Thoughts of and on the Week...

This week is another of those weeks where I wonder how in the world I’m going to get it all done. It’s looking like once again I will manage to fit everything I need to do into my week and maybe a bit of what I want to do too. The want stuff is a miracle in and of itself, let me tell you. On top of all the fun of it being a paper turn in week in this class, I somehow am fitting in three chapters in my Pathophysiology class (compared to a normal of one chapter) and the normal workload in my Econ 180 and Kine 103 classes. Gulp. Oh and on top of that my work schedule is a bit sideways because my preceptor is moving us from working the end of the week to the first of the week so he can have a long stretch off at Spring Break time as he’s planning to spend some time with his wife. On top of that it’s crunch time educationally for me at work, I have an Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) Prep class next week, a Non-Violent Crisis Intervention class, then during our Spring Break the Trauma Nurse Core Course (2 long days of lots of information and a test at the end) and the actual ACLS class right after Spring Break. Makes me a bit nervous thinking of all the stuff I have to arrange to make everything happen the next few weeks. But I know I can get through it, I just need to stay super organized & it’ll all get done, I know it will.

On the home front things are things. Pretty quiet here, but that’s better than what has been going on the past few weeks, so I won’t complain about the silence. The upside is that I’m working a ton the next week and a half to accomplish the adjustment to the schedule and classes so won’t be over here in Ozark much, which frankly rocks for me.

The car hunt, now that’s frustrating. I have found a car on Craigslist that I really like, but I’m starting to think the sellers just posted it for fun. I’ve tried to set up a time to see/test drive the car a few different times, but can never get them to commit to a time. The best I’ve gotten is a day and they’ll say they’ll contact me closer to that day to set a time, and then they never email or call back. Grr. This car is in decent shape, not too many miles and is priced pretty fairly as long as it is in as good of shape in person as it is online. I found another car over near where I live that looks okay, but I just get the feeling with it that I’m buying someone else’s headache… I already drive a headache that is leaking oil, antifreeze and transmission fluid on my driveway as I type. The upside is I’m making a flying trip to Kansas City on Saturday to see a Winterguard Competition and think I’ll try to set up a test drive or two while I’m up there if the cars I’m considering are still available then.

Oh well, this season in life will end. Me not being a fan of change and the fact that the past year of my life has been nothing but changes is the key to my current frustration, but I know in the end these changes will wind up being what is best for me and my kids, so I’m powering through and looking toward the bright light that’s at the end of all of this. 

Medical Tattoos

Hi all J Tonight’s thoughts are being brought to you first because of my favorite time waster/avoidance of things I should be doing, Facebook. So see, every now and then procrastination and goofing off can pay off because I had no clue what I was going to do my linked post on for this week. Thanks to my friend Jennifer for posting the original article that sparked my interest and led me to do a bit of research to see what it was about.

So what is all the excitement about? It’s about using tattoos instead of medical alert jewelry. Being a nurse and never having heard of doing this I was intrigued.  Sure I know about medical alert bracelets and other jewelry, but hadn’t ever thought about using a tattoo for that purpose. It’s a pretty cool concept now that I looked into it. Instead of the typical bracelet for example that while useful for alerting medical personnel to potentially life threatening issues and information has major limitations; such as they break, some people are allergic to the metal the jewelry is made of, there are people who are not allowed to wear jewelry to their workplace because of dangers of injury from the jewelry and there are those people who just forget to or refuse to wear their medical alert bracelets for a variety of reasons. If you’re okay with body art this could be a great option for you. Of course there are some downsides, paramedics aren’t currently trained to look for them, there’s no real regulation or consistency to location, appearance or information contained, but these are potentially easily overcome obstacles.

I found this website that is full of Diabetes Advocacy Tattoos, some of which are gorgeous and do show some consistency in information and location. I have noticed many of the alert style ones are on the forearm, predominantly the left, which works for me as that’s where I’d wear a bracelet and where I’ve personally seen many alert bracelets.

You also need to realize that if you have a medical condition, for example diabetes as many of the articles use that you need to take some precautions when deciding a medical tattoo is right for you. The guidelines lined out in Tattoos as Medical Warning include but are not limited to: use a reputable tattoo artist, do not get a tattoo in an area of poor circulation such as your feet and make sure your blood sugar is controlled during the procedure. These recommendations are fully endorsed in that article by Yimmy Householder who is the manager of NeedleMasters Tattoo Studio in Toledo, Ohio and a tattooed diabetic himself.

