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!!

"Wooded Acres: Townhomes and Condos for sale and rent"

They'll probably name the development something like that.  It makes me feel nauseous to even think about it. 

The land upon which Treeman's rented Civil-War-era farmhouse sits is being sold and parceled up by its owner, to be turned into 67 homes.  The house itself can't be bulldozed because it's considered "historic"... but it will only be left with 0.4 acres of land. 

The road through the development will plow right through the workshed and the garden beds surrounding it, filled with flowers... it will run up the hill and into the woods, probably taking out the tree in which they've built the platform at the start of their ridiculously high and long zipline.

On Friday night while sleeping under the bright moon, I dreamt about foxes.  On Saturday night, Action Figure Bob trekked off into the woods with his gun because a rabbit being killed by a fox had been screaming for 20 minutes and they couldn't stand to hear it anymore (he wasn't able to find the pathetic creature before it finally stopped screaming). 

On Saturday afternoon, Jeremiah and I chased a herd of deer, a dozen or more of them, through the woods in our bare feet, giggling as we ran over fallen branches and acorns. 

Where will all of these creatures go?  Where will the fox hunt the rabbit, and where will the rabbit run to hide from the fox? 

It's heartbreaking to think of.  The garden, the outdoor shower that I've enjoyed by torchlight, the firepit and the field in which two gentle giants of plow horses once grazed... this is the place where I've celebrated the Spring Equinox for the past three years, where I first lit up a fire hoop... Soon it will all be paved and landscaped, probably with that horrible red mulch, and torn down and built up and made to look like every other place...

Treeman will be moving this winter, before they break ground next Spring.  He can't stand the thought of seeing it happen, and neither can I.

Playa dreams and jelly.

... and here I am, awake.  I tried to sleep, got in a few hours maybe before waking myself up by talking in my sleep about "water dripping in through the roof of the tent".  I'm having Burning Man dreams on the regular lately.  Part of me longs to be out on the playa, with its spectacular sunrises and sunsets, it's vast open emptiness in contrast with the buzz and hum and burn of the city that emerges from the dust each year.  But, the other half of me breathes a sigh of relief at being home when I think of the dust, the heat, the dryness of that place... and of all the work it takes to get out there and survive it.  This weekend, we're going to visit Treeman, where we will cook delicious food, climb old trees, take a bubble bath in his clawfoot tub (we have no bathtub at our place... the hot tub helps but it's just not the same!), and be lazy like it's our job.  I can't wait.

I worked a 12-hour shift last night, and was pleasantly surprised to find that I really liked it.  Sure, waking up earlier and hardly even seeing my Honeybunch before going in at 7pm was a little rough... but it was really a pleasure to get to know my patients while they were awake.  I felt like I had so much more information to work with, such a greater understanding of the "big picture" surrounding my patients' current illnesses.  What a difference four hours makes!  Of course, by the end of it I felt like I'd been beaten with a baseball bat... but not so much more than I usually do to deter me from wanting to work 12's on a regular basis.

Tomorrow my To-Do list is as long as my arm, and includes making jelly from the fallen apples provided by my mom's trees, and finishing the green pepper jelly I have cooling its heels in the fridge.  I've never made (nor tasted) green pepper jelly, but Honeybunch claims to like it, and having bought a giant box of green peppers for ten bucks at the farm down the way and filled the dehydrator twice over already, I need to do SOMETHING with them besides munch on them with hummus.  I am not planning to add green food coloring, however.  I think that awful color is the main reason I've never tried the stuff!

Today, I...

... canned 6 more quarts of tomatoes.
... bought parsley when I meant to buy cilantro, and therefore got halfway through making salsa.
... dyed my hair flaming orange, just 'cause.
... found Samosa sleeping in the fruit bowl.
... gave a little lesson in vegetarian cooking to a lovely young lady who is new to the non-flesh way o' life.
... slept about two hours.
... found myself really looking forward to the end of summer (and the end of mosquitos).

Keep your fingers crossed...

...I'm requesting to be transferred to a new position at my hospital.  It is the Holy Grail of nursing positions.  Two days/week floating on the floors, doing things like admitting new patients, helping out the other nurses with random tasks, but not actually taking a patient assignment of my own, from 11am-11:30pm... plus one day/week taking an assignment on telemetry from 7am-7:30pm.  I wants it, oh do I wants it!!   

The HR department called me today to offer me full-time work... they wanted me to do three 8-hour shifts plus one 12-hour shift/week on nights.  I declined.  My commute to work is long, and ultimately I don't want to give up the flexibility that comes with working three shifts/week unless it's for the perfect job.  And to be quite honest... anything on night shift is automatically imperfect.  I'm tired of nights.  I'll keep doing it as long as I have to, but I can't tell you how much I miss sunlight, sleeping with my Honeybunch, and being able to relax with him over a glass of homemade wine when he comes home from work in the evenings. 

Plus, everything is just more difficult at night.  We only have one physician on staff in the whole hospital at night.  Our patient loads are enormous.  It's more difficult to get a hold of the supplies and help you need, should something be amiss.  There are fewer opportunities to teach, to get to know your patients.  They either don't want anything to do with you because they're sleeping, or they want everything from you all night because they're demented and frightened. 

So I'll put in for this position, and hope that they'll overlook my relative inexperience and choose to focus on the fact that I have awesome people skills that are being wasted during the nighttime hours. 

In other news, I'm hauling in loads of hot peppers from the garden... more sahuaros than I know what to do with.  Looks like I'd better get the dehydrator running again...

And so it ends...

