group therapy

I finally had the pleasure of spending an evening with my fellow triage nurses on Monday at Melt (which has an all night happy hour most of the week) as a kind of goodbye/group bitch session. The evening was both enlightening and comforting, but in no manner does it bode well for the longevity of the staff.

One of my biggest problems with my job (of which there are many) is that there is little actual interaction with my peers. I spend, on the whole of the course of the day, less than 5 minutes of face time with either of them en total. It creates a rather odd work environment, where your colleagues are largely strangers to you. I am not stating that 'work' isn't the dominant priority of time spent in employ, but there has to be some socialization as well. I know a lot of rather arcane information about my pod mates, but did not know until I planned this evening that my co-worker/functional supervisor was a vegetarian. I, in point of fact, could not tell you she has any siblings, her likes in any form of entertainment, where she heralds from, nor her age.

So, it came as somewhat of a major surprise that she is also unhappy with working triage. This is something I only found out after putting in my notice and, instead of a 'sorry to see you go' she responded instead with something to the effect of 'Good for you! I am happy you made it out!' The newest triage nurse (we can call her S and the other one C) said much the same. In our HH meeting I found out that C isnt even sure she wants to be in health care much longer, let alone in triage. She does not sleep well at night. She hates the phone work and finds it as relentless as I do. She wants nothing more than to work part time. S is new to triage and came from a rather haphazard clinic, but she too is already wearing down and also wants to just do the job part time. All mirrored the same complaints I have detailed over the past few months. As enlightening, is that they too were promised something more with the position and were likewise duped by the beguiling story of multiple job duties and working closely with the doctors. Now both are struck with the same disappointment when the job failed to provide any differentiation is task. The term 'groundhog's day' was used by all involved to describe the unerring uniformity of each and every day.

So, while not a heartening overall picture of the profession of triage nurse, it is also nice to know that it isn't 'me' per se, but rather the job itself. Maybe they say misery loves company for that reason alone. It is nice to not think of yourself as a failure. Its the job that is a failure. And that, at least, is something to hang your hat upon.

I wish them the best and everyone in the clinic. I don't think many will last very long.

Tomorrow is my last day!

1 week and Christmas

The long weekend has come and gone and, as usual, I find myself wondering where on earth it went. I remember leaving work an hour early on Thursday at the behest of my supervisor, a few family gatherings, a movie, and now it is Sunday and quite dark. I think a major holiday came and went as well. Why can't Monday-Friday feel that way?

Speaking of Monday-Friday, this will be the last such that I spend doing triage (maybe not ever, but hopefully for the foreseeable future). Tia asked me today if I was excited about the new job. I was not really sure how to answer that. I am happy to be leaving a job that I do not like and that does not agree with me, but I cannot say I am excited for what is to come. I am more cautiously hopeful. I am no grizzled health care veteran, but I do know that what is promised is often not delivered. Even if it is delivered as promised, it has a tendency to change rapidly into something else entirely.

My old supervisor (lets call her J) worked in the IV dept for many years. Specifically in pediatrics. Anyway, the supervisor down at MP ran afoul of some of the higher ups and they needed a new supervisor. With some measure of reservation, she decided to do it. She then found she quite enjoyed it. Within a year she was replaced as the supervisor down there, and her hours and pay cut. Within another year she was squeezed out of a job. Now I am not going to suggest that J was the world's greatest supervisor or employee, but she was not nearly the worst in either regard. So, effectively J left something she professed to really enjoy to do something to help the department, ended up really liking it, and then ended up out of work entirely.

So, to get back to the point, am I excited to be the guinea pig for a newly created position after some significant retooling in the department? Well, not entirely. Will I be more excited to go to work next Monday than this coming one? Absolutely. And that, at least, is a step in the right direction (though truth be told I would much rather be a 'kept' man and just stay home and go back to school.........working on it :)

As to the above, it may be creeping closer to reality (not the staying home entirely aspect, but perhaps something less than full time plus school) as Tia continues to garner accolades and, it appears, significant interest from others to advance her position. The nature of how exactly she might get the promotion or even what that would exactly entail in regards to remuneration is murky, but it appears she is doing quite fabulously and they will be rewarding her. I am of course, thrilled for her. I am not ashamed to admit that she is a much much better employee than I am, with more dedication, drive, and general ability than I seem to be able to muster. It of course creates no minor conundrum: her career trajectory vs. my general disinclination to stay in rainy Portland. But that is nothing to directly be considered at the moment.

