Randomness

I feel like every post I start these days needs an apology.  A "I'm still processing internally and not really writing" sort of thing.  And that's mostly true. It's also true that I'm busy with school, and that I've been making some big life and faith decisions that are taking a lot of time and energy that I used to spend blogging.

So, I'm letting myself off the hook.  No more starting posts with apologies.  I'm just going to show up here when I have the time and motivation to show up here.  And today, I do.

So allow me to present a list of random thoughts for your perusal:

• Yesterday I purchased two lawn chairs.  It was sort of one of those "I feel like a grown-up" moments.  I mean, adults own lawnchairs, right?  Non-adults use blankets, or sit on the grass, or sponge a chair off a friend who has more grown-up cred than them.  So I get some grown-up points for buying a pair of lawn chairs for use at all future summer/outdoor parties!
• I'm pretty peopled out at the moment.  I always feel like that after the first week of a new semester, and this semester would appear to be following right along the same trend as usual.
• I have Mondays off this semester.  This is going to help immensely with the trend of getting overtired and peopled out so quickly.
• Also, I'm spending the semester in a perinatal placement.  That means I'm spending my summer doing two days a week in placements that include labor and delivery, NICU, and postpartum.  Mommies and babies all summer long! I'm pretty much ecstatic.
• Because I'm peopled out, I'm spend the day alone, enjoying quiet and getting ready for the week ahead.  That means I'm cleaning, organizing, doing laundry, making lists, and just chilling out.  It's kind of perfect.
• This morning I tried a gluten free pancake mix that I'd purchased with the hope that it would actually taste good.  It did!!!  Hallelujah.
• On that note, I should add that I've recently begun trying to seriously limit the gluten and starches that I consume.  I've noticed that if I eat a diet higher in protein and fruit and veggies, and lower in starch, I feel a lot better.  Also, I have less mood swings.  I find that slightly annoying, since most of my favorite foods are sweet and starchy and full of gluten.  However, these days I'm placing a pretty high premium on feeling healthier, so it's a toss up.  Also, I find that not being militant about it helps - it makes me thankful that my food sensitivities are just that - sensitivities - and not allergies.
• In other random food related news, I'm currently having a love affair with green smoothies. And quinoa.  But not together.
• Also, I've discovered that exercise really can reverse a low mood.  This discovery truly annoys me, since I hate exercising with a passion!  That said, it's hard to argue with results, and since I really am working on ways to be a healthier person, and to manage my anxiety and moods more naturally, I'm annoyed to admit that I have several times put on a Jillian Michaels video to kick a bad mood in the butt.
• In the area of managing anxiety and mood, after two years on my medication, I'm at a place where I'm starting to work towards weaning the dosage, and hopefully going off the medications. That said, I don't recommend the first week of a new semester as the time to start the weaning process.  Clearly I didn't think that one through.  Thus the need for those dates with Jillian Michaels videos!
• And finally, I woke up this morning thinking about loneliness and community.  Yesterday was a day where I got some rare in person time with a very trusted friend, and it was lovely.  It also highlighted the ongoing challenge of having my closest friends in other countries and continents, and the need to continue to build a supportive community here at home.

And with that, I'm going back to cleaning. And laundry. And organizing. And maybe baking.  And well, I might leave my introverted haven to go eat some frozen yogurt at some point today.  Because I kind of got hooked on the stuff while I was in Florida. And I'm craving it. A lot.  But I might just bake something tasty and gluten free instead, and stay in my quiet haven.  It's hard to predict!  See you soon!

Hunting for Rhythm

I'm writing this post in class on Wednesday afternoon, and it's going to be all kinds of random.

I've put off my usual pre-write of Thursday's post as I try to figure out what on earth it is that I'm going to talk about.

Truth is, my creativity wells are running just a little bit dry.  Actually a lot dry.