... our tomato plants are officially dead.
Their withered brown stalks are dropping unripe fruit, and I have to give in and pull them out this week.  Sigh.  The heat and lack of rain this summer really killed 'em good.  One of the many lessons I've learned from this year's garden: use a soaker hose in the tomato plot. 

Facing Me

An experiment in self portraits from the Old Nichols Farm blog...

A change in perspective: winter.

I'm finding myself to feel differently about the seasons as I become more in tune with the natural cycle of the year.  I find my attitude changed most notably in regards to winter.  As I lay here in bed trying to stay cool with three fans blowing air around in our little Cave, I think about the sense of dread I've always felt as the summer ends... Fall moves in, but never stays long enough... and the bitterness of winter creeps up on the heels of October and kills all joy and light.  Winter has always meant death to me. 

Now, as the heavy harvest work of climbing fig trees and canning tomatoes peaks, I find myself looking ahead to winter with a sort of prepared anticipation.  I know that come February I'll be itching to have my hands in black soil again, with the sun beating down upon my back and the chickens panting in the shade of the fig tree.  But right now, I can see myself beginning to view the months of cold and dark as a time of rest. 

What will I do on my days off when there are no weeds to pull?  How will I fill the hours when our meals do not require the filling of a compost bucket with peels, cores and seeds?  Yes, I admit that as I spend these afternoons sweating in my kitchen and putting pounds of prepped fruits and vegetables in the freezer/canner/dehydrator, I find myself looking forward to the time when I pull out these stores, throw them in a slow cooker and call it dinner. 

I do not consider myself a lazy woman, but I do enjoy my hours of leisure, and the idea of having more of them is almost worth having fewer hours of sunlight.

Chip.

I deal with illness all the time, with dying, with coronary arteries and clots and S-T segment changes showing the suffocating death of those precious cells of heart muscle.  I observe, analyze, and act based on protocol and instinct, keeping calm above the clamor of it all, knowing that seconds are critical and that life hangs in the balance.  And then I go home, pour myself a glass of milk, feed the chickens, laugh with my Honeybunch, and play with my cats.  Life goes on for me, largely unchanged, after some person's body wages the battle of its lifetime against the inevitable.

And then it comes home.  It's an altogether different experience when those little waveform changes on the telemetry strip usher a friend of your found-family into their next life. 

He was a kind man, generous with his affection, treating us like long-lost niece and nephew, planning a piece of stained glass as a wedding gift, lending me books on conservative political ideology, ever reading, ever learning.  He'll be remembered, and his characteristic limp will missed when we gather around the bonfire to share stories, music and wine.  We raised our glasses of whiskey in your honor this morning, friend.

Friday Peach Party

I have a long weekend off from work, and yesterday I brought home a giant box of local peaches from the farm down the way.  They were super sweet, dead ripe and filled my car with a heavenly fragrance on the way home.  Knowing that they'd be mush in a matter of a day or two, I set about the hot, sticky work of preserving them.

First, I packed four quarts of halved peaches in light syrup to be saved for snacking during snowstorms.  Nomnomnom! (Ignore the date stamp on these photos, it is incorrect).

Then, I decided to make peach butter with a touch of vanilla and cinnamon... completely naive to the fact that it would take more than 6 hours of cooking down on the stove to go from 20 cups of this:

...to 14 cups of this:

By the end of the night, I was miserably hot and tired, and not wanting to see another peach ever again.  That's a problem, because even after all of that, there's still this left in the bottom of the box that was once overflowing with peaches:

However, by the time I woke up this morning, my loathing for the fruit had passed.  When it came time to devour my breakfast of french toast (made from homemade oatmeal bread, our girls' eggs, and local raw milk), spread with the bit of extra peach butter that wouldn't fit in the jars, I concluded that it had been indeed worth the heat, time, and effort.  Meals like that make me feel almost like I should be able to walk outside afterwards, hitch up my horse and go riding through the wooded acres of the farm we'll own someday...

The fig tree is pushing out colanders full of ripe fruit on a daily basis.  We're picking every day and freezing them whole to make jam and wine with at a later date.  It's unbelievable how delicious these are... and how I ever got by without a tree in the yard.

Our little rooster, Mr. Ethel, will be going to a new home today.  I was lucky enough to find a lady in need of a rooster to protect her little flock of bantam hens.  I'm very sad to see him go.  He's really a sweetheart, and a beautiful creature to boot.  I have loved watching him court the ladies... and watching him submit to Popcorn... even though she's half his size, she's still the top chicken in the flock and he runs from her if she charges at him! 

I know that at least a few of our younger girls will miss him, despite his very sudden and rude sexual advances.  Here he is with Lady Jane:

And in other chicken news, one of the young ladies has begun laying!  Beautiful little creamy light brown eggs.  They grow up too fast...

Apparently preying mantids also grow up fast... this dude was hanging out on the lemongrass yesterday evening... I'm thinking he was once of the little nymphs that hatched in the garden earlier this Spring, all growed up and purdy...

Incidentally Vegan Pumpkin Lammas Muffins

Today is Lammas, the Harvest Day.  I hadn't even thought about it until I saw a friend post on Facebook about it, but upon reflection I discovered that we were accidentally celebrating it all day long.  Yesterday I filled the vases in our home with sunflowers and Russian sage.  We started our morning with a breakfast of fresh blackberries, eggs from our girls, and freshly baked bread.  We were greeted by the amateur crowing of our flock's little rooster.  And this evening, I welcomed in the harvest season with our first pumpkin creation of the year.  I suppose these things happen when your eating in synchrony with the seasons.

