annnnnnddd I'm sick.

Sigh.
Went to work last night, and sudden got the "whoa, I don't feel good" blues.  Nausea, sweats and chills, an a burning churning tummyache were shortly followed by vomiting.  I stayed until after 3am anyway, because our floor was insanely busy and I simply couldn't leave my coworkers with an absolute sh*tstorm.  I assessed all my patients, gave out all their meds, completed my admission, did all the paperwork and documentation, all punctuated by episodes of placing toiletseat covers on the floor of the bathroom so I could kneel before the porcelain throne and hurl.  I somehow managed to change diapers, dressings, and IV bags while smiling at my patients and faking a calm sense of wellbeing (I think I missed my calling as an actress).  Then I crawled into my car and drove home seeking my bed. 
I feel like crap. 

In other news, a nice steady, heavy rain is falling, the kind that we were missing all summer long.  My fall garden is drinking deeply.  I planted *correction: replanted after the bed was destroyed by a poorly behaved dog* romaine and salad leaf lettuces, spinach, and tatsoi. Yet to find its place in the ground are my two types of garlic and the green manure cover crop seed I purchased to sow in the tomato bed.  Leaning against the house right now are three old windowframes that need to be stripped of their paint and sealed before they become the ceiling of my little coldframe. 

All of this will wait until I am able to eat without feeling like I'm on a small boat on choppy ocean waters.  Until then, I have three very sweet and friendly kittens who simply can't believe their good fortune that they have someone to snuggle with all day long today. 

"Tell" Tuesday

You know you're an urban homesteader when... you come home from work in the morning and the back of your little black Hyundai contains:

100 lbs of chicken feed, 1 very large warty pumpkin, 2 head of brocolli, 2 ears of corn, a lb of butter, a gallon of milk, a gallon of cider, a head of cabbage and a mason jar filled with season flowers... all grown and harvested locally and sustainably.

Spring and summer garden lessons

This past year has been full of lessons for me here on the homefront.  This was the first time that I actually had a little chunk of earth to garden on, and I've come away from the warm weather gardening seasons having learned quite a bit.  Here are ten lessons I will do my best to take with me into next spring when I'm planning, plotting and scheming about the season to come:

#1 Skip the cherry tomatoes.  We don't eat enough of them to justify the use of the space, and most of them ended up being chicken food.  Next year, I'll instead plant more yummy Black Sea Man slicers. 

#2 Use soaker hoses.  I failed to this past year because it was going to be a pain in the ass to thread a soaker hose into the different beds scattered across the yard.  But the hot and dry summer we had absolutely demolished many of our plants long before their time was up.  I am simply too busy to spend an hour watering every day. 

#3 Forget the brassicas.  The soil is too poor right now (though we're trying to change that!), and the cabbage worms were too much to keep up with.  Besides, the plants are huge and we're tight on space.

#4 One Sahuaro hot pepper plant is plenty.  These prolific producers are still pumping out more spicy green gems than I can possibly use... and we made the mistake of planting two!

#5 Plant more winter squash.  They produced well with very little effort on our part, and we loooovvvveee to eat them!

#6 Order lady bugs early in the season to control aphids.  Toward the end of spring our lettuce patch was infested and it was too late to do anything about it. 

#7 Skip the tomato cage business all together.  The cages were too small and flimsy to support the massive plants and we ended up resorting to tree stakes... and when it came time to pull the plants out it was a real chore to untangle them from the wire cages they'd outgrown!

#8 Mulch heavily, mulch early, mulch often.  Aside from the moisture retention and weed inhibition mulch provides, the quality of the soil right now in fall is much, much better in the beds I mulched as opposed to the beds I did not mulch with leaf compost.  It broke down beautifully and now the beds are ready for fall planting. 

#9 Potatoes should be grown in the ground, under dirt.  Our experiment with the taters in bags and covered with straw yield lush, green, beautiful foliage... and two spuds the size of dimes.  Total failure.

#10 Plant way more traditional 'pesto' basil plants and fewer smaller leaf flavored varieties.  We pretty much used the basil strictly for making pesto, and while the other varieties were delicious, they were much more labor intensive to harvest and yielded a great deal less leafy goodness.