I'm buried in the state of "adapting back to school is overwhelming".  I've been reading hundreds and hundreds of pages of information about things like family nursing assessment, fetal development, congenital anomalies and circular pattern diagrams.  Some of it it is interesting, a lot of it is slogging.

Add to that some ongoing therapy homework, the need for social interactions, and taking time to send out resumes and try to find work to alleviate some financial stresses, and I just haven't had much time to fill my personal creativity tanks. Entertainment has been less in the stimulating category and more in the mindless category (hello Bachelorette!).

I keep telling myself I'll find the time for personal development and creativity, but the truth is that that might be the thing that slides a little bit until my next semester break in August.  I'm hoping that won't be the case, but I'm recognizing that it might be possible.  It might also be possible that this is just an adjustment phase as the variances of a disorganized program and a brand new semester get sorted out.  It might be that the days are an hour longer this semester and I don't have a full day off in my week.

I'm trying to figure out a new rhythm, and I'm definitely in the trial and error phase.  Every time I hit this phase, I hope it will be shorter than the previous time.  It rarely is.

So my creativity is dry, and that's what I'm here telling you about.  I was so desperate for a topic that I asked the classmate sitting next to me for ideas.  She suggested spring flowers, or the Diamond Jubilee (can you tell that Canada still has strong ties to Britain? I didn't even have to wonder what the diamond jubilee was, I just knew!)  I'm not writing about spring flowers or the diamond jubilee, but that means that I do have to tell you that my inspiration is so dry that I'm soliciting ideas from a classmate, who is pulling ideas from the newspaper she read during class today.

Wish me luck as I move towards finding rhythm and inspiration again!

Thursday Randoms

I want to share some random things today, jumping from topic to topic, sharing little bits and pieces that I keep meaning to share, but that never seem to qualify for a whole post to be devoted to them.

It's amazing to me how challenging it has been to go back to school after reading break.  I had felt like I was settling in to the rhythms of school prior to reading break, but a week where I slept in and didn't spend hours and hours every day with people seems to have set the settling in process back further than I anticipated.  It hasn't been this hard to get out of bed, and I haven't been this tired since the first week or two of the semester.  Here's hoping that my level of adjustment jumps back up quickly!

This morning I'm off to a junior high school, to do school immunizations.  If all goes well, by the end of the day I'll have given at least a couple of kids their immunizations.  It still seems a little bit crazy at times that this nursing thing is actually happening, and perhaps even more crazy that the first real patients we'll ever have, we're inflicting pain on, but I'm pumped for this!  (Well, not for the inflicting pain part, but definitely for the first client encounter part!)  I wasn't feeling nervous until yesterday when our instructor gathered the group of us going with him and told us that a few people had sort of freaked out a bit, and we needed to have a "safe word" that we could say to let him know we needed him to step in, or for him to let us know if there was trouble and he needed to take over.  Those comments made me just a little bit nervous, but I'm still feeling like I'm more than capable of this, and I'm excited for it.

This has been another tough week in the finances department.  I'm not sure if I mentioned it here, but the accountant who did my taxes last year made a major error that ended up sticking me with a very large bill.  I got another bill in the mail yesterday, informing me that I owe a different government agency still more money, since I received cheques that I shouldn't have (a subsidy cheque) based on the correct income that the account failed to report.  I also found out yesterday that there continue to be snags with my student loan funding, and that I may not receive any more funding, much less the nearly ten thousand dollars I thought were coming.  Not the best news ever to get on the day that a brand new laptop I ordered arrived in the mail.

And, speaking of the laptop, while my finances are a bit of a mess, I think I would have had to order it anyway.  Turns out that the trusty MacBook that I've had for seven or eight years, the one that has been slowly inching towards death for a couple years now, was picking up its pace on the trip to death's door. I couldn't take the risk that the MacBook would freeze (its new favorite activity) in the middle of writing an in class paper, or any sort of school project, really.  So, I ordered a new 13" MacBook Pro, and it arrived yesterday.  It's shiny and beautiful, and I can't wait to make the full transition to using it.