Treeman lives in a small town outside of Baltimore.  It's a quirky place, full of neat little shops and cafes and boutiques.  Whenever we would visit him at his old farmhouse just outside of town, we'd go to a little place called Sarah and Desmond's for breakfast the next morning.  We'd get big mugs of strong coffee, veggie fritattas, and a Vegan Pumpkin Muffins.  The Vegan Pumpkin Muffin deserves capital letters.  It was truly the BEST muffin I have ever had in my life.  Words do not do it justice.  Unfortunately, Sarah and Desmond's closed down, and since we have been Vegan Pumpkin Muffin-less and in despair.  Until today!

Today, I fussed over the first pumpkin of the year from the farmer's market.  A little thing, yielding about 1.5 cups of mashed flesh after I'd chopped, skin and roasted it in the oven.  But the sight and smell of that lovely orange flesh, with its slippery seeds and warty exterior, made my heart skip a beat or two.  Fall is on its way.

I debated whether to make a soup, or a curry, or roast it with potatoes and rosemary.  But then I remembered the Vegan Pumpkin Muffin, and wondered if it would be improper to try to replicate such divinity in my very earthly kitchen.  I did a little research online, comparing existing recipes for pumpkin muffins (all of which called for pumpkin out of a can, which I found both amusing and sad).  Finally, I threw the stuff together in a bowl, filled the last of my muffin tin papers, and waited anxiously for the verdict.

It took all of my self control to pack up a few of the mini muffins for one of our neighbors.  Really.  It hurt.  These are vegan, but only incidentally so.  If you lack vegetable oil, I'm sure melted butter would be positively decadent in these.  Next time I'll experiment with replacing some of the sugar with honey... if you beat me to it, be sure to reduce the oven temperature by a few degrees to avoid over browning.

Incidentally Vegan Pumpkin Lammas Muffins ala Marlenah but Inspired by Sarah and Desmond's and Adapted from Various Recipes Found Across the Interwebs

1 cup all-purpose flour
½ cup whole wheat flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp cardamom

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup mashed fresh pumpkin

1/3 cup vegetable oil

2 large eggs

1 1/4 cups sugar

A few tablespoons of cinnamon sugar

A few tablespoons of roasted pumpkin seeds for sprinkling on top

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Mix the pumpkin, oil, eggs and sugar together in a bowl until smooth.  Sift the dry ingredients together, then whisk into pumpkin mixture until well blended, but don't over beat!  Spoon into prepared muffin tins, sprinkle with pumpkin seeds and cinnamon sugar, and bake until puffy and golden on top, and a toothpick inserted in the center of each comes out clean.  Try to resist eating every last one in a single sitting.  Do your best.

4am

... and I am awake.
My sleep schedule is all screwed up.
I was awake at 8am yesterday, making breakfast and getting ready to hit the farmer's market up for some berries and greens.
Then I canned tomatoes. 
All.  Day.  Long. 
We now have a total of 16 quarts of tomatoes canned in their own juice.  My kitchen must have been 5000 degrees.  I decided that if I was gonna heat it up, I might as well bake a loaf of sourdough and roast the first pumpkin of the year while I was at it.  Yup, that was one hot kitchen. 

By the time I finished up in there, it was dark outside, and the heat had sapped the life out of me.  I needed water, and I needed sleep.  Just a little nap, before we head out to the party....
I awoke past midnight, and the party was pretty much 6 feet under by then, and my Honeybunch hardly stirred when I turned on the laptop and started perusing the many blogs I follow and haven't had time to read lately.

I ordered "Made from Scratch" by Jenna at Cold Antler Farm http://coldantlerfarm.blogspot.com/.  This woman inspires me on a daily basis, and I can't wait to read her book.  I can't tell you how many times I spend an evening in my apron and think, "Jenna would say that I am 'a very exciting young person' right now". 

The figs are starting to come in now.  We picked a handful or two for breakfast yesterday, and the tree is LOADED with green fruit.  Honeybunch and I are determined to make a serious amount of fig jam this year, as well as another 5 gallons at least of fig wine.  On Friday night, we enjoyed the last existing bottle of the fig wine we'd made at the end of August two years ago, when we were living separately and spent two weeks housesitting for Good Neighbors. 

It was our first experiment in living together, in sharing a kitchen, after only 4 months or so of (blissful) dating.  We baked incredible fig bread, made loads of fig jam, and brewed three gallons of fig wine that matured to a beautiful finish recently.  We dined together in that kitchen for every meal, and found that the two weeks we had together "playing house" ended too quickly.  Upon returning from vacation, Good Neighbor asked how living together had gone... and I told him, "I want to marry that boy."  Our friends toasted our engagement with glasses of that fig wine on Friday night, and everything felt as though it had come full circle.

I quit my second job last week.  Upon realizing that my orientation period would be requiring me to work double shifts (going straight from a night shift at the hospital into a day shift at the rehab) on a weekly basis, I decided that I'd like to keep my brain somewhat in tact and that I have enough going on at the one job right now to keep me quite busy and stressed out as it is.  Plus, I have the opportunity to pick up some 12-hour shifts at the hospital this month, and I'd like to see how I manage that schedule.  Ultimately, I'd love to work the holy grail that is three 12's in a row... so now is the time to start weaseling my way into that position if I can. 

Our rooster has started crowing.  I need to get to work on finding him a new home where roosters can be roosters without having the police called on them.  He thinks that one of the Barred Rock pullets is just about the sexiest thing he's ever seen, and she's taken to roosting in the fig tree at night to get away from him.  Sigh.  It's fun having a rooster in the flock, especially since he's a really sweet and beautiful one, and his pubescent antics do make me laugh... but we're not on a farm (yet), and we have to be pragmatic about these things.  I'll miss him though.

