I hate traffic!!

I seriously dislike driving in traffic. It doesn't even have to be heavy traffic. If there are more than 4 cars in a relatively short section of roadway, I don't really want to be one of them. People drive like idiots, as if they MUST get in front of every other car there, and they don't care how as long as they get there.

Over a month? Really?

What have I been doing? Not writing, that's for sure!!  The new job is wonderful, I am truly loving it and everyone I work with. I've been picking up hours and worked on another floor a couple days. Didn't realize how different my floor is until then, and I've gotta say, I like it.

We are a floor that tries new things and tests new programs, and that's kind of fun. Sure, it may cause a little stress when things first change, but it's nice to be able to identify the bugs and work out fixes right away, while they're still thinking about the program. Consider us the beta-testers of the medical world :)

Slacking...

Sorry all, I've been slacking on my blog a little... Partly because I've worked the last two Saturdays, partly because I can't remember what day it is lately, and mostly because I just forgot.

Working part-time with variable days means that sometimes I think Wednesday is Saturday, and Saturdays sometimes feel like Mondays. Add another part-time job and the only thing that gets me to work where and when I need to be is Google Calendar's reminders feature. Syncing that across all my devices is a snap, thanks to the CalanGoo App (auto sync upon open? Yes, Please!!) Hmm. Maybe I should put in a reminder to Blog?

Score!

I went with my parents and grandparents to neighborhood garage sales last Friday, and found the usual stuff (books and old Tupperware) and then I found the best thing ever... for me at least!

I am makeup challenged... Meaning I have no idea what colors would look good for me and I hate spending money on makeup in general, let alone something that turns out to be all wrong for me. Enter my garage sale find....

Centralized Orientations

I have changed jobs and physical locations within the company I work for which meant I got to go to centralized orientation not just for my new job but also to the system and entity.

The first day was system orientation, which taught us all about the company as a whole and showed everyone how far-reaching they are. The bus tour for me was different than for some, as we went from location to location I counted people I knew that worked at each one. There was only one location I didn't know someone at!

65 Years

This past Saturday my grandparents had a party celebrating their 65th wedding anniversary. That is an amazing feat, and they are an amazing couple. They had friends and family come from all over to celebrate with them, it was quite a crowd!

Last week I....

Got a new job!! Yay!! It's part time, so I need to make up about 15 hours every two weeks for the difference between my current job and the new one. I'll be working 12 hour shifts instead of 8, so that will give me a little more free time to make up the hours too.

I'm going to be a unit secretary at Butterworth Hospital, in a position that's just newly created. I'm looking forward to starting there, and all the time I'm on orientation I will also be working full time, so at least I don't have to worry about making up hours just yet.

Back to the books...

Back to a book review, though I'm not through with the book yet. The Dalai Lama's book "The Universe in a Single Atom" is an excellent read, filled with a lot of scientific and spiritual information. Once I made it through the chapter with quantum physics it's been going much faster for me.Still lots of philosophy, which I have some trouble with, but the analogies and similes make it much easier to understand the principles behind the theories.

What fun!

Okay, so I forgot to post last weekend... I was going to complain about the lack of courtesy in "customer service," so maybe it's a good thing I just stewed on that and didn't post while I was annoyed.

Instead, I'm going to post about my fun this weekend. We've had a ton of rain here lately, and lots of flooding because of it. The Grand River was at 21.17 feet as of 3:32 Saturday, and is expected to crest at 2 a.m. Monday around 22.7 feet. Yikes!!! I was downtown right next to the river on Saturday, and it was amazing to see the downtown bridges with water almost up to the roadway. I did a senior photo shoot down there a few months ago and where we were for the photos is all completely submerged now.

Anyway, on to the fun part. I was downtown to work as a volunteer for JumpJam, a free jump rope competition for 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade students of Grand Rapids Public Schools.

Currently Reading....

I'm back to reading the Dalai Lama's book The Universe in a Single Atom again, now that I've finished the music/neuroscience book. This is about the convergence of science and philosophy, and I'm not a very good philosophy student. The book is interesting, but it twists my mind in ways I'm not used to, so it's a slow read for me because I need time to process and make sense of what I've read.