At the moment, we must consider another move it appears. A local one however. We have mutually determined that the ENSO is not what we had hoped it would be. The staff are gracious and accommodating and the location is superb, but the apartment building itself leaves much to be desired. As I have detailed before, it is largely about expectation vs. reality. We expect that the trash chute will not be clogged (now multiple occasions), that the facilities will be clean and in working order, and that we won't have water in our apartment windows nor share music or conversation through our walls with our neighbors. These are expectations that we would not necessarily have were we not paying a premium price. What makes it even less tolerable is that there are SO many other places about. So, the search will begin in short order. More to come as always.

Good news/Bad news for Portland (mostly bad)

Interesting write up in the Tribune about the rather precarious economic situation facing the Portland metro area. The highlights (lowlights?) of which were the following:
- regional wages are 4 percent below the national average
- the cost of living in the Portland region is higher than 84 percent of all other metropolitan areas
- Portland housing costs are 31.6 percent higher than the metropolitan average
- health care costs were 10.9 percent above average
- groceries were 4.9 percent higher than average

On the upside:
- the cost of utilities was the only major expense category where Portland was lower than the average U.S. city.
- Portland is still the least expensive major city on the West Coast (12.6% less than Seattle, though their wages are 17% higher)

Throw those numbers in a bowl and mix liberally with some of the highest unemployment in the country and you have a mess. But not to worry, the article does state that our leadership has a plan: community leaders agreed that creating more good-paying jobs is the key to making Portland more affordable to more people. Or perhaps it is just a general statement of the obvious like saying to a bunch of starving people "what we need here is some food, preferably good food." With no real way to make that happen, it is more like a wish or a dream than a plan per se.

It certainly will be interesting to see how it goes. Hopefully well, but Portland will be competing for those good-paying jobs with a lot of other cities. Well, at least we can drink to drown our sorrows........uh, "A heavy drinker might want to move from Oregon, where hard liquor is taxed at the rate of nearly $21 a gallon, to Maryland or Washington, D.C., which have the country's lowest liquor taxes, $1.50 a gallon." Damn! Foiled again!

stuck in my craw

I was getting the mail the other day and I got something from the University of Rochester where I most recently matriculated (I am guessing I move around too often for the people from Florida Atlantic to locate me). It touted some new incoming dean tangentially related to the nursing program, included pictures of students doing something nurse-like, and had some feature about some new and interesting (and likely expensive) piece of equipment that will help students further nursing in some nebulous manner. It also had an envelope and a plea for me to send them money. One would perhaps rightly assume that that was the point of the venture all along, with the articles serving as window dressing.

I do not now, nor shall I ever, understand this practice. A school, in my eye, is nothing if not a business. They are not performing acts of random kindness by educating the huddled masses as great personal expense. They are charging a fee for a service. In point of fact, they are charging many fees for many services. You are likely going to need to pay for books, lab fees, a parking permit, fees for transcripts, food cards, and on and on. Yet, they have the temerity to ask for more based on some warm fuzzy experience I had there.

I like eating out. Its one of my favorite things to do. Tia and I particularly like a restaurant called Belly, who serves incredible hamburgers, the likes of which I have rarely seen duplicated. When we go there, we have a good time, we order, eat, and then pay. They contact us if they are running specials or have a new menu item to tout. They do not, however, send us pictures of us eating in the restaurant, reminding us of our shared times there and then ask for additional monies because, 'my wasn't that quite fabulous!' In fact, I know of no business that operates like that and if they did, it is certainly a place you would not frequent again.

What makes me angrier about it is two, I think, very salient points:

1. I am still paying for school. In fact, I shall for some time and at personal sacrifice be paying for a number of years. As many as 20 are allotted me such is the magnitude of the sum I already paid for the privilege of learning there.

2. The endowment for the school is in excess of $1.3 billion dollars of approximately $380,000 per student. There are other schools that have more, but not many. By any accounts it is in the top 30 or so in the country in that regard. They could offer education for free......though of course they do not.

Ultimately, I just don't get it. Maybe I am missing some larger point, but mostly I just wonder incredulously how in the hell it works. Cause that is one sweet business model!

I haven't had a good bitch session in awhile. Thanks for indulging.