Grey eyes.

When I first met her, I thought, "I hope I look like her at that age". 
She was in her eighties, sitting up in her bed, peering at me with bright grey eyes. 
She wore a barette in her stylishly cut chin length hair.
She smiled gently, her unlined hands folded neatly in her lap. 


She'd come in with a "change in mental status".  When I received report that night, I laughed out loud as the story unfolded about her trying to hit her husband with a cane at their assisted living facility.  As I looked at the pleasant, pretty older lady sitting before me, I wondered to myself whether perhaps he deserved it.
Upon examination, I found her to be confused as to where she was, but largely appropriate in her answers to my questions.  She was pleasant, with an easy laugh and a sharp wit.  She was startled by my cold hands as I felt for her pulse and kindly rubbed my hands in hers to "warm them up".  An hour later, she was asleep, and I saw the faintest of smiles play on her lips as she dreamt. 

Six hours later, a disheveled, half-dressed woman emerged from her room, blood dripping from her arm, carrying her bed alarm, crying out for her husband.  I rushed over to her, donning gloves as I ran, and pulled her gown around her shoulders as I clamped a hand over the bloody mess where she had torn through her IV tubing.  She looked at my like I'd killed her cat.  "Get me a telephone, I will not be held prisoner here!" she spat at me.  After 15 minutes of back-and-forth, I managed to calm her down enough to pull out her mutilated IV and tape some gauze over the site.

I placed a call to her husband as she demanded she speak with him.  She made him tell her his mother's name, as she didn't believe it was actually him on the phone.  Then, she stood at the nurse's station, staring at the elevators down the hall, refusing to return to her room until her husband arrived.  I waited with her, all other tasks delegated to coworkers, as she would let no one else near her.  She spoke with me, about the weather, and about the upcoming holiday picnic planned at their retirement community... but she was guarded, and eyed me with suspicion as I asked questions as innocent as, "what dish are you planning to prepare?" 

When her husband arrived, he walked her back into her room, and I sat with them for a good while.  She sat on the bed, with her arms crossed, bright grey eyes shooting daggers at her husband of sixty-odd years whenever he divulged a bit of information to me.  He explained to me that over the past year she'd only had minor forgetfulness, such as putting water on the stove for coffee, then forgetting to make the coffee at all.  "Nothing like this, not in all the years we've been married," he said, the concern and love he felt for her obvious in his voice.

Over the next week, we both watched this bright, beautiful woman die.

In a matter of a day, she was moaning like an injured animal.  Her eyes were dull, and looked inward... seeing nothing of the world around her.  She was edematous, the extra fluid leaking from her skin and soaking the bedding.  Her hair was tangled, the barrette long gone now.  A nurse's aide had to sit with her 24 hours/day to keep her from pulling at her IV, her heart monitor, her gown.  No amount of morphine, Ativan, Haldol, or hydromorphone assuaged the pain, anxiety, and fear.  When the drugs failed, I put the business of the night out of my mind and went back to basics.  I combed her hair.  I turned off the television and placed my hands on her back, focusing all of the soothing, healing energy I could find within myself, letting it flow into her.
 
Her breathing relaxed.  Her moaning ceased.  She slept, perhaps for 10 minutes.  Then, a noise.  Somewhere on the unit, someone dropped something.  And so the moaning and writhing resumed.  I sighed, looked at the clock, and knew that I had a time critical cardiac drug to give to another person who needed me. 
I left the room, and when I left the hospital that day, I thought about her.  I thought about her husband, who'd known and loved her for over 60 years, and who woke up a week ago to find that his lover and best friend was a different person.  I thought about the mystery of it... all of her tests were normal, no signs of a stroke or heart attack... but her mind had deteriorated over a matter of days, her body simply giving out as her kidneys, liver and heart failed suddenly and quickly. 

This woman was elegant.  She was tall, and self-posessed.  She'd lived a life that I'm sure was full of stories, full of humor and adventure.  I had the honor of seeing a glimpse of that, the very first night we'd met.   I learned the next week that ultimately, her family decided to make her a hospice patient, and she was sent to another unit of the hospital.  I silently prayed, to no one in particular, that she would die soon, that the cruel indignity of her descent would end quickly.  I prayed that the nurses on that floor would keep her hair tidy, and wash her neatly manicured hands. 

She haunts me still, and my eyes sting each time I think of her calling out for her husband on her last lucid night of life.

Summertime thunder

It's storming outside right now, which makes me very happy for several reasons.  Thunderstorms are exciting, invigorating, and give me an excuse to sit still for a few moments to watch the show.  They mean that I don't have to be eaten alive by mosquitos this evening while watering the tomatoes and peppers.  Plus, the rain makes the chickens look soggy, pathetic and comical (although they don't seem to mind too much).

While camping out in North Carolina last weekend, it was like living in the rainforest.  Every day the weather shifted multiple times between brilliant hot sunshine and violent torrential rainstorms with thunder that echoed and bounced off of the mountains in a deafening roar.  It was gorgeous, despite the car getting stuck in the mud and the tent taking three days to dry out once we got home.  It was during one of those storms that Honeybunch asked me to marry him and I (of course) said yes. 

We're both so excited.  Everyone in our lives is thrilled.  And we're determined to throw an awesome party while keeping it simple and down to earth.  There will be circus arts at our wedding, but the wedding itself will NOT be a circus!  This is going to be easy, and fun... much the way our blessed relationship has been all along.  I am really enjoying calling him my "fiancé", especially with a soupy French accent.  And, because everyone asks, no, there is no ring, and that's the way we like it.  My humble opinion is that diamonds are largely unethical and overrated, and I am a simple, practical girl.  My honeybunch knows me.  We're planning on exchanging simple white gold bands at the ceremony, and getting tattooed wedding bands as well (I do NOT wear rings to work).

