Hello blog friends.

Because I have been severely chastised by my few faithful readers, I am prepared to offer another brief glimpse into the people and circumstances surrounding my late night phone adventures.

The mysterious caller is, indeed, of the male persuasion. His name is Charles and he lives in Arlington. In fact, for 2 whole years we walked the halls of the same high school, where both of his parents teach. However, it seems the 2 year age gap between us kept our paths from ever crossing until quite recently.

Charles has a younger brother, David, who was actually in my graduating class. I did not know David. However, he and Megan are quite good friends. About a month ago, Megan informed me that David and his older brother and a friend were going to be visiting us in Abilene. That is how I met Charles.

We did not start our phone friendship that weekend. It did not come about until 2 weeks later when Megan and I made a weekend trip to Arlington. Megan arranged a bit of a mutally-agreed-upon setup, and that is where this all began.

We are now quite good phone friends. And in 4 days, he will be coming to Abilene, so we will be able to be real life friends too. I am quite excited.

That is all you get for now. Time will tell if the story shall continue.

So I have this annoying cowlick in the front of my hair that causes this one little section of hair to totally reject all my attempts to tame it. It is driving me especially crazy right now. Just thought I'd share.

Who else out there cried pretty much all the way through Grey's Anatomy last night? I know I did. They can't kill off Meredith. How can you have a show called Grey's Anatomy without Meredith Grey? It cannot occur.

I got to be on the radio this morning. This weekend is the radiothon for Children's Miracle Network, so they needed some pedi nurses to volunteer to go on air to talk about what the funding goes to. It was pretty fun. I'm a pretty big fan of talking, so it came pretty easily. :)

I am pretty sleepy right now. I have been up late the last several nights talking on the phone. I've never been much of a phone person, but I do have to say I have enjoyed the hours I've spent talking on it this week. Or maybe I enjoy the person I've been talking to...I will keep you posted. :)

So I had probably the busiest day at work that I've ever had today. It was a little bit insane. Highlights include:

• Having 3 different charge nurses (thankfully, none of whom were me).
• Taking care 7 different patients throughout the course of the day. (Minimum of 4 and maximum of 6 at one time.)
• Assisting a 5'11", 300+ lb., 11-year old patient to use a bedpan.
• Informing the parents of a probably terminal cancer patient suffering from severe chronic pain that there is a national shortage of the new pain medicine her doctor ordered, so we will have to continue with the current, seemingly ineffective treatment regimen until the other drug becomes available sometime next week.
• Listening politely while the mother of one of my patients talked for at least 15 minutes solid about the sudden death of Anna Nicole Smith, the snow that is predicted to fall on Wednesday, spicy ice cream in Mexico, the religious preferences of her various family members, and her suspicions of the sexual orientation of her cousin's 10-year-old son. (She was actually quite entertaining to listen to, but not so helpful in a time crunch.)
• Attempting to impart my limited knowlege on an overly-eager nursing student, while desperately trying to catch up on my charting.
• Clocking out at 8:38pm, an hour and 38 minutes after my shift ended.

As if the day wasn't already crazy enough, we also found out early this morning that JCAHO representatives were making rounds in the hospital. Every time I saw an unfamiliar person walk down the hall towards the unit, I said a little prayer that it wasn't someone from JCAHO coming to grill me or follow me around, waiting for me to mess up. Thankfully, the pedi unit was spared this little joy today. I wish the same good fortune upon those working this weekend...

Crazy as it was, I survived and lived to tell the tale. Lucky for you. :) Just be glad you are not Megan or Moose, who happened to be the captive audience I unloaded on for approximately 45 minutes after I finally arrived home. Yay for friends who will listen and at least pretend to be interested in your professional trials and tribulations. I have good friends. :)

If I didn't really enjoy my job as a nurse, I think I would quit and find a job where I could draw floorplans and arrange people's furniture all the time. It's just so much fun! Megan and I just spent the last few hours drawing scaled floorplans of various rooms in our house. We then measured each piece of furniture in the rooms, and cut out little squares (also to scale) representing each piece. Now we can try out various arrangements without having to move furniture. Ingenious! Our goal in this little endeavor is to eventually map out each room in the house, including hallways and closets, so that we can piece them all together and have a scaled blueprint of our entire house. How much fun is that? There is a reason behind all this madness (although, even if there wasn't, we'd probably do it anyway). We have big dreams of converting the pink room into another bedroom, expanding the small bathroom off the laundry room, and also expanding Megan's bathroom. Just the thought of it all is so exciting! The hope is to get these various projects accomplished this summer. I hope we can do it!!

Ah, the joys of orthodontics. I had my first appointment for adjustments on the braces today. I now have a lovely rubber band box in my mouth. It is supposed to be closing my bite. While this is the main goal of my orthodontic treatment, and I am very excited about the end result, I have to admit that I will be slightly sad when I can no longer poke my tongue out through the little gap in my teeth. But not that sad.

Today I watched the past few weeks' worth of episodes of Men In Trees that I missed. Such a good show. In one of the episodes I watched, Marin (love that name!) bought an old cabin on a lake to fix up. It made me incredibly jealous. I so want to do that!! I have always had this huge desired to buy an old, run-down, character-filled house and give it the time and work and love it needs to be beautiful again. I will do it someday. Just wait.

Congrats to Phyllis on getting in to grad school! I knew you would have no problem impressing those people with all your adventurousness!

Hello, blog friends. Thanks for your votes of confidence and prayers for me during my freak-out last week. As you can now be assured, I survived the dreaded day of charging. It was not an entirely horrible experience, but I look forward to not taking on such responsibility again for many months to come.

My newest stress-inducing work-related responsibility is being in charge of making the schedule for the pedi unit. This one I can't blame on anyone but myself, because I volunteered to do it. I think it will be slightly challenging and a bit time consuming considering the lack of staff resources at the moment, but I'm a bit of a nerd, and I look at it like a puzzle I have to solve. I think I will enjoy the task in a way that would probably sicken most normal people. Plus, I kind of like the feeling of having something to do that other people are counting on. It makes me feel like I'm actually doing something that matters. I've been a bit bored lately, and feeling kind of selfish because I don't really do a whole lot that doesn't concern me directly. The change feels good.

While we're on the topic of stress-inducing situations, I'm becoming a bit stressed about the upcoming spring break mission trip to Honduras that my roommates and I are planning. For a while, we were really concerned that we weren't going to get the number of people we needed to make the trip a reality, but we decided to go for it and trust God to bring us people. We ended up with a list of 13 names, and we were very excited. Plane tickets were purchased. Then, today, we found out that 2 people are backing out. Besides the fact that it's just a wee bit frustrating to have people back out so late in the game, it's bringing up the delimma of what to do with the plane tickets that have already been purchased in these people's names. Do we make them pay for tickets they won't be using? Do we try to find people to take their places on such short notice? If we do find willing participants, will we be able to have the names on the tickets changed? I'm so bad at handling situations like this. I hate the awkwardness of it all. I really wish I could just eat the cost of their tickets and not have to address the situation at all, but aside from the fact that there's pretty much no way I could afford to do that, and the fact that it's not exactly fair, it's also incredibly passive of me, and I need to learn to grow up and deal with things. So, if you would, please pray that we find an effective way to deal with this little snag pretty quickly. I honestly believe that this trip is something God will bless, and I know that He will provide us with a solution, but the little person inside me who desires to have complete control and know exactly how things are going to work out is going a little bit crazy at the moment.

Despite my last several less-than-cheerful posts, I promise my life really isn't that horrible! God has blessed me incredibly, and I really am loving life. Sometimes a girl just needs to vent...