Another emerging and somewhat controversial use of medical tattoos is explained in this article I found that features Dr. Ed Friedlander, a Kansas City pathologist who has “No CPR” tattooed on the center of his chest. I personally applaud his commitment to his personal feelings and have considered getting a similar tattoo when I reach that point in my life. As a nurse I see so many conflicted families that aren’t 100% sure what their family member wants (even with well documented living wills) so I’m hoping this will help my family out, or at least remind them that they aren’t following my wishes should they choose a different path. The article does mention that currently medical tattoos don’t carry much legal weight, but you never know what will change in time, right?

I hope this gave you all a few things to think about as it did me, happy researching & commenting!

A Rant on Trust or Lack Thereof.

Okay, trying not to go negative here, but I have something eating at me that I need to vent about. My two best friends have heard enough from me and are supporting me fully, but in an effort to not overload and burn them out as they have plenty of their own stress in their own lives I’m going to unload on all of you.

It all boils down to I got married almost sixteen years ago one week after I graduated High School; of course at that time I thought it was true love with all the birds chirping, sunshine, rainbows etc. As an added bonus my parents hated the guy I married, yes I was just that smart. One of the reasons I rushed into the thing called marriage was my at the time ten month old daughter. Don’t get me wrong, she is seriously the best thing that has ever happened to me; she is beautiful, smart, funny and just an awesome person. I wish I was half as smart and brave as she is, not to mention committed to personal opinions and standing up for myself. She is all of that and so much more. 

Life hasn’t been easy over the years, we’ve had our ups and our downs, and we’ve made it through. The past year has been rough, I was told when I decided to go back to school that he wouldn’t put up with me slacking around the house in favor of school, I’m doing what I can and luckily my kids rock (I also have a thirteen year old son) and are doing what they can to help keep the house running. Me finding a job in Joplin hasn’t helped, but I couldn’t find a job that both allowed me the time for the kids and school as well as enough money to attempt to stay ahead of the bill collectors in Springfield (it’s a long story, another blog post in and of itself).

Things were going tolerably, not great until this past Friday. Early last week, we jointly made a decision to let our daughter drive his GMC Jimmy over to Joplin to join me for the weekend and spend some time with her best friend. All was good in the world until my parents (who tend to be controlling) found out what she had done and where she was and threw a fit. For some background, our daughter has made the trip from Ozark to Carl Junction probably forty times behind the wheel and this was her fifth or sixth trip by herself (just the first my parents found out about). He wound up calling her, yelling at her and demanding to have our friends’ address so he could come get his truck and bring her home Friday night. We made arrangements instead for my friends to bring his truck back to the South side of Springfield and drop it off. In all of this my parents (who back when it was time to get my daughter a car seemingly generously found and paid for one for her) decided she had lied to them by not telling them her weekend plans and came and took her car away. I’m really frustrated by all of this. First by how my parents are being so controlling, this isn’t their daughter, they have no right to punish her. Also she didn’t utilize the car they bought, she talked to both of her parents who agreed to allow her to drive a car we paid for to see her friend (as she has done before). The thing that frustrates me the most is that instead of standing behind his decision and standing up for his daughter my husband allowed my parents to railroad him into recanting the decision we made together and in the way I see it throwing her under the bus to take all the blame.

I’m currently only speaking to my family on a limited basis and feel I can not trust any of them. To say the least this has been a very stressful time and is helping me see some things I have previously been blind to. I think this could even qualify as a life changing event. Sigh. Sorry for ranting, but I needed to get some of this off of my chest. 

Gas Prices, Bad? Good? You Decide

Gas prices, yup, one of the subjects everyone loves to hate. As gas prices are shooting up and the internet is littered with articles speculating why and pointing fingers at everyone from gas executives to the president, I thought I’d pull a few with varied opinions and put together a blog from them. Gas prices matter a ton to me. I put from three to five hundred miles on my car a week. I currently drive a 1989 Chevy Suburban. It gets around ten miles per gallon. I’m not joking. If I put a couple thousand dollars into some mechanical work it might get fifteen miles per gallon, but some fun things like the air conditioning still won’t work. Therefore I’m in the market for a new to me car, namely a Toyota Corolla (if anyone has one that runs good with A/C power windows & locks, let me know). I figure I’m better off putting the money into something that will get better mileage for me than I am fixing the Suburban at this point.

I digress, back to the subject at hand, rising gas prices. There seems to be multiple reasons gas prices are high; crude oil prices are up again, some refineries are closed earlier in the year than normal for maintenance and some refineries that weren’t efficient are closed entirely. All these things together equal more pain to all of us at the pump. Now whether these factors will influence the election in November remain to be seen. I found this article that shows that while gas prices can be a factor, they are not totally responsible for who wins or loses the election. I personally think there are many, many other reasons that Obama needs to go, but I’m trying to stay away from political discourse as I’m just not in the mood to go there currently.