On the homefront, tomatoes are out in full force.  The Black Sea Man tomatoes have been amazing... tasty, prolific, and good keepers for a few days off the vine.  The Nebraska Weddings have been less prolific and suffering more from the multiple heat waves, though we plucked a couple of them this week.  The yellow pear tomatoes are putting out little golden jewels that fill my apron on a nearly daily basis, and we're having to get creative about how we use them... in omelettes, pasta salads, dressed with oil, vinegar, basil and mozzarella... We're canning today, mostly tomatoes from the farm down the road from us.  Our own tomatoes get eaten up fresh pretty darn quickly.  I've never canned tomatoes before, so it's a bit of a learning process... but I have to say that I enjoy the satisfaction of slipping the skin off of the blanched tomato in one smooth motion.

The sweet and hot peppers are growing, we're harvested a few hot but can't remember which types we planted where.  The Salad Blue potato plants are dying off, so digging em up and seeing what kind of harvest we've gotten is on the To-Do list once the rain passes.  I'm not entirely convinced that we'll have many spuds under those layers of straw... it was an experiment with perhaps too many variables... but we'll see.

We've discovered that one of the Rhode Island Red "hens" is actually a rooster.  I'd suspected this for weeks, as they've matured and this particular bird got very, very big and developed a large, upright comb and shiny green tail feathers.  Then, "she" began trying to mount "her" sisters.  That was a red flag.  And this morning, Good Neighbor heard "her" distinctly attempt to crow twice.  Oi vey.  We are not permitted to have roosters in our area.  Technically, this one belongs to Good Neighbor... so (though I forget it sometimes) it's not up to me what fate he meets.  I'm hoping Good Neighbor will let us find him another home... he's beautiful, and not aggressive towards us at all... but there's a possibility that there may need to be a lesson on kind and humane chicken slaughtering.  Again, we'll see.

We've also adopted (yet another) kitten.  His name is Samosa, he's orange and white, and sweet as pie.  This kitten wants to do nothing but cuddle.  As I type he's pulling at my hands with his paws, begging him to pet him.  I'm in love with him.  He came to the farmer's market with us yesterday, and everyone there fell in love with him too.  He's a real charmer.

At work, everything is chaos.  Our new computerized charting system just went live, and it's all a mess.  We're still understaffed.  Such is life. 

It's a rainy Sunday afternoon, so I'm going to spend some time reading before we heat up the kitchen for canning.

Hip hip, hurray!

My honeybunch and I are engaged to be married!

Fruit panic.

It was with a sense of panic that I suddenly realized this past week that the cherries and raspberries will soon be gone from the fields.  We hadn't put anything by with these fruits, and the idea of going through all of fall, winter and spring without the taste of cherries or raspberries was too terrible to bear.  Thus it was that this past Saturday morning, we ventured out to a local orchard.  In the pouring rain.  Yes, we finally got some rain.  And we were wet, and cold, and the waxed cardboard tray we were given to put the berries in melted in the rain, and because I was with my Honeybunch it was fun, and we giggled and picked and wondered how crazy the kids working in the market thought we were. 

It was slim picking in the raspberry brambles, but we picked about 2.5 quarts, which have since either been frozen or turned into sauce for our french toast breakfast this morning.  We bought cherries from them as well.  Picking our own wasn't an option, but they still had some for sale in the market.  I have frozen half of the sweet and dehydrated the other half.  The sour cherries are cooking down into preserves on the stove as we speak.  I decided to go for the Martha Stewart pectin-free preserves recipe found here http://www.marthastewart.com/recipe/sour-cherry-preserves , which was silly of me given that it's 90-something degrees outside and I'm in here cooking cherries and sugar at 220 degrees for 40 minutes.  However, it used less sugar than the other jam recipes I found online, and I did not feel like making a special trip to the grocery store just to pick up a box of pectin.  The preserves are deep, deep red and, as I'm finding when I taste the foam I'm skimming off the top, delicious.



This weekend, I dehydrated/canned/froze a full bushel of corn, 2.5 quarts of raspberries, 12 quarts of sweet cherries and 6 quarts of sour cherries.  It feels good to be able to say that.  Make hay while the sun shines, right?

Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

Lately at work, we've had a major increase in the number of patients coming to our floor with psych, drug and alcohol issues.  I assume this has something to do with the fact that many other local hospitals who previously had units devoted to "dual diagnosis" patients (those with both acute psychiatric and medical issues to attend to) have shut down said units. 

This is very, very unfortunate. 

Our community hospital does not have the resources to provide the kind of care these patients need... most notably, we do not have the staff.  Many nights in the past several weeks we nurses have had to work the floor without the assistance of our nursing aides (who are precious and wonderful and necessary for our sanity) because they've been pulled to sit in on "1:1"s.  When a patient is out of control, suicidal, or demented and trying to climb out of bed/pull out tubes/pee on their roommate we initiate 1:1 observation.  This means that a nursing aide, or sometimes a nurse, should no aides be available, stays within arms reach of that patient 24 hours/day, and records what they are acting like every fifteen minutes.  On Monday night, we had SIX 1:1s. We don't have six nurses aides in the whole hospital on night shift under normal circumstances.  A nursing aide from evenings worked a 16 hour shift overnight to help manage this.   It's absurd. 

