The Way My Day Began...

...was by driving to work listening to my absolutely beautiful, new Grateful Dead CD, Steppin' out in England which is a totally awesome 4 disc set of many, many lovely songs in one easy package. Gorgeous. Mellow. Dark and slow. Incredible background music for driving all over southern Bergen county, to and from home, work, client's apartments, delis, ATM's and so on. Makes me feel like I could do visiting nurse work for the rest of my days as long as I have such good tunes in my car to listen to from 9 to 5.

The song Black Peter has been a personal favorite of mine since, like, forever. First of all, this song made itself known to the world on Workingman's Dead which came out in 1970, so it's older than me. My parents have owned that album since before I was born and have been playing it for about that long. Anyway, it's an old, old song for me and I must've heard it about a million or so times. Still, I hadn't listened to it for a really long time too and hearing it again struck up old feelings with a new twist for these times I'm in.

This song is so heavy when you hear it; much more cumbersome on the soul than just reading the lyrics. It absolutely struck me that maybe this was a little bit what my husband felt like when he was laying in his hospital bed during the first couple of days after his open heart surgery when he was on just about a million different drugs, medicinally paralyzed, kidneys barely doing their job, no food or drink, just saline, dopamine, amiodorone, and whatever else keeping his body going, tubes in every opening, lights on constantly, not even being able to scratch his own nose when it itched.

Amazing to me that such an old, old song could have a current application to my life.

If you've never heard the song, please try. I promise it's not bad. Yeah, yeah, it's the Dead, they suck, blah, blah, blah. C'mon. How can they possibly suck if they've drawn such an amazingly loyal crowd over the past 40 years? It's folk music for God's sake! The will go down in history with Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and other similar American folk artists.

So give it a try. It's not all peace, love, and inebriation (which isn't always a bad thing anyway). It's about playing cards, pretty girls, shootin' guns, murder, riding trains, having fun, mourning occasional losses, and strange twists of fate.

More to come on the Dead in the future. Of that you can be sure.

Something Beautiful

Alfonse Mucha is my favorite artist. He made a zillion gorgeous lithographs, paintings, prints and so on. He was something of a national hero in the Czech Republic during the early 20th century, having the honor of designing currency and stamps as well as advertisements, posters, and other works of art. A nice thing about his story is that he was celebrated during his lifetime. To my knowledge he had a pretty nice life. I had the good fortune to visit his museum in Prague in 1999.

One thing I love the most about Mucha is how much he has influenced other artists whose work I appreciate too. A good example is Bob Masse, designer of countless concert posters dating from the 60's to the present. From the Grateful Dead, to Hendrix, to Cream, that familiar visual thread runs through his work.



And much to my surprise, a Masse-made Tori Amos concert poster. This is only one among a few he's done for her.
I enjoyed browsing this site. You might even find something you like. It's refreshing to see someone who does something creative keep at it for so long and do it so well all the while.

http://www.bmasse.com/

The Internet

Sometimes I think a lot about how the Internet has changed my life.

I relied on the Internet quite a bit to get through school.

I met my husband on the Internet.

I have become a more independent traveller by being able to view and print maps, pointing me to exactly where I need to go.

***

Husband, Rob, just said to me "I love football. Don't make me hate football." We are watching some college football news on ESPN. For some reason, in my life, I cannot escape football. It is not my favorite, but at this point I'm getting used to it, almost starting to understand it. From Sunday at 1:00 pm to Monday evening the TV is on, and it's on football. The laptop is keeping a running tally of fantasty football scores.

Rob's team this year is called Oblivion, named after the beloved game he has just finished. He is the commissioner of the league, Creeping Death, which he named after a Metallica song that he is quite fond of. As the commissioner's wife, you'd think I was maybe responsible for some fancy hostessing or something, but alas, it doesn't require much effort on my part.

***

Everyone in our house has been taking turns being sick for the past 2 weeks. The baby seems like she might be getting another ear infection so she'll be going to the doctor tomorrow. Rob will be taking her since he has a cold and won't be going in to work. I stayed home two days last week.

Blogging Along

Alright, so I never find any comments and I don't update my blog often. I'm not going to let that deter me from keeping a blog and adding to it whenever I get around to it. I still like to write and feel that I have good observations ever once in a while.

