So, for the past week I’ve done an average of one load of laundry a day; we’ve done multiple loads ever since the washer/drier arrived… And I’ll grant the pile of laundry is smaller.
But not as much smaller as it should be. It peaked at around 5′ high with the dead washer/drier; but it’s still more than one laundry basket full…
Gah?
Oh, not to save the environment then? No? I’m confused. You said it was to save the environment – instead it was a temporary measure to prop up an ailing industry that’s not even ours1 at the expense of our frail environment (considering it takes an old car roughtly 100,000 miles to put out the amount of pollution required to produce one new one).
Well, that seems wise. I trust our government completely now with making good environmental policy, don’t you.
1 since we don’t actually make cars anymore. All the companies supported are based… outside the UK. So propping up foreign companies2 is a great plan for the UK government.
2 At the expense of UK industry – and the cutsy idea that we could, say, do something towards building a green economy.
Bad things:
– The court thing is making me super stressed. I feel faintly nauseous (at times, actually quite), and since I can’t find the information I need I’m spending the morning ringing the appropriate court trying to catch the individual who deals with civil claims.
– The DAF has been unsold. Sadly the buyer’s finances did not work out, and so I need to sort-her (fix exhaust, paint, etc) and sell-her… again.
– I’d forgotten how stress feels, proper stress that doesn’t exit my brain after a few minutes. I hate this.
*sigh*
So, I’m in Somerfield buying myself a treat* for doing the civil claim stuff**, and I get to the till – pop my stuff at a safe distance behind the person in front (there’re no ‘next customer’ dividers and wait). I get to the front of the queue and while the woman in front is paying someone arrives behind me and starts shoving their shopping right to the front of the conveyor mixing my (thankfully only) two items in with theirs.
I have to pick mine out of his collection and hand them to the cashier who’s looking quite confused.
Since when was that acceptable behaviour?!
*le sigh*
Anyway, paperwork calls***.
* Technically two treats, a book from the charity shop, because we just don’t have enough books*** and a maple/pecan pastry.
** Not the one I plan to bring against C/Ware, but the one that is being brought against me by Dragon EVs.
*** Paperwork and money are the things that give me the most stress. I know my bloodpressure is probably up, and I have a raging headache, and I feel faintly awful. Great. I hate that man.
So, back onto a few days. Well, a few days off. Well, two weeks if I’m strictly honest.
Which means I’ve just come off nights.
Some of the worst nights I’ve experienced. The first time I’ve ever been in charge (which was surprisingly okay, if very stressful). The patient volume this week has been incredible. Prolonged cold weather means lots of sickening older people, people with rubbish lungs, or rubbish circulation getting unwell.
The people the GPs and crews were sending/bringing in seemed much sicker than I’m used to, and in some cases really tested my abilities. The department actually ran out of some fairly important drugs, not the hospital, thankfully. But when you’re completely exhausted and you open the drug cupboard and see a space where the antibiotic you need for the septic patient should be, it’s really quite distressing. Thankfully our sister department helped out, and so did ITU, and eventually quite a lot of wards found they were donating drugs to the ED.
And equipment. Our ECG machines, overworked and battered* as they are started to fray – thankfully we got a loaner and with some cunning application of MZ skills one of them was persuaded back into working. Of course, that didn’t help when we ran out of paper.
Incidentally, I hate equipment manufacturers. We don’t, unfortunately, have one standard type of monitor, or one standard type of ECG. Two brands of ECG machine and they have two separate types of paper. Which means that we get through a lot more of the paper for the older machines (reliable, work almost all the time) than for the new machines (flakey as hell, crappier trace). The paper is not interchangeable. Guess what we end up using more when we’re more pushed? Yeah****.
I’ve never been “in charge” of anywhere before. It’s scary. Suddenly the life and death of everyone in the department ultimately resides with you. Where you assign patients to, it matters. You need to think about the skills, the knowledge of the nurse who’s going to admit & care for them, the abilities and familiarity of agency staff with the department. The equipment available in the bay they’ll be going in to. I apologised to ‘my’ resus nurses, because I used them more than I imagine I normally would, just because we had 2 agency staff who I were new to the ED.
I also had one of those phases. For a night and a bit I could not, for the life of me, get a cannula in first time. Quite often I stuffed up the second time as well. It was frustrating, and the more frustrating it got, the more it became a self fulfilling prophecy. Finally, I got my mojo back, and eventually ended up cannulating someone that the doctor’s hadn’t managed. More luck than pride, but it made me feel better, and it meant we could start getting her the fluids she so desperately needed.
But it wasn’t that that made me feel good. One night this week I had a proper sick patient. A complex, difficult to manage, really deeply unwell patient. And the Doctor and I worked as a team, then the specialists came down and we all did the proper team thing.
His blood pressure was a nightmare, we didn’t want it too high – just around 100 systolic – because we didn’t want to make the internal bleeding worse. But at the same time we needed to perfuse his organs. We knew we were diluting down what blood he had, so were trying to be sparing, but he was totally fluid dependent (as soon as we stopped fluids, his blood pressure would drop – stone like)*****. I found out this morning that we did it right. He’s in ITU recovering from a whole slew of procedures in theatre.
