It was like being in a big glass pizza oven with bad carpeting.

There was one house in Hudson that was very nearly perfect and I fell madly in love with it even though I did not fall madly in love with Hudson: a cute little colonial with perfect wide-slat wood floors, vintage light fixtures, a nice back yard and a barn.

Of course it’s on a truck route.

“busted frog”
.22
Courtesy of the Podsafe Music Network

August 16, 2006 | Filed under: hello, nurse!, misadventures

click here or above for Quicktime
or here for Flash at BlipTV

If this one is a little dark because it was, in fact, filmed in the dark. I lightened it up a little, but it’s terribly grainy. Sorry. This one’s more for the audio, anyhow.

It has been sheer hell at work these last several days. For whatever reason, an excess of mid-winter nookie, the astonishing changes in barometric pressure after that thunderstorm this past week, the full moon, and who knows why else, there has been a sharp increase in the baby-havin’ at my hospital. That would be fine except that there has been an accompanying sharp decrease in nursing staff. Why? It’s Summer. Those who hold a grudge about not getting any Summer Vacation have chosen to abuse their sick time privilages. Folks are cancelling their overtime left and right, and one of our RN’s got exposed to the chicken pox and has been determined to be non-immune and has been quarantined. For two weeks. Did administration cover her shifts? No. So on a floor that should be staffed by eight nurses at all times (and really, we’re lucky to ever have six anyway) we’ve been running with four or five. It’s stressful. Actually, it’s damn near impossible, but somehow we pull it off. I’ve decided to attempt to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem by forcing myself to show up to work instead of calling out sick because I’m so burnt out…I hate to say it but it’s not an easy decision to make.

On the night I filmed this, the five of us managed to help get everyone delivered as safely as possible given the circumstances (every day this week I’ve come home and kissed my nursing license because no patient has yet suffered from our lack of staff thus lessening my chances of being sued and keeping my malpractice insurance costs nice and low) and the Charge Nurse managed for us all to get breaks–no small feat.

But with a full house, there’s noplace to take a break except the nurses’ lounge which is across from all the delivery rooms. Not exactly a quiet place to rest, as you’ll see. How can you rest with a patient screaming “IhateyouIhateyouIhateyougetitoutgetitoutgetitoutwhywon’tyouHELPME???!!!” over and over combined with the cheerless cheering to “push!” by that night’s less-than-stellar resident team?

Please know that although the MD comes into the hall screaming for a nurse to come in the room that I didn’t rush to my feet because I knew there already WAS a nurse in the room and that for some reason although there were THREE residents in the patient’s room and only ONE nurse those bozos STILL expected THE NURSE to page the attending.

I really don’t like that MD team. They just don’t mesh well, they don’t know how to talk to patients (”No yelling! No yelling!” are you kidding me??) and they treat us like poo.

August 12, 2006 | Filed under: loves, misadventures

click the picture or here for Quicktime or here for a Flash version over at blip.tv!

Getting married. Talking about getting married necessitates talk of having children. Talking about having children causes me to reflect on how I have raised my pets; which then, in turn, makes me think about reasons I should NOT have children.

Yes, this video may seem a little long at 2:25″, but in reality, getting my scaredy-dog to walk passed the cat lying on the floor took ten whole minutes. Ten.

Ten.

“Car Ride”
Julia Nonet’s Woodwind String Orchestra
Marty Buttwinick
Podsafe Music Network

August 6, 2006 | Filed under: wedding bells, un-vlogged

I’m just flabbergasted by this.

I actually get a kick out of Weddingbee nyc. I like that they’re in New York and they have some terrific links to neat DIY projects and nifty cost-cutting ideas that I’m way too lazy to scout out myself. And I like that it’s a friendly blog managed by real live ladies with no corporate agenda. We’ve all heard stories about well-intentioned, sensible women who start planning weddings and suddenly careen over the deep-end, but o’ sweet cheeses! Trotting down to the post office to request that they cancel each and every stamp on each and every wedding invitation is a whole new brand of Super-Crazy. All for the trivial fear of…dare I even say it…smudging!?

(okay…I also understand that there is widespread worry regarding those chubby invitations getting caught in USPS sorting machinery…well, between the invitation, the RSVP card, the tissue paper between the invitation and the RSVP card, the SASE, the map, the local hotel list, the tissue paper between the map and the hotel list, the dried rose petals and the velvet bow tying it all together there is reason to worry! How about just an invitation and an RSVP? Mail the rest separately! Sure, it would cost more in postage, but at least you could sleep at night knowing your expensive envelopes wouldn’t get disembowled! The tissue paper is a real stumper for me. Is it in poor taste to have all those cards rubbing up against each other freely like they’re in some kind of stationery orgy? And really, what’s with the bow? Isn’t holding all the papers together why envelopes were invented in the first place? I just don’t get it.)

How does this happen? How have we created a whole generation of women hell-bent on this kind of perfection? It’s an invitation! An envelope! I realize that it may be a relatively expensive envelope, as far as envelopes go, but hey–no one held a pistol to your head and forced you to buy them. It’s not like the recipient is going to reach into their mailbox, look at the machine-canceled stamp and shudder

“Oh, God, no. They seemed like such nice people, it’s too bad I can’t attend their wedding. This invite is just too smudgy.”

I guess what I’m really asking is not “How does this happen” but rather, “Will it happen to me?”