The relationships between science and spirituality are what drew me to this book, and there are a lot of parallels drawn so far that make sense to me. I am partly through chapter 3 (of 9 chapters), which is titled "Emptiness, Relativity, and Quantum Physics."

A few days...

Sorry, needed a few days to finish the book "This is Your Brain on Music" by Daniel Levitin.

In a word, wonderful! It took me longer to read it because every time he named a song, I found myself singing it when I knew it. I also looked up a few on iTunes to see what he was referring to.

Mystery of the Wet Hallway

Finally figured out where all the water that was in my hallway came from, yay! I couldn't find a leak because it wasn't leaking all the time...

When I fixed my running toilet by replacing the ball cock, I didn't know I needed to put Teflon tape on the water inlet hose threads (I followed the directions in the package, it didn't say ANYTHING about that!). This resulted in a leak every time the toilet was flushed, but only while the water was running into the tank.

Last week in my life....

Over the past week I finished reading "Friendfluence," which was an excellent book overall. There were some parts that were hard to get through, but overall it was an excellent read that provided a lot of insight into my friends and myself. I've loaned that one out to a friend, we'll see what he makes of it.

Nate and I had a date night, we went to Fazoli's for dinner, because that's where we always go when we head to Kalamazoo, then we went to Kalamazoo Valley Museum for a documentary film "The Music Instinct: Science and Song." I was afraid partway through that he was bored (it was a 2-hour movie) and I told him he could take out his iPod, but he didn't.

Books!!!

I've been stocking up on reading material, both with e-books and "real" books (you know, on actual paper). Now that I'm not in school, I have time to read and I am enjoying that very much!

Current reads:

Still working on Anna Karenina, which is a good read but slow going for me. It's not that I don't find it interesting, it's that I get confused on who's who when everyone seems to have three or more names! That one is an e-book, so I tend to read that when I'm out somewhere without another book.

Friendfluence by Carlin Flora is a hard read, but very interesting. It reads like a dumbed-down psychology textbook, but it's really interesting. I have read through the overview chapter, early childhood, late childhood, and I'm finishing up the teen section about friendships and their influence on us.

It's been a while...

Wow, over a month since I posted. Sorry 'bout that! Life goes on and Saturdays escape me it seems!

Over the past month I've had issues with my water bill, accidentally shut off my gas (and thus my furnace, in the winter time, and then couldn't get it re-lit for almost 24 hours), had a toilet decide to run constantly, and read a few books.

It looks like maybe my water meter is bad. It was looked at yesterday and I was going to stop at the office today and find out what's up, but forgot until after the office was closed. Maybe I'll just send an email inquiry...

The gas and furnace problem were caused by me shutting off a valve I thought was water (due to the above-mentioned water bill problem, no way I used 11,000 gallons of water in a month!!). After 3 hours my house began getting decidedly chilly, and that's when I discovered exactly what I'd shut off. The water heater and fireplace pilots lit with no problem, no such luck on the furnace... The pilot is a ways back into the furnace, an aim-n-flame can't reach it, and it's also NOT where I thought it was. Apparently no place local carries the long fireplace matches either. I stopped and got some in town on my way home from work, walked into a house with a temp of 39 degrees (nothing froze, whew!) and lit the furnace right away. Much better than the 2 hours I'd tried to get it lit the night before.

The toilet is in the boys' bathroom, so I only noticed it running when Nate's here. It took me two weeks to go buy the part, and a few more days to install it. Because of the lack of water shut-offs under my sinks, I was a little worried there wouldn't be one for the toilet either. There is. That went easy and quick, and now is another thing I can check off my to-do list. Most of the home maintenance I have had to do/get done has been pretty easy stuff, and I'm lucky to have my dad close (and skilled) to fix what I can't. He's an excellent teacher too, and very willing to talk me through repairs when I need help but want to learn to do it myself.

