The Covid Death Toll is nearly to 800,000.

Shall we have a moment of silence?

Or should we the vaccinated rant and rave and throw things to get the point across?

There is only 1 way out of this pandemic.

I’ve taken my now 3 shots and society is still struggling against mostly self-sabotage of a few people who won’t take 1.

Or mask.

Or, for all we know, wash their hands.

We are nearly 3 weeks out from Thanksgiving and cases are rising.

Typical.

Deaths are rising.

Availability of hospital beds is decreasing.

Nurses and other healthcare workers are still tired.

Still can’t catch a break.

Yeah.

Not a lot to say that I haven’t already said.

I’m so sorry that your self interest has impacted the world so much.

Better luck next pandemic to the survivors.

It is Friday.

I’ve not had Friday as a normal day off in years.

Unless it was a PTO day.

YEARS.

I have had the stray Friday off, but always as a PTO or actual holiday.

As long as I’ve been an OR nurse I’ve worked Fridays.

Even when I worked 12s Fridays were always involved.

Looking back, it seems the last time I was not regularly scheduled on Fridays was my short stint as a Med-Surg nurse.

I’ve blocked much of that from my mind but it seems to me that as we worked an alternating weekend schedule I would have been off the Friday before my weekend.

That’s how I would do it as a scheduler.

In my new role as the call nurse I will be off Friday and Saturdays.

That’s different.

This is a journey of discovery for me.

The limited work days.

Not my style.

Especially when I see the OR struggle against the December onslaught.

And me unable to help.

This is my first Friday that I am off.

I need to get into a routine.

I think I will do something off my to do list.

Anyone have any dice?

One of my favorite things to make, and eat! at the holidays is Chex mix.

There have been some past Decembers that Chex mix was basically my primary food source.

For the entire month.

I love it.

I love it so much I have to limit myself to only making it once a year.

After all, if you make something you really like it is better to limit the times you make it to make it even more special.

I buy supplies early: the three different Chex cereals, butter, Worcestershire sauce, onion and garlic powders, seasoning salt, nuts, and pretzels.

After I have bought supplies I do not buy more.

I do not make it until after Thanksgiving.

The secret is that I use Worcestershire powder in addition to the onion and garlic powders, twice the butter and twice the powders.

Okay, I double everything, except seasoning salt.

Melt the butter, add the seasonings, add the Worcestershire sauce, pour over combined cereals, nuts, pretzels and stir to coat.

Recipe?

Who needs a recipe?

I bake it loooowwww and slllloooowww.

225 degrees, stirring every 20 minutes, for 2-3 hours.

When time is up, if I’m lazy, I just turn the oven off and let the batch sit in the oven until I portion it out into bags.

I do not eat the vast majority of the Chex mix.

I usually give it out for presents.

However, it is a very popular item for Cookie Thursday is a Thing.

It appears quickly in the roster.

It may even be a repeater.

Kind of like the nightly lap appys.

The Way Back Time Machine is, according to Google, the digital archive of the World Wide Web.

A way to look back, as it were.

I’ve been cataloguing articles of interest since Covid began.

Since the lockdown in America began.

On March 10, 2020, a state of emergency was declared in my state.

My husband’s office closed soon after that.

And a stay at home order was implemented on March 27, 2020, except for essential workers and trips to the grocery store.

Hospitals do not get to shut down.

We are always open for business.

At about this time I started cataloguing, or archiving articles of interest on my Covid Stuff Pinterest board.

Pinterest is a way to accumulate data from a variety of sources and store them digitally.

I use Pinterest as a cache all.

All the recipes I want to try.

All the places I want to go.

All the books I want to read.

All the fandom stuff I don’t want others to know about.

Ask me about Star Trek or Sherlock, we could have a conversation.

In January of 2020, in response to the personal pressures I was under as a grad student in the last semester of my MSN, and also in response to the personal pressures my co-workers were under in this new reality of mine, I started a Happy Place board.

With funny picture of cats and dogs.

A laugh is always good for a stress relief.

On my Covid Stuff Pinterest board, I pinned things that I thought might be useful.

Things that made me laugh.

Things that made other people laugh.

I’m not sure why I wanted to look at the very first pin that I pinned to that board.

But I did.

I waded through all 2949 pins to get to the beginning.

And it was how to do a fade haircut with clippers.

