still grouchy

Well, work was frantically busy, and there was a lot of heavy lifting again. I had to make 18 bags of bedside dialysate, each of them being 5 liters of fluid. 5 liters of fluid is heavy, especially when it is stored on a shelf down near the floor.  So my back is very angry with me tonight.

Tomorrow will be very bad. Half of day shift for tomorrow and one of tomorrow night's afternoon people had already called in by the time I got to leave work tonight. Tomorrow is going to royally suck! But it is the last day of the week, so hopefully I will make through, somehow. If I could live through my father's death I can live through a bad night of work. If I could live through being betrayed and emotionally tortured by a friend I trusted and adored, I can live through a rotten night at work. I can do this. Somehow.

Tomorrow Bill will not have school. It is a graduation requirement that he shadow a non-family member through work for a day and produce a report on it; the person he shadows has to fill out some forms about his day as well. So he will be shadowing one of Dan's friends. I almost wish now that he could come to work with me so he could do all of the heavy lifting.

I cannot wait for the weekend. I am going to plant my potatoes and the asparagus. They are sending out roots in their bags - I cannot wait anymore for frost free weather. I will just have to risk it. And on Friday we will have a great Mexican dinner for Cinco de Mayo. On Saturday we will have some down home Southern food in honor of the Kentucky Derby. I just hope my back will let me freely move.

grouchy

Bill got home a few minutes ago. He had been taking his AP calculus test most of the day. He said the multiple choice questions were ridiculously easy, but that the free form questions were the hardest math problems he has ever seen. I just hope he did well enough on the thing that he will get college credit for it. If he passes his three AP tests, and since Ball State has given him credit for freshman English due to his high ACT score, he would come into college with one semester of work done. That would save a lot of time and money.

Our dogwood tree began blooming this morning. Bliss!!  I have always loved the legend of the dogwood:

http://www.promiseofgod.com/dogwood/

Last night work was crazy and busy and I had to do a lot of heavy lifting. My back is really sore today. As a result I am quite grouchy and I just want to take lots of naprosyn and lie still in bed. Instead I will have to go to work and it will be crazy and busy and I will have to lift a lot of heavy things and my back will be even more sore tomorrow.  By the time Friday gets here, I will have a hard time even moving, and will be grouchy beyond anything.

I am also grouchy because I had to work last night and Steven had his band concert. I always hate missing things like that for the kids.  And I missed his concert, and work really stank on top of it.

 

amazing animal documentary

Dan and I just got done watching an amazing animal documentary on the National Geographic channel. It was called Predators at War and was filmed at a game reserve in South Africa during a prolonged and severe drought. I do not think I have ever seen such awesome nature closeups. Simply amazing footage. Here is a link about the show:

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/predatorsatwar/

The Red Wings got eliminated from the playoffs tonight. It was to be expected after they lost Captain Yzerman to back spasms a couple of games back - he is the heart and soul of the team. But it still sucks.

One of my friends and his wife are flying out over the ocean someplace right now. They are on their way to Russia to pick up the baby boy they adopted. YAY!!!

Rainy night tonight. It was a good night to come home and cuddle on the couch.

I am hankering to work in my garden. This year we will be trying at least two new things - asparagus (a perenniel vegetable) and potatoes. I have two different kinds of gourmet seed potatoes - blue and russet. We're not past frost danger yet, though, so I cannot plant anything but "cold crops" like snow peas - plants that like cold and wet weather. The red raspberries and strawberries I planted last year are all coming up and doing very well so far this spring. One of the blueberry bushes is happy and healthy, but the other one did not make it through the winter, so I will have to replace it.

I want to work on my photos, but my project this week will be getting Bill's graduation announcements out in the mail. He has his first AP exam on Wednesday this week, and the other two next week. those three classes will be finished and he will be a halftime student until the end of the month. he should be completely finished with school by the time we go to Kentucky at the end of the month. All he will have left at that point is to go to his class honors dinner and his graduation ceremony.

I hope to work on the photos next week, after the announcements go out, and before things get nuts with our vacations and the graduation.

May Day

It is allergy season, and I am having a bit of a rough time of it lately, but am hanging in there. Even with all of the pollen, I am deliriously happy that it is spring. Today one of my friends gave me a bucket filled with flowers and chocolate and other small goodies in honor of May Day. I thought that was really sweet of him to do.

