10 days off

Another weekend and the best part of this Friday is that it’s the beginning of a 10 off work break. You notice I’m not using the vacation word – saying farewell, organizing dental surgery, and transporting offspring to various universities is not exactly a vacation. Nice (and likely not possible) to be NOT working in my day job as this is all going on.

Vacation is something you say when you’re planning where travel miles will take you. I’ve discovered that we have enough collected through various reward programs to do four return short haul (will get you to a major gateway for a package) trips. There was also an ad in the paper saying that the new passport application process is simplified and since we need to try that out this fall we will find out.

Today was a pretty steady push to wrap things up before abandoning the workplace, about 85% of whom became very needy as they experienced anticipatory separation anxiety from a dual role practitioner. Not as bizarre as yesterday when I must share the following yarn with you. I was on the nursing unit when I was paged for an extension I wasn’t familiar with, I dialed it and a supervisor called me by name and said “ringworm” after a pause I said “pardon?” and “can you repeat that?” I was questioned as to cleaning products for a chair someone with ringworm had sat on “yes people do that” I agreed. I explained it was a (common, fairly harmless) fungus and that mould cleaner would banish it so the regular products were ok. The exchange passed from my mind until about an hour later when I heard shouting up the hall. I peeked around the corner to view one of the rather stocky cleaners purposefully heading in my direction, backed up by a smaller less assertive colleague pushing a cleaning cart bearing down on an office chair about midway down. The larger cleaner was saying in a resonating voice “now if this is going to be a regular occurrence” to which the office occupant (not to be outdone) was loudly replying “not a regular occurrence I didn’t want it to happen once!” I beat a hasty retreat, the ‘discussion’ finally settled and I noted a wet floor sign perched on the chair as I headed towards the copier. Good thing we didn’t make a big deal of it I thought.

I headed over to the nursing home to visit Mom and found a ‘social’ in progress for the baby daughter who was saying goodbye on her last day. I think she will miss the residents as they have become a large part of her these past two summers. She received a lovely flower arrangement and card signed by most of the residents. The President of the Residents Council spoke on behalf of residents and staff and advised her to “stick with it and come on back”. She’d also had Gary brought in as a show & tell activity (albeit a rather chunky one she found after conveying him about in his cat carrier) and he was placidly being shown to all the residents. He waited patiently in the car while I picked up the party supplies for the weekend BBQ and we headed home.

The hamsters are fine, thanks for asking. We are into the countdown for their safety of only six days remaining in their cat risky living conditions.

The quote of the day was on a t-shirt worn by a woman I followed in the grocery store which read…Well behaved women rarely make history. Ain’t it the truth?