One More Time, With Feeling

So my rental house lease is up at the end of January. For those of you playing along at home, I’ve been here for 3 years. And that’ll be it…

I received a call from the landlord’s real estate agent on Tuesday saying that the landlord is selling this property. Yeah, that out of the blue. F*ck!

After I got over the initial “I don’t wanna move, I like this house, why is he doing this, waaa!” reaction, I’m moving forward. The rent was getting a little tricky to manage on my child support checks alone (and with work hours being so flakey), this is a chance to move into some place cheaper. Unfortunately cheaper also means “smaller” and “out of our current elementary school district”. But I only have 2 in that school until the end of the year and then just one for next year. That’s doable.

The kids are mixed on the move. The best fit place I’ve found so far puts us closer to the high school and therefore a lot of the Big 3′s friends. However it takes us away from the Little 2′s friends so they are obviously less excited. Oh well, good opportunity for them all to learn about the trade-offs in life.

On the upside, this last nursing school semester seems like it should be okay. Of course there’s the usual hoop jumping and “really? how is this relevant?” stuff but for the most part, I think I’ll manage well.

Apparently in the master plan for my life, I’m required to have at least one “OMG, ARGH!!!” issue at all times. I’ll keep you all updated.

Last semester!!!

One day of classes down and I hesitate to say anything prematurely but it’s looking like it’ll be a little easier than the fall semester I just finished.

I think my hospital job is going to stress me out more than anything from college.

The mantra for the next few months is: One Day at a Time.

One day at a time: keeping the budget in line. One day at a time: working 4-8 hours at the hospital. One day at a time: research and paper writing. One day at at time: sitting through “leadership and management nursing” meetings. One day at time: jumping through hoops for “community nursing”.

In other news, Shaun is feeling better, the kids are doing well, the cat hates the cold weather (me too!), and we’re entering the Girl Scout cookie sales period. Honestly I’m so immune to the cookies now, I don’t get excited about them anymore. In fact, I’ve had boxes of all the varieties (including Thin Mints, Samoas, and Tagalongs) in the house all year and I haven’t wanted to eat any of them. Madness, I know.

116 days til graduation.

And merry belated Christmas!

It’s been a crazy few weeks. I swear I have no idea where the time goes. We obviously survived the End of the World yet again and then there was Christmas and a big snow storm and my cousin’s wedding in Michigan and visits with random family members and a quiet catch up Sunday and then 7 hours at a local emergency room yesterday.

Poor Shaun was hit with the New Year’s Eve Kidney Stone Curse.

(He’s hanging tough but I really hate to see him suffering.)

So needless to say 2013 didn’t start off quite as planned.

I’m still working on my New Year’s resolutions but so far I have: don’t go bankrupt, graduate nursing school, sew a jean quilt, and catch up on Girl Scout stuff.

Maybe I should add “no kidney stones” to my list too.

130 days until graduation!

And there are no hours available at the hospital to work. I signed up for five 7am-3pm shifts this week (M-F) and have only worked one of them so far (Monday). There are a few reasons, the first being that all the other students are out of school and have free time to work. And two, this is the time of the year where no one wants to be in the hospital anyways (surgeries aren’t being scheduled, patients are actually wanting to be discharged). Too many students plus too few patients equals very difficult to get hours. Blah!

In other news, I’m 99.9% done with my Christmas shopping. Hopefully this is the last Christmas ever where I’m scrimping by and not buying for everyone that I want to. I pretty much told everyone when I started this nursing school business that I’m not going to be able to give a lot of gifts while I’m in school but in return, you don’t have to buy anything for me either. I hope to make up for this next year!

Speaking of school, even after the bumpy start way back in August, I ended up on the Dean’s List. 3 A’s, 1 A-, 1 B+, and 1 B. Whew, I’m glad that’s done. I start my final semester (yay!) on Jan 14th and I’m taking Community Nursing, Leadership & Management Nursing, Health Psychology (to finish psych minor), Study of Intercultural Art (to finish liberal arts requirements), and Zumba. Yeah apparently you can take a dance class for college credit. Only 1 credit hour though. It fits in the schedule and a couple of my friends are taking it too.