Another article I found claims that these horrid gas prices are actually good for the economy in various ways in that they encourage (force) Americans to find other ways to save money such as online shopping and other methods of conservation. I admit I do my share (possibly more than) of online shopping, but nothing beats actually going to the store and choosing what you want. Trying it on, feeling the fabric, fun stuff! Hmm, on an unrelated note I’m thinking I’ll visit my favorite store over here The Red Poppy before heading to Joplin tomorrow for the weekend. J

The third article that held my attention long enough for me to reference it in this posing talks about how even though dropping gas prices quickly might seem tempting to the nation’s elected officials they need to resist and find a long term solution with a sensible energy policy. This is a stance I can support. We need a long term solution and new ways of producing, using and conserving energy are the way to go. Otherwise every few years or even more often, we’ll be in this same situation, wondering how gas prices got this high and demanding a solution. It seems that high prices now might be more bearable if a long term way to lower them were on the horizon. That’s just my two cents on the matter. What do you all think?

Cats...

As I’ve been doing random things around my house today how odd my cats are has really struck me. In my house there are three cats. At the house I stay at when I work there are a total of six since my youngest cat travels with me. The difference in the two groups is striking. At my house I have two older cats; they’re both six and a 10 month old kitten that is a Maine Coon mix. At my friend’s house there is a 10 year old Japanese Bobtail, a 4 year old Burmese, a 2 year old Maine Coon and 2 9 or so month old Maine Coon mix kittens. So when you add my youngest in it is quite a wild bunch some days.  At my house the two older cats will play with and nap with each other pretty much anytime, but only the male, Simba will include the younger cat, Lilly. The female, Midnight will only hiss and growl at Lilly and swipe at her when she thinks Lilly is too close to her. The area that Midnight considers too close seems to depend on the day, hour, temperature and multiple other factors I have no clue about. Sometimes they’ll be just a couple of feet from each other just hanging out and others if Midnight can see Lilly she feels the need to growl at her. I just don’t understand. I could understand it when I first got Lilly as Midnight has never been a fan of changes of any type, but she’s been here for three months now! Three months is plenty of time for Midnight to adjust in my mind.

On the other hand when Lilly travels with me to my friend’s house she is greeted the moment she gets out of her crate by anywhere from one to five other cats that are ready to play. One of the kittens, Charlie is usually waiting at the door for me to bring her in and will play through the door of her crate if I don’t let her out immediately. The older cats will all play in their own ways too, plus will snuggle to nap with her anytime she will stop to sleep. I’m not sure if it’s a temperament thing or what. I do know that when I first started taking her down there the Burmese acted a lot like Midnight did, but she’s completely adjusted to her now and I find them napping together pretty frequently when we’re over there.

Cats are just odd creatures in general. They are very useful what with the snuggling, purring and rodent eradication. On the other hand their choice of where to sleep at times defies explanation. I’m not sure how the top of a couch could work out to sleep on with how often I’ve seen a cat dreaming and fall off of one, or sitting on a person’s head while they are trying to sleep. Also the 2 year old Maine Coon that weighs about 16 pounds will curl up on your hip if you are lying on your side and try to sleep there. Oh and all of them won’t hesitate to sleep on a computer keyboard, especially if you’re trying to type on it J

Yes, cats are a little odd in behavior with the odd sleeping and running around the house as if they are crazy, but I wouldn’t give mine up for the world and know plenty of others that feel the same way. 

Facebook or no? What should a teacher (or any of us do)?

Okay, the subject that has caught my interest this week is one that is in the media teachers and Facebook. Most recently on my new feed I ran across a story about a football coach in Maine that resigned because he posted a nude picture of himself to his very public Facebook account instead of somewhere only his girlfriend could see. Definitely not a shining moment for him in any way I’m sure. For one, posting naked pictures of yourself anywhere is just plain stupid, once it’s out there, it’s out there and you’re not going to be able to erase it entirely, someone someday will find it and it will come back to haunt you. Secondly if you are a public type person such as a teacher you have choices to make. I see three basic ones. You can either choose to have social networking and be friends with your students and parents you interact with and be sure everything you post is appropriate; which to be perfectly honest, you shouldn’t post anything you wouldn’t want your grandmother reading just because employers and others are using internet searches to help make decisions about hiring, promotions and even whether or not you can keep your job, no matter what it is. Secondly you could choose to enjoy social networking but not be friends with any of your students or their parents, this can be a challenge too quite honestly. And you should still think twice before you post anything, just because someone will see it and who knows who they’ll share it with. Or thirdly you can choose to not use any of the social media options available to you. This means you can’t use them to keep up with your friends, your former classmates, your family. Really this is a form of censorship. Some would argue that all three options are, but honestly the first two are just being good stewards of your online presence.

