25- Freaking Finally

Freaking Finally the message from the left is breaking through to those who need to know that we have their backs. Even if they are so brainwashed to hate everything about the left they cannot hear or comprehend that the left fights for all American’s freedoms, not just the right’s.

Before Tuesday’s overwhelming repudiation of the administration’s cruel policies and money grubbing ways, I have to admit it was feeling a little bit like the boys at the barricade in Les Miserables. There they were, fighting for the little guy, fighting to make everyone’s lives better and, after a long dark night with the loss of Eponine, they came to the realization that no one was coming to fight alongside them.

If you are interested, the song is called “Dawn of Anguish” and is track 34. With thanks to Victor Hugo who wrote the seminal book and Cameron MacKintosh who wrote the musical.

Enjorlas, the leader of the revolutionaries, is singing mostly to himself at the beginning. Perhaps to give himself courage. His words echoed how I was feeling on Monday. When he is informed that the revolutionaries are low on ammunition and the rain has ruined the gunpowder, he addresses the small crowd.
“The people have not stirred.
We are abandoned by those who still live in fear.
The people have not heard.
Yet we will not abandon those who cannot hear.”

This neatly sums up how I have been feeling since January.

In the 2012 movie Les Misérables, after Enjolras states this, the street urchin and revolutionary child Gavroche pipes in with an echo of his song and the main Les Mis theme.
“Do you hear the people sing?
It is the song of angry men.
It is the music of the people who will not be slaves again.
When the beating of your heart echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start when tomorrow comes!”

I spent a lot of time recently listening to Les Mis, especially after the latest No Kings protests on October 18th. Yes, I realize that the story is somewhat problematic and some of the words are not PC, but I enjoyed my deep dive into the source material.

Les Misérables is a tragedy as nearly all of the revolutionaries at the barricade are dead. However, there is some hope there too. In Marius and Cosette’s story.

However, even if the revolutionaries at the barricade would have won the battle of the barricade, they would have to come to grips with the realization that the battle of the barricade is just that, merely a battle. A battle win is not the winning of the war.

The election results on Tuesday, November 4th are not the war. They are merely a skirmish during the war.

Yes, we had an amazing turnout for an off year election. Yes, we had most of the amazing wins, including the four marquee races in New York City, New Jersey, Virginia, and California.

This is not the time to let off on the pressure. There will be more skirmishes and battles to fight.

Keep the faith that what we on the left are doing are for everyone.

But be aware that this is not done.

See also the refusal of the administration to fund the SNAP benefits, even after 2 judges told them they had to, and another judge affirmed it.

Yay us on Tuesday November 4th!

But there is work to be done.

Volunteer to be a poll worker.

Keep up the phone calls.

Continue to protest in the way that you can.

And maybe donate some food kits to a food pantry. If you are able to.

Cookie Thursday 11/6/25- Pumpkin Pie Pudding Cookies

Pumpkin pie pudding.

Now say that three times fast.

This is a new recipe and I have some thoughts.

The first thought is that the pudding was required to be pumpkin spiced. Yeah, but according to the ingredients it is only spices. And I have a pumpkin pie spice container that I concocted myself.

The reason I point it out is because none of my local stores had a pumpkin pie pudding 3.4 oz packet. Heck, they had no pumpkin pie pudding at all. Full stop. Amazon had it but Amazon and I are having a beef these days. Or rather I am having a beef with Amazon and only ordering minimal things from there. So I can clearly not choose this option.

So I made my own dry vanilla pudding recipe, measured out 3.4 ounces and add as much pumpkin pie spice to the vanilla pudding mixture as my heart desired. Hint, it was at least 2 tsp, maybe more. No I did not measure.

My second thought is that the 12 oz of white chocolate chips is entirely too many. I usually add half a bag of chips. Which would have me adding 6 oz of white chocolate chips. All those chips made the dough hard to stir and scoop out.

My second and a half thought is that mini white chocolate chips would be better. The regularly sized chips made for a lumpy cookie. Pretty cookie, but lumpy.

My third thought was what other pudding flavors could I mock up and use in a cookie.

Perhaps in the new year.

Call Secrets of the OR- Keeping up with the Joneses, Dr. Jones that is

Call is my job and has been for nearly 4 years, since December 2021.

In that time, many surgeons have come and gone.

There have also been many different pieces of equipment that may be useful at night that have been introduced to the OR.

There have been many changes to the instrument sets.

There have been many changes to the type and style of suture that are kept on site.