Second hand jobs

So, as promised, I will spend this post looking forward and not back. Although I did neglect to mention one especially important nugget of gossip/insider information about my current digs. Upon telling my functional supervisor/fellow triage nurse about my plans of imminent departure, she both congratulated me, wished me well, and said in no uncertain terms that she would be following shortly thereafter! Which will mean that the only RN remaining, until they replace me that is, will have exactly 2 months experience. I can only imagine what a flippin nightmare it would have been to hear my supervisor's news and then have to continue working there.

The new job is, well, somewhat like my old job..........only different. They have undergone a radical transformation in the IV dept over the past couple months. They had an outside group come in (much like the Bobs above from Office Space) and evaluate and make recommendations. A lot of meetings, consultations, and general realignment was discussed which ultimately led to EVERYONE in the department having to reapply for their positions and then go through a 4 question, 15 minute, interview in front of a panel that included two managers from the department and two people who were outside of it and could, presumably, be unbiased. They all scored the answers on the 4 questions and then totaled those scores and used that along with some multiplication of absentee rate and ranked everyone top to bottom. But, that is when it gets a little, well, iffy.

So, lets say that Position A has two openings and Position B has two openings and 4 people are applying, lets call them 1,2,3,4. People 1,2,3 all apply unknown to one another for Position A and Person 4 applies for position B. They do the interview and factor absentee rate and rank them exactly as they are numbered. So, in this scenario Position A is filled by people 1 and 2. Position B is filled with Person 4 and, presumably, person 3 would be offered the 2nd opening in Position B, right? Wrong. The way it actually worked was that Person 3 would get no job at all. The remaining position would be opened up to anyone who applied and didn't get their preferred position.

The process allowed for a couple things to happen, likely both intended. One, use collected data to make staffing changes based on actual usage and not on the desires of other departments to have people constantly at the ready just in case. And two, weed out some staff whom either were generally not reliable/effective or they just didn't want around anymore without needing to go through the often lengthy and complicated process of firing someone.

As for me, I did not apply to the initial wave of offerings as I did not wish to, in any way, take someone's job. I had/have a job and they would ostensibly no longer. I may lack huge reserves of empathy, but I have enough not to be a total asshole. Plus, these were people I at least peripherally knew, if not knew well. However, once the first wave of interviews were done and positions were granted, there were actually some jobs still available. At the time, I did not understand the process. I honestly did not even know that they were effectively downsizing, thinking they were more or less reassigning roles. I clearly did not read the fine print (or between the lines), and I applied.

The jobs were posted late Wednesday, I spoke to my old manager that evening and applied the following morning. I was interviewed by her and another gentleman, who was not part of our department but did the other interviews, that afternoon. I was offered the job that evening. Accepted Friday morning and turned in my notice late that same afternoon. I found out that same day that one of my closest friends in the department did not fare so well, despite 7+ years in the department. She was rejected from a total of 4 positions she applied for (2 in the first wave and 2 in the second), though none were thankfully the one I accepted. I do not know the fate as yet of many of my former MP co-workers. I certainly hope they found something.

The specifics on the new job are not much different than what I did before, and wildly different. I will be the EM clinic. Just me. I will have help if I need it and someone will cover my breaks, but otherwise it will be just me and the patients. It is M-F and the hours are very similar to the ones I work currently, though I will now be a 40hr/wk employee. I will also get inpatient pay again, which is about a 10% pay bump. Strictly financially, it should be about about $9K annually (before taxes of course). But, honestly, I would have taken the job for the same pay I have now or even somewhat less.

The hope is that this works out. I will have the opportunity to do the kind of patient focused clinic care I love, though I will be going it solo which is a little bit nerve-wracking on a few levels. I will be able to keep up IV skills and do some PICC work as well on the floor should things quiet down in the clinic for stretches. I will be, in many respects, my own boss provided I don't rock the ship too abruptly. But, perhaps as importantly, I will not be sitting on the phone 95% of my work day. That alone is cause of some minor celebration!

Time for some gym work. Got another, albeit shortened, week staring me dead in the face. However much I am not looking forward to it, there is a lot less dread when you know the end is nigh. No matter how tough a day is, you can check it off the the calendar as one less you have to go through instead of just one less day until the weekend. Let the countdown begin!

My how things change (I quit!)