As a result, I'm learning to manage 7+ acutely ill patients without the assistance of an aide.  Usually at least one or two of them has some psych issues going on.  I've had several patients in that past month or so going through alcohol withdrawal, more than one pain medication addict, a woman in her 70s whose drunk daughter beat the hell out of her and attempted to drown her in the bathtub, and just about the saddest case of rapidly advancing dementia I've ever seen. 

In light of this, when a nearby drug and alcohol/psych rehab hospital called me up and requested an interview, I obliged and have since accepted a position.  I'll be working 4 shifts/month, and start next week.  It's a nice place, 100% voluntary (which makes a big difference... everyone there is detoxing because they want to be, not because of a court order).  I figure that the experience will interesting and will help diversify my young nursing resume.  If I hate it, it's not a job I have to keep to survive.  If I love it, all the better for my nursing career.  I'm hoping to develop finer skills dealing with patients in pscyhiatric crises, and to become more familiar with the methods and drugs used to help with the detox process. 

Part of me feels like I am absolutely insane for taking on a new challenge at this point in my life... but another, louder part of me thinks, if not now, then when?  There's never going to be a point in my life where I'm not busy, not overwhelmed, not sleep deprived and behind on my to-do list.  I may as well accept that and embrace the opportunities for growth presented to me. 

Speaking of growth, do a raindance for me.  This heat and dryness has to break soon.

Happy Independence Day

This year I celebrated my independence in the same way I have for the past five years.  I camped out on beautiful, unspoiled land... danced to pulsing drums in the mountains... played with fire... walked a labyrinth and gazed upon the Milky Way... and of course, there were fireworks.

We made new friends.

Well, to be quite honest, this fellar wasn't too happy to meet us.  Not even after we tried to buy his love with cherries.

This moth, however, was quite friendly!

He wiggled his fuzzy little bonkers at us for several minutes before flitting off into the golden sunlit leaves of the forest.

Once we returned home, rejuvenated from our trip, we attended to the animals and the garden.  They seemed glad for us to be home, and the chickens greeted us warming by pecking at our toes.  The cats pretended they'd been starving over the weekend.  The skunk tried to hide the fact that there was still nuts and dried fruit in her food bowl, and pretended to also be dying of hunger.  We were not fooled, but gave them treats and cuddles all the same.

It seems that we arrived home just in time... a heat wave has hit our area, and my poor blossom-end-rot suffering tomatoes require watering twice/day to keep them from shriveling up!!  The Black Sea Man tomatoes are producing very well and seem to be quite hardy to the dry weather... no black spots on the bottoms of these beauties...

However, the Nebraska Wedding Tomatoes can't seem to get beyond the size of a golf ball without developing a nasty leathery welt on their blossom ends.  It's frustrating to no end... I've worked powdered milk into the soil, I'm watering deeply, I mulched with leaf compost... what else can I do?

It's wild raspberry season, and as you can see above we took about ten minutes last night to grab some in the dark on our walk in the woods.  We really need a few hours and broad daylight to bring in a big haul like last year, but the 100 degree weather has deterred us from attempting that this week.  Hopefully the bushes will still be producing after this heat passes and we can once again journey outside while the big bright yellow thing hangs in the sky. 

Work has been horrible lately, which makes me not even want to write about it.  All y'all need to know is that we had only one bed vacant on our floor Monday night.  Not fun.

Lastly, a recipe.  This one has been a family favorite for generations.  My grandmother said that it came from the Depression era, when families may have had weeks in which there was only one or two food items available, and you had to make a meal of it.  I think it is one of the most delicious foods on the planet, even though it looks more like slop than anything else.

Creamed Tomatoes

Tomatoes

Flour

Butter (traditionally, bacon fat is used, but not for us pescatarians)

Milk

Salt and pepper

Slice fresh tomatoes and dredge them in flour.  Fry in butter until browned on both sides.  Mash 'em up and set aside.  Add some flour to the excess oil in the pan and cook to make a rue.  Return the tomatoes to pan, add milk until creamy and smooth but not soupy.  Add salt and pepper to taste.  Serve with slices of hearty bread, using the bread to scoop up the sloppy delicious tomatoey mess.  This meal is the absolute taste of summer when served with fresh corn on the cob.

My fever is broken!!

Hurrah!  Hurray!  Weee!!

I'm still not feeling 100%, but I feel a heck of alot better than I did 4.6 degree ago!

This means that today I got out into the garden (in fact, out into the world at ALL) for the first time since Wednesday morning.  And, I discovered some of our lovely tomatoes were showing signs of blossom-end rot.  Le sigh.  Apparently I haven't been watering enough... or maybe there isn't enough calcium in the soil... either way, I sprinkled a generous amount of powdered milk at the base of each and will henceforth be watering religiously.  Only a few of the fruit needed to be tossed to the chickens, so hopefully I caught it early enough to prevent a big loss.

I also discovered several zucchini that should have been picked days ago... one was the size of my forearm... so the poor dears are relegated to baking purposes only, as the flavor and texture aren't quite right for eating on their own at that size.  They yielded 9 cups of shredded zucchini.  Yipes.  Looks like I'll be getting a head start on our freezer supply of zucchini bread.  I'm baking my way through the massive bowl of batter, but have only three loaf pans to work with, so it's slow going over here.  I'm going to be up late tonight.  I am reminded of a part of "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" by Barbara Kingsolver in which she describes the desperate attempts gardeners make to rid themselves of their excess of zucchini.... and to protect themselves from being "gifted" with the same.  And it's only the end of June....

