Work Highlights of the Week...

1. Black, gangrenous toe. Ahhhh, don't you just love the smell of rotting flesh in the wee hours of the morn. Kind of smelled like really, really bad onions.

2. Convinced the new grad that always avoids taking a new admission on nights to take an admit that I was going to originally take (and she had avoided). I did have a legitimate excuse to pass it off, of course. When the ER called up with report, I had just found that one of my patients had a funky irregular, irregular heart beat that wasn't there on admission and my spanish-speaking guy (with his newly amputated gangrenous toe (see above)) was having pain and nausea issues. (I'm usually the only one on nights who speaks more than a few words of Spanish. Instead of being pulled away from my work to help translate other nurses' patients, I just started assigning myself to those patients. This meant running the whole length of our large unit last night...good exercise)

3. History of panic attacks, anxiety, and depression all in one...mixed in with pain, pneumonia, and chronic respiratory problems. Ativan, supplemental oxygen, and respiratory therapists are my friends. In general, please don't smoke. But if on top of it, you have a history of all of those psychological issues...really, really, really don't smoke. The nicotine may seem to help calm you down in the short term (perhaps). However, once you develop chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma, and/or other respiratory issues, the anxiety and panic attacks will come back ten-fold when you can't BREATHE anymore--then making it even harder to breathe. Okay, I'm done with that rant. (*sound of Rachel stepping down from her soap box*)

3. The most friendly, passive paranoid schizophrenic ever who constantly prays to Jehovah and tells Jehohvah how kind and wonderful every person is that comes in to help him. Everytime someone walked out of the room after talking to him, I'd hear from the nurses' station a loud: "I love you!"

5. Vanilla Extract alchoholic

6. And since I always leave the hospital thinking "gee, I sure didn't get to see enough excrement today", I was of course thrilled to come home to the enchanting aroma of fresh dog droppings today. Thanks, Oscar.

Home Improvement Project #1

Our marriage has successfully survived our first home improvement project. We painted one whole room! One room may not seem like a big deal to some, but our task included painting over a very bright, bold purple. It's bothered me since day one, but I obviously didn't let it keep us from buying the place. Somewhere between Home Depot and home, we also worked up the motivation to strip the baseboards in the room too.

Backing up....the previous owners did a horrendous job at painting in at least three major rooms...and in very bold colors. Two out of three of the rooms, at least the color choice is fine. The painting job included streaks that still showed the color underneath, splatters onto baseboards, moldings, and ceiling, painted outlet covers and outlet receptacles (some had been removed and some had not...) and slightly painted vent covers. And then...they painted the baseboards white in the bedroom. However, like the rest of their painting jobs, they just kind of quickly slopped on the color, leaving it covering them completely in some parts, completely ignoring other parts, and streaking some white across the rest. Our only logical explanation is that they let their 9-year old son do the painting as part of a Boy Scout badge or something. It bothered (at least me) enough that we tried our hand at stripping the paint off the baseboards. We were successful...several coats of paint/stain stripper, a couple pieces of sand paper worked to shreds, and hours later...we were triumphant! And two coats of primer, one coat of top coat, some touch ups, an uptight wife, and a day and a half later...we have a newly painted bedroom. It's definitely a much more soothing color..."Silent Tide". Ahhhhhh.....

In conclusion...painting is a big pain in the patootie.

Back from Beer Camp

A very small part of my psyche is bummin' because I can't claim to be a self-taught brewer any more, but the rest of me is pretty stoked about beer school. Being a course geared towards professional brewers with sufficient practical experience but scattered theoretical knowledge, a fair amount of the material was review for me. The rest of it did a good job of filling my knowledge gaps concerning things that most homebrewers don't bother with, either because of scale (using pumps to move vast quantities of liquid) or money (no fancy lab equipment to analyze yeast health). Lectures on the brewing process were nicely punctuated with subjects like equipment design, quality assurance, packaging, draft systems and sensory analysis. Yeah, I know what you're thinking about "sensory analysis." I'll have you know that if my taste buds were more sophisticated (like Rachel's), I'd have had to sample some pretty nasty stuff in the name of science. Thankfully, my taste buds aren't very sophisticated and most of it tasted pretty much like beer to me :).

The Siebel Institute, where I took my class, also offers a twelve-week diploma course that includes practical brewery work and classes in Germany. The long session would certainly be more intensive (I did feel like my teachers were blowing by some interesting material due to time constraints), but the short course did a good job of laying out the groundwork for things that I can study independently. Planting the seed, if you will. Sara, I may need to steal my fancy brewing book back from you to check a few specifics - I have a newfound interest in yeast metabolism, among other things *pushes glasses up nose and makes a nasal sound*.

This is getting long, but I've gotta say that the other students in my course were really cool. They came from all over the country, plus Brazil, and most of them were usually inclined to go out after school and have a good time. Chicago has some great bars, especially if you're into Belgian beers. John and Dan, thanks for letting me crash in your living rooms! The $90/night that other students were paying to stay at a @$%# Days Inn seemed out of control to me. Of course, a lot of them were being reimbursed by their breweries. I didn't even ask, because I already knew the answer.

The greatest value that I'll get out of the class, by far, hasn't happened yet. If I decide to open my own brewery someday, the resources that the class provided will be indespensible in designing the place and knowing what to talk about when dealing with manufacturers and consultants. Yay for beer school!

Windy

Raking dry leaves to the curb on a day when there are 40mph gusts of wind is just plain pointless and silly. However, that didn't stop me from trying.