OK, I've spent some time in my pool. I've seen my grandchildren. The boys were here with their mom for three days this week. It was great to see them, but it was nice to have them gone. It's so quiet around here tonight.

Tuesday my husband got laid off. We don't know if it's forever or just for awhile. One of the guys from the office is suppose to call him Monday and let him know. They let him work all day and then called him while he was driving home from work to tell him he was done. I call that chicken shit. If you can't do the hard stuff face to face don't take a job with responsibility.

I'm tired. I'm going to try and pick up a couple more shifts next week. I also want to go fishing next week too. I've been thinking about taking the boat, camper and my husband and going to one of the lakes close by for a week. If we stay close I can go to work if I need to.

We had a party for the youngest grandson on Wednesday. He's first birthday is the 30th, I have to work that day and it's a 'daddy's day' so we decided to celebrate a little early. It was fun for the kids. I made a drum cake. It was a lot easier than the train I made a few years ago. He'll probably get one of those in a couple years.

Not much else to say, too tired. Had to clean house on my 'rest' day so I'm tired from working too hard at home today. Good night.

I will call my sister....I just have to think about it before I'm too tired to talk or it's too late to call.

OK so it's been another month. I seem to have trouble spending any time on the computer lately. I'm no longer the director of nursing at work. It's a relief. Unfortunately it's hard on the staff. They seem to like me in the position and will work hard for me. I just can't do the job for very long. I work myself half to death. My family worries about me when I take the position. None of them really complained because they knew it was just a temporary situation. I just hope the new DNS works out. She's a little flighty and nervous. I hope it's all just energy she has to burn. I've taken a week off. I felt like I needed to be out of the building so the staff would go to her for issues instead of me. I'm going back to weekends and I'll work on input (computer crap)



Went fishing last week. Caught a few. Catch and release. I'm thinking I need to start keeping some and have a fish fry the end of the summer. I need to get the camper cleaned up and see about taking it to the lake for a couple weeks. It's close enough to the house that I can go to work from the lake. Since I only have to work 2 days a week it wouldn't be bad.



I don't know what to do with my daughter. She's still living here. Her current boyfriend is....well....not my choice for her but it's her choice. His house burned down on Friday. So he is spending the night. They stayed in a motel over the weekend. I sure hope she's not planning on him being here very often. He kind of gives me the creeps. Maybe that's not the right word. I find it hard to trust him. There's a history there. He's got a rep of being a woman beater and that really bothers me. I'm just hanging on for the ride.



My garden is looking good. I need to finish planting. Maybe tomorrow (later today) I can finish up. It's suppose to be cool, in the 60's so it won't be too hot. Fruit tree are doing good. Blueberries are loaded but we have to compete with the birds. I'm determined to win.

Today's date August, yes, August 5, 2009. I might get this posted.

It's been a long summer so far. I've not spent enough time in my pool. I've not been riding my horse. I've not been spending time with my grand kids. I've not been camping. I've not been fishing since I started this post. So what the hell have I been doing? I can't answer that. I'm busy almost all the time or I'm too tired to care what's going on around me. I guess I'll figure it out somewhere along the line. I do know that some how I will spend time in my pool, ride my horse, see my grand kids, go camping, and go fishing.

I've been asked to be the assistant director of nursing at work. I've said yes. Do you really thinks I'm going to get around to the above items anytime soon???

If I'm going to get these things done I need to get off here and get some sleep. Thanks for stopping. I will be posting more frequently come September.

Roller Coasters aren't my favorite

I am sorry and I am slack. I've been very busy and very tired.


I don't know where to start. I've been on vacation since last Wednesday. I have stayed home and made use of my time. We have had rain, rain and more rain. So much rain that we haven't been able to mow any grass. Any how it's been sunny for a couple days. I broke out the push mower and started on the fenced in back yard. It isn't very big but it took me forever. It had to be cut. The grass (weeds) had all gotten so tall that we'd needed a month of sunshine to dry it out. You know the mess...you push a few feet and smack the mower around to knock the wet sticky grass out from under it. A few more feet and the mower dies. Lift the mower (trying not to spill gas) reach under and pull the huge clumps of soaked green slimy insect filled should be grass out from under and around the blades. Great fun.

