Okay, so with a two month lj hiatus behind me, I return - as a NURSE. As in monkey_pie, BSN. Graduation was last night. AND I have a job. It's at the same hospital where I just finished my senior practicum, on the Mother/Baby unit. So, come February when I start, I'll be spending my days with new moms and babies...and getting paid for it!. It's all pretty exciting. To celebrate graduation ms. sin and I are going on vacation to Mexico. yay! I think it will be necessary after spending Christmas in chilly Pittsburgh.

Anyway, I won't even try to wade through all my friends pages I've missed, but if anyone is up to anything good, drop me a line. Because while real life has been pretty consumming I haven't forgotten my nice lj friends.

Spent yesterday going around with the Lactation Consultants at the hospital, and it was great. Won't gush about empowering women and supporting them and all, but what a great job. And man, I want a baby. Like hardcore.

I started watching Smallville since it just went into syndication on abcfamily. Oh, the slash. AND tripping_sin and I watched 'life as we know it' and it was good so there's another show on the schedule now. Like I really needed more distractions in my life? I will never get my midterm reading done at this rate. I am ruled by pron and tv.

Curse my lovely girlfriend. I caught her cold and am feeling miserable and whiny. And stuffy. bleh. However, she rented Return of the King, so at least I know how I will spend my afternoon. Well, I'll either be watching that or reading porn. I've gotten terribly predictable. Also, I've been sucked into reading HP slash, which at one point I swore I wouldn't do. I think I've scared tripping_sin by reading Harry/Snape. oh well.

In other exciting news (exciting to me, anyway) - I stared my senior practicum! Yay. This is the clinical I get to do in my special area of interest, so I am working on a Mother/Baby unit at a local hospital. I went on Sunday and loved it! I'm wondering if it's too early to ask them to hire me when I graduate in December. The hospital is very nice, smallish, newish, about 15 miles away. And omigod the nurses were all so nice. In past clinicals, they've been sort of like 'do what you gotta do, but stay out of our way.' Here they're all 'we're so happy to have you, we hope you'll like it here.'

I love Mother/Baby. I had thought I wanted to work Labor & Delivery, but am changing my mind. The pace is different (slow, my pace), but the nicest part is the way you get to work with new moms, educating them, empowering them. I'll avoid rhapsodizing, but suffice to say, I spent some very enjoyable time helping a first time mom breastfeed. It was good to feel like I was teaching her and reassuring her. I could feel her anxiety decrease by the time I left. It appeals to the 'fix it and make it better' part of me. Also, my preceptor is the sweetest, a very nice older woman. I hope I do a good job and they hire me in December. I go again next Sunday and I can't wait.

So, tripping_sin and I had an adventure this weekend. We drove to Indiana for a wedding and had the most lovely bonus of meeting cincodemaygirl. She is the best, and I wish she lived closer, we had such a fun time. I plan to lure her to the East Coast with copious amounts of Bailey's. We had such a good time that we could not bear to get back on the road until nearly 10:30pm, which, with the time zone change, meant we did not arrive at our stopping point in Pittsburgh until 6am. And it was so worth it.

( More Wacky Midwest Adventures )

off to the beach for a few days w/ tripping_sin and her family (if she ever gets herself packed, that is) -- whee! lemme know if i miss anything good while i'm away.

meanwhile - GO SEE Garden State! it was so good, i wanted to stay and watch it a second time. also, go see Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. funny. I want some Harold/Kumar fic because they totally do the gay thing.

omigod. i just need to moan a bit. i just spent the past few hours dealing with my flooding house. wah. rain was pouring in the study window (which is closed!) and the floor, the area rug, the day bed -- all soaked. threw towels on the big puddles then ran out back to check the storm drain, which was clogged. so the basement also flooded. waded in more than ankle deep water to clear drain, with the overflowing gutter dumping on my head. wah. wet-vacced the basement, set out buckets to catch the drips from the ceiling as the study flood leaked through the floor. am now doing much laundry, i think i used every towel and blanket in the house to clean things up.

and my big plan for today had been to come home, shower and take a nap after a fucking long day at the hospital. no such luck.

if anyone sees my lovely tripping_sin online, tell her to let me buy new windows. tell her if she loved me we could get new windows and be done with floods and invading yellow jackets building nests in our house.

Drive Shaft. Could there BE a gayer name for dom's band in Lost? The clip of him talking about the band kills me. Anyway, back when I first heard a rumor of Drive Shaft I made some icons. Because really shaft? *snicker*

Anyway, here's some Drive Shaft icons for the taking, and some miscellaneous things I did while playing around. Enjoy, lemme know if you take, and please credit (btw, i think the bases for #1 & #4 are by bleedskint, so props to her too)

( Iconage )

just watching the news and there was a story about a kitten trapped in a sewer (collective awwwwwww now). and they were interviewing a guy and below him on the screen it said "Joe Smith - Heard Meows" *HA* that is awesome.

also, i saw a kid riding his bike and talking on a cell phone. it made me do a little double take and laugh.

monkey_pie Look out for the

m HOLE

tripping_sin has me working on some icons for her, so while i'm at it, i'll put this offer out there -- anyone have any icon requests? send 'em my way and i'll see what i can do. semester is over so i'm finding ways to amuse myself until summer classes start. breaking in photoshop seems like a good place to start.

i think i just spent like 2 hours at babies r us shopping for my friend's baby shower. it's like crack. i refrained from indulging in my impulses towards cuteness though and got her sensible things like a diaper bag and special kit with a thermometer/bulb syringe/tweezers/medicine dropper/etc (i figured it was an appropriate gift coming from me). okay, there was some cuteness - a little outfit and some toys. i'm not made of stone.

so - i never did get around to writing about my last 2 weeks of OB clinicals. so much action and excitement!

