Learning to be a lady

Mike and I have been married five years now. Mike is an old-fashioned Texas boy who believes in opening doors for ladies and treating me like someone special. We have a standing joke because I just have not got this waiting for him to open the door thing down. It's complicated. You have to stand in the right place so he can get to the door. We're always running into each other because I was never treated like a lady in my first marriage, so I don't know how to act. The other day, I was watching The Bird Cage when I had an epiphany. Robin Williams and Nathan Lane were walking into a building when without thought or planning, Robin opened the door for Nathan who was standing exactly on the correct side of the door. Eureka! I got it. All it took for me to know how to be treated like a lady was to watch a movie featuring two gay characters.

Nursing

I will always be a nurse no matter how far from the bedside I get. I am cutting and pasting an email I received from a friend.

YOU KNOW YOU ARE A NURSE IF.......
Did you hear about the nurse who died and went straight to hell? It took her two weeks to realize she wasn't at work!
You know you're a nurse if... You would like to meet the inventor of the call light some night in a dark alley.
You can identify different types of diarrhea by the smell.
You find nothing unusual about eating popcorn from a new bedpan.
You think there ought to be a valium salt lick in the ER waiting room, and a Xanax aerosol for visiting hours.
You've been telling stories in a restaurant and made someone at another table "sick".
You've told a confused patient that your name was that of your coworker and to holler if they need help.
You work when you're so sick you can hardly hold up your head so you can call in sick on the day you need for recreation, since you know you'll never get it by asking!
Your bladder can expand to the size of a Winnebago's water tank and you learn to store food and water like a camel.
You find that when your friends in non-medical lines of work (should you have any) ask about your day that they never knew that the glamour of a nursing career included people throwing up on you and catheter bags leaking down your leg.
You find yourself checking out other customer's veins in grocery waiting lines.
You avoid unhealthy looking shoppers in the mall for fear that they will drop near you and you'll have to do CPR on your day off.
You've become a human lie detector, asking yet one more person with nicotine-stained fingers if they are sure they don't smoke more than "a couple cigarettes a day."
Your finger has gone places you never thought possible.
You pretend to specialize in obstetrical nursing when someone just introduced to you on your big night out finds you're a nurse and starts asking if you think they are on the right medical regime for their condition (unless she's pregnant, of course!).
You have seen more penises than any prostitute.

I confess I have checked out strangers veins and avoided unhealthy gamblers in the casinos at Wendover because I know we get a lot of heart attacks from there. And yes, I have seen more penises than any prostitute. I've always wondered why men think a penis is something women would like to look at; when combined with a set of baggy balls, it's kind of unattractive.

Water Aerobics

This blog is starting to turn into my exercise, weigh loss journal. There hasn't been a helluva lot of weigh loss lately but I keep plugging along. I know it is because I am too lazy to cook a lot of the time and because I like those snickerdoodles at Starbucks. Anyhow, I was lying in bed this morning thinking I'll exercise later but I knew I wouldn't do it unless I got up right then. So, I made it to water aerobics. To anyone who thinks water aerobics is for wimps, you're kind of correct in that it is better on the joints and doesn't overheat you but it is definitely exercise. I've found it is something I can do even if I have a sinus headache because the cool water feels good on my head.

Who needs the gym?

Who needs the gym when I can run my ass off at work? I had to work an extra shift this week because one of the other supervisors was on vacation. We were flat out busy as hell with all sorts of craziness going on in multiple areas. Some of those hallways can be pretty long and I was speed-walking all day yesterday through those hallways. I can't count every day at work as aerobic exercise but I'm sure as hell counting yesterday as exercise.

Water Aerobics

I made it to the gym today. When I first started going, I discovered that I enjoyed water aerobics but my carpal tunnels became inflamed from using the barbells so I stopped for a while. I like water aerobics; I'm the least obese in the class. I don't get as overheated in the pool. But being only 5'1" I have to be careful not to bounce my way into water over my head and get water up my nose...very unattractive. Helga, the German aerobics instructor, is quite a taskmistress (and not in a good sort of whips and chains way). I can't understand a damn word she says because her accent is so thick. OK, her name isn't Helga but I since can't understand her I made up a name. I don't much care for changing clothes in the locker room. I've always been kind of shy about that but will do it if I have to. I know, I know, guys romanticize about women's locker rooms but it's not like Porky's (remember Kim Cattrall). Most of the women in there are pretty average or fat and flabby. I like that in a gym; I don't have to set my goals too high.

What a Girl Won't Do to Avoid Exercise

I was going to go to the gym today. Honest, I was. I was getting ready to take a shower so Mike and I could go play at Ikea when I was suddenly hit with that really bad psycho sinus pain that makes me nauseated, panicky, and makes my legs shaky. I haven't had that since May so I thought maybe I wasn't going to be blessed with that kind of pain anymore. At least I wasn't at work this time and could go to bed with an ice bag on my head and a Lortab in my stomach. God I was nauseated. I laid there rubbing my feet together until I fell asleep. I've always done that; rubbed my feet together as a kind of self-hypnosis when I'm in pain. The nurse in me always tries to diagnose what the hell just happened but its impossible. I do know that I get pain with big barometric pressure changes and there is storm coming. Thank heaven the pain is better now and what the hell, it got me out of going to the gym. I tried going once when I was having mild to moderate sinus pain but I got so nauseated that I've decided that idea sucks worse than exercise.

One day at the gym down two to go...

I am constantly looking for an excuse not to go to the gym. Yesterday, I didn't go because it was my first of four days off and I decided I was allowed to rest. In my defense, I have a mild sinus infection and had been working with fevers and pain the last few days (more than my usual), but frankly if I let that stop me I'll never go because I have pain and fevers pretty much every day. I want to go at least three times this week; my week starts on Saturday because that's how our payroll works. Anyway, this morning I had a protein-fruit smoothie and went to the gym. Hooray for me! I am finding I have to work harder on the treadmill to get my heart-rate up. When I started at the gym in February the damn treadmill kept slowing itself down because it thought I was going to have a heart attack when my heart-rate went above 150. Now I'm going faster than before with a heart-rate in the high 130's-low 140's. I still can't run on that thing; I'll fall on my ass.

Bear Lake

We're spending our weekend at Bear Lake (UT). We call it our weekend but it's actually Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. Those are Mike's regular days off. My days off vary because I negotiate with my co-workers and we have to have 24/7 coverage. We belong to a campground association called Camperworld. There are 10 campgrounds in Utah that we can use, one of them is at Bear Lake. I put the link there because we forgot to bring our friggen camera. The lake here is the most beautiful blue. The blue is because of limestone in the water. It looks as if the lake has been dyed aqua. I'm a bit bummed that we forgot our camera because it's so beautiful here. But we'll be back again.

We went to museum in Montpelier (ID) today. It was about the Oregon Trail. It was different than your standard pioneer museum in that they did kind of a vignette where they pretended we were families going on the trail. It was hokey as hell but Mike liked it. I think it would be fun to take grade school kids.

Can't take the girl out of the desert

I'm melting. We have a swamp cooler instead of air conditioning. For those of you unfamiliar with the desert, a swamp cooler is a large box on our roof with a big fan and a little teeny copper pipe that drips water into the filter. It usually cools the house by up to 20 degrees because our usual humidity is about 10-15%. This last week we've had lots of thunderstorms and the humidity is 73% this morning. I did not sleep at all last night except the time I was dreaming that I was at a truck stop with no clothes...another story altogether. If I wanted to live with this kind of humidity I'd move to Texas.