Nervous neck rash

OK. Sometimes when I'm nervous I develop a temporary rash on the front of my throat. It's not an attractive sight and if you ask me if I did a google image search for 'neck rash', I'll plead the fifth. (So what if I did. Lemme tell you, though, all those images were WAY grosser than my version of neck rash. I just get red and splotchy and it's not contagious.)

If the tension doesn't subside, I also get a little nauseated. Most of the time, all this cool stuff occurs when I'm anticipating some sort of conflict.

Today was a recipe for neck rash, nausea, and anything else my body wanted to throw at me. Why?

After almost exactly 2 months of employment at my first big-girl job, I had to give my boss my two weeks' notice. Whoa.

Don't worry, I'll still be bringing home the bacon. Actually, I'll be bringing home a few more strips, and it'll be higher quality bacon. Hospital Social Worker bacon, to be precise. Medical Telemetry and Oncology bacon. Dang, Gina. That's good bacon, and hopefully it'll smell less like urine.

Summer Scrapbook, Round 1

I may have mentioned that I'm not a good scrapbooker. I've tried a little, but my skills end at writing in bubble letters. Even then, the page usually runs out before the word I'm trying to squeeze in does. Thus, el blog serves as the sole record of our lives. Pretty shameful, 'specially for a good little Mormon wife like m'self. Here's some fun stuff we did a long time ago.












We have about a million pictures of Megs and various animals at her request. There is a chance she's a bit of a diva.

Also, Jordan is cute. Husband is cute. Jordo and Husband together at the zoo? Super cute.

Megan and Jordan get a long just swimmingly, and this Hogle Zoo adventure was no exception. Right up until Jordan nailed her in the arm with a rock.

This was my favorite exhibit. The mammal in question wasn't super amused to see that I was taking his picture, but I figure anything inside a cage is fair game.

From the side lines to the front lines

I have come up with the perfect analogy for my current job. Prepare yourselves, all- I'm actually going to make a sports reference.

In this confusing game we call work, we in the Social Services department basically compromise Special Teams. Stay with me; it's true, and not just because the rest of the professionals think we're a little bit pansy. Mostly, it's because no matter how many interceptions are thrown, we come in at the end and still get blamed for losing the game. Oh, and I never get to tackle anyone. It seems the only meaningful difference is that my hamstrings are not nearly as limber as real kickers.

Without boring you with the details of the mounds of paperwork, Advance Directives, Adult Protective Services abuse allegations, and discharge planning I spend my time on, I'll move on to my new, much more interesting job. Happily, it more closely resembles Special Forces than Special Teams. Right on.

In what may or may not be a thinly veiled attempt to get my foot in the door for those coveted hospital social work jobs, I am now officially also employed as an on-call crisis worker in the ER at a local hospital.

It. Freakin. Rocks.

Well, at least the first 3 hours of training did.

I get to tackle (the second football reference was unintentional, though in retrospect, pretty much rad) drug and alcohol detox, psych referrals, and suicide assessments, plus whatever else the nursing staff wants to pass on. I can be found wearing the pager between 11 pm and 8 am on Wednesday nights. I'm pretty sure pagers are so dorky they've actually rounded the corner and returned to awesome- a little like neon colored fanny packs. Awe-some.

Maybe at 80, I'll suddenly be athletic, too.

M.J. is complaining about the lack of new posts. The thing of it is, I can't seem to think of anything funny/amusing/thoughtful/important to say. Also, the camera still won't connect to this computer for some reason so we are without visual aids. My brother hasn't opened a mission call, and since there isn't a baby in my tummy -- though that would legitimize the unsightly weight gain -- we don't really have anything to blog about.

Oh. I'm not sure how funny this is to people who don't wander halls lightly scented with scent-o-urine all day, but I giggled for a few minutes. My boss was taking the family of a potential resident on a tour of our facility the other day, which is a somewhat rare happening, when our of the clear blue sky one of our less oriented residents grew upset over something or other. Picture contorted old person fists lashing out from a little hunched body in a wheelchair, the resident-turned-boxing champ screaming vulgar obscenities at, well, whatever. Turns out that while he's usually fairly immobile, he can deliver a wicked kick in the shins from where he sits and those slow hands can whip out to inflict great pain on the more sensitive areas of the anatomy of a particular male nurse. From my safe plot of ground behind the wheelchair I could hear the chaos, see the barely controlled rage on the aforementioned male nurse's face, and the look of horror in my boss's eyes while he debated the merits of calming the resident versus quickly steering the visiting family down the opposite hall.

And the newly hired Director of Social Services? I just sat back with a jolly grin and enjoyed the show. Maybe old age will be cool after all.

Other than that, not too much that we haven't expected; after all, life without a few more outlandishly bizarre tragedies from Paddy's family really would be unusual. Ah, life.