This coach is not the only one who has made mistakes on social websites, this article from NPR mentions others and urges teachers to stay away from Facebook, I guess it could be the best choice for some, but I personally don’t think that not utilizing Facebook at all is really a fair option for anyone. We don’t expect any other professions to not use it, so why limit teachers? To take it even further there is a Missouri law that they are working the kinks out of that school boards and others are seeing as forbidding teachers to interact with their students at all on Facebook, although from what I understand of it the law only forbids exclusive communication between teachers and students such as chatting. It doesn’t seem to forbid in any way publicly viewable conversations or interactions between teachers and students. Many districts were scrambling to put policies together last August to address this ruling, but a judge put it on hold to get further clarification so policies could be consistent and thought out rather that hastily thrown together chaos like they were looking to be.

So it comes down to, social media, worth it or no? I think so, especially if you keep in mind that no matter who you are or what you do that you should be very careful about what you post, because you never know for sure who will see it. 

Parents at Sporting Events... My Personal Observations.

The background; my daughter is playing on Ozark High School’s indoor soccer team this year. They play up at an indoor arena in Springfield twice a week against teams mostly from other area schools, although some are league or travel teams that are on the more competitive side. Generally at these games the parents are supportive of both teams and try to foster responsibility and teamwork, plus make it a learning environment for their kids. Of course this only holds for the indoor league. In a couple of months when these same girls are facing off on the big field for actual soccer season things tend to be a bit more heated, shall we say. The exception so far this season was the team the girls played last night. The team we played goes by Inferno, and is affiliated with a school in the Springfield area, I’m just not going to mention which one. The parents for this team were yelling, screaming and berating not only their kids, but our kids too. I will note there were a few parents sparking all of the uproar and there were some parents for their team that did look embarrassed, but overall the impression their parents give off due to these few is very negative.

While the girls were playing if one of our players fell, either by accident or by being tripped, these parents cheered and told their girls “great move” and other things like that, as well as if the referee called their kids on tripping or any other violence they commented on his need for corrective eyewear. Fun, right? And when one of their kids fell, or in one instance when their goalie fell there were screams of “she was tripped”  or “they kicked her” Oh, yes it was quite the fun night at Lake Country last night. I’m guessing those parents have never read the fan code of conduct that Lake Country sends out every year. Near the end of the game the ball bounced off of the edge of the goal and hit their goalie in the face, the most vocal mom immediately jumped up and started screaming “they kicked her again! Kick them out of the game” and on and on. One of the Inferno dads walked down there and said “I saw, and everyone else up here saw the ball bounce and hit her. Sit down and SHUT UP! Everyone is sick of your mouth.” He walked back to his seat to a round of applause. And one more fun point, during a play one of their players accidentally kneed one of our girls in the stomach hard enough to knock the wind out of her, and once our girl was off the field, this mom was heard to say “she finally got what she deserved” it makes me wonder what she thinks she’s teaching her kids and makes me worry about where they’ll wind up in life.

I personally don’t understand what motivates some of these parents. Yes, I can get loud cheering during a game, but I always realize it’s exactly that, a game. In the end the games the kids are playing are more for fun and fitness than as the be all end in of their lives and my opinion should be enjoyed rather than be such an unpleasant experience.

I really wanted to show the screaming mom the following video that shows how much you can accomplish if you just jump back up and keep going rather than laying there screaming “she tripped me” but I didn’t have the nerve. Maybe I’ll be brave enough next time. 

$16 House, Really???

Okay, interesting reading in the news today. Once again I had zero intention of writing a blog post at this time, but once again Yahoo convinced me otherwise. No, seriously, got maybe 2.5 hours of sleep last night & am exhausted. Got the husband and kids out the door, inventoried my Scentsy plus got the bare bones of my next order entered into the website, tracked a couple of packages, laid out some chicken for dinner tonight & totally planned to go take a nap so I can work on my Pathophysiology and go to my daughter’s soccer game tonight. Hoping I can still manage a nap at some point, because all the stuff on the to do list must get done at some point today.

Now back to the reason we’re here, right? As I was scrolling through the front page on Yahoo before shutting the old laptop down I saw an article that made me go, hmm, now this seems awfully contradictory to the typical American way, let me read further. This article, talking about a Texas Squatter that had been living in a $340,000  home in Texas since June of 2011 for just $16! I’m thinking, what? My home is worth nowhere near $340,000 and I have to pay way more than that to live in it for one month, much less over half of a year, what in the world is going on here?