( Read more about c-sections, sad birth defects, and other OB adventures )

Also - to any interested parties, I'm selling a bundle of text books. I'll list 'em later, but if anyone needs nursing research, informatics, or psych books, lemme know.

hurrah! today was officially the end of the semester. after exams we all went drinking and i only just got home a bit ago. so much fun. so much alcohol. i think i even smoked a cigarette (wtf?). lots of folks from school went and i even talked to the annoying noisy girls and made nice. also, one girl who i don't really know said she remembered me from class and that i had 'cool clothes.' what an awesome compliment. then, she specifically mentioned pants i inherited from tripping_sin, so, guess i can't take much credit. also, there was puking (but not by me!) lemme tell you, if you're gonna puke, might as well do it with a bunch of nursing students handy. also, there were boobs. boobjob girl was there and was totally giving free shows in the bathroom. i touched them...they're hard. ew. and, i might have let someone else touch my boobs. but then, i'm generous like that.

also, i got a haircut. who's a pretty pretty girl now? (um, i'm either still drunk, or tired, so my apologies for this randomness. i very much want to update with all the cool things i saw in clinical the past two weeks - gastroschisis, people! - but that will have to wait for a more lucid moment)

eep, today's the first day i've been on lj since friday!

the may moot was wonderful! AQ and sumbitch are the best hostesses, and it was good to see aprilkat again. plus, i got to meet libitina and traveller. good food + porn talk is my idea of a very good saturday evening. it's such a pleasure to spend time with such smart, funny, naughty women.

my day has been full of weirdness. i had psych clinical, and it turns out my uncle was a patient today. very unexpected meeting for both of us. but, since we've been out of touch we took it as a chance to catch up with each other (and then my instructor let me spend the rest of the day working on the adolescent unit, because really, how weird is that to be working on the psych unit where you've got a relative).

it's such a pretty day i came home and put a skirt on. it's like i needed to feel pretty too, and trust me, the white uniform wasn't cutting it.

( news from the nursing school front )

hi. my name is heather and i was a buffy virgin.
and now i'm just trying to figuring out how i totally missed getting hooked on this show. seriously, was i living under a rock when it first came on? the very kind sumbitch and abundantlyqueer lent me their season 1 dvds and i've been having a buffy fest lately. and loving it. i feel like one of the cool kids now.

also, here's a first: hot guy at psych clinical today. woo! there's a cutie counselor who is gonna be my orlando-bloom-knock-off crush. big brown eyes, dark curly hair. kinda precious. plus, he works with troubled adolescents, how can you not love that?

ow. my feet hurt. my legs hurt. even my ass hurts. too much standing around at the hospital today i guess. that, and i'm a whiny wuss. also, i am buried under a mountain of schoolwork and can't do any fun writing. not until i finish three term papers. though somehow the crush of responsibility did not prevent me from enjoying joaquin phoenix & liv in inventing the abbotts. apparently WE television is having a special movie man-athon.

( what i did at the hospital this week )
Well, I'm off to eat ice cream and watch Beavis and Butthead and Aeon Flux on MTV2 (uh, what schoolwork?). Is it wrong that I'm kinda excited at the prospect of the new Olsen Twins movie? C'mon Eugene Levy is in it too. That makes it better, right?

"plain exterior belied the pulsing chaos within. Elijah practically attached himself to Anna and leaves the island of slots for the challenge. I won't spill the scenarios I got, but I have a patient i can only blame my poor memory so much). anyway, it was a slight language barrier as her English was not his intention, but there weren't the schizophrenics and such that we had to buy her some jeans (she needs new clothes more than his time with her? She could imagine Anna doing her best to ignore the churning in his heart he once again pledged"

wow. frighteningly, this is sometimes what it's like to live in my head. it's like all worlds colliding at once. thanks to 1420 for the link

When I am a licensed nurse working in the hospital I will always be nice to students. You would not believe how some nurses want nothing to do with you and how shitty that can feel. Alternately, I have been lucky to work with some amazing nurses who take mentoring to heart. I hope I'm one of them when I grow up.

So, I have a tale of drama (and me being stupid) from OB this week...
( Read more... )

Okay. Here is the beginning of a little AU story my brain has hatched. Elijah's a college student interning in Washington, DC. Herein, he meets his new roommate Orlando (a British au pair). If folks think it's a promising beginning I will write more.

Title: Intern
Rating: PG (smut to come later)
Disclaimer: Not my boys, never happened. All lies.
A/N: Many thanks to lostangels18 for her most excellent beta skillz

( He wasn’t nervous exactly, but it felt like he’d been holding his breath since his plane landed. )

Today I registered for classes for my final semesters of nursing school. Woo. Sadly, looks like summer session is gonna be hellish. Here's to having no life. S'okay, I'm too poor to go on summer vacation anyway.

( This week's adventures in the hospital )