I have been listening to some new (to me) classical music lately. The concert schedules for next year for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra, and the University Music Society are already out. Money might be tighter next year with Bill going to school out of state, so I need to be very picky about which concerts I go to. So far the ones I am really leaning towards are the Netherlands Bach Society playing Bach's Great Mass; the London Philharmonic; the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra playing Verdi's Requiem; and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra playing Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, his Seventh Symphony, and Mahler's Second Symphony (those are three different concerts). We shall see. There are also a couple of good jazz concerts I might want to go to. I already have my tickets to the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Steven has decided to repeat eighth grade. His grades are fine - he has been on the honor roll all year. He either met or exceeded state standards on the required state exams (and the ones he met he was on the border of meeting/exceeding). Like his brother, he is a late fall baby and so is a year younger (in some cases two years younger) than most of his classmates. So he has decided to repeat this year. There is one higher math class he can take, and he can take band again. And maybe an elective or two. I will probably home school him for English and social studies, as the district will allow us to have a combination of school and home school. I am figuring out the reading list with Bill. So far we are talking the three Shakespeare plays we will be seeing, The Iliad, the Odyssey, and probably further classics to be determined later (Beowulf will probably end up on that list). I think it will actually be fun.

busy (but good) weekend

It's been a busy but good weekend. Well, other than Edmonton beating the Wings again today, which sucks beyond words.

Today we did a lot of housework and yard work. We took a time out to go watch Steven play travel soccer in town.  Then we stopped off at the grocery store and bought some basic grocery items. Dan and the boys went back outside and got some more work done, while I cooked a healthy dinner, with Bill's help (we are working on expanding his rather basic cooking skills). We had a green salad (we used chives from our garden instead of onions), fresh steamed corn on the cob, some corn bread, a potato and cheese casserole I made from organically grown potatoes, and grilled pork chops. For dessert we had a coconut pudding and bumpy cake. Good dinner.

Thursday night at work we had a Cinco de Mayo party. I took in my electric quesadilla maker, and we made yummy quesadillas with cheese and peppers and black beans and onions. We had chips and two home made dips. Another girl brought in her smoothie maker and we had freshly made smoothies as well. Good stuff!

The man whose life I supposedly saved continues to slowly improve, though he is still in the intensive care unit. Every time I go through there and peek into his room I feel good.

 

UGH!!!!!

UGH!!! UGH!!! The Red Wings just lost tonight's playoff game in double overtime. RATS!!! Years ago, back in their Gretzsky days, I used to hate the Edmonton Oilers, because they seemed to knock us out of the playoffs every year. I think I am about to renew that hatred.

In happier news, the man whose life I supposedly saved is still alive. He is still in the intensive care unit, but no longer in critical condition. He is improving a little bit every day.

Today I finished reading Bernard Cornwell's The Warlord Chronicles, about Arthur of the Britons.  The three books were gritty historical novels about a world falling apart due to invasion, religious discord, and internal pressures. Very good, very enjoyable.

The two people I asked to be my netflix buddies both accepted. One is a very sophisticated (and very nice) liberal city dweller. The other is a traditional (and very nice) conservative person who lives in a much more rural area. Between the two of them, I should get a wide variety of movie and television recommendations. Since I lie somewhere in between, hopefully they can get an occasional recommendation from me as well!

Tonight is clear and cold, it will bottom out below freezing. I came home and immediately started turning up the thermostats to sixty degrees (we had them turned off to save money). Dan was "Why are you turning on the heat???" I looked at him and said "Because it is in the fifties in the house tonight. Check for yourself and see." He checked and apologized. He had not realized it had gotten so cold, and before the coldest part of the night...

A friend is going on vacation on Friday and will be gone for more than a week. Since she will be out of town for Cinco de Mayo, we will have a small Mexican food party on Thursday night for her. Should be delicious!

back to work

It was a pretty good day today, despite the fact that the Red Wings lost their playoff game.

Dan and I had bought a couple of gorgeous coffee table books last night at Borders that we found in the bargain bin. They were imported from Britain. One was all lovely photos of outer space, and the other was all really cool pictures of the earth as taken by satellites. The kids found the bag on the kitchen table this morning and literally spent nearly the entire day looking at them.

Dan fixed the cd player from my room. A cd had gotten stuck in one of the slots so none of them would open up and/or play. He got the stuck cd out, so now I can listen to music in the peace and privacy of my room again. Heck, the kids like to curl up in my bed and listen to music in my room, too. I am so glad he fixed it!

I got to work and found out that the patient whose life I supposedly saved on Thursday is still alive. He is still in the intensive care unit, but the doctors think he will make a full recovery. That makes me really happy.

My friend says that he will be coming by later this week to plant the trilliums and even a few May apples. Very cool.