There have been many misguided re-working of the OR core. The general cart specifically.

There’s even been a brand new robot introduced into my OR.

Guess what?

Even with all of these changes I am expected to still know everything.

When a surgeon asks for a certain piece of sterile supply, an AbThera, I am required to know where it is. And when I convince the surgeon that no such thing lives in this OR because it doesn’t match our negative pressure wound machine, I have to be able to trouble shoot Macgyvering or cobbling together a facsimile of available sterile supplies. While we are putting our Frankenstein dressing on, I am required to listen to the surgeon bitch about the department not having such a thing. After all downtown’s hospital has it. The why doesn’t this hospital is sometimes silent, most likely not.

Sigh.

The point of this post is that it takes a lot of time and effort to keep up with the various changes to the operating room. But also not look I’m struggling when I can’t find the exact thing the surgeon is asking for. Kind of like Ginger Rogers dancing all the dances with Fred Astaire; only backward in heels.

I just have to bear in mind that the surgeon and I are united in our desire to provide the best care for the patient currently on the table.

Sometimes that requires a little imagination. And a little homework.

In order to keep up with the Dr. Joneses, I tour the OR when I am there and make note of the changes. Because, you know, no one is going to loop me in.

I read my work email nearly every day, looking for policy changes.

I attend the staff meetings when I am able.

I ask questions.

Just keeping up with the Joneses (department changes) can be a full time job.

Good thing I am built for this position.

Tuesday Top of Mind 11/4/25- Did you vote?

Every election is important.

Every opportunity to flex your constitutionally given powers* is important.

I used an asterisk because in the constitution only white, male, Protestant land owners could vote.

Of course.

By 1830 most states had dropped the religious and land owning components.

In 1868, the 14th Amendment recognized African Americans as citizens, giving the males the right to vote.

Of course, this led to some states denial of this right.

In 1870, the 15th Amendment gave African Americans the right to vote. This amendment prohibited any state or local government from stopping them from voting.

But they still tried.

In 1890, Wyoming recognized a women’s right to vote. And they did so in the state constitution.

Go, Wyoming!

In 1920, the 19th Amendment was added to the constitution. This gave women the right to vote.

In 1947, all states granted Native Americans the right to vote.

And then some of states, outraged by being outnumbered, instituted a poll tax in the 1880s and 90s. This meant that people, mostly black men, had to pay a tax in order to vote. Naughty naughty. Some people will cheat to win, won’t they.

In 1964, the 24th Amendment stated unequivocally that no-one should be denied the right to vote because of bullshit, made up “tax”.

The 1960s were hot because in 1965 there was an amendment to the Voting Rights Act, the very same one the 2020s Supreme Court has been chipping away at, that banned the use of literacy tests.

In 1971, the voting age was lowered to 18. I am not sure if this was because of the Vietnam War. Because of the draft teenagers and 20 year old were old enough to die in a senseless war, but not old enough to vote.

Today your mission was to have voted.

It is the only way to send a message that some people will understand.

Beyond the economic blackout that is being planned for the end of the month.

Someone else said it best. Perhaps we should have a non-corporation holiday season and focus on the small companies.

FFS 10/31/25- Feed Me, Seymour!

It is definitely cartoon villain adjacent to give another country $40 BILLION dollars to shore up their currency when your own people are facing double or triple insurance premiums in 2026.

It is definitely cartoon villain adjacent to dangle food assistance for the food insecure people as a gotcha to make the Democrats do what you want and capitulate to the bullshit budget bill that will double or triple the healthcare exchanges premiums.

It is definitely cartoon villain adjacent to extort the Democrats to capitulate with your demands or 40 million American people will lose their SNAP benefits.

It is definitely cartoon villain adjacent to starve your own constituents.

It is definitely cartoon villain adjacent to give talking points to the bots that says that they don’t want their money to go to others having steak and candy and baked goods that they don’t have to bake themselves. And have it taken up by the mommy bloggers and the manosphere to endlessly repeat it.

Did you know that according to the USDA, in 2023, the average household who received SNAP got $332 per month. This is $177 per person. FOR ENTIRE FUCKING MONTH’S FOOD SPEND!!!

Now, I know that the vast majority of congresspeople and senators and people in the government do not do their own food shopping. I’m going to tell you gently that $177 is not steak money. It is money that goes to the dollar stores or Walmart to try to cobble some semblance of healthy food for the household. Again, for the entire fucking month. Breakfasts, lunch, dinner, a snack if you are lucky.