Zucchini Bread

2 eggs
1.5 c sugar
0.5 c honey
1 c vegetable oil
2 c grated raw zucchini
3 tsp vanilla
1 c whole wheat flour
2 c all purpose flour
1 tsp kosher salt
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp baking powder
3 tsp ground cinnamon
1 c sunflower seeds (or chopped walnuts/filberts, whatever you prefer)

Beat the eggs until light and foamy.  Add the zucchini, sugar, oil, and vanilla and mix well.  Combine flour salt, soda, power and cinnamon in a separate bowl, mix well, then add to wet ingredients.  Stir until well blended, add seeds/nuts, and pour into two greased loaf pans.  Bake at 350 degrees for about an hour. 
Alternately, add chocolate chips and bake in muffin pans... delicious and sinful.
These loaves keep well at room temperature, and freeze beautifully too!

...Again??

...I'm sick.  Feels like the flu. We'll know soon enough, if it persists beyond today, I call it the flu, and I call out of work tonight.

Had a horrible night at work last night.  Continuous bladder irrigation, blood transfusions, stinky colostomies, combative, demented patients screaming their heads off and throwing punches each time I tried to go near enough to find out what was the matter.  All with a fever, body aches, nausea, and a sore throat that won't quit. 

Time to curl up under the covers and try to heal.

Sweet corn pancakes, mud and zucchini.

Well, Honeybunch and I completed the 10k adventure race "mud run" this past weekend.  What a challenge!  6.3 miles of running, climbing, swimming, mucking, jumping, sliding, and belly-crawling through mud.  We were literally up to our ears in mud!  I really enjoyed the obstacles (think bootcamp on a rainy day... cargo nets, hurdles, walking across a ravine on ropes), and the pure ridiculousness of being so incredibly filthy.  We got hosed down by a fire truck after completing the race, and it still took three cycles through the washing machine to get our clothes (mostly) clean.

A local farm has already begun harvesting sweet corn and blueberries, which is positively thrilling me.  This past weekend I made sweet corn pancakes with homemade raw butter (which turned out so neon yellow I could hardly believe it).  It tasted like heaven.  The recipe I use is adapted from one given to me by dear TreeMan.  His mother used to make them in batches for 60+ people at a time!!  We've divided the recipe to serve about 10 people, and you can halve it again if you want but I find that these are best when shared with neighbors and friends.  I fyou want pure, straight-up buttermilk pancakes, the original recipe called for all white flour and no spices/vanilla.  I personally can't resist fuddling with it to complement whatever goodies I'm adding (corn, blueberries, raspberries, chocolate chips...).  I've added other spices and whole grain flours with great success, so feel free to experiment so long as you keep the proportions in tact.


Sweet Corn Pancakes

Mix in batches to feed 10 people at a time as listed below.
4 ½ c. flour (I usually use 2 c. whole wheat flour and 1/2 c. finely ground corn meal here)
1/4 c. sugar
2 tbsp + 2 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. soda
2 tsp. salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp cardamom
2 tsp vanilla extract
4 eggs
½ c. oil
6 c. buttermilk*
1 c. fresh or frozen sweet corn kernels (or other goodies).
Sift dry ingredients together.  Beat eggs in a separate bowl. Stir in oil and buttermilk and beat together.
Add to dry ingredients, stirring only until dry ingredients are completely moistened.  Fold in corn.  DO NOT OVER BEAT!
Brush hot griddle with vegetable oil and fry, turning once.  My rule of thumb is to turn my pancakes when there are at least 5 bubbles forming in the center of the cake.

Serve with fresh butter and warmed maple syrup.  These keep well in the fridge for several days and can be gently reheated in the oven with great success. 

* Add a tablespoon of vinegar to a cup of milk and let it stand for five minutes and you have made buttermilk.

Our garden is providing us with snow and snap peas, green beans, lettuces, carrots and zucchini now.  A few little hot peppers the size of my little finger sprung up overnight where I swear there had just been flowers yesterday.  Despite having cages as support, I've had to tie up the branches of our tomato plants to keep them from breaking with the weight of the fruit growing on them.  They're positively loaded, and some of the fruit are already as big as my fist.  Next year I may invest in some Texas Tomato cages like these http://tomatocage.com/, as my tomato plants are almost taller than I am and stretching far above the funnel-shaped wire cages I used to support them.

The chickens haven't laid eggs for the past two days.  I'm wondering what the heck is going on with them... they don't appear to be molting, they're acting normal and healthy... just no eggs.  I've searched the yard to see if they had a hidden nest somewhere but there's nothing.  Very curious.  I suppose they're lucky we're vegetarian... but if they keep this up I might make an exception!!

Not really.  I love those birds.  I'd keep chickens even if they didn't lay eggs, just for their antics and snuggles. 

Oh, Popcorn.  You act so tough in the yard but you're really just a big ol' softie!!

Bringin work home with me.

I found it rather surreal this morning when I came home from working on a cardiac floor all night and awakened my Honeybunch to have him sit up and bed and tell me that his "heart feels weird".  

He was having palpitations, and as I pressed my ear to his chest I heard his heart beating irregularly and rapidly.  When it did not pass after a couple minutes, I said that I thought we should go to the ER.  He agreed, and went to take an aspirin (he has Factor V Leiden, which makes him more at risk to develop blood clots).  As he bent to drink from the faucet, the palpitations vanished, and upon listening to his heart I found it pulsing out its usual slow, steady drumbeat.  At first I was relieved, but the suddenness with which the rapid irregular nature of the rhythm went away made it even more weird.  The concerns lingered and we went to the ER to have him checked out.

The telemetry monitor wanted to make him look like a liar, and he sat in the cot for four hours with a perfect sinus waveform bouncing across the screen. 

It was really, really strange to be on both sides of the situation in one morning.