Yes, I gave my husband a clipper cut when he hadn’t been to the barber in 6 weeks.

I am not good at the fade.

Although I am impressed that he knew the individual length clippers that I would need for each step.

It makes me chuckle now.

Frantically learning a new skill for someone who wouldn’t have to leave the house for the next 12 months.

And yes, I did trim my own bangs with the clippers.

But not until 7 months later when I couldn’t stand it anymore.

In September of 2021, those who were fully vaccinated went back to the office.

Including my husband.

By then he was comfortable going to the hair cutter place.

But early in the day.

Baby steps.

This is the last day of our vacation.

My husband says he can’t wait to go into the office tomorrow.

This is our third staycation since the pandemic began.

And even for homebodies this is getting a bit stale.

Right now the Thursday Cookie is in the oven.

I say cookie, but in reality it is Chex mix.

Another fan favorite for the OR department.

So far this vacation I have NOT done much on my to do list.

I have cleaned our closet.

I did laundry.

I read.

A LOT.

Tomorrow is another chance at my giant to do list.

Tomorrow properly starts my new job as a call nurse.

Tomorrow I get the house to myself, for the first time in what seems like forever.

Certainly since last March when the office closed to in person for my husband.

And then at 2100 I go to the hospital.

I don’t clock in.

I go to finish out the evening shift, and do whatever needs to be done.

To set day shift up for a good Thursday.

There are no parameters on this.

I think I am going to wing it.

The hammer has dropped.

I am now officially only a call nurse.

This fall has been a time of thinking about this.

And overthinking about it.

But the existence of a call nurse meant that my very comfortable role as a workaholic was steady.

You need me to pick up call?

You’ve got it.

Someone called in sick and you need coverage?

You’ve got it.

Oh, shared governance is struggling and needs an experienced person at the helm?

You’ve got it.

I have been a yes woman for a long time.

And it has been lucrative.

I’ve earned lots of money.

And many, many hours have been worked.

Many hours.

Now those call hours would be disappearing to someone else.

Call is my favorite.

Over the summer, I began wondering if I was doing a disservice to the department.

You give a man a fish and he eats for one day, et cetera, et cetera.

I don’t want to have an entire department dependent on me.

And changes made by leadership were chafing.

And my role in the department was beginning to be taken for granted.

I was not allowed to complain.

And my complaints, when I felt strongly enough to speak up, went unheeded.

But others could complain about me.

Nitpicky shit about well that person got out early yesterday too. No I don’t want to leave early, I just want to complain.

Or I was on the computer when I arrived, again, no matter that I had just been in their room and nothing was needed.

You’ve got lots of time after the schedule is over to work on the computer.

Do I though?

And I would have to have a conversation with management about being aware of millennials tender, purple feelings and I needed to find a better way to tell them to do their job.

Crap like that.

There needed to be a change.

I am on the precipice of my new life.

Terrified.

Staring at the entire mountain of things I have let slide while I was at work.

Because that was what my mind was telling me was the priority.

Can I be a reformed workaholic?

Is that a thing?

Or will I just replace my workaholic shifts with other things?

Let’s get started.

The post-it reads ‘a month in a finger snap’.

This has literally been the fastest month of my life.

In my head I am still in San Francisco.

And poof.

It is December

And the 4 week notice I had to give my current job at my current hospital has expired.

And I start my new job at my current hospital.

Technically today.

But I am on vacation.

I am supposed to be in London.

Again.

But we demurred when the cases started to go back up in the UK in September.

Immediately before we bought our tickets.

Back to the flying month.

I had a lot I wanted to accomplish this month.

I wanted to set up the schedule so if they took it away from me it could be done on auto-pilot.

Nope, cases got in the way.

I wanted to flesh out the Call Preserver book so that people who have not taken call in a very long time could do so.

Somewhat.

I wanted to work as much extra call that I could before the hammer came down and I was no longer going to be taking extra call.

I have had 2 nights in the past 6.

Weird.

I wanted to have an idea of what I was going to be doing with all my new found time now that I was no longer working 1430-2300 and solely taking call.

I have some ideas?

I don’t know.

On vacation I was going to start some of the projects that I’ve been neglecting during covid.

I have cleaned our closet.

And did leaf eradication in the front yard.

yay, me.

I have three days left of vacation.