To do the math, even a little bit, $177 is roughly $5.90 per day. Again, not steak money. Hell, it isn’t even fruit and vegetable money.

But, but, Kate, it is in the name of the program “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program”, it is supposed to be in addition to whatever you have to spend on food.

Ignorant fucker.

These numbers are from 2023. Before the inflation went nuts, before every little thing at the grocery store started to shrink in size, for the SAME price. This is known by the cutesy name “shrinkflation”. But what it really is is the multi billion dollar companies trying to make us pay more for less. Look, they cry, it is the same price as before.

Yeah, fucker, for less product.

This was hammered home to me yesterday when I pulled out the bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos so I could make a Halloween treat for Cookie Thursday is a Thing. This is not something I would normally buy the house as I anticipate no one would like it. The bag was 10 full ounces less than what was called for in the recipe I was following, almost half the number of ounces. 10.75 oz to the recipe ingredient which was a 20.5 oz bag. This made me take evasive maneuvers with the suddenly twice as much caramel than I needed.

I am lucky in that I can afford the prices and drive to more than one store, searching for the best price. But for how long? And even that is only if I maintain my current employment as a full time nurse in a hospital. But what about the ones that cannot?

As of this writing, a federal judge Rhode Island, Jack McConnel has blocked the administration from ceasing to pay SNAP benefits during the shutdown. Despite the lawyers for the administration arguing that SNAP doesn’t exist and there is not entitled to the $5 billion that was set aside by Congress in case of an emergency.

Like a government shutdown.

Their villainy strokes are so broad and diabolical you’d think they’d be afraid for their immortal soul.

Look, I don’t care if my tax dollars, and as a double income no kids couple we always pay, go to feeding the food insecure. It is a pittance compared to the corporate welfare that the gigantic companies receive every year.

So stop clutching your pearls and consider not torturing the single mother who is struggling.

The way better and bigger target are the corporations and the billionaires.

Cookie Thursday 10/30/25- Trick or Treat

Foiled again by the rain.

It’s been raining for 4 days. Cold, spitty kind of rain. The kind of rain that raises the humidity enough that candy won’t set.

But, like I wrote in last Wednesday’s Call Secrets of the OR, I am nothing if not flexible.

You see, Halloween is my favorite holiday. What’s not to love?

The costumes!
The candy!
The carving of the pumpkins! Or, if you’re me and busy, the buying of pumpkin to put on the front stoop.

I had planned four different candies for this Cookie Thursday is a Thing, Halloween edition! This is a traditional even that has been rained out several times during CTIAT.

But alas, it is too humid.

I was going to make an old fashioned vinegar candy.
I was going to make marshmallow candy corn.
I was going to attempt pop rocks again.
I was going to attempt strawberry mochi.

But what did I make as a pivot?

I made no bake matcha bark (gotta have something green, you know), caramel sweet chex mix, cheddar pickles and, the only recipe that made the line up for this Trick or Treat CTIAT Halloween edition, caramel hot Cheetos.

Also, there is a Trunk or Treat at the hospital right after CTIAT, so I didn’t want to get too ambitious.

The cheddar pickles was something I’ve made before and the department really liked. This was a super easy quick bake. Put the pickles in a layer on a paper towel and pat dry, taking care to make sure they aren’t too small or too large. Very goldilocks this recipe. In a mini muffin tin, put some shredded cheese into the bottom, top with a pickle, top with another layer of cheese. Simplicity itself.

Everything else was a new to me recipe.

The no bake matcha bark was decidedly simple to make. Three ingredients. White melting chocolate, matcha, and rice Krispies. Melt the chocolate, add the matcha, and when it is all combined to a pale green, add the cereal. Chill to set. This was surprisingly tasty. My husband swears by matcha, which is why we had it in the house.

I started the caramel for the caramel hot Cheetos. This is also a simple recipe, 2 c brown sugar, 1 c butter, 1/2 tsp baking soda, 10.5 oz bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos. Make the caramel, stir in the baking soda until the mixture is pale and frothy, add caramel to the Cheetos. Double check the bag against the recipe and realize that the bag was 10 oz of Cheetos.

Shrinkflation strikes again.

