A new resident, a bit younger than most residents, was a biker and bike mechanic until he began getting into a series of wrecks, due to, he says, not recuperating from the previous accidents. He has a long white beard and sometimes we talk about beards and other times we talk about motorcycles, which I know as much as anyone who's read Sonny ( Read more... )

There's a new resident, we'll call him JJ. JJ is a bit younger than most the residents by a good 10 years. He wears pajamas everywhere and slicks back his gray hair. He sleeps on the floor on a pile of blankets. The Nurse told me it's because he is always falling out of the bed and injuring himself. He sits on his blanket pile and listens to ( Read more... )

The state inspector from "life-safety" who was about to shut the building down because of various violations, with whom we are now making an attempt to comply to the regulations which the administrator claims to have know nothing about, now rejected our plan of correction in lieu of rule he himself knew nothing about. So, my job yesterday was to ( Read more... )

I am finding it annoying to write these stories in here and then find myself retelling them in-person(or phone)to many of the same people who read this. So I'm going on hiatus until I get over that.

You know you've been working somewhere for too long when this subject comes up again ( Read more... )

There's a room on the top floor that is referred to as "The File Room". Whenever the nurses or management or whoever has filled up a box with "files" someone takes the box up to the file room and "files" it, which quite literally consists of tossing the box into a huge pile of boxes piled up like a bonfire. It's a regular size room they quit ( Read more... )

Today I cleaned the leaves from out of the swimming pool which had been amassing for a few weeks. When I was finished, a female resident stopped me in the hall telling me how glad she was that I had cleaned the pool. She said at night when she looks out the windows, the lights from inside the pool make the large clusters of leaves look like dead ( Read more... )

I got to watch some TV again at work while painting a residents' room. I watched Jeopardy and then Teen Jeopardy. I think Jeopardy is getting dumbed-down. I don't usually get so many right answers. I guess dumbed-down to people as smart as myself.

There is a printed out list tacked up to the bulletin boards in the elevators. The list contains the names of every resident who died at the facility in the past year. There have been 25 residents die; half of which died after they were taken to the hospital. The other half died at the facility. The number of deaths within the past year has ( Read more... )

In the dining room there is a sign that announces what will be available for the next meal. Yesterday morning it announced "Don nots" for breakfast. Of course I assumed they meant donuts. I went into the kitchen where there were a couple boxes of Sam's Club donuts. I asked a Mexican lady if these were the donuts because I wanted to see if she ( Read more... )