Also in random news, I'm growing out my bangs.  I hate growing out my bangs, and clearly forgot how frustrating the process is when I decided back in August that I needed to have bangs for the first time in a decade.  Being back in school, and broke, bangs and the constant styling and trimming were too high maintenance for me, and so I'm growing them out.  They're in the horribly awkward stage - the too long to style as bangs, but too short to effectively put back without a bunch of work stage.  Let's just say that my collection of barrettes, headbands, bobby pins and sundry hair accessories has grown in size over the last few months.

And that, I believe concludes this set of Thursday randoms.  Do you have any random questions for me? Leave them in the comments, and I'll answer them either there or in a post if there are enough of them.

Happy Thursday, y'all!

Catching Up

Are you ready for a hodge-podge of random bits and pieces?  Because that's what I have for you on this Monday morning!

Last week was entirely helter-skelter, thanks to all the appointments to get things ready for nursing school in January.  I think there is only one more appointment on the list...  I sure hope so.  It's not easy to get permission to leave work early that many times in a week.

I'm happy to report that last week's streak of odd encounters continued through the weekend with a random encounter with a woman who wanted change for a bus ticket (when I told her I wasn't carrying cash, she walked off muttering loudly about how everyone carries cash, except of course, liars!)  I visited with a phlebotomy tech who had a great number of things in common with the vampires that seem to be the current stuff of teenage fiction.

That said, I also hung out at the zoo for a while with my favorite little guy and his mom (a good friend from house church).  I did some shopping with my mom and sister-in-law.

Oh, and speaking of sister's-in-law, in all the excitement of finally being accepted into nursing school, I do believe I forgot to mention that in June of next year, I'll be adding another sister-in-law!  Last month, while his girlfriend was on vacation with a mutual friend in New York, my brother (with the help of the friend) flew to New York, waited in Central Park on a rainy day, got down on his knee, and popped the question!  J and R have been together for probably four years now, and it will be fun to have her become "officially" part of the family!  Wedding plans are well under way, with venues booked, and dress shopping being accomplished, and it will be fun to see the ways our families celebrate the two of them.

I'm hard at work on some Christmas treats that will appear under the tree for the people I love.  It's fun to create and shop.  I'm not the biggest fan of family focused holidays (I find them just a bit painful, if I'm honest), but I do love to give to others.  Pinterest has provided some inspiration this year, too.

A Random Assortment

It's been a while since I've done a bullet point, mish-mash style post here.  In no particular order, here are some of the things I'm thinking about:

