Monday, April 7, 2008

Back to Work

Last week was my return to work after being off since January 15th.  That was a long "vacation".  Certainly not the way I had intended to spend my vacation time or money.  But oh well, I keep telling myself, it is not cancer.  And it certainly is not, which is a very good thing.  Just a bump in the road we call life. 

 

Everyone at work was very happy to see me, so that was a warm welcome.  I have done a few computer projects and am in the process of checking off all of the yearly competencies for all of the nurses.  This involves watching them do all of their IV related work and checking that they are doing things correctly per our protocols.  It is a bit of a tough job after being off of work completely for so long and also still feeling sort of new to the job.  Although, one of the nurses who has been there a while pointed out that I am probably better at knowing how things should be done since I more recently received training.  That made me feel a bit more comfortable with this role I originally thought might be better suited to someone who has been doing this job for a while. 

 

On the home front, K has very kindly and diligently been working on our new raised garden bed.  I found the plan on the internet, we modified it to fit our smaller space and we went and bought the lumber and materials together (K hauled it all) to build it.  K then built it (and I requested one minor change which she kindly and willingly made).  I am still unable to use heavy equipment and power tools.  We were ready to buy some healthy soil when K discovered her ex-housemate had bought too much dirt and she offered us the rest if we hauled it away.  So we used my Zipcar funds and rented a Toyota Tacoma pick-up truck for a few hours.  And again, K did all of the lifting and I provided the moral support.  She not only shoveled it into the truck, she then shoveled out into our driveway, and then again wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow to the back yard and into our newly placed garden bed.  But before being able to put it in the garden bed, she had to spend a day in the rain digging out the ground it was going to sit on since the ground was very uneven.  I assisted, with my one arm, moving the garden bed into its eventual place several times before the ground was level enough and the right shape to hold the bed.  While K worked on digging, I worked on weeding the mulched area of the yard and coming up with an eventual landscape plan.  However, I am definitely not a landscape designer, so we'll see how this goes. 

 

So far, we have sugar snap peas and two kinds of tomatoes for our garden bed. 

 


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