Nosferatu

Sunday Morning:

I got home from work a bit ago, stripped out of my scrubs and jumped in the shower. I am in my pajamas now and should be trying to get some sleep...

It's been busy at work and we are perennially short staffed. I spent a good chunk of my night giving breaks to techs. It never makes any sense to me to use someone who gets paid three or four times what a tech gets paid to break a tech. The techs would be happy to skip their break and get paid for it, but no, instead management prefers to spend a dollar to save a penny. Ridiculous. Not that I care about doing tech work. I try to take care of my techs because they take care of me in return. The hospital where I work runs on techs. There is no way I could do my job without them.

Anyway, like I said, it's been busy. I'm tired. And yet...

Last night, it was cold out and clear. The moon was a perfect crescent, like the moon in children's storybooks. A family of rabbits hopped around on the grass outside. We have rabbits and owls and hawks and squirrels and snails, to my great delight, slugs. (We also have mosquitoes in the summer and--yuck--mice in the winter.) When I say I work in a wild place, I don't just mean the psych hospital aspect of it. (But I also don't not mean the psych hospital aspect of it.)

I'm going to lie down for a bit and see if I can turn off The Brain.

Monday

How did it get to be Monday??

Dave and I are sitting in a nearby Mexican restaurant waiting for a couple of folks that I  don't know. One is Dave's former coworker. The others are his family (wife and two kids). They're running a bit late.  We are having chips and salsa while we wait.  (Poetry.)

Tuesday morning

That brings us to today, I guess.

Last night, Dave and I had a quick dinner with his coworker, his wife, and their two daughters. They come from Boston, but the wife grew up in El Paso and was bringing her family to visit the southwest. Their little ones are pretty little and so they weren't up for an extended dinner. It was nice though to see a family who interact appropriately and affectionately with their children. I deal with a lot of abused children and, by extension, their sucky parents. It's easy to forget that the other exists sometimes.

I almost didn't go to dinner because I've been feeling slightly under the weather. There's a cold going around work and I've been feeling like I'm getting it. That has meant a lot of saline up my nose to rinse out bad stuff and gargling with salt water. It helps! I also drink honey and lemon juice (not much of each) dissolved in very warm water. That helps, too. So I think I'm fighting it off. I hope I'm fighting it off!

After dinner, we came home via the fizzy drink store and at home, I put on my pajamas and dozed for a bit. Woke up in the night, then was able to get back to sleep and sleep until around 6 a.m. My brain feels like I'm half asleep right now, though, despite two cups of coffee. I came over to Kelly and Kevin's to hang out with the pups and to sit in the sunlight. (Our casita is set up to be dark so that I can sleep during the day--though it was dark before I started working graveyards, to be honest.)

(And speaking of working nights, I've had to buy new makeup because I'm as pale as a vampire these days. I could only find the shade I needed ("flax") in a full coverage foundation and I tried it this morning and it kind of makes me look like Lt. Data from Star Trek: Next Generation. Is that a thing that I want to look like? If it's not, I need to return the foundation because it was thirty bucks for the bottle and I can't really be burning cash on unwearable makeup.)

(I do wear makeup when I work. A lot of my coworkers don't, but I don't feel right going to work without some makeup on. I didn't always feel that way, but that was back in my 20s, when everyone is beautiful. Even people with bad skin are beautiful. It's all downhill from there, I think. And this last round of hyper-stressful schooling put years on my face. Yes, I'm old and pale now. Just call me Nosferatu.)

I'm off today and tomorrow, then work again on Thursday.

My plans for today are few. I am going to chat with my friend Hannah, who I haven't spoken to in months (just texts), and then I have therapy. We are likely to have dinner with our friend Grace after that. I rented Parasite on Amazon last week and have yet to watch it, so I'll probably do that tonight. (I've read everything about it, including a description of the entire plot from start to finish, because I don't do well with suspense/creepiness anymore, but I do want to see it.) Then sleep. I'll complete flipping my week from nights to days just in time to have to flip it back from days to nights.

Lucky me.