Stream of consciousness

It’s a Wednesday morning, and I don’t have any posts ready to go.

And you know that that means: STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS TIME. 😉

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I am trying to decide if I want to hire someone to do some yard clean-up for me or not. I think it would probably cost around $300.

Another option is to borrow my neighbor’s lawn tractor/leaf collector and do the work myself.

A third option (leaving all the leaves and branches on the ground) is not actually an option because my lease says I am responsible for keeping the yard presentable and maintained.

Soo, what to do, what to do?

Part of me is thinking, “Just spend the money; you have a lot on your plate and you don’t even enjoy yard work. Also, you’d be hiring your neighbor’s landscaping company and supporting a small business. $300 isn’t the end of the world.”

And another part of me is like, “Oh geez, don’t be so soft. You can find a few hours to go out there and get it done, and then you’ll still have that $300 in your bank account.”

Stay tuned. 😉

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I had orientation yesterday at the hospital where I will be doing my OB rotation and oh man, I am so excited for this. Everything about it made me feel happy.

It was a very different feeling than being oriented for the med-surg and assisted living rotations.

I am still trying to hold my future plans loosely, because who knows, perhaps there is some type of nursing that is going to catch my eye in future semesters.

But right now, I’m still feeling a pull to OB. We’ll see what I think of it once I actually try it!

(If you’re new here: one of the things that first made me think that I might want to be a nurse was walking through the stillbirth of my niece and the subsequent joyful birth of her sister), so OB has my heart.)

Mannn, I love babies.

They showed us an area where sometimes nurses are assigned to hold babies who are coming off of drug addictions, and I guess my face must have betrayed me because one of my classmates looked over at me and was like, “Kristen REALLY wants to hold babies.”

She is not wrong. 😉

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I had an almost five-hour zoom orientation yesterday (before the in-person orientation).

I have NEVER been in a zoom of that length, even at the height of the pandemic. Thank goodness this is not the norm.

Chiquita joined me for part of the meeting.

She couldn’t manage the whole five hours, though. Understandable.

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Sometimes I make mistakes that are slightly embarrassing, and then almost every time, I tell people about said mistakes.

In labor and delivery monitoring, we have this mnemonic to help us remember how to read fetal heart rates in conjunction with maternal contractions.

So, I was doing a practice test and I wrote it down: PORK CHOP.  I tried to use it to help me answer the question, but I was stuck.

And then I realized my mistake…it’s VEAL CHOP, not pork chop. Ha.

(Here’s a link explaining it, in case you are intrigued.)

I immediately texted my school group chat to tell them about my mistake. And hey, maybe now that I made that error, we will all remember that it’s veal, not pork.

(This has nothing to do with meat.)

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In the past two years since I left my marriage, I have done a lot of processing.

I’ve written about that quite a bit, and about my way of rolling with the memories and their attached feelings, letting them move on through.

Last semester was just so NUTS on so many levels, though, I think the processing took sort of a pause.

This semester, I’ve had a little more space and time, and interestingly enough, the processing has become unpaused.

For a while, a prominent emotion I felt was anger but right now, it’s more sadness as I look back at my past self and my past experiences.

I’ve been writing small, stand-alone essays about these feelings here and there.

I don’t know what I will do with them; they don’t really belong here, but perhaps they would be helpful to someone else in similar circumstances. So, I have considered publishing them on a Patreon at some point.

For now, though, writing them is helpful to me. Sometimes I figure things out by writing, and this is no exception.

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I came across some sweet little piano tracks, by a 20-year-old guy from Mexico, Gibran Alcocer.

They’re mostly waltzy sounds, and since they’re really simple, I paid for the downloadable sheet music from his site, and I’ve been having fun playing them.

Sometimes it’s nice to have something so easy that you can just sightread it and be good at it right away.

And if you want something peaceful to listen to, you might enjoy his music.

Alrighty; that’s enough of a peek into my brain for today.

Want to join me? Share a little stream-of-consciousness comment if you’d like!