• I almost never paint my fingernails with anything other than clear polish.  There are two reasons for this.  The first is that I feel like fingers are closer to your clothes and body than toes, and that it's more important for them to be either neutral or to somehow match.  Since I'm picky about that, that means that I just don't like the look of color.  The main reason, though, is that I am NOT one of those women who somehow seems to be able to maintain the perfect manicure.  When I paint my fingernails, they always chip badly, within days, or sometimes even within hours.  With all of that said, I painted my fingernails this week.  A fairly neutral and unobtrusive pink color.  More importantly, the color has lasted!!!  Without badly chipping.  I'm now totally sold on the higher quality of OPI nail polish.  (And I love the name of the color I'm wearing, a Pirates of the Caribbean inspired pink called "Sparrow Me The Drama")
• I'm seriously in love with an app I bought this week from the Mac App Store.  It's called Delicious Library.  It definitely wasn't the cheapest thing around, but for someone like me, with a huge library, and a fairly sizable collection of DVDs, it's brilliant.  It uses the iSight camera on my macbook to scan the bar code on my books and DVDs, and then loads the information.  If for some reason an item doesn't have a bar code, I can type in the ISBN number or search by title to find it.  It then adds the items to my shelves.  Best of all, if I loan a book or DVD to someone, I can drag that item from it's "shelf" in the app, onto that person's name in my contacts, and it records who I've loaned the item to.  This is fantastic, since over the last few years I've actually lost some much-loved books when they were loaned out and went missing, and I forgot who had them.  My one complaint with the app is that the iSight camera scanning can be quite slow and finicky, and that the compatible Bluetooth bar code scanner is crazy expensive.  But, that's a minor complaint, and if I get really frustrated with it, I can quickly type in the ISBN numbers instead.
• It's a long weekend in Alberta this weekend.  "Heritage Day".  I have no idea what it celebrates or commemorates, but I'm thrilled for an extra day off, and an extra day of sleeping in.
• I'm slowly and quietly beginning to toy with the idea of looking for housing some place other than Grandma's basement.  I'm keeping my ears open for friends hunting for roommates, and starting to watch rental ads for affordable bachelor suites or one bedroom situations, in neighborhoods that are still easily accessible to the rest of the things going on and important in my life via city transit.  (If you know of someone looking for a roommate in Calgary, definitely put them in touch with me!)
• I'm settling in to the reality that I will not be in school again until at least January.  I didn't make the cut for the September entry.  They had less than 40 spaces available, and the GPA for entry was astronomical.  I'm a good student, but not that good...  So, hopefully January will work out, and in the meantime I'm settling into this new "career" of office temping, and enjoying the flexibility and lack of pressure that it brings.  Nothing needs to come home with me at night, nothing needs to be worried about beyond the confines of the working hours.  Since my last office environment was the highly charged environment that my former roommates referred to as "the soap opera", this low-stress, show up and do your job and then go home environment is one that I'm loving!
• On a personal level, for the first time in years, I've been consistently feeling fairly healthy and good.  I'm loving it, but sometimes I wonder if my creativity ran away, along with the health and mood issues.  I wonder if people who have been reading here as I processed all of the negative and harder things are still interested in the me that is not struggling with those things on a consistent basis for the first time in the history of this blog.
• I'm discovering that I'm also needing to learn new language to talk about this different space in my life.  It's like the old adage about the many words that the eskimos have for snow - I have a highly developed and nuanced vocabulary to talk about pain, mental illness, depression, struggles, and wrestling.  I don't have as many words to talk about this news space yet.  In fact, in some ways I'm waiting to see if it even lasts, even as I work to find ways to share it.
• And, back to a lighter note to round up this mish-mash of a post, even though it totally does not do happy things for my lactose intolerant stomach, I'm in the midst of an ice cream craze.  I'm loving it, and eating it a couple of times a week or more.  My current particular favorite flavor comes from a local grocery store and is called mango swirl.  So tasty in a waffle cone.

On that note, I think I'm done.  My brain has been emptied of the random tid-bits I wanted to share with all of you!  Happy Weekend!

Wednesday Randoms

I spent 40 minutes on the line with internet tech support at home this morning.  Thankfully, they were able to solve the problem.  Here's hoping it stays solved, since it definitely wasn't how I'd planned to start my day.

And now? now I'm sitting in a hallway at school, surfing job websites, catching up on some blog reading, and writing this post in which I really have very little to say.


I'm pretty tired, and I woke up with a bad headache this morning.  The drugs are kicking in and making this morning of history lectures a doable feat.  Some night soon, I imagine, I have to be able to sleep better than I have been lately.  At least I hope so.


I'm planning to go to a yoga class tonight, and looking forward to it.  But, if I don't feel a bit better by then, I'll probably go home instead.


It's been that kind of week.  A weird mixture of stuff.  Of not sleeping, and consequently not feeling all that great.  Of carving out time for rest, and ending up restless.


At least I'm getting some reading done as I sit on the bus every day.  I have rather a lot of books to get through in a short amount of time at the moment, so time on the bus to read is a very good thing.


And with that, it's almost time for class, so I'll sign off!  See you tonight for the daily 5!

Totally Random

I really, really want to buy these.

Because how fun is it that they can be used in the middle of a page, instead of just on an edge like a normal punch?  The options for making cards would be endless!