So I guess today I’m going to do some Girl Scout stuff that I’ve been putting off. And probably strip all the beds and wash all the sheets and blankets. The kitchen could use a good scrubbing too. And vacuum the whole house. Kinda wish I could get paid for all that though…

143 days until graduation!

Christmas is not my holiday. It just isn’t.

I don’t really enjoy moving all the furniture around and putting up the tree or worse, having to take it all down in a month. Or let’s be honest, with my track record, in three months. Just thinking about the process of putting it up and then taking it down makes me grumpy. Course Christmas morning is at my house this year so I’m kinda stuck putting up the tree unless we want to open presents under the TV.

I don’t like dealing with the crazy traffic around the shopping centers (‘look people, I just need to buy some toilet paper and milk, get the frack out of my way!’) or the stress of everyone else around me (‘aaa, I need to buy twenty gazillion gifts and they are out of fuzzy baby boos everywhere!’).

I don’t like the expectations of the season. While I’ve let myself off the hook for a lot of them (baking cookies, finding the perfect matching outfits for everyone, Christmas cards because postage is expensive), I still get hit with the “it’s Christmas, let’s be merry!” attitude everywhere I go.

And the biggest “bah humbug!” is the lack of money on my part to buy Christmas gifts. Thanks to my fairy godmother (hi!) the budget survived two months of me not working (stupid panic attacks) and the lack of alimony for the last three months. But Christmas money? Blah… Shaun is determined to buy the kids’ gifts and I love him to pieces but it kinda kills me to accept that sort of generosity. I know I’d do it in a heartbeat for someone else if I had the money and they didn’t but I suck big time at being on the receiving end. I keep telling myself to quit being such a scrooge and this is the last year I’ll need help like this because next Christmas I’ll have a RN salary. But in the moment when we just spent $200 at Target? *deep breath* It’s extremely hard not to say “nope, never mind, we don’t want any of this, they don’t need anything this year because I can’t pay for it myself.”

I’m totally not uber religious but can we just make it about Jesus’s birth (which was probably in the spring but whatever) and less about ‘ho, ho, ho’ and present buying?

So while I won’t be all jingle bells and caroling, I’m hoping I can keep my inner Grinch contained enough to not ruin the holiday for anyone else. I totally see myself in a few years being one of those people who spends the last week of December on a tropical beach somewhere away from it all. Christmas is just not my holiday.

(Side note: I actually have Christmas lights up outside. I don’t know why but stringing up lights around the porch and tossing some over the bushes totally does not bother me at all. Go figure…)

(No reference to the Mayan calendar…)

16 days until the official end of the semester.

I have 1 powerpoint to write and present (about 6 slides and a few minutes), 1 six page paper, 1 test, 4 finals, and 1 ‘course reflection evaluation’ (to complete ‘in class’, I hear it’s suppose to be 3 paragraphs or so long).

After everything I’ve done over the semester, to have so few things left on the To Do List feels amazing.

I worked a whole 4 hours (well 4.7 after I finished charting) at the hospital last night without even the hint of an anxiety attack. Woohoo! Last Thursday I realized I was finally ready to go back so I picked up a mini-shift on one of my favorite ‘least stress producing units’ and it went very, very well. I kept checking in with myself, “Self? How do we feel?” and the answer was always, “Just fine, thank you, let’s do this!” Which is so much better than the previous answer a month ago that went something like this: “Not good! Abort, abort, I can’t do this! Let’s quit and go home right this very second and never come back!”

Everyone has conversations with themselves like that, right?

Happy Thanksgiving Eve! I have the kiddos this year and the turkey has been in the fridge since Sunday. It’ll go into a brine tonight, my not-so-secret trick to a moist turkey. Shaun’s coming over and we’re going to have great time. The menu is turkey (yum!), cranberry jelly (from a can cause no one likes the ‘real stuff’), mash potatoes (from scratch, the twins are in charge), rolls, Amish noodles, asparagus (Shaun’s request and something green, no one likes green bean casserole either), and pumpkin pie for dessert (not from scratch, I’m not a baker). No stuffing/dressing. No one likes the boxed stuffing and I’m probably the only one who likes my Grandma’s dressing but I don’t have the recipe.

There’s only 3 weeks left in this semester (including finals), I can’t wait! 171 days until graduation!