All of a sudden, I had more caramel than I knew what to do with. I portioned out most of the caramel into the Cheetos and stirred. I spread them out on a baking pan and baked at 250 degrees for 1 hour, stirring halfway through. I remembered we had a box of peanut butter chex that had not been eaten. I quickly upended it onto a baking sheet and stirred in the caramel. Now I needed more binder/fluid and I poured in the rest of the white chocolate. After the caramel Cheetos came of the oven, I popped the sweet chex mix in. I didn’t bake this for an hour, more like 20 minutes. When I pulled it out, I stirred it all together. The white chocolate was melty and the caramel was caramelly. Good enough. I chunked it apart and went to lunch with my mom.

When I got home I pulled the match bark out of the fridge and broke it apart.

I used parchment paper as boats for the four makes, so that the pickle juice wouldn’t get on everything and because it just looked neater that way.

Off I went to the hospital with my 2 trays of makes.

Another CTIAT Halloween down. Time to start planning the rest of the year.

Psych!

I’ve already got the rest of the year planned.

Call Secrets of the OR 10/29/25- all call cases are emergencies

All call cases are emergencies. I admit sometimes they are emergency adjacent but still the case must be done. There are the rare exceptions when the call team did a total knee in the middle of the night and then discharged the patient because the surgeon, who was 5 hours late, insisted. That’s for another time.

All call cases are emergencies. To that end, it is okay to tell another department who has their gurney waiting outside the room when you go to pick up a patient that their non-emergent test is just going to have to wait.

Yes, that happened.

Another nurse and I were up on the 4th floor picking up a patient. We packaged the patient up. This means that we removed all the monitors, and replaced them with our own, we cleared all the stuff from the bed that wasn’t the patient. We unplugged the bed and told the family to follow us to the elevators and opened the door.

To be confronted by a worker from another department, ready with a gurney, to take the patient to their department for a non-urgent test.

Um, no you may not have the patient for your non-urgent test.

No, I don’t care that this patient is next on your to do list.

No, I don’t care that it looks badly to your supervisor if you don’t get the test done in a timely manner.

This patient is ill, ill, ill and requires emergent surgery to fix what is wrong with them. Well, not fix, but to remove the offending body part that was making them so sick.

No, we have to rush down to the OR and start the surgery.

No, you will have to do your non-emergent test on them after surgery.

No, I don’t know how long the emergent surgery will take. Surgical cases take as long as they take for the surgery.

No, I don’t care that this is the last thing on your to do list and you get to go home after the non-emergent test.

Sometimes you just have to say no and mean it.

Even if it means blocking another department from getting their hands on the patient for a non-urgent test that could wait until morning. But they don’t want to tell the hospitalist the non-urgent test wasn’t done.

Sorry for delaying this non-emergent test for a real, honest to goodness emergency surgery without which the patient has a good chance of dying.

Nah, not sorry.

I’ll probably hear about this later from my manager.

Oh, well.

At least we saved that patient’s life.

FFS Friday 10/24/25- Fret not, the White House East Wing has gone to a better place

We should have expected this kind of reaction.

The reaction of an abuser when the abused stand up to them.

Also the reaction of a mob boss trying to shake down a business. I’m sure we’ve all seen the memes; “This is a real nice place, it would be a shame if something were to happen to it”.

This is a shakedown. Something we’ve already seen from this administration.

What happened to the East Wing of the White House this week went beyond that.

It was a message from an abuser to an abusee.

And absolutely was in response to the wildly successful No Kings Protest on 10/18/25.

He fumed all weekend and then went hard on “making the White House better”. In his image. After he “gilded” the Oval Office with tacky gold tchotchkes. After all, he wants a golden ballroom that none of us are ever going to step into.

He reacted by tearing out the East Wing of the White House. The image of our government as much as the Jefferson Memorial and the Vietnam Memorial Wall has been irretrievably broken apart.

Bit on the nose there, dude.

I saw a message from a trauma survivor that called this kind of over the top reaction that of a narcissist. Well, if the orange makeup is badly applied.

I was sickened and enraged by the pictures and video that were filmed and released by the Treasury.

If you haven’t seen them, google works just as well for you as for me. Watch them. Watch the gop try to soft pedal this desecration. Trigger warning, the pictures and video are obscene.

Also know that one of the talking points is that nothing ever happened in the East Wing anyway. And it wasn’t even original to the White House. As construction began in 1902 under Franklin D. Roosevelt and renovated several times. The idea of the East Wing goes back further. To Thomas Jefferson who

The East Wing was also the public entrance. Again, a bit on the nose. From the fascist who doesn’t like the American people and only cares about his image and his money. Not that any of his money will be spent building the ballroom.