Saturday Randomness

I'm laying in bed at mom and dad's, getting ready to face the day.

There is a muffin and a banana on my bedside table.  On Saturday's especially, I eat breakfast in bed.  This is solely because I don't want to get out of bed any sooner than necessary, and on Saturday's it is imperative that I eat my breakfast by a certain time.

This is because I take a "warm yoga" class.  If I haven't had an hour or so to digest before that 11 am class, or if I haven't eaten, it's not good.  Somehow, I don't think keeling over, or puking in the middle of 90 minutes of exercise would be the healthiest thing around, so I make sure I bring some breakfast downstairs with me when I go to bed on Friday nights.

And, speaking of yoga, I cracked up on Thursday night, when, just as house church was getting ready to start, my phone buzzed with an email.  I checked it quickly and had to laugh.  It was an invitation to an event from my yoga studio, a fundraiser for a woman going through cancer treatments.  An invitation to ladies only, candle-lit, naked yoga.   Umm, I'm pretty comfortable with my body, but I think I'll pass.  No one needs to see that!  And I don't need to see that either!  I'm still laughing just imagining the concept.  I don't think even candlelight could make that sexy!

Today is going to be one of those days with lots of time spent on a bus as I transit to and from appointments.  I have a book I'm hoping to finish up, and then a novel.  I think I'm very informally shooting for reading the equivalent of a book a week this year, and novels are what will help me make that goal!  They are the books I can plow through in a couple of hours instead of a couple of weeks.  The brain candy.  I had stopped reading novels for quite a while, almost two years, actually, as I began to discover some interesting effects that a steady diet of brain candy was having on my emotions.  (That, I think, is a whole separate post, for another time.)  When I finally came back to them, I tried to do it (and still try to do it) with a level of balance.  I pick up novels that still teach me something.  Or I read ones that I know are "healthier" for me.  And I make sure to balance them with books that have more edifying and challenging content.  But today, after a couple of really full and challenging weeks, I think I'm going to finish up my more edifying title, and then dive into a novel on the bus.  (And, I'll just comment that novels can also very much be edifying and uplifiting as well.)

I'm tired these days.  Sleep has been more spotted with dreaming again, and I've had more early mornings than usual as school obligations have picked up speed.  And, honestly, right now, I'm just kind of traveling from one day to the next, making lists and hoping to tackle at least a portion of what they require from me in a given day.  I'm usually multi-tasking, though I'm also discovering the beauty of single-tasking as well.  This coming Monday, night, for example, I have three hours at home slotted out for some truly brainless entertainment.  It's on my calendar.  But I also know that while that is going on, I will be doing a load of laundry, and maybe some filing, and definitely some emailing.  Yesterday, though, when I needed to study, I simply closed all the windows that would normally distract, limited my ability to "cheat" and open them again, and surrendered to the lovely beauty of letting one thing have my complete focus. 

And that singular focus is perhaps my argument for bus reading - though these days I'm not so much doing the formal "bus reading" as squeezing reading in on my multiple trips around the city by bus.  But that is working, too, for now.  And really, depending on the number of places I need to be in a given day, it's not totally uncommon for me to spend up to four hours a day on a bus as I transit from place to place.  (Audio books are also lovely for this sort of transiting, since they don't have to be stopped for transfers, walking and the other things that come with a lifestyle where city transit is your main form of transportation.)

And now, now that I've rambled lengthily, clearing my brain a little for the day ahead, I'm off to prep for yoga, and for the rest of my day!  See you tonight for the daily 5!

Random Anatomy Fact of the Day

A few weeks ago my fascinating fact had to do with the reason your nose runs when you cry.

Today's random anatomy fact involves obesity and high blood pressure.

If you have an increase in the number of blood vessels in your body, your blood pressure is higher.

The reason obese people tend to have high blood pressure is this:  For every extra kilogram of weight that a person puts on, the body develops approximately 650 kilometers of extra blood vessels.

650 km.  How crazy is that?