Inertia is a difficult thing to overcome. It can feel like pushing a loaded down wheelbarrow up a steep incline. The thing is, once you hit the peak, things move rapidly. In this vein, I applied for, was interviewed for, was offered and accepted, a new job in the span of 48 hours. After dozens of resumes and applications were sent out to disparate places with frequently no response, it happened just that fast. Why? Well........

If you have been reading this blog at all you know I hate my job. I have had many jobs in my life and I can certainly not attest to loving any of them. They are now, and will likely always be, necessary evils. Things I do because I need to eat, pay rent, and so on. I know this about myself. I work to live, not remotely the other way around. I would also be more than willing to lower my standard of living if it meant a corresponding reduction in my need to work. But I digress.

That said, I don't frequently hate what I do. Would I rather be reading a book on a beach with a tropical drink firmly ensconced in my right paw? You betcha. Would I also rather be cleaning the house, grocery shopping, or wiping down the interior of the car? Also strongly on the side of affirmative. However, are the health care jobs I have held, present company included, better than, say, working at a care facility bathing the dementia patients who no longer have control over their bowels or emotional states? Abso-freakin-lutely! There are many darker holes to climb out of to be sure. I sat in a climate controlled office bathed in fluorescent lighting with a headset atop my cranium with eyes forward perpetually affixed to the CRT in front of me. Many a worse fate has befallen many a better person than I.

I tried to figure out why I hated what I did. Why it made me feel the way it did. I tried to figure it out with a counselor, with Tia, with friends and family and on the pages of this blog. I can say without reservation that it had nothing to do with the people I worked with. The only one I did not care for left (and made many people in the clinic quite happy) and of those that remained I can say, at worst, I was ambivalent about them and, at best, I considered them friends that I would be more than happy to see outside of the confines of our clinic. They were a stellar group of generally upbeat individuals doing work that, from the doctors on down, paid them less than they were worthy of. I will truly miss most of them and hope to stay in touch.

I can also not largely say it was the patients who call. For the most part they are gracious and eager to hear anything that might make them feel better. They are calling at a low point physically and, like all of us when we are feeling that way, just looking to feel better. Sure, there are confrontations, the avidly over-calling anxiety junkies, and the straight up pill poppers looking to dull the pain of living away.

What I like to think is that it is the relentlessness of it all. The fact that around every corner and over ever hill is another expanse the likes of which you just traversed, like an MC Escher painting. Or perhaps it more like the sublimely funny Bill Murray movie Groundhog's Day, where the same day keeps happening again and again. There was never a beginning and and end to anything other than what the clock and calendar displayed. Mondays are the same as Fridays and July is the same as December because the calls never stop and they often don't even vary in content.

I also blame the chasm between expectation and reality. I was told, and naively believed, that I would have the opportunity to work closely with the doctors and, in some sense that was true, but mainly it was misrepresented. I exchanged mostly emails (TENCs) with them about patients and frequently didn't see or talk to some of them for days at a time other than good morning and good night (I barely exchanged words with the other nurses there because we rarely saw one another during the day as well). They were just as busy seeing live patients and, when I told one doc I was leaving, Daniela, and she said that she understood re: the learning issue as the clinic is a poor place for even doctors doing their rotations to learn. There just isn't the time available to do so because the doctors themselves are always running to play catch-up.

All the metrics are set up for one thing and one thing only: make primary care, or health care in general, profitable. The only way to accomplish that is volume. We were recently told that we need to make hospital follow up calls and given a hand out about it with some rather elegant doublespeak about caring for patients and the rate of illness that occurs after hospitalization. However, what stuck out the most prominently was a graph on the last page that assigned a dollar figure to each of these hypothetical patients and how much money that those follow ups to their primary care doctors might generate. Cold reality on display.

So, will I miss it? Well, in some ways I think I will. I will write more about the new job in the next post, but lets just say it will be far less peopled. I will miss working with a team, though we often didn't work on the same projects. I will the banter, the laughs at our own and at the patients expense, and I will miss the common bond of fighting a battle you can never win. But will I miss the job? Well, if you think that you haven't been paying attention the last few months.

new opportunity?!?!?

More to come........tomorrow I hope.

Midweek

Today has been quite interesting.