I start my new life on 12/8/21.

And, rightly so, I am terrified.

I can do this, right?

Why is that still a thing?

Colleges are dumping the SAT and ACT, what about the GRE?

I wasn’t going to take the GRE as some schools do not require it.

However, one of the schools I am very interested in does.

I sat the GRE on Friday afternoon.

The email that I was sent to remind me of my appointment.

That I paid money for.

At a testing center.

Told me to expect 5 hours.

Yeah, no.

And also the testing company sent me an email.

Today at 1100.

About the math portion.

Breaking it down.

In bite sized pieces.

The only problem is I had to leave the house to get to the testing center by 1415.

Sigh.

One of the hardest tests I’ve done.

Probably because it has been over 25 years since my last Geometry class.

And I swear there is new math in the test as well.

And I am unused to reading a paragraph or two that I need to parse and answer questions for on a computer screen.

I know first world problems.

Picture it.

A room with 6 computers, and 4 people before I got there.

Social distancing much?

No.

However, the waiver I signed asked if I had been exposed to people with active Covid infections.

I work in a hospital.

I presume I am exposed all the time.

Especially since we don’t test the patients from the ER.

The waiver, though.

Stated that healthcare professionals could ignore that part of the waiver.

Because, you know, we are exposed constantly.

Especially those of us who work in a hospital.

Back to the test.

The person on my immediate left.

Less than 3 feet away.

Was doing a different test.

An open book test.

He dropped the book at least twice.

During my essay portion of the test.

And jarred me from my thought process.

Joy.

The overall test did not take me 5 hours.

It took me three and a bit.

In the last segment my lower legs ached.

Probably because of the horribly hard chair.

This also distracted me.

Pro tip- when the test gives you a 60 second break between sections, stand up.

Get the blood moving.

I’ll be able to access my results within 14 days.

We’ll see how I did or didn’t do.

At least that is done.

I will see if my brain will let me not do well.

Often I sabotage myself and re-do tests.

A little frustration was the testing center was not well marked.

When I looked up the testing center in the directory on the wall, there was no details of what floor the center was on.

That was disappointed.

But, hey, it was in the same building as the NPR station I listen to.

That was fun.

I didn’t see anybody I recognized from promos though.

On to the next part- more applications.

The president of the hospital knows who I am.

We worked together at my previous local hospital.

He’s been president of this hospital for several years.

We’ve worked on different projects together.

Most recently the use of the enneagram to foster communication.

Like, real recently.

This is a project we’ve been working on for the 2 years.

And it keeps getting sidelined by the pandemic.

But that is another issue.

Yesterday we had the quarterly awards ceremony at the hospital.

Shared Governance hosts them.

And, after dodging it for years, OR is the keeper of the nominations.

That’s a lot a work in itself.

But not what I’m talking about today.

The president of the hospital was at the ceremony.

As the Chief Nursing Officer couldn’t make it.

And we were making small talk like you do.

When he asked me point blank about my new job.

On some level it makes sense.

The approval had to start somewhere.

He said it was going to be good to have someone strong on the call shift.

And then he referenced a problem with one of the call shifts when I was in San Francisco.

Um, what?

And then he said the call shift would relieve the staff.

Not as if they would not be taking call.

But that it would be a burden off their shoulders.

And something about how it could be expensive for the department.

Or less money out for the department because they no longer had to pay out call back.

I don’t know.

The entire winding story to point out that the president knows about the call position.

And that I took it.

Yikes.

This was such a fail.

I am embarrassed for this recipe.

I had such high hopes.

I could have made traditional latkes.

Savory is a precedent.

But I was wowed by a cookie recipe I found.

Y’all know that Cookie Thursday is a Thing is all about experimentation.

This is an experiment I will not redo.

I finished baking the batch and realize they were horrible.

Potato chips, butter, sweetened condensed milk, and an egg.

I thought it would be something caramelly.

But no.

It was horrid.

I binned the entire batch.

Straight into the trash bag.

And the Pinterest pin that gave me the idea.

Straight to the Pin Fail board.

I have standards.

Even around cookies.

This is the first time all year I’ve had to buy cookies for Cookie Thursday.

Next week there will be homemade cookies.

1 batch for the OR.

1 batch for the ER.

I am expanding Cookie Thursday to other departments.

Because other departments could use the morale lift too.