Circus summer camp

Honeybunch and I just returned from a weekend of intensive fire performance and circus arts workshops.  It felt like being at summercamp when we were kids!  Eating together in a giant mess hall, folks standing on the tables doing silly things to entertain us during dinner, a horn blowing to notify us of the end of one class and the beginning of another, campfires burning at night during the "talent show" of fire hoops, poi, staves, fans, juggling, firebreathing, eating, fleshing, acrobatics...
It was a great time.
But I am oh so very sore.

Eggplant be warned!

I've had a bushel of eggplant sitting on my kitchen counter for over a week.  So far, I've only prepared six of them.  I'm having a very hard time motivating myself to take the hour out of my day to peel, slice, bread, and freeze all of those buggers for future eggplant parmesan.  I'm intimidated, which is silly, because while they have numbers in their favorite, I have the knives. 
Sigh.
Today, I WILL finish off that bushel, if it is the last thing I do.
I will also roast the pumpkin I carved up tonight for soup.  And I will toast its seeds to a perfectly crispy salty finish. 
I will bake bread.
I will then clean up the ridiculous mess that is sure to be created by all of this kitchen activity, take a shower, and open a bottle of wine.
Today is the day, no more excuses!!!!!

Sunday

Honeybunch let me sleep in late this morning, and made us cinnamon pear pancakes for breakfast.  He is the awesome-est.  I'm a lucky gal.

Cats vs. dogs

I am a cat person.  I will not deny that I absolutely love and adore my cats, all three of them.  I also love and adore pretty much everyone else's cats too.  If there is a kitty about, I will find it, scratch it behind the ears, and talk to it as a peer.

Someday, I hope to have land enough for a dog.  A REAL dog, mind you.  The kind that is bigger than a cat, and will defend our livestock from predators.  The kind that will round up the chickens, goats, and sheep with a few simple words from me.  I want a working dog.  The dog will have a warm, comfortable home in the barn, with the other animals, where it can keep an eye out for nighttime critters like foxes and raccoons and coyotes.  It will be showered with affection and praise, but trained and disciplined to be a farm dog.  To me, that is what a dog is meant to be, and they are truly wonderful creatures when they are given the chance to be what they should be. 

I love dogs.

Today, I found the dog my neighbors arebabysitting happily digging up my entire newly planted fall garden bed.  I ran outside, yelling "NO!", and she bounced over to me happily, placing her giant muddy paws on my stomach, nearly knocking me over and requiring me to change my clothes.  I grabbed the scruff of her neck and put her on her side, but she just continued to grin that toothy grin at me, and bounced back up as soon as I let her go.  This dog has had absolutely NO training, NO discipline... she has been given no purpose, and has been living in a small urban apartment the whole six months of her life.  It would have been much easier to train her before she was 60 lbs.  She jumps up at you, chases the chickens and cats with her jaws open, digs in the garden, chews on things... she has become an ill-behaved dog. 

I do not like ill-behaved dogs.

I know it is not her fault.  Without a firm and consistent trainer, any dog will become a "bad dog".  It is really the owner's responsibility to make sure that boundaries and rules are set and enforced to the point where the dog does it naturally.  But that does not change the fact that I now have to replant my entire garden bed, use more water and electricity for my laundry, and keep my kitchen door closed on this gorgeous fall day so she doesn't try to run through the screen at my cats. 

Dogs are a lot of work.  As far as I'm concerned, if you don't have a decent sized backyard for them to run around in, if you don't have the time to teach them basic commands and good habits... don't get a dog.

Get a cat. 

The witching hour.

People often go down at dawn or dusk.  Some say that these hours of transition are times when the veil between the two worlds is thin... the time when lines, edges and boundaries are blurred.  The sky blends into the ocean, the ocean blends into the shore. When the sky is starting to lighten but the sun has not crested the horizon, it is the witching hour, and this is when many people will leave this world and move on to the next one. 