- First, the magical imitrex that smothered my migraine (quite literally as it constricts blood vessels in your brain) also had me buzzing on what seemed to be a caffeinated high. Ended up not falling asleep until better than 3:30 in the morning. Accumulated only a handful of hours even then. Thankfully today was my half day and I switched from AM to PM and was able to go to my appointment and make it in to work. The latter was funny because NO ONE thought I was coming in evidently even though I called saying I was in the message. Not that it matters. My job is definitely the more the merrier. Helps you spread the shit around a little thinner and that is good for all involved.

- My counseling session was actually quite good and more productive than most have been. That said, it is 3 and done there and, ultimately, I am left wondering if it was really helpful. I liked her as a person, but felt the sessions lacked much direction and wanted for insight. I didn't expect a tidy summation, but I would have at least liked to see one or two plot points tied up. I basically learned that it can be helpful and I think I will pursue it anew in the coming year with new insurance (and probably new hoops to leap through).

- As an odd aside, I heard from my former manager, and they apparently are opening up a few positions after a major shakeup which left more than a few people out in the cold. It was indicated that I ought to apply for one closing tomorrow. I think I will. No guarantees, but worth looking into. More to come as events warrant.

- Tried out Little Big Burger in the Pearl today and it was quite good, if not exactly great. On par price wise with 5 Guys burgers, but I have to give the edge to the latter. They do however have some amazing truffled fries for the same price as you would find for a large fry at McDonalds and these win hands down! So good. Anyway, if you have $10 and are in the area, not a bad place to spend it (or the sushi place next door or Roccos.....come to think of it there are a lot of cheap eats around there).

- Heard from our place, ENSO, regarding our concerns. They actually addressed them very thoroughly in a letter. Much appreciated. Don't know if that will warrant us staying long term, but I applaud their professionalism.

- Tia found a possible alternative place that is nearby and significantly cheaper. We are going to take a peek at it in a week or so. God help us if we have to move yet again. I can at least promise it won't be with Thunder Movers.

Migraines. juxtipositions, and dilemmas

I ended up coming home early today due to a migraine. It was only an hour early, because there is always too much to do and the third nurse has her half day today, but early nonetheless. We had finally hit a point of relative calm (generally around 4, though not always on Friday) and that along with the relative failure of the over the counter ibuprofen I had taken (which was no longer even remotely mastering even the most peripheral of symptoms) I finally ran up a white flag and surrendered. This is not meant to draw sympathy, I hate my job and would have happily left for a hangnail were it not for the regard I hold my coworkers in, nor to lionize my efforts under duress (though it does stress my already limited reserves of empathy), but rather to emphasize that today kind of blew. Thankfully my doctor, who I will truly miss when I switch to Kaiser in a few weeks, called me back and provided some imitrex. That plus a nap equals almost good as new. As good as I have felt recently anyway.

Part of the fun of migraines for me is the mild nausea (for some it is much worse however). Hence, lunch consisted of 2 pretzels, a diet Dr. Pepper and 3 bites of a sandwich. Needless to say, I was a little hungry when I awoke. Having little inclination to cook, I heated up some creamed chipped beef and made some toast and called it good all while reading about a restaurant called Alinea in Chicago which has some of the most marvelous looking food I have ever seen. I don't know if you would eat it or just stare at it (though for $195 per person you might as well eat it). Evidently dinner consists of 23 courses of small bites and crazy combinations. Check it out, the pics are incredible looking: Alinea. This of course made my already minimally appealing dinner look as appetizing at it already sounds. Bummer.

I am unfortunately not dealing well with the winter doldrums again this year. For some reason I always think it will be better than the last year, and then it never is. I am trying though, but it feels almost physical in how it affects me. I just feel, well, flat. Two dimensional. And it seems unfair or unrealistic (though it is completely fair and realistic because everyone else does it just fine.....or some semblance therein) to just move on about the day as though everything is hunky dory. I feel more badly for Tia than myself though. She has to deal with something she just doesn't really understand. Something that you can't see. Not only that, but she as to go through the motions with me even though she feels completely unaffected by it. And I don't blame her that. I mean, you put a band-aid on a cut, you take an aspirin (or more) for a headache, but what do you take for melancholy? It has to wear on her as it does me. And, unfortunately, life stops for no one and her job is already taxing and her family is having its own set of health troubles which she is trying to help with.