Right now I'm practicing psychiatric nursing which gives me endless things to think about, figure out, discuss... The thinking part is easy, it happens as easily as breathing. I think, and think, and think about all of my clients (we don't really call them patients in the outpatient setting) during the day. The figuring out part is a little more difficult; lots of different problems arise and usually I am part of finding the solution. It feels nice to be able to say that!

The discussion-ah, the art of talking to other people.

Discussing mental illness is a trick, a skill, an art. Among other mental health professionals who understand the jargon (hallucination, delusion, extrapyramidal, internal stimuli, anticholinergic) there is the richness of a special language we share. It's just as special to me, even more so actually, than the terminology that gets thrown around on any old, med-surg unit in a hospital. It makes everything I see in clients, everything I'm trying to solve, so damn real. We have our methods of qualifying and quanitifying most every complaint, every symptom, from the voices to the tremors to the lateral jaw shifts and the like.

Try to discuss it with an open-minded lay person and it feels pretty good to know that there are people out there who doubt the stigma. It gives me hope. It makes me feel like someone beyond my tiny professional circle appreciates what we are doing.

Talk to someone who doesn't get it and it just makes you want to cry. Everything you know damn well is real, as in a real illness just like diabetes, hypertension, coronary artery disease, is instantly reduced to having no self-control and in need of incarceration. It's scary to think that some of our policy-makers are part of the people who don't get it. The less fortunate are at their mercy and they haven't even begun to understand the needs of these people, much less gotten over their fear and hatred of them.

Consider that more people die by their own hand than by homicide and you might catch the gravity of the situation.

On another note I wanted to say that my husband is kicking ASS at this Xbox game Oblivion! I don't know how many of you (are there ANY of you?) are gamers, but it's a really great, old-school RPG set in a fantasty-medieval world. So if anyone has Xbox out there and you like RPG, this is some cool gaming. You can toggle between 1st and 3rd person very easily, which is a nice feature if either style is your cup of tea. The world you play in is huge and quite a bit of it can be manipulated. You can jog out into the woods, pick herbs, and brew potions. You can play a totally honorable, benign character, you can be a total murderous bastard, or you can do it all. Even when you create your character, so many choices are available. Aside from selecting male or female, you can pick different races, some that look like animals more than humans. My husband is a dark elf, with blue hair, and a fairly handsome appearance. His name is Roibeard. Check it out, that's Irish for Robert :-)

I only know this because one Christmas I got him his name cup from some Irish store in the mall. Robert=Roiberd.

I have been a chick in love with video games for as long as I remember. I used to play Intellivision for God's sake. Then came Atari. Sega, Playstation, PS2, now the damn Xbox. And a bunch of PC games in between.

Alright, so there is no doubt that I am not only a nerd, but also a geek. It's documented in this blog. And I'm going to just keep blogging along until I can blog no more.

Anyone out there like William Carlos Williams? I re-stumbled upon him Friday for reasons I can't really post here, but they don't matter anyway. He is GOOD. Anyone like "This is Just to Say?" He was from Rutherford, NJ dammit! That's right around the corner. He was also a doctor, he delivered some 2000 babies in his career. Kind of cool...

Wow

I really thought I'd do more with this blog in the past 2 years. It's kind of sad that I only posted about 5 or 6 really shallow sugar-coated posts back in July of 2004 and then sort of let it fall to the wayside. Well believe me folks-a lot has happened, a lot of big important stuff in my life that is deep and thoughtful and wonderful and sad and awesome and intriguing! Just because it's not in my blog doesn't mean it's not real!

So what has happened? Well, along with cooking a lot of really great meals, including my famous chili, I've managed to squeeze a lot of life into the past 2 years and 2 months.

We've visited some really great places, including:

Cape Cod, driving out to good ol' P'town, which is one of my favorite places on Earth. There is nothing quite like being out on the end of a spiral cape of beach to make you really feel like you are at the end of the Earth. It's a good feeling. I wish I lived there. Hyannis has a hospital. I could find work there. I would brave the winters in a 4-wheel drive vehicle, a nice steamy coffee in my cupholder as I drove to work singing the songs of my early 20's with a smile on my face.

We've been to Florida twice since the last post and have decided that we need to live there. Both of our parents live there. It's hot, tropical, wild, crazy, and the kind of place where the pursuit of happiness is alive and well. Although a red state through and through, it has enough displaced Northerners to make me feel like I could turn it into my home. It's the kind of place you actually move to for the lifestyle. And we're in desperate need of a lifestyle. I want to go boating, throw a line into the water on a weekly basis, grow a banana tree, and swim most days. I want the beach to be in walking distance. I want to throw back some Coronas under my lanai, listening to the thunder coming in from miles and miles away, completely unobstructed, completely clear over the flat land of the peninsula.