I was caring for a sickly man in his 50s with multiple health issues, two of which were low blood sugar levels in the mornings, and chronic pain in his legs.  His pain had been poorly controlled on the oral Dilaudid the whole previous day, despite taking it every four hours... so the doctor changed the order to IV Dilaudid.  Shortly after midnight, I entered his room to assess him, and found him stable, but in pain.  I brought him his scheduled dose of Dilaudid, and a little bedtime snack to try to keep his blood sugar from crashing out at 6am as it had been doing for the past several days.  I checked on him half an hour later, and found him resting comfortably, stating that his pain was relieved and that he thought he could actually get some sleep.  I wished him a good night's rest and continued with the business of my night. 

Throughout the night, though it was a very busy one with 6 patients and NO nurse's aides on the floor, I checked on all of my patients at least once each hour.  Each time I checked on this gentleman, he was either awake and watching TV or sleeping comfortably, with a gentle snore.  His color looked good, his breathing unlabored, all was well.  At 5:30am, I entered his room to check his blood sugar.  He did not wake up when I pricked his finger for the blood sample, but this did not cause me alarm, as patients will often sleep through this testing, especially if they have neuropathy of their extremities, as this man did.  He was still snoring quietly, breathing easily, and his fingertips were pink.  His blood sugar was well within the normal range, and I was relieved.  I moved on to the next task. 

40 minutes later, I was walking past his room on my way to see another patient... and I just had a feeling.  I entered the room, and found this man slumped over in bed, cyanotic, soaked in sweat, and breathing in a very labored way.  I shook him, hard, calling out his name... no response.  I rubbed my knuckles into his sternum with painful force... nothing.  I pulled his pillow out from underneath his head so I could assess his pulse, and he flopped onto the bed, limp, mouth lolling open.  Horrible.  I ran out into the hallway, telling one of my fellow nurses that I couldn't get my guy to wake up, and grabbed the pulse oximeter and blood glucose machine, running at full speed back into the room.  I was sure this guy's blood sugar had somehow bottomed out on me. 

I check his blood oxygen level with the pulseox... he's at 47% on room air.  You should be at least above 92%.  I ask one of the nurses to call the Rapid Response team, and grab me some 02 tubing and a mask.  I check his blood sugar.  It's perfectly fine.  "But that doesn't make sense," I think.  One of the other nurses had even said "oh yeah his sugar is definitely low, look at the sweat on him" and had run into the med room to get some IV Dextrose.  He LOOKS like textbook hypoglycemia.  I check it again, on the other hand.  Still fine.  What the hell??   Could it be the narcotics?  I gave that dose of Dilaudid nearly 6 hours ago, and he had no issues all night!  How could his respiration be depressed from that NOW??

The rapid response team arrived, and we began pushing air into his lungs with the Ambu-bag.  We attempted to find the guy from anesthesia, find that he need to be sedated in order to get a tube down his throat (he was clamping his jaw shut), but guess what, they leave at 0630!  We sent someone out to call around to find the CRNA from the OR. The physician arrived shortly thereafter.  I'm checking the man's pulse, which was still strong, and trying to get another good reading on the pulseox.  Another nurse is trying to start a second IV, another is getting his blood pressure.  The monitor tech calls in that he is still in normal sinus rhythm.  "What's this guy's story?" the doctor asks me.

I freeze.  My mouth goes dry.  I can't even remember the man's name.  "I am totally blanking out right now."  I say aloud.  I recite what had happened in the past fifteen minutes, and what had happened since the beginning of my shift.  The physician starts grilling me on this guy's health history, social history, etc... details of his life that my adrenaline is not allowing me to remember, and my note sheet is nowhere to be found in this chaotic room. 

Finally, after about 8 minutes of stuttering disorganized thoughts, my brain is starting to unfreeze and I'm recalling his history, labwork, and how much Dilaudid he had receieved orally the previous day.  Now this makes sense... his liver function wasn't the greatest, and all that oral Dilaudid he'd received previously was probably building up in his system and just caught up with him during the witching hour that morning. The CRNA arrives and sedates him so the respiratory therapist can intubate him, and his oxygen level finally begins to rise.  However, his blood pressure tanks from the sedative.  We push a bag of fluid into him as fast we can, my hands aching as I literally squeeze the bag to force the saline in. 