On top of it all, I keep tugging at her to move. I need it because I can't tolerate another winter here, but I know it is not something she wants to do. And from her side of things, I truly understand it. Here is her family, her friends, her career. The life she knows. There (wherever that may be) is a huge question mark. I feel like Monty Hall and I am asking her to trade in her prize money for whats behind door #3. Though even I don't know whats behind the door. I am more willing to do it, because I have much less to lose (though still a considerable sum as I value the people in my life here). I feel torn because, well, what if its a booby prize and we both ultimately lose? Or, what if it means that I am happy and then she falls into the hole I feel I am in?

On the other hand, you can't win anything without risking something. You certainly aren't going to go in a casino and be awarded money for just walking in the door, you have got to be willing to put your money in the machine and pull the handle. And there are risks to staying as well. I am already holding up about as well as a cardboard house in a rainstorm and the winter has just begun. The job market most places is bad, but here it is worse than average (45th out of the 50 states) and based on the applicants that are applying for jobs with Kaiser that Tia is seeing, they are literally higher people at 2 or 3 job classes below their level of expertise. People with Master's degrees and 10+ years of experience clamoring over entry level positions. So, using the gambling analogy, my options for finding a good job are about the same as taking a poker hand with a pair of 2s.

Ultimately it comes down to compromise and sacrifice and setting targets for those things. More to come as always.

over promise and under deliver

A successful business slogan I have always remembered is under promise and over deliver. The principle does not always work to be sure, but it largely does. When you exceed even modest expectations, people are almost always pleased. When you fail that, the outcome is reversed. I also believe in expectations being modulated to the environ. I do not expect that a McDonald's cheeseburger will be comparable to a burger at a chophouse nor do I expect even a new Kia to outperform a 5 year old Porshe. However, I do expect a McDonald's experience be consistent to other McDonald's experiences and a new Kia to compare to other new cars in its class and price range. According to people I have worked with and dealt with, even this puts me in a high needs class, seemingly because I expect some standards at all.

What does the preceding paragraph have to do with anything? Well, mainly it relates to our apartment. When we moved in, they over promised and they are certainly under delivering. This may not be a big deal, but for a 'luxury' apartment that is charging prices congruent with that moniker, it is highly disappointing. Since we have moved in the laundry list of complaints is as follows:
- The garage door keeps being repaired. At each repair, it gets noisier and noisier. It now has the distinctly displeasing sound of rending steel every time it opens. And it opens a LOT. And we are far too near it to ignore each and every opening.
- The gym is supposed to be stocked at all times with towels and cold drinks. It is a 50/50 proposition generally. Fine if that wasn't one of the sell points, but it was.
- The one garbage chute per floor works fine mostly, except when it is stuffed and blocked. Fun. But the big common problem is one recycle bin for everything but glass and one for glass that is emptied weekly. Tia and I used to fill one of those up ourselves at least monthly. Now you are talking about 30+ apartments and one bin. Which means recycling everywhere in a small room that gets cleaned out once a week.
- Leaky windows that, honestly, they continue to not address. I don't know what is being done behind the scenes, but the communication is poor. In the meantime there is no way there wont be mold issues in due time. This is in a number of apartments and appears to be structural.
- Supposed free internet that really only works about 20 feet from the hot spot.
- A big screen TV in the common room but only an antenna hooked to it so it gets 8 channels. Kind of like buying a sports car and then putting bike tires on it.
- No entrance from the lobby to the stairs, meaning you have to wait a long time for an elevator to take you up one floor. It is comical and everyone in the building is frustrated by it.
- A new front load washer/dryer that seems to never dry things and vaguely washes them.

I am sure there is more, but I mainly mean to make the point that a LOT of these things would not be problems except that we are paying a premium price for them. My expectation is that the price affords premium accouterments and that they be maintained. However, that is not happening. And, as our complaints dont seem to resonate, we are left contemplating other options that are altogether unappealing like moving yet again. Bah!

On other topics:
- It won't stop raining, and raining hard no less. Missing warm sun.......or either one of those things.
- Work is crazy busy. Even with 3 RNs running the phones it is a scramble to keep up with volumes. They also want to add more to our agenda. I am thinking that might be a while in the coming at this rate or something will fall off the table and be forgotten. Still nothing else in the pipeline.
- Going to a wedding reception today. My recommendation, just elope and have a party after. It is cheaper, more fun for all involved, and you can use your 'special day' money you would have spent on overpriced catering and attire to have a truly memorable honeymoon.
- I just read that the US govt spends more on defense than the NEXT 20 NATIONS COMBINED! Some estimates put it as higher than all other nations combined. And yet they dicker over pennies on tax breaks and the like. What the hell!?!?!
- Only three more weeks until the new year. Hopefully that means new opportunities too.

