Kates Journal

So, it’s been a bit of a week, really. Well, couple of weeks.

What started as a one week kitchen renovation ended up taking 4 weeks and a day; and still isn’t actually finished; we’re missing two drawer/cupboard handles and there’s some filler that needs sanding, the walls, sadly, still need painting and the outside render also needs painting. I’m thinking spray gun for that :)

But, for all my complaints about their atrocious scheduling, having to almost shout at them to get the gas connected – a day late – rather than as they wanted to – two days late (and the day after Kathryn’s mom and her partner arrived). The experience as a whole was incredibly draining – but, and I have to keep saying but – the kitchen is great. For all the fact it’s cheap units and formica worktop, for all the fact the handles are plastic and the doors are veneered in plastic, not real wood; and for all the absence of silent closers and such. It’s pretty. It’s big. It’s a good space to cook in.  And after 2  years without a kitchen at all? It’s bloody awesome. The new doors add so much light, the new lights (while hideously energy inefficient – plan is that as they blow we’ll replace some of them with LED Faux-Halogens – although apparently they’re more decorative than ‘bright’) add so much more light to the previously dingey kitchen. There’s still lots to do in there. Painting, boxing in the pipework around the boiler (can’t afford to box in the whole boiler!); etc, etc. But. It’s come together and the room’s going to be gorgeous when it’s painted.

Despite us cutting costs on tiles (grey natural slate, not the nicer multicoloured stuff; ceramic tiles not stone on the walls) they still look the part. I am very pleased.

Also: Very nice people gave us very nice presents. We have a stand mixer, a pasta maker, a salad spinner, kitchen utensils, a gorgeous teapot (and a cookie sheet of awesome cookie proportions) ; and as I think I said before many other non-kitchen items. But our kitchen looks the part. In fact, our kitchen is a really damn nice place to be at the moment.

What was slightly unfortunate is that for reasons which I’m not quite clear on, the dishwasher blew the 30A fuse on which the entire house runs the first time we used it. Kathryn’s mom and partner were here, we were desperately clearing up to try and make the place habitable and suddenly it became aparent that there was no power… anywhere in the house (apart from the lights).

Unfortunately I’d not noticed that the previous owner had lost an important (ceramic) bit of the 30A fuse (why would I?!) and thus it toasted the fusebox a bit when it went. I’ve now got a replacement fuse, and surround but at the moment it’s currently back ‘together’ as best I can. I still don’t entirely know why it blew the fuse. I took the dishwasher out, and in a paranoid moment at B&Q ended up checking each and every socket in the kitchen (with a cheap and cheerful socket tester); I’m wondering if they managed to do what they did with the washer, and catch the cable somehow on the casing, which appeared to make the case live – but I couldn’t find any damage on it. I’ve now run the dishwasher twice without incident (with me going a little mad running around touching the fuse casing every five minutes).

So, the kitchen is more or less finished. I’m keeping a little money back for reparing the washing machine door they broke and to encourage them to turn up with the two missing handles… it’s also finally made me sort out networking on Ubuntu. The music (and actually, the video) is all shared out from the file-server in the lounge. This is fine, except that the laptop didn’t know about it. Now it does. I’ve spent the morning going “I don’t know what to listen to, there’s so much”… *grins happily*.

In other news I did the ATNC course. For once in my life I get to be quite smug. The pass mark in the exam (we no longer sit the same exam as the doctors, ours is short-answer and theirs is multiple choice) is 80%. I got 92.5%. Pleased? You betcha. I got to play at putting in chest drains, needle decompression (which I am actually allowed to do, in an emergency, apparently); intubation (which I’m not allowed to do ;) ), surgical airways (you guess), jet insufflation…. It’s useful to know what’s needed and what landmarks there are to do these things because sometimes you do get the new baby doctor who’s mind goes blank when faced with blood everywhere, and needs a little guidance (“it goes there… ideally now…”).

It was incredibly stressful, and not aided by me not having any annual leave so I essentially worked 5 long days (4 of which had 4 hours travel time) and 4 short shifts in 9 days. Knackered? Definately. Pleased? Very much. Of course it helps that I’ve something huge and fantastic to look forward to *grins*. Despite all the stress of the course I have to say I thoroughly recommend it; looking back I am incredibly pleased that I did it, and I can say I enjoyed it hugely. Really and truly it is a great course (at least, if you look after trauma patients).

And so we come on to the truly massive event of the weeks… Kathryn and I are to be wed. Well, civilised. Again, I’m mixed – there’s an awful lot of excitement and wanting to bounce around the place but it’s tempered with nerves. It’s a simple ceremony and a simple event, we’re not expecting launches of 1000s of balloons, or 50 doves to descend at the appropriate moment. We’re going to basically walk in, say vows, walk out. Then we do photos, then we eat. That’s the day. But we’ve put a lot of effort into getting the day sorted – well, more into asking our friends to do things. We’ve got a poem we want Lauren or Chrissy to read, we’ve not typed it up; hell I’ve no idea where it is apart from I think I know which book it’s in. We’ve not printed out our vows yet. We’ve got our wedding favours to make.

