Two Great Books

I've been meaning to post about this book I finished a few weeks ago. It was fantastic and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a good read. It's called the Time Travellers Wife and it's by Audrey Niffenegger (thanks Jeff and Fiona!). It's about a man who time travels back and forth in time. Here's what the back says "When Henry meets Clare he is twenty-eight and she is twenty. Henry has never met Clare before; Clare has known Henry since she was six." Henry gets periodically displaced in time to emotionally significant events in his life. He repeatedly travels back in time to Clare, his wife, when she is a child. He travels back in time to see his parents before he was born. Sometimes he travels back to happy times or finds himself in the middle of a fight or he travels forward in time to see events that havn't happened yet. It's a great book but it can get kind of confusing if you don't read it frequently because you have to keep track of where Henry is in time. I suggest picking it up when you have an hour to dedicate to it, but then after an hour you won't be able to put it down ;o) Read it and let me know what you think! I'm reading another 'page turner' right now and I'm sure that you'll hear all about it when I'm done.

Great Salmon Recipe

Travis and I made some pretty yummy salmon for dinner last night and I know there are some salmon lovers in my family so I thought I'd better post the recipe. It's from my Rachael Ray 365: No Repeats.

Sweet Lemon Salmon with Mini Carrots and Dill

3 tbsp light brown sugar
Zest and juice of 1 lemon
2 tbsp vegetable oil
4 6oz salmon fillets
salt and freshly ground pepper
1 18oz bag of baby carrots
2 tbsp unsalted butter
1/4 cup fresh dill

Preheat oven to 400F

For the carrots with dill, fill a medium skillet with 1 1/2 inches of water and bring to a simmer.
For the sweet lemon salmon, in a small sauce pot, combine the brown sugar, 2 tbsp water, and lemon juice. Place over medium heat and bring up to a simmer while stirring to dissolve the sugar. Once at a simmer, cook for 1 minute, then reserve in a warm place.
To cook the salmon, preheat an ovenproof nonstick skillet over medium-high heat with the veg oil. Season the salmon with salt, pepper, and then lemon zest. Add to the hot skillet, and cook for 3-4 min on the first side. Flip the salmon over, brush with the brown sugar-lemon mixture, transfer to the oven, and cook for 4-5 more minutes or until cooked through.
While the salmon is cooking, add the baby carrots to the boiling water, season with salt and simmer for 3-4 mins, or until temder. Drain the carrots, then return them to the skillet and place back over the heat. Add the butter, dill, salt, and pepper and stir the carrots until the butter has melted. Transfer the carrots to a serving platter and serve alongside the sweet lemon salmon.

Soooo good!

Courses, courses and more courses

I feel like I'm in school again! Right now I'm working on three courses for work. I'm updating my Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) next Friday. You might remember my posts in early September describing my own personal heart attacks trying to prepare for that course. Normally, I wouldn't have to re-certify until Sept 2008 but the Heart and Stroke Foundation has decided to come up with new guidelines for the course so I get to re-certify now rather than later. I know the H&S Foundation does great work but this wasn't one of their brighter ideas in my mind. I spent today at a workshop for the obstetric course I'm taking called Strategies for Teaching Obstetrics to Rural and Urban Caregivers (STORC). It is soooooo basic, nursing school knowledge of labor and delivery I was bored to tears today. I'm probably one of the most experienced nurses taking the course, there's 6 of us and 4 of them are new grads, and the questions they were asking.....I just had to shake my head. Oh well, it's a good review, I'm getting paid to take it and I get 4 'buddy' shifts on the labor and delivery unit at the Foothills to get some good experience. The third course that I just signed up for is the Emergency Nursing Pediatric Course (ENPC) and that doesn't happen until March but I picked up the 300 page text book today that I have to have read prior to the course starting. Whew! Lots of reading ahead of me but it's a great opportunity and all the courses are both paid for and I'm being paid to take them. Oh, and I learned today that I've been selected to take the advanced obstetric course (when I'm finished the basic one) called MORE OB (not sure what it stands for) and that course requires a 3 year committment although because we're a small facility we'll likely be done in 18 months. I'm going to be a super nurse by the time I'm finished!

Working way too much

Ahhhh...finally a day off! I've been working far too much lately. I worked all weekend last weekend and I'm working all week and all weekend this week so I'm feeling like I've hardly seen Travis lately. I get home from work and I'm so tired and in so much pain that all I can manage to do is crawl into bed. I had the best surprise Saturday morning before going to work. While I was in the shower Travis got up and made waffles with whipped cream and sprinkles, just the way I like 'em! He really is the most amazing boyfriend ever. He had a fun filled weekend of teaching the new recruits at the firehall on Saturday and skiing at Sunshine all day Sunday and what did I do?.....work, work, work. Blah and blah.
We're still working on moving my stuff from my old place to here. It's hard to find time lately with me working 12hr shifts and weekends when Travis gets weekends off and after a full day at work we just don't feel up to doing it in the evenings. I think today I'm going to work on unpacking some of my boxes, I'm going for a much needed massage at 3pm and then hopefully meeting up with Sue this evening when she gets off work.

quick post!

Quick update......no delivery for me on Thursday! She labored all day and didn't end up having the baby till Friday morning. Poor girl but she has a BEAUTIFUL, and I should know cause I've seen lots of newborns, BEAUTIFUL baby girl.
I'm off to work this morning in the ER so I'd better get moving. Sick people are waiting!

great day!