Time to get back to trying to do things. Hard to get motivated when it seems perpetually dim outside.

the weather for the next week.......color me unimpressed

	Today Mostly cloudy. Highs 45 to 50. Northeast wind 10 to 20 mph... except east wind 15 to 25 mph with gusts to 35 mph near The Gorge and over higher terrain. » ZIP Code Detail
	Tonight Partly cloudy. Lows 35 to 40. East wind 10 to 20 mph...except east wind 20 to 30 mph with gusts to 45 mph near The Gorge and over higher terrain.
	Monday Mostly cloudy. Highs 45 to 50. East wind 10 to 15 mph with gusts to 25 mph near The Gorge and over higher terrain. . » ZIP Code Detail
	Monday Night Mostly cloudy with a chance of rain. Lows around 35. East wind 5 to 15 mph. Rainfall amounts less than a tenth of an inch.
	Tuesday Mostly cloudy with a chance of rain. Highs around 45. Southeast wind 5 to 15 mph. Rainfall amounts around a tenth of an inch. » ZIP Code Detail
	Tuesday Night Rain. Lows 35 to 40.
	Wednesday Rain. Highs around 45.
	Wednesday Night Rain likely. Lows around 40.
	Thursday Rain likely. Highs around 45.
	Thursday Night Rain likely. Lows around 40.
	Friday Rain likely. Highs around 45.
	Friday Night Rain likely. Lows around 40.
	Saturday Mostly cloudy with a chance of rain. Highs around 45.

Its beginning to look a lot like...........well, Portland in winter

I have been trying to be better about posting, but have been somewhat waylaid by illness this past week. It is really tough to blog when you are A. somewhat dopier than normal due to regular doses of cold medications and B. not producing much to write about when you are doped up on cold medication and your sojourns include work to home and couch to bed.....intermixed with copious amounts of slumber. Had I blogged, it would have been something like: Woke up. Took pills. Forgot to eat breakfast. Fell asleep on couch. Woke up again wondering why I was so hungry. Made some kind of 1 or 2 step food item. More TV/sleeping. Nyquil. Wash/rinse/repeat. Compelling I know.

I did manage to make it to work most of the time during the week.......mainly because I knew it would be hell and I felt terrible about leaving my coworkers to deal with it understaffed. I was unfortunately right on with my prediction. For every day the clinic is closed, the amount of calls doubles on the following Monday. A three day weekend in September led to the most brutal Monday we had had since I started. This was a four day break and the calls did not let up until Thursday really. We ran dry of appointments most days by 10am. On one occasion, the day prior. It finally petered out around Thursday afternoon and, by Friday, was no different than any other Friday. I hope next week is better.

So, today Tia came back from her east coast shenanigans (or conference) and we decided to get out and get moving today............of course that didn't happen until nearly 2:30 after we both kind of milled around for a few hours aimlessly and belatedly realized that we had just burned through 80% of our daylight hours (they are shockingly brief here in the winter). We took the streetcar downtown, briefly ventured into Nordstrom Rack (where Tia and I simultaneously remembered that I dislike shopping normally, and HATE it when they are packed to the gills with shoppers between turkey day and commerce day). If you haven't been to the Rack, it is an experience to behold. All the name brands from Nordstrom's (albeit many brands I am not even tangentally familiar with) at reduced prices. Though, I have to admit, even the discounted prices still puts most things there at uncomfortably high prices for my liking and everything is tightly packed together, giving it the impression of a high end rummage sale and making me feel incredibly claustrophobic. Thank god for online shopping!

From there, we shuffled off to a 4 o'clock Happy Hour at Hubers which, aside from watching them make their famous Spanish coffees, was rather disappointing. The service was slow and indifferent and the food was middling. At least it was cheap. So, at least they have that going for them.

After wandering back in the blisteringly cold wind that made it feel infinitely colder than it actually was, my body quickly reminded me that I am only 'getting better' and not yet 'recovered' as I honestly feel like I have run some sort of marathon rather than just walked up the street (less than 2 miles total). Did I mention how much I hate being sick and how much it is going to hurt to get back to working out? Not looking forward to that.

Thats all folks. As I said, not much going on when you are prone most of the week.