I proceeded out into the surrounding grounds. We have fruit trees, plum, apple and pear. Two of each. The grass had taken over so I cut under them. The old lift the front wheels off the ground and gradually lower it over the weeds. After the trees came the fence lines and the area around the deck and the blueberries. Hard slow work but doable. This process took one whole day and 1/2 of the next.

That was Friday and Saturday. Wednesday and Thursday I cleaned the house up. I did one of the jobs I hate. I have glass cabinets with dragons and wizards in them. Two cabinets. They have to be emptied and dusted and I hadn't done it since 2007. Yeah I know, how gross. It wasn't as bad as you might think. A friend of mine told me I had really nice frosted glass in my cabinet. Worked for me. (she knows better)

My friend lives in Indiana now and we don't get to see each other very often. I sure do miss her. She's one of those unique people that not everybody understands but for me she is one of the best. She came in on Friday afternoon and stayed the night. She and her son. Her son is very unique also. He is a fragile X person. Makes visits very interesting. He amazes me. I find I can understand more of what he is trying to say if I don't watch him while he talks. He talks with his whole body. He did something that almost made me cry. He walked up to me, extended his hand, shook my hand and said, "Thank you Zuu" As he walked away from me he said, "I like it here Clara...I like it here." Fragile X have a difficult time expressing emotion so this was very touching to me.

I've been on a roller coaster with my daughter. I had said before that I was waiting for her to start packing...well she hadn't started packing because the wedding's off. I told she had to find a place and soon. She brought some guy home this evening and apparently she is going to move in with him. "Jive" is his name or what he goes by. I wouldn't know that they were moving in with him but her ex was here dropping off their son and he stayed and talked to me. He wanted to make sure that I knew what was going on. He seemed a little disappointed but not in too bad of shape for a break-up. He said it was something they both wanted. So whatever works for them. Now my concern...my grandchildren. I'm going to hang on to my ass and enjoy the ride. Do I have any other choice. I'm just glad my grand daughter is old enough to call if she needs me.

I'll try to do better at letting you know what I'm up to. Thanks for stopping by.

2:30 AM, then again later

The whole family has been sick for several weeks now. Tomorrow will make 14 days for me. It's an upper respiratory infection. It's been hell. My throat was sore for days, fever for a couple days, head congested (it's amazing how much snot a human can produce) then chest congestion and cough. I lost my voice for three days. I only missed 2 days of work. I'm such a weakling, it seems like I catch everything and get sicker then everybody else. It's always been that way. It's part of my genetic make up I guess. One of my mom's sister was that way.

We had a visit from state inspectors this past week. They came in on a complaint. Nursing facilities are inspected at least once a year. When some one has a complaint about a facility they call the state inspectors and submit their complaint and then the facility gets inspected concerning the complaint or complaints. They were with us from 11:30am until 7:00pm. That's a short visit. All complaint issues were found to be unsubstantiated. They did however, find that we had failed to provide adequate care to one of our residents and issued two 'tags' for things that weren't in the complaint. Now we have to come up with a plan of correction or provide the state with proof that we did provide adequate care. We'll be fine, we just have to dig through parts of the chart that have already been sent to medical records. Just time consuming. I won't have to do much with that.

It's 2:45 AM. I'll have to finish this tomorrow.

February 25, 2009 10:25 PM.

Well I started this a couple weeks ago, I think. It seems I just can't find a few minutes to write a few lines. The economy is starting to take it's toll on us. My husband works for a family owned company and they contract repairs for condos and apartments. They do individual jobs for home owners and other businesses as they come along. Well, needless to say, there aren't many individual jobs coming up right now. No body has the money for remodeling and repairs.

Hubby had a little accident last week. He fell off a ladder. Only a short fall but he landed on a brick and twisted his ankle. It was bad. He had x-rays, no breaks just a bad sprain. He's been off work with that but it didn't really matter because they've only worked one day since his accident.

