A man's version of "fixing" something

Allow me to preface this story with a familiar(ish) phrase:

"The cobbler's children have no shoes."

This is extremely parallel with my life except Greg is not a cobbler.  He is a carpenter.  So the "fixer upper" that we moved into and I was promised it would be a 2-year situation has turned into 6+ years.  When he pulled the towel rack out of the wall in the bathroom, it didn't get hung up for nearly a month.  Our laundry room was half-painted for several weeks while I was waiting for him to put in the base trim.  At any rate, our water heater went out awhile back and although we were only without hot water for a few days (we bathed at my parents house, for those that are wondering), he promised that it would only take him a few hours to replace it.  I laughed and told him that I would try not to kill him when I came home and my bathroom was a disaster & he was 4 hours into the project with no real end in sight.  He got his panties in a bunch and mumbled something about, "You should be grateful that you don't have to pay somebody to do this shit."  Ah, married life. 

I had planned to be out of the house with the kids for most of the evening so he could get done what he needed to do and have the bathroom together before we arrived.  When I pulled into the driveway at dusk I saw him wheeling the old water heater out of the house on his dolly & the new heater in the box next to his truck.  Not a good sign.  Things got even worse when I walked into the bathroom.  This is what I saw:

Sorry for the side-view here.  It is our bathroom rug.  That I had just washed the day before.  Covered in mud, rust, old dirty water from the bottom of the water heater, etc.

This stuff?  This is the stuff that was on the shelf above the water heater.  Inside our baby girl's infant tub.  "Neatly" piled together into a huge wad of crap.

Luckily our sink doubles as a work bench.

So here we are, two weeks later and I do have a water heater again (and 10 gallons larger than the last one!) but the "stuff" that was on the shelf is STILL in a pile.  I had to move it out of Sissy's tub and into a spare laundry hamper in order to bathe our child.  I still don't have a new shelf built inside the closet so I can put the stuff back onto the shelf and the old water heater was just hauled out of our driveway a couple of days ago.  But I do have a husband who, when he sets his mind to something, can be pretty darn handy!

5 More Shifts

After I leave work this morning, I only have 5 more shifts.  5 more shifts of being an ICU nurse.  5 more shifts until I venture out into a totally different area of nursing of which I have no prior knowledge.  5 more shifts until, once again, I'm in a new surrounding where I am uncomfortable and unfamiliar.  5 more shifts until I am the one consistently tucking my babies in at night.  5 more shifts until I have a normal schedule again where I don't have to miss celebrations and get-togethers because "it's my weekend to work".  And, oddly, up until this moment, I have felt . . . indifference.  I knew that I was supposed to be happy and I definitely was on some level.  But this morning, it was like somebody flipped a switch.  I am ready.  I am excited and nervous and apprehensive and worried.  I am all of the things I should be about starting a new chapter in my career (and effectively, my life).  I only have 5 more shifts until the rest of my life can begin and I've never felt more content professionally.

Change in plans

Unfortunately, after a meeting with my boss at the end of last week, I discovered that I'm not going to be able to cut my hours at the VA like I originally thought.  If I drop to anything less than 80 hours/2 weeks I will have to pay back the $5,000 sign-on bonus that I got when I started working there a year ago.  The only way around it will be to finish out the next year (until Sept. 14, 2010) or buy myself out of it.  However, the job at the pain clinic is too good to pass up and there is definitely the potential for me to get a full-time position.  Eventually.  Just not right now.  So, for now my only option is to continue working nights at the VA (because a day shift position won't become available for years and this is not an exaggeration) and stay prn at the pain clinic.  The good news is I'm making really good money at the pain clinic, it's relatively easy work, and I'm getting experience in a new area of nursing.  The bad news is, I don't get to see my kids nearly as often as I want to, Greg is still in Kansas City more often than not (and helping his dad quite a bit on the weekends), and I'm flipping between day shifts and night shifts.  So, the situation is not as wonderful as it could be but it's definitely not the end of the world.  So for now, we will just keep on doing what we have been doing and keep praying that God's reason for these obstacles will be revealed sooner rather than later.

Coat pockets

Today I was going through the pockets on a few of my fall/winter coats that used to hang on the coat rack in our living room but since we put the house on the market they have been living in the bottom of my closet.  These coats are, oddly enough, one of the few winter items I left out when packing up 1/2 of our belongings when I was assured by our realtor that our house would "sell quickly".

Good things I found:
-A tube of lip balm that I have been looking for FOREVER.  I was so pissed that I couldn't find it when I was packing my hospital bag for Adrianna.  It's THAT good.
-48 cents.  Random?  Yes.  But hey, money is money.  Even if it did go straight into the kids' savings jar.  Which is actually an old milk jar that Greg found and it is pretty badass.

Bad things I found:
-About 20 used Kleenex.  This is disgusting and interesting at the same time.  Disgusting for obvious reasons but interesting because I'm a nurse and a mother and I'm very well versed in how germs spread.  So rather than throwing the germ-infested Kleenex away as soon as I used them (or as soon as I got home if there was no trash can nearby) I wad them up and stuff them into my coat pocket.  I've also found that I do this when I'm at work and there are plenty of trash cans handy.  Yet nearly everyday when I get home (on days that I'm sick.  I don't just shove dirty Kleenex in my pocket when I'm the picture of health) I find at least one used Kleenex mixed in amongst my pens, scissors, Alcohol pads, pen light and any other random object that has fallen into my scrub pockets.  I don't know why I do this.  Maybe because my mom is always preaching to me telling me the benefits about recycling but I think that even SHE would think this is taking it a little too far.  That will be my September resolution.  Stop wadding up used Kleenex and shoving them into my coat pockets.  But then again, September isn't really coat season and by the time October rolls around I will have long forgotten about this.  Oh well.  Better luck next year!