That list is a who’s who of the billionaire elite and corporations.
Here is the list, sourced from the Time article released October 23, 2025 titled ‘Who is Paying for Trump’s $250 Million Dollar Ballroom- and What They Might Get in Return by Rebecca Schneid and Connor Greene.

Altria Group, Inc.
Amazon
Apple
Booz Allen Hamilton
Caterpillar, Inc.
Coinbase
Comcast Corporation
J. Pepe and Emilia Fanjul
Hard Rock International
Google
HP Inc.
Lockheed Martin
Meta Platforms
Micron Technology
Microsoft
NextEra Energy, Inc.
Palantir Technologies Inc.
Ripple
Reynolds American
T-Mobile
Tether America
Union Pacific Railroad
Adelson Family Foundation
Stefan E. Brodie
Betty Wold Johnson Foundation
Charles and Marissa Cascarilla
Edward and Shari Glazer
Harold Hamm
Benjamin Leon Jr.
The Lutnick Family
The Laura & Isaac Perlmutter Foundation
Stephen A. Schwarzman
Konstantin Sokolov
Kelly Loeffler and Jeff Sprecher
Paolo Tiramani
Cameron Winklevoss
Tyler Winklevoss

What you do with the names on the list is up to you.

The final thought I had about the East Wing (RIP) is that it housed the First Lady’s office.

Of course, it did. It’s all about control and hurting the women.

Aren’t you tired of being abused?

Cookie Thursday 10/24/25- Cotton Candy Cookies

Step right up, step right up!

Get your snacks before entering the big top.

Step right up!

What is a good circus snack?

Cotton candy.

Are there good cotton candy cookie recipes on the interwebs?

No.

But there is some AI slop where the picture doesn’t match the recipe ingredients.

But there is some AI slop where the picture is too good to be true.

Scary right?

And that is why Cotton Candy Cookies is a fitting edition to the Something Spooky This Way Comes October theme.

But I still had no recipe. So I read them all.

I had cotton candy, which none of the crappy recipes included. It seemed a good fit and was on sale.

I had cotton candy flavoring, which only 1 of the crappy recipes included.

You see one of the main problems with the AI generated picture is that the cookies looked like clouds. Like cotton candy. They were all sorts of colors; the palest of pinks and the cheerful yellow and the baby blue.

None of the recipes included food dye.

“Fine. I’ll do it myself!” Growled Obadiah Stane, the bad guy in the first Iron Man Movie.

He wanted control over the trillion dollar Stark Industries.

I just want a cotton candy cookie.

This cookie has been one of the true experiment cookies that I have done for awhile. I mean, Inflation Baking 2022 was the last time I really let my hair down in the kitchen. Experimentally, that is. My hair is always tied back when I bake and all the surfaces are freshly cleaned.

How to get the cotton candy into the cookies, without melting it?

Truly, a question for the ages.

I made a sugar cookie base (the one from the animal crackers week, nice to see that I am continuing the circus theme) and folded in cotton candy hunks.

Would this work?

Probably not.

But it was pretty.

When I pulled the first batch out of the oven, the cotton candy had coalesced into a ball of sugar. Kind of like a chip.

Perhaps these should be called Cotton Candy Chip Cookies.

I think I might be onto something here.

Or I could melt white chocolate chips and add the cotton candy flavoring to make a true chip.

Or I could melt white chocolate chips and add the cotton candy flavoring and the cotton candy and put it into a mold to make cotton candy chips.

Why do I only have these ideas when I am writing up the experiment results?

Call Secrets of the OR- Flexibility is your secret power

To be on call is to do battle with the unknown.

Every day.

Well, every shift.

Each moment you are on call can bring a phone call from the nursing supervisor. Or a text or call from a surgeon.

To be on call is to be vigilant every day. To sleep when you can and to know the power of a nap.

Some nurses and techs are unable to grasp this and stay awake all night, just waiting for the phone to ring to summon them to the hospital. Or they wake in a panic and check their phone, frantic that they have missed a text or a phone call.

Shhh. Relax. I always call twice. And so does the nursing supervisor.

This is part of our flexibility. The ability to sleep through anything and everything. The ability to work all night, have a small sleep with maybe a nap later and emerge ready to do battle with the unknown again.

More than that it is our flexibility to be okay with the known and unknown.

Will there be a case? Maybe.

Will I sleep all night and awake refreshed in the morning because there was no case? Maybe.

It is being absolutely okay with either instance that makes you flexible.

And don’t you forget it.

Battle stations.