For the books, I've read "Head Cases," an excellent collection of brain injury case studies written by a case manager. It's very engaging and an easy read, I highly recommend it. I loaned it out at work or I would tell you the author. After that I read "Mistaken Identity" about the two girls in the car wreck, one who was killed and one who survived but was mis-identified. Also excellent, explaining how the mistake was made and why it took 5 weeks to discover the mistake. I chose this one because I work at the facility that she was at when the mistake was discovered. I work(ed) with several of the people named and pictured in the book, but I was not employed there at the time. On to fiction... Two of the Kathy Reich's books that "Bones" is based on. Love these! They get technical sometimes, but the characters are very identifiable. Now I'm reading a book titled "Friendfluence'" about how our friendships shape us into who we are. It's very interesting but sometimes reads like a psychology textbook. I'm only a few chapters in, I'll let you know about this one. A couple people at work want to read it when I'm done.

I have a stack of books in my to-read, I have classics in my e-reader apps, and some on my Amazon wishlist...  I love not being in school, I have a ton of time to read, cook, do home projects, knit, etc. It's nice not feeling like I'm gone all the time! It took a while to get used to, I've had assignments for so long! Now I give myself assignments instead :)

Job Search

Still no new job, I haven't heard back from the interview on Monday, and since she'd wanted the new hire to start next week, I don't expect that I got the job. Too bad, it would have been fun!

Still putting out lots of apps and sending out resumes, I think it's time to have the college help me though, at least with an internship so I can get that done. Phone calls on Monday to schedule an appointment with the counselor, and I'll go from there. It all gets so frustrating, but this is what happens when you change fields. It takes a while to get someone to take a chance on someone with no previous experience outside of school...

Job Interview

Monday morning I have a job interview. This one is for a part-time job, so it will be a second job. It sounds very interesting, some of the job requirements included photo editing skills and some basic HTML knowledge... Check and check... data entry, some clerical, shipping and receiving... Yup, I can do all of that! The company sells home & garden accessories, Heaven's Gate Home & Garden. Awesome products, they're gorgeous!

Looking forward to the interview, and really hoping I get this one. The hours are flexible, so I am hoping to be able to keep it even when I do find a full-time office job.

I had a date!

That gets an exclamation point because I haven't had a date in a long time... Over a year. That's mostly because I chose to focus on school and keep myself busy with that and family. It's also partly because dating can be scary, and my past choices in men have not been that great. Don't get me wrong, I regret nothing. Every choice I've made has shaped who I am and taught me something new about myself and what will or won't work for me.

This time, though, I've managed to find someone that listens to a lot of the same music, loves to read, values (& encourages) education, and loves museums. I can't possibly go wrong with someone whose favorite store is Barnes & Noble and thought our second date should be to a museum!

I've known him several years, glad I finally found out that he was available & worked up the nerve to ask him out. Everything in it's own time, that's for sure!

Back to school...

But not for me, yay! Still looking for a new job, but I am done with school and very happy about that!

RJ's first semester went well, he seems to be enjoying MSU very much and I am very happy about that. Going away to school can be a little scary, but he's such an easy going guy that I knew he'd do fine, and I really wanted him to have the full college experience you just can't get living at home. I love having him close enough to spend an afternoon with and far enough away to be on his own.

Nate loves having the iPad for school, and it's helped him get in some of his homework, since it's handed out and turned in via iPad, it's not so likely to get lost or forgotten. Since he saved enough to buy his new iPod Touch at Christmas, I hardly saw his iPad over the break though. He discovered it's not nearly as portable as the Touch.

I finally worked up the nerve to ask a certain someone out, we are going out later this week. Nate gets a dinner date with Grandpa (and maybe Grandma too), and I get a date. Dad is happy, he was sad that their dinner dates with Nate were done since I was done with school. I am happy because I have time for a social life again. I did bail on mom for the Depot Diva night at Home Depot, sorry about that mom... It was for organization too, something I could definitely use!

Yesterday (Saturday) I did a senior photo shoot downtown Grand Rapids with one of my co-worker's daughters. We had fun walking around, enjoyed the 50+ degree weather (January in Michigan, you never know what you'll get!), and the photos turned out great even though she was still getting over the flu.