I'm waiting for my daughter to start packing her things. She's one of those people that packs for a trip two days a head of time. For moving into a home of her own I would think she'd be packing now. They're suppose to move the first of March, oh, next week. Nothing's in boxes, no signs of a move to me. I can't take much more. I love her, I adore the kids but I need to be grandma. I need to not see all the things that go on. All the yelling, the staying out until all hours, the missed doctor's appointment and so on and so on. It all makes me crazy. The doctor thing really drives me crazy. She has had positive tests results for cervical cancer and that was before the baby was born he's about to be six months old. There are times I wish she was 17 again. A 30 year old needs to take care of herself, handle her own issues. I hope she isn't putting this to the side like she did her pregnancies. Ignoring pregnancy just resulted in a baby, ignoring cancer ends up with dead. She's killing me and doesn't seem to know it.

Enough. I'm getting anxious for Spring. Some of my flowers are up and beautiful. They shouldn't be out yet, usually they don't bloom until first of March but they've been up for a couple weeks. I've had some Easter lillies up since January. I don't think we're going to have much winter left because my horses have started shedding their winter coats.

Thanks for stopping by. I'll try not to take so long to leave note. No promises, I try never to make them. Promises are too important to make lightly. Hug your loved ones and give yourself tight squeeze too. :o)

How time flies

I've been busy. If you remember I said that several of us were going to work on a Saturday because of an audit...Well we worked on Saturday and then stayed late on Monday for the audit on Tuesday. The audit was of my department. I've been working in this department for 6 months. I started the end of June 2008. I'm just now starting to understand a very small portion of what we do. On Tuesday the woman came in to check us out. I was already exhausted but ready to breeze through this thing because we had prepared. My executive director and director of nursing were in control of which records to pull. Remember I'm still learning. I had thought we should pull records for the months of July, August and September. I was corrected and told to pull the records for the months of January, February and March. So for 4 days we pulled records, dug through piles of patient records and tried to sort things out to make the audit run smoothly. We had everything ready. All in order and separate so we could just pick up what she asked for and hand it over.

The woman came in, we set her up in an extra office and got ready to get this thing over with quickly. She produced the first list with patient names and dates. I smiled walked slowly to my office, stepped in and closed the door. I went to my desk and sat calmly into my chair. I called the ED and the DON and asked them to come to my office please. The two other woman in my office were just looking at me and waiting. ED and DON walked in, I smiled and handed them the list. All the records requested were for the months of July, August and September. I wanted to puke. I took a deep breath and went to work.

The audit didn't go badly, it was just stressful. We are allowed a 25% error rate. We have a 19% error rate. Don't freak, this has nothing to do with patient care, this is all on the money end. Anything below 25% doesn't have to pay back any moneys already paid. Anything over 25% starts costing the company.

I had to do some in-services this past week. I went in Saturday morning at 1 AM and again Saturday at 2:30 PM. I only held 4 classes and they weren't very long, about an hour.

Some of my flowers are getting ready to bloom. It's too early but we've been having some warm weather. One day it'll be 60 and the next it'll be 30. I'm tired and it's getting late here. Thanks for stopping by.

Just stopped by

A new year. It's started with a bang. Work is nuts right now. I was going to work 1/2 a day today and ended up working 10 hours with no lunch. Gotta love nursing.

Just a short note for now. Had a quiet New Year at home with my husband. I was baby sitting so we just had an usual night at home. We did watch the 'ball' drop in New York. Man, Dick Clark has finally aged a little. It took a stroke for him to add a few years.

Gotta work tomorrow. It's Saturday and suppose to be a day off but unexpected audit is causing a bunch of us to work too much for the next week or so. Stay safe and learn something new everyday. Later.

Short note.

We had our Christmas on Sunday the 21st. It was busy and crowded. We had a big dinner. Everyone is doing fine. All my grands were here at some point in time during the day.

I'll get pictures of my new addition. I got a pony for the grands. Since Jo died I decided it would be good to have another horse bigger then Jo so the kids could ride until they are grown. This horse should be perfect. He has no name yet. I'm trying to let my grand daughter name him. We'll see how that goes.

To all, have a Merry Christmas. Be safe and happy. Hug the ones you love. Thanks for stopping by. The picture is Logan and Rain. The new baby, now four months old and his sister 7 yrs. old.