I had a great day at work today. I was orientating a new staff member, actually a brand new nurse let alone staff member. The surefire way to find out what you know and what you don't know is to try and teach someone else. Luckily, for the most part, I realized that I actually knew a lot more than I thought I did! Yea! I made it through the day with only one severe headache, my arm only went numb and tingly three times and now instead of pain I have a dull ache through my neck and shoulders. So today was all around a good day! (my lawyer says I have to complain more and not keep my troubles to myself as much so I'm giving it a try, sorry) So today I had a first time mom and new baby and it was awesome because I got to spend a lot of time teaching them. She didn't believe me when I said I didn't have kids of my own because apparently I know tons about babies. I should hope so after spending 4 years working with them! It's fun when you have receptive parents and you leave at the end of day feeling like you really helped someone. Tomorrow I have a mom coming in for an induction of labor. She's almost a week overdue and in agony waiting for her baby. I got to meet her yesterday and they're a great couple and the doctor is fantastic so it should be a good "first delivery at the Canmore hospital" experience for me. I'm a little nervous but excited too because it's been so long since I've been involved in a delivery. I just hope that it all goes smoothly for mom, baby and especially me!

Weekends go by too fast

Monday already?! The weekend flew past. Saturday we went to Calgary and had a total waste of a day. The roads were awful and the whole time we were there we were worrying about having to drive home so it really ruined the whole day. We went to the Home Expo, mostly out of curiosity but also to see if we could get any ideas for changes to make around the house. We realized that the show was geared more towards people who are building mansions and have $10,000 to spend on a shower with a TV, telephone and LED light show. It wasn't really geared towards people like us who want to make changes but can't really afford to. We wanted to know 'how can we make noticable changes with our bank account noticing?' and there was nothing like that. We walked around there saying 'when we're rich, we'll get that.' Now we just have to get rich.
Sunday we got up and went for our usual breakfast at Harvest where we usually meet up with firehall people but we were the only ones there yesterday. We moved a ton of stuff out of my old place and into the garage here so my job today is to unpack what I can. I hate moving. I tried to tell Travis that when we buy a house we're hiring people to move us but he seems to think that we'll just get a bunch of guys together and they'll move us in an afternoon in exchange for pizza and beer. Just as long as all I have to do is call for pizza.
I'm supposed to be sitting here thinking of what to tell my doctor this morning. I'm going in to give her an update on my lack of progress with my neck. It's too depressing to think of all the things that I can't do anymore or might not be able to do in the future. Mom and I went through it a few months ago and filled 4 pages front and back. I got the Botox injections into my head and neck muscles which was supposed to help the spasms and headaches by paralyzing the muscles. It's helped somewhat. I noticed it more right after I had it done in December. I still get pretty severe headaches but they don't last as long and they aren't as frequent and I'm still waking up in the night with cramps in my neck and shoulders. I definately notice it more at work. When I'm at work I'm in constant discomfort, my muscles are tight and that's when the headaches and tingling in my hands happen the most. It sucks and I'm getting really frustrated and really tired of having to deal with this. Physio isn't helping, mainly because I can't afford to go as much as they want me to and massage is a nice temporary fix but it doesn't offer any long term relief. With the combination of massage and physio that I'm supposed to be getting it's going to cost me $854.40/month. My benefits cover a small portion of that but I'm pretty close to maxing out my benefit coverage already. I just want it all to go away.

Quiet Sunday

It's a quiet Sunday morning for me. I needed to sleep late this morning since I'm working nights tonight so Travis being the wonderful, most amazing boyfriend in the world, went out for breakfast with the guys from the firehall and let me sleep. He's still out, and I'm sitting in the kitchen waiting for my Cheerios to get soggy, watching the cat entertain himself with the cords from the blinds. It's a good thing we didn't buy this cat very many toys since his favorite ones are empty boxes, piles of paper and now it seems to be the hanging blinds. We do have one toy on an elastic cord that we tied to the back of a chair and it takes him all of 30 seconds to get it all tangled up and go back to playing in his empty box. It's kind of ironic that he even likes the box since someone abandoned him in a box on the side of the highway. Short term memory I guess. We took him to the vet yesterday for his second set of shots and $120 later we found out he was healthy, no kidding. We spent the day yesterday cooking a turkey for my sisters 'faux Christmas dinner" She had friends over for turkey dinner and 'faux Christmas' We kept most of the leftovers so now we've got turkey for a week, again! I think I might make turkey soup. I'm working the next 3 nights and then I have a week off! I'm really starting to look forward to the day when I either don't have to or can't work anymore. I love my job but I'm getting sick of working nights and 12hr shifts. I'd like to work 4hr shifts, no nights, and make my own schedule. Maybe someday.

Christmas Pictures

Happy New Year!

I hope you all had a safe and happy New Years Eve. I spent it at work and at midnight I was literally cleaning old puke basins. They had been sitting there leftover from the day shift so not only were they old puke basins, they were old and crusty puke basins. Yuck! I was working in the ER and I was expecting it to be a crazy, busy night but it was slower than than it has been in a really long time. I've been working there the last 4 night shifts I've done and it's been hopping busy all night long, with two nurses running our butts off all night. Last night it was a slow but steady trickle of patients with nothing more exciting than allergies. Not at all what I had expected.
This morning I got home and Travis and I slept in till noon then made a big breakfast and went snowshoeing. It was my first time on my new snowshoes and they're great! We were out for about an hour and then on our way back home, Travis's fire pager went off and I got dropped off at the fire hall. So now I'm sitting at the internet cafe down the street waiting for him to finish saving lives so we can go grocery shopping before the store closes. I wandered around downtown for a bit, went to the bank, the post office and to Beamers for a matcha latte so I'm hoping he's done soon cause I'm running out of things to do.
Welcome to 2007!