But lots has been done. It’s all more or less ready. Although I’m confused as to what we have left to do – apart from packing and so on. Anyhow, I’ve got a few Wedding related tasks to do now; so I shall be off to see if I can organise such things. For example, it turns out we’re entitled to free dinner at the hotel every night we’re there; and my mum was hoping that we could all eat together tomorrow – at the hotel – because she’s staying there with her hubbie too. So, plan of action is to ring them and see how late they serve food and whether Kathryn’s Mom and Partner can eat there with us (which they should be able to!). Anyhow. I shall be offski.

Okay, so I shouldn’t be looking at e-bay. I can’t afford anything anyhow, and I’ve no space for one, but sometimes it’s nice just to windowshop. In this case, I was
looking at DKW Junior’s (I just wondered how much they sell for, and how common they are). Being as it’s a german car I stuck it into ebay.de and lo, I found 2.

The 61’s cuter than the 62. But it being ebay.de the text was all in german – and so translate.google.com was hit upon, and lo the following text did spue forth:

"Small crack in the sky. The cars in front of potential purchase should be viewed! No guarantee / warranty. The stain on the passenger is only a shadow. Fun bidders will be prosecuted!"

I suspect it’s not accurate. Either that or the description’s certainly odder than most of the ones on Ebay uk.

I am, I conclude, sick. Not hideously so, but enough that I’m off sick again tonight. My throat feels awful and I suspect I’ve been spiking temps on and off. I’ve sucked my way though a bunch of USian throat sweets, drunk a surprising amount of water for a night shift and still feel fairly awful. Since I’ve got ATNC on Monday, I think it’s best to take the night (and the weekend which I have off) off and be better by monday.

It also means that enduring the builder* working on the kitchen (there better be plural builders present today, and it better be fitted today, otherwise words shall be had) shouldn’t be too bad, ‘cos I can doze and look at ATNC. I’ve not managed to do the pre-test test yet, because, well, I feel underprepared.

Although, really I ought to just sit down and do it. Nor have I made flash cards, which I wanted to do, and was hoping to do… So I might try and do them this morning…

On the bad front, I managed to unintentionally cancel our booking for dancing after the wedding.

The conversation (a couple of weeks ago) went thus:
"Hi, this is the Whatever** hotel; you enquired about booking a room for a venue
after a wedding"
"Oh, ah, we’ve already booked a place, but thank you for ringing"
"Okay, bye!"

Now, we – as I understood it – had booked a place and were waiting for a confirmation letter from them to say it was booked. At no point did they mention that we’d booked it, that they might be known by more than one name… Oh no.

It’s only when we rang to confirm today that we found out that the Lamp-Lighter Bar has an alter ego, a pseudonym it uses to evade detection. And thus it was that we discovered we’d cancelled our own booking. You’d think that she might have mentioned that we’d actually *booked* it, not just enquired… but apparently not.

* Distressingly back to singular yesterday – and only present for 2 hours.
** This is, apparently, the other name of the dual identitied bar which we’d book.
It’s their secret identity.

Today I have:
- Found out that Nurse Vancouver are at the Practice Nurse doojit in London. I shall go.
- Sorted out the Nursing Agency problem which meant that I was no longer registered. I shall be registered again as of later today.
- Read lots of the ATNC course.
- Checked and found out how Kathryn gets more time here after we’re civilised. Another £395 quid! This gets us 2 years residence, which is more than we need, but means that Kathryn doesn’t get permanent residence (which only comes after 2 years). I’m not sure why she’d want it here, but hey, it’s useful to know these things.
- Put out the recycling
- Worked out from where the water that’s taken to appearing on the floor by the shower is coming from. It is, as I suspected the silicone sealant which has failed at that end of the shower, which is good in that I know where it’s coming from, but ups the need for me to fix that. I still don’t know why it won’t stick to the shower base.
- Confirmed that UK Civil Partnerships are recognised by Canada.
- Moved my motorbike so as to allow Kathryn to get her bike in the shed.
- Uploaded an enormous number of photos to Flickr
- Listened to the ‘new’ Radiohead album, and a few other new albums we acquired in the USA.
- Put my somewhat more mangled suitcase away, thus saving me debating it’s future anymore.

I’ve not rung builders yet.
I’ve not decided whether to switch the Denon amp which does work (but with a knackered and awful CD changer and no phono input) for the amp in the lounge which needs it’s volume control slider switched.
I’ve not done anything on the house.