We rush him to the intensive care unit, where he's hooked up to a ventilator and started in a drug to keep his blood pressure up.  He's still blue, and going rigid at this point, and his core temperature is low.  I give report to the nurse taking over, finding myself now able to think clearly.  She smiles at me, says she's got it from here.  I scribble a note on the chart recounting the events of the morning, double check the rapid response team record for accuracy, and sigh as I head back upstairs to clean up the mess, reassure the man's roommate, and give report on the rest of my patients to the oncoming shift.

I leave late, sit down in my car, and burst into tears.   Had I missed something?  When did things go wrong?  Could he have been in that state when I'd checked on him earlier in the morning, had I not noticed??  Why did my brain completely shut down on me in the middle of that?  How much of an idiot do my coworkers think I am right now?  Is that man going to die?  Is it my fault?

I cried the whole way home.  I had nightmares about it as I slept that afternoon.  When I woke up that evening and got into the shower for work, I cried again, dreading going back into work for fear of finding out what happened.   I stopped at the grocery store on the way in, grabbing some cookies to thank my coworkers for their help and support.

When I arrived, everyone who had been there the night before told me that I'd done a great job, that I knew my patient well and that it was normal not to be able to answer those kinds of questions in the middle of a crisis.  My supervisor reassured me that I did exactly what should have been done, and that there was no way that man could have been in that state for very long before I found him.  They also informed me that earlier that day, he'd pulled his own breathing tube out and walked out of the hospital against medical advice.  We all knew he'd be back before too long, but it was a relief to know that he'd pulled through. 

Even if they'd told me all of this the morning of the event, I know I still would have cried in my car on the way home.  It was too horrible not to.  The color of that man's skin, his body dropping limply onto the bed, his chest heaving maybe twice per minute...and then the coarse gurgling sound as the air was pushed through the tube into his lungs... it was terrible.  To go from being awake, alert, and talking to THAT... it was traumatic. 

I've had people go into distress, I've had people go into deadly arrhythmias, and I've had people die.  But I've never had a patient have such a rapid and drastic change in status before... and it was terrifying.  Some parts of my brain functioned... the ones that knew what emergent steps I needed to take to keep the guy from dying... the ones that knew how to hook up IV tubing, enter my user code in the blood glucose machine, and look for a femoral pulse.  But other parts of my brain completely shut down as my body reacted to the situation with complete and utter panic. 

The other nurses praised me for keeping my cool, so I suppose it must not have shown... but on the inside, I was a boiling vat of anxiety.  I suppose that is normal in a crisis situation... but I have learned now to NEVER let my clipboard leave my side again.  That sheet of paper with my notes written on it would have saved me from those 8 minutes of flustered bumbling, and might have held vital information that my crisis-activated-brain could not recall. 

8000 lbs of rock

We pulled, by manpower only, an 8000 lb stone, uphill, in the dark, in silence.  And then we raised that stone and set it in the ground, amongst many other stones from years gone by on the hilltop, to stand with its shoulders in the sky for generations to come.  It was beautiful.  It means something.  I can't put my finger on exactly what, or why... but this was good work. 

Labor Day

After we hit the farmer's market for provisions, we're off into the mountains to spend our weekend hauling two-ton stones up a mountainside, using raw man power, to be set into the ground as part of a megalithic circle that will stand and mark sacred ground for centuries.  I'll return on Sunday with hands blistered from pulling rope and feet sore from dancing the night away in the sand of the drum circle. That's my kind of labor. 



Have a wonderful holiday weekend, world!

Back-to-school time

It's officially September, and I have the back-to-school bug.  It's been a full year now since I finished nursing school, and it feels strange to not be buying new pens and notebooks for the start of a semester at this time of year.  This is compounded by the fact that several close friends are going to back to school (for the first time in years, in many of their cases) this semester.  Their excitement, anxiety, and anticipation is infecting me. 

When those first few crisp nights of Fall roll in, I always start to get just a bit manic. 

