We had to fire the contractor at the new house because he stopped coming to work on the new house. It's a little ugly. We maybe have a new guy on board, but he says he needs almost a month to navigate the construction loan bureaucracy, and that the house likely won't be ready till late summer. In the meantime, we have a mail-order orchard and a ( Read more... )

I had short but interesting conversation with my therapist today about the messy intersections of socioeconomic status, dis/ability, Maslow's hierarchy, and popular literature on mindfulness & meditation. I think we both finished the session with some things to think about.

We're working on buying a small property -- the footprint of the house is perhaps 600 square feet, the lot perhaps 6000 -- on the edge of downtown Conshohocken. I would have meaningful amenities in walking distance, surrounded by neighborhoods through which I'd actually /want/ to walk: A coffee shop, with an owner/barista who could tell me where to ( Read more... )

House buying is complicated. Trying not to get too much of my sense of self get caught up in it.

There should be a word for that complicated feeling you have when a community you're not really a part of anymore is collectively mourning the death of a person you never particularly cared for.

My favorite bit of graffiti keeps coming to mind: I have forgotten what I came for, and I am getting old.

Work is so satisfying, and so draining. It's hard to quantify what I do. I do monitor lab values and vital signs, and dispense drugs, and try to keep my patients far away from the life-and-death situations most people imagine when they think of nursing, but that's the least of it. I also confiscate bananas and dole out prune juice. I talk about ( Read more... )

Before I leave a patient's bedside, I am required to ask, "Is there anything else I can do for you?" Approximately 5% state yes, they would like a drink. In general, middle aged women of all races want red wine, as do most white women with dementia. Very carefully groomed people with severe dementia sometimes want martinis, but typically forget ( Read more... )

This is the sort of day where I'd love to throw open all the windows and blast some nineties music and spend the next two days cleaning the hell out of the house. Except bedbugs (still, again, whatever) mean the joint is littered with plastic bags that can't be put away, and all those old CDs are in a plastic box in the basement somewhere, and the ( Read more... )

The past few weeks, D and I have been working really hard on fiscal responsibility. For our sixth anniversary, we'll get to take a nice, if short, vacation together for the first time ever. If we stick to the plan, we'll have credit debt paid off in a few weeks, savings sufficient for a house down payment AND a respectable rainy day fund in 15 ( Read more... )

The past few weeks, I've gotten to work alongside an older male nurse for whom I have a lot of respect. He's nearing retirement age, and I totally want to be just like him when I grow up. Staffing being what it is, we're in each other's rooms throughout the evening, often handing off patients mid-shift ( Read more... )