I don’t mind tho’, ‘cos frankly, we spend 18 hours travelling yesterday and I’ve swung my body clock through 8 hours, so I think I’m doing pretty well to not be feeling like death microwaved.

:)

This week has been incredibly hard work – mostly due to short staffedness; well, that and doing 1.7 extra shifts. I know it’s bad when work call me at home and invite me to come in early,  because I’m about an hour away from work, and if they’ve reached the stage of calling someone who’s going to take an hour to get in, it’s going to be bad.

We’ve actually been short, I think, every day I’ve been on. Our new method of work requires one extra nurse, and the shifts quite simply aren’t being filled. No one wants to do either of the new shifts – the early one is not different enough from an ordinary early, and in fact makes you leave at a worse time. The late shift goes on waaaay too late; meaning that, well, no one wants to do that either.

Which has lead to us really, really struggling. Now I’m qualified to not-triage (we do something simpler and quicker than triage), this has also lead me into a minefield of being annoyed and frustrated. It is the most unrewarding job of all time. One of the most amusing things is that we pick people up who we think are likely to need an xray (mechanism of injury, obvious deformity, etc) and then will inform the doctor that we suspect they’ll need an Xray. Quite often they’ll listen to the mechanism of injury or the description from us and just order it without seeing the patient. In fact, I think I’ve only every had one turned down – who was later Xrayed anyway. That certainly doesn’t mean I’ve caught all the people who need X-rays, but means I generally catch the ones who are likely to. But much to my amusement, a poster has appeared at work reminding nurses that we’re not allowed to independently order Xrays for patients without our knowledge being assessed. I presume someone has been doing that; but the fact is, the Xrays that get ordered by me, following discussions with the Dr and them writing the card? Well, it’s essentially the same thing…

I do, however, want to get a lot more knowledge on proper triage assessment, because I’d like to be better able to assess injuries.

One other thing I’be picked up from a much more experienced nurse is to not say that I’m a nurse. We have a variety of protocols for ‘nurse led referrals’ – where we can see, assess and refer the patient without involving a doctor. Ear, Nose and Throat; pregnancy and gynae problems can quite often be sent straight to the specialists without wasting the patient’s time on two examinations and telling the story several times.

This is a great idea – except that when you say it’s a nurse led referal, some docs have a strop and say that they have to be seen by an A&E doc; this is often all the more frustrating as you’ve spent 10 minutes bleeping them and trying the wards they’re on to try and find them. But my new method – which is really the only method I’ve known, is to say “Hi, this is [my first name] in A&E, I’ve got a referral for you…”. This seems to work much better, although they do still get a little stroppy sometimes…

I’ve actually though, looked after a lot of really charming and lovely people. People who you feel real full-on good about looking after. You shouldn’t have favourites, and I have certain masochistic enjoyment when I’m looking after the stroppy indepentent sort, or the mad-as-a-badger-with-UTI-or-other-infection sort, or indeed the dementia-pissed-off sort. But looking after nice people who are just nice, is really a bit pleasant.

Anyhow, all this work has got in the way of quality snuggling time with Kathryn; which has been quite distressing. We have however made some progress on the wedding and the ceremony in the states. Although they’ve both ended up being lots bigger than we originally planned. It’s funny how these things expand and expand :)

It’s also led to slow progress on the DAF. Well, that and the hub puller’s frustrating absence from my life. All that’s left to do to make it road-worthy (not, you note, finished or anything. But roadworthy) is to reattach the end of the bumper and to unseize the brakes (well, I say ‘all’, it may be that the brake cylinders are shot). These are potentially trivial jobs, but I can’t actually *do* the latter because the hub-puller ordered from e-bay more than a week ago hasn’t turned up. The seller’s not answered an email yet, either, which is also frustrating.

I’ve busied myself with prepping (in a very limited sense) and painting the new metalwork. One side’s got a coat of Nissan Arctic White on the sills and a bit of the back quarter (which looks a little whiter than the rest of the car, but never mind). It’s a gash job, I should, really have spent time with filler and carefully prepped things. But I didn’t have time for niceties and I’d rather get paint on there to protect the new metal than worry about getting it looking pretty. It also turns out my wire-wheel has vaporised, which is frustrating. I’ll have to go and pick up a new one. because the area by the rear window needs cleaning up before I fill it.

And the side I sprayed (with one coat) and had left all the masking on so I could spray today? Well, it’s rained overnight…

….which is terribly annoying. I’m hoping the sun (which has come out now) will dry it out and then later in the day I’ll be able to throw another coat of paint on. I’ve had to take off all the newspaper though, which is quite bothersome.

I wish to inform everyone that as of today Kathryn and I are Applicant and Approved Proposed Civil Partner. Romantic, n’est pas?

*bouncy bouncy*

So much planning to do!