We made our way down to Ocean City, Maryland by way of South Jersey and down through Delaware. What the hell is the deal with Delaware anyway? God damn. There is, like, NOTHING going on in Delaware. We drove through Dover thinking that since it was the capital of the whole entire state that there would have to be a decent place to eat. We found NOTHING. It was eerie. Anyhoo...Ocean City is gorgeous, especially in the off-season when no one is there. We got an amazing room-actually more than a room, it was kind of like a pent-house suite on the corner of the building with a hot tub inside, a hot tub outside, a couple of rooms, all for a very decent price at a major hotel chain. That's probably where Penny was created if my logic and math are both correct.

We made a beautiful baby during this time.

We've done a million fun things with both of our girls and done some hard work as parents together. We've ushered our older girl into her teen years and all of the difficulties, joys, laughs, and tears have been right there where you would expect them to be.

My husband had major open-heart surgery during this time. He had extensive pre-testing, a week's stay at NYU, and a 3 month recovery at home.

I managed to go slightly crazy working on a very demanding med-surg floor. I learned a lot. I saw a lot of really fascinating stuff. I left feeling very conflicted, heart-broken, defeated, and terrible. I'm just too old for that crap.

I found work as a psych nurse at an outpatient mental health facility in a major urban area of my state. I am one of a handful of nurses in a social service agency. I can't imagine doing anything but psych nursing from now on. There is a reason why it was my favorite rotation in school. It is where I belong...for now...I can still see hospice nursing as a possibility in my future, but that too is so dependent on strong psych skills and pharmacology.

At the end of the day what is GOOD nursing besides very strong interpersonal communication and strong pharmacology knowledge?

I don't know who said it first but I was taught in school that the definition of nursing is "therapeutic use of the the self." Beautiful, isn't it?

It all boils down to one human being using energy and knowledge to help another human being.

Monday Morning

yesterday we had such a great time at my parents bbq. it wasn't a huge crowd, but we had a lot of fun. my uncle jeff's family there, and of course, my parents and grammy. we had all kinds of grilled meat and things to go with it. my mom also made sausage and peppers.

sadie had so much fun playing with her cousin natalie. they exchanged email addresses. i think we're going to try to work something out where they can spend the weekend with each other from time to time.

more later...

Today has been...

...wonderful so far. Slept in. Had a crazy dream about being chased through a huge old house with some of my friends from nursing school. I think I was back in the frame of mind I was in during preparation for our presentation: a lot of pressure, a lot of fear, and the same people all over again. I'll probably never stop dreaming about these familiar themes from school.

We cleaned up a little, lounged around, watched an excellent movie (Cold Mountain), and cleaned up a little bit more. Sadie has spent her day either working on cataloging Rob's record collection and playing the Sims. Rob has been helping with chores all along. He also met with the contractor over at his parents' house to see about getting the attic refinished. He'll give us the estimate sometime next week.

The plan is to order some food for dinner, either delivered from the Grill or picked up at Bensi...

Dinner and Beyond

We just finished eating our dinner: steak, mashed potatoes, glazed carrots. Now it's on to a television odyssey: Jeopardy, and movies from Blockbuster with the family and the dogs...til tomorrow...

Middle of the Day

So this day has been OK, I guess. Extremely rainy. Hard to get around in the car. Between flooding and traffic, it was an adventure just going to the store.

Sadie and I had a really nice lunch. Homemade chicken broth with elbow macaroni, celery, carrots, and scallions. We also had crackers with a spread I made: chevre, scallions, port, all kinds of seasoning, and tiny, minced ham, celery, and carrot pieces. It was so good. And I treated myself to a little nip of port while I was at it :-)


Rob will be leaving work soon. He's planning on stopping at Blockbuster to get us some movies for the weekend. I hope he gets something good. We watched the movie of my choice last weekend, which was Monster.

Today I found out

that my license is going to arrive at my house within the next 10 days!!! Yippeeeeee!!!

On the more mundane side of things, I'll be leaving the hosue for the the grocery store soon. We need some more DrainO, bleach, dryer sheets, and other things.

Steak for dinner tonight.

my first blog entry

mommydawgsfamouschili is going to be the place that i gather all current and relevant information in one place for me and my loved ones to check out any time they want.