As it turns out this man, Kenneth Robinson was using the law of Adverse possession. Adverse possession is a common law concept dating back to the 1800s. From the article according to Lucas A. Ferrara, a partner in Newman Ferrara, a New York City real estate law firm, adverse possession was enacted to ensure that property wasn’t abandoned and was “maintained and monitored.” It requires the posting of a clear, public notice that someone is at the property-hence the court filing- and that someone would remain there for a specific period of time, usually 10 years.

I couldn’t help but think that this really isn’t a great way to go about getting a home to live in. Yes, this property was in foreclosure and had been abandoned, but it’s really not the American way per se to just take what belongs to someone else because you want  it and they’re not using it at the moment. Apparently from the article Robinson’s neighbors agreed.  However, even though I’d never heard of this law, there are websites on the internet that for a small fee, of course, will tell you how to utilize the law of Adverse Possession for your own benefit. I'm not sure it’s something I’d be willing to or advocate trying, but I guess for someone in desperate enough of a situation it might appeal.

While essentially squatting in this Texas home Robinson was not idle as you might presume. He wrote an eBook and has created a website about his experiences in the home he was squatting in. Apparently from the article and his website he sees himself as a successful person. I think the average American might not agree, I personally don’t, do you? 

Summary of My Week/Update from last week's posting

What a week this has been… Last week I blogged on how crazy the coming up weekend was going to be, and let me tell you it was all that and more. Plus I was hit with an inability to sleep, that really messed life up for me in major ways. I got up around 4:30 Thursday afternoon to go to work that night, pretty typical in my world. Little did I know that I wouldn’t sleep again until well after 2 Saturday morning. Ouch! I worked Thursday night at Freeman, got off of work, dropped the RN-BSN application off at Southern, went to my friends’ house that I stay with while I work, packed up all of my stuff, including my kitten that travels with me and loaded my suburban to drive to Ozark. All of this among multiple texts from both my husband and the friends we were traveling with. Little do they realize that without all of those texts I probably would have been back in Ozark way earlier. I got to my house expecting a few minutes to repack and reorganize only to find our traveling companions already at my house wanting to leave. Sigh. So I unloaded my truck, unpacked my work gear, packed my stuff for Spring Sprint (luckily I had the foresight to set it all out Tuesday when I was packing for work.) loaded it all in their car and got in. We picked up some last minute snacks and drinks to travel with and hit the road for Oklahoma City. An hour and a half later I was experiencing de ja vu… we were at Starbucks on South Rangeline in you guessed it Joplin. After grabbing coffee we got back on the road to experience the joys of the toll roads in Oklahoma including tons of construction in Tulsa. It wasn’t a bad trip, just made for a long long day. We finally arrived at our hotel around 5:30 that night to meet up with our group and go to dinner. Cracker Barrel was literally right behind our hotel, so yes we drove 5 hours and wound up having dinner at a place I could have eaten at within 30 minutes of home, oh well. Bright spot Friday night was our hotel was also near Shepler’s a western store I’m a fan of and I found a cute new pair of boots on their clearance rack J Yay boots!!!

After dinner with the crew I shut myself in my hotel room because it was 8:00 P.M. and I had homework due at midnight, gulp! Busy week was catching up with me there. Luckily I buckled down and finished it all well before my deadline. Unfortunately all of the stress of the week had me pretty wound up, so even though I was done with my homework before 11, it was after 2 before I fell asleep, part of that was due to the fact that everyone else in the room sleeps with the tv on & it was bugging me, another factor was the fact that our hotel was right on I-40 and I live in the country so traffic noise isn’t my thing.

Saturday dawned bright and early, we got to go to Spring Sprint!! This is the mid-year convention for Scentsy Wickless Candles and at it we had a chance to shop at a discount (yay!) and learn about all the awesome new products coming out. There’s some really exciting stuff coming up with Scentsy and I can see my business taking off big time. Which will be nice, I’m hoping to not have to work as a nurse while I’m doing my master’s degree, I’m hoping my Scentsy business can pay my bills through that part of school, and I can honestly see it happening at this point. So as to not be self promoting and what not I’ll stop here, if you want to know more, just email me & we can talk. (misnim@gmail.com)

We did eat lunch at Toby Keith’s I <3 this Bar on Saturday, very yummy stuff, well worth checking out when you see one. Saturday night we went to an Italian restaurant as a group and hung out in our director’s room playing Guesstures. Then after another night of fighting television and traffic noise we loaded up and headed home. All in all a very cool, although sleepless weekend.