And y’know? I feel like I did good :)
* I’ve noticed other departments seem to treat equipment with a lot more respect. We tend to slam ours into doors, floors and walls**.
** Not on purpose, it’s just we’re…well, in a hurry***.
*** Just ask my hand which met, ironically, the helium cylinder for blowing up kids balloons, and now has a big gash in it.
**** And just guess how many different Oxygen sats probes there are, or ECG leads, or even sodding blood pressure cuffs.
***** We were holding off the O-negative (universal donor) blood for the minute, waiting for the crossmatched blood.
So, I’ve narrowed it down to the Flash plug-in. Disabling it results in a happy clappy machine. Enabling it leads to Urgh-splutch events. Unfortunately, much of the internet is Flash based these days.
Anyone got any suggestions? I tried uninstalling/reinstalling Flash, that didn’t solve it…
So, something is making all the browsers on my nice shiny laptop crash. As in properly needing force-quitting crash. In fact, for the first time in my ownership that I recall the laptop had to be forcibly powered off and restarted yesterday after one of these instances.
I don’t know what it is, I’ve got as far as “it’s probably a plugin of some sort” because it affects Chrome, Firefox and Safari. iPlayer kills it stone dead straight away. But it seems to be happening on random pages. I was thinking flash, so I might rip the flash plugin out, and try that.
Was working *fine* yesterday, though, and I’ve not installed anything for a while (apart from Chrome a few days ago). Bah.
So, today being a day set aside for such a purpose, we set out in search of Jeans and Pyrex (well, cookware). The cunning plan was this; it just having been Christmas, many people would clear out their old clothes and kitchen stuff and we would benefit mightily from the spoils of Xmas.
Well.
It didn’t quite work. We did find Jeans and teeshirts (currently experiencing the manifold joys of a Chinese washer/drier), unfortunately I also found a ‘half price’ set of 7″ singles with a stack from the 60s and 70s. We also found a Red Hot Chilli Pepper’s album, a few board games, a copy of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (in great condition – creating my new challenge*) and a copy of Native Tongue.
God damn it, we were meant to just get Jeans and Pyrex. And maybe a few teeshirts. No one seems to be getting rid of Pyrex (or other cookware) though. And nor did I spot any Icecream makers lurking. Damn.
Still, I think, despite the desperate lack of space in the house, we can class it as a success.
* To acquire all the Harry Potter books in children’s UK hardback editions (not the ‘adult’ ones), in reasonable condition, from second hand shops. Today was ‘goblet of fire’ in paperback day, and half blood prince in hardback day. My copy of Half Blood Prince was the best I saw today, but was 50p more than the cheapest copy (which had lost it’s dust cover. I want the dust covers too). Not that I need a book acquiring mission!
So, yeah, apologies to those who hate my writing. If it’s any help I’m not very convinced of my abilities on that front, but it’s fun having a play. Anyway, the new washing machine is finally here and our kitchen is slowly starting to smell less of cheap Chinese electronics.
Cheap Chinese electronics have a very distinctive chemically smell; one which pitches at me from the 90’s when I started having modern electronics (most notably, my 17″ monitor, back when 17″ CRT monitors were impressive*). I’ve never before had a self-assembly washing machine – having taken it from the box, attached some sound deadening, removed and replaced various panels it was brought into service, and has proceeded to attempt to walk across the kitchen several times.
The last attempt prompted me to obtain a laceration to my finger as, in between loads I attempted to readjust the feet. I discovered that one of the panels is ‘really very sharp’. However, for all my whining and complaning about it’s cheapness (or the fact my finger is throbbing away), it actually appears to work very well. It’s produced sheets that are actually dry, something the hotpoint never could do. The clothes are coming out clean (and frankly less wrinkled). So, really, it’s doing it’s thing.
The MZ has returned from the bike-shop, the carb having been serviced, the tank cleaned, the fuel filter replaced, the wiring modified further (apparently we had a 2.3Amp drain going ‘somewhere’. He’s fixed this with a ‘switch’ which I switch on when the bike’s running, switching the charging circuit in only when it’s running).
The carpenter was due to come quote, but is now coming in a little over a weeks time, and BT have promised to come fix the broken line. With the planned carpenter’s visit we’d moved the bookcase, allowing access to the master socket – this proved that our line still sounds like shit when connected directly to the master socket with, or without our ADSL filter. Checking the line made it flag up a little diagram which said ‘look, the automated tester things the fault is in the box at the end of your street which, incidentally, has no cover on it and is full of snow’. They say that Monday is the day for fixation.
We have, however, not done much to the house because all the work clothes are waiting to go through the laundry, which is going to take days to clear. The pile was potentially as big as us (only the fact that my uniforms were in the dead washer/drier meant that it wasn’t actually that tall. That and stability issues) and is only slowly going down. 6kg at a time.
* A beast with which I could heat my room, it having a more impressive heat-haze than my 1970’s TV set. I actually did heat my room at university, at some points, by turning on the monitor. It was cheaper than any of the brand ones, and cooked itself over the next 5 years.