Fall feels like the start of a New Year for me... much more so that the lonesome, cold beginning of January does.  In September, I feel an intense need to simplify, get organized, and tackle overdue projects.  It's a new day!  Old habits, procrastination, dust be damned!  Life is short and the air is brisk, breathe deep and dive in!  Each year before, I'd be starting school and pouring this energy into my schoolwork.  Last year after graduation, we were at Burning Man, then in California until mid-September... and when we returned, we were moving into our new place and I was looking for a job and studying for my boards... it all served to satisfy my Autumn urge to be busy.  I don't have any of those distractions this year, and this is dangerous.

The sense of possibility, of immediacy, and of endless energy will sometimes make me do crazy things.  At 4:30 this morning, while the first batch of Rambo applesauce cooked down on the stove, I seriously considered starting to paint the front door of our apartment (it's an awful color grey in our nice sunny blue kitchen).  I talked myself down enough to let it go until there was at least some light in the sky to work by.  It's 7:30am now, and just about my bedtime... but I'm still resisting the urge to start priming.  This is the kind of idea that posesses me in September. 

This was taken when we moved in last September (ha!  Flower, our pet skunk, got to that watermelon before we did... we learned to never put anything with sugar in it at skunk height ever again).  See the awful, awful grey color?  It's been bothering me for nearly a year!!

If it is found that I'm still awake at noon today, organizing my seed collection alphabetically or sorting the gravel in the fish tank, please send help. 

The Pantry Tally

As of today, I have canned 24 quarts of tomatoes, 8 quarts of pasta sauce, 4 quarts of whole peaches, 3 pints of sour cherry preserves, 6 pints of spiced vanilla peach butter, 4 pints of green pepper jelly, 2 pints of apple jelly (from windfallen apples from my mom's trees!) and 8 pints of salsa. 

Our freezer is packed to maximum capacity with corn, cherries, raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, green beans, snap peas, spinach, and figs.  And I still know that we haven't put by enough (especially in the fruit department) to last us until next season. 

I've dehydrated corn, cherries, kale, sweet peppers, hot peppers, and potatoes... but only quart or two of each.  Not much.

I still feel like I have a lot of catching up to do. 

I'd like to have put by at least twice the amount of pasta sauce and tomatoes that we have canned at the moment.  We use a lot of canned tomatoes in our stand-by cold weather dinner recipes, like chick pea curry and black bean chili.  Pasta is a meal we fall back on time and again when my creativity in the kitchen is drying up. 

Red raspberries are back at our favorite Pick Your Own farm... but finding the time to get there and pick (a tedious and time-consuming task) is difficult.  I'm determined to get there within the next two weeks, and to freeze as many as I possibly can, and turn some more into fruit leather.

I definitely need to freeze and dry more corn.  A couple of weeks ago I bought a bushel of corn and ended up letting it dry out and feeding it to the chickens... I simply didn't find the time to preserve it.  At least it was used, but still... I hate waste.  I bought another bushel today and I intend to blanch, cut and freeze all of it by the end of the day tomorrow.

One thing we absolutely must address is the figs.  The tree is so overloaded with fruit, the chickens have learned not to run to the feed buckets in the morning, but to beneath the fig tree where overripe fruit litters the grass.  I want to can figs in syrup, dehydrate some, and make wine and jam.  We've put several full gallon bags of the fruit in the freezer to be used in wine or jam when we have the time, but we're now officially out of space in there.

Fall approaches, and with it will come applesauce, more apple jelly, apple butter, dried apples dusted with cinnamon... and of course, the delicious crunch of fresh apples off the tree.  Local galas have arrived at the farmer's market, my very favorite of apples.  I'd also like to make a large batch of hard cider... we have but one bottle of my two-year-old cider left and I can't bring myself to drink it and accept that it is simply all gone!  It tasted like rubber bands for the first six months and we put it away and forgot about it... when we rediscovered and opened a bottle, it was hard to stop drinking them. 

It is satisfying to look at all of those lovely jars of food lined up in the stairwell... but intimidating to think of the long months of winter not too far in our future.  Can now, sleep later!!