I'm a worry-wort and I know it.  I'm that family member who all nurses wish didn't exist... works in healthcare, watching every move you make, asking questions, suggesting theories, anxiously glued to the bedside.  I was irritated that no one else seemed concerned about the Factor V Leiden history in combination with symptoms that sounded VERY much to me like paroxysmal atrial fibrillation.  Hello thrombus?? 

Finally, doc comes back with news.  Blood work is fine, chest x-ray is fine, D-Dimer (a blood test used to screen for clots) is within normal limits. Follow up with your PCP and avoid caffeine, they say.

Relieved, but still unsettled.  Wishing I had a homemade EKG machine at the ready for if/when it happens again.  Honeybunch thinks that he can make one pretty easily, which I find hilariously amusing. 

Either way, I'm likely to be even more patient and sympathetic towards anxious family members than usual at work tonight.

Round two and running.

The season is moving on.  Spinach and strawberries are waning, to be replaced by zucchini and cherries.  The sight of cherries at the farmer's market this past weekend was such a thrill... they looked like such beautiful little jewels, in their red and blushing yellow! 

A few recent night runs on the rocky trails of our local woodlands have led me to discover the downside of "barefoot" running (in Vibram FiveFingers)... stubbed toes!  Goodness me, my left foot is throbbing today from the many expletive-laced encounters with rocks and roots last night.  This revelation about running shoes has enabled me to run painlessly in regards to my knees, hips and back... but my toes are taking a serious beating.  I suppose I should run by daylight instead of by the light of a red headlamp, at least until I learn to pick up my feet.  However, night runs feel so damn good... the chilled air, the rich smells of cooling earth, the quiet... so far we haven't come across anyone else on the trails at night.  It's much easier to get me out there at night than on a 90 degree afternoon.

The 10k mud race is this Saturday, and I'm fairly certain that I'll end up walking a good portion of it.  I'm getting stronger and running longer, but I'm unlikely to finish the race without stopping to walk once each half mile.  I'm okay with that.  The whole point of running in general is to have fun, and the point of this race is to have fun and raise funds for a good cause.  Whether I walk or run across the finish line, I'll enjoy the process.

BEST ICE CREAM EVER.

Seriously.  And the easiest to make.  No cooking up egg custard and waiting for it to cool... just whip it up and throw it in the ice cream maker!!  We used some honey as well and it is simply unbelievable.  This recipe is originally from Dinner with Julie at http://dinnerwithjulie.com/ .

Sour Cream Ice Cream

2 cups full-fat sour cream

1 cup half-and-half

½ cup heavy whipping cream

½ cup sugar

1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice

½ teaspoon vanilla

pinch of salt


Whisk everything together. Pour the mix into your ice cream maker and freeze. (I cover the top of the ice cream with some plastic wrap to help prevent against freezer burn.)

Dr. Jekyll

83 year old man admitted with change in mental status.  Sweet as pie, but confused and forgetful.  Makes multiple attempts throughout the night to get out of bed by himself, setting off the bed exit alarm and prompting me to rush into the room, settle him back in bed, speak softly to him and remind him that he needs to call for help if he wants to get out of bed.  "Thank you for all the work you do, sweetheart", he says to me.  "It's no trouble at all.  Try to get some good rest tonight", I reply.

83 year old man admitted with change in mental status.  Obnoxious, but confused and forgetful.  Makes multiple attempts throughout the night to get ouf of bed by himself, setting off the bed exit alam and prompting me to rush into the room, settle him back in bed, speak softly to him and remind him that he needs to call for help if he wants to get out of bed.  "You're a downright witch, what's that in your pocket, did your parents leave you out in the cold?" he demands loudly of me, reaching his unwashed hands into my scrub pocket to grope for the pens, saline flushes and scissors there.  "Get your hands out of my pocket!  That is very rude!", I reply.

Where did that sweet, though slightly confused old man go?  DID YOU EAT HIM?!?

62 year old man admitted with pneumonia.  Homeless, absolutely filthy even after multiple intense scrubbings by staff, positive urine drug screen for opiates, elevated blood alcohol level upon admission.  The first night I cared for him as a new admission, I walked into the room to find feces all. over. everything.  Walls, floor, commode, bed, bedrails, patient... everything.  I patiently clean him up, he yells at me for bothering him, I firmly tell him that he has poop all over himself, and that part of being healthy is being clean and I simply cannot let him lie in that mess.  He concedes.  Refuses his meds.  Goes to sleep. 

The second night I have him, I receive in report that he was pleasant, calm, cooperative, agreeable to the treatment plan, taking all of his meds and resting comfortably.  I breathe a sigh of relief, happy to hear that his attitude about his healthcare seems to have changed.

I enter the room and find that he is refusing all assessments, all care, vital signs, meds, EVERYTHING.  He would not even permit me to take his temperature.  Uses explitives to get his point across.  Is completely disinterested in the fact that our nursing staff pooled money together and bought him new, clean clothes (to replace the ones saturated with urine and feces... including IN THE POCKETS... the smell of which made a seasoned nurse vomit when she handled them).  Yells until I finally leave the room. 




Sometimes, I can have seven patients, and it honestly feels like I'm caring for fourteen of them.  Holy hell.  I need some sleep.

Even as the days lengthen...

...I'm finding it difficult to find time to accomplish all that I need to.  There are days when I look at my Honeybunch and ask him, "How are we ever going to do this on a large scale?"

He works full time, and is building a business of making incredible LED and fire flow toys unlike any that I've seen on the market.  While mostly still in the R&D phase, he's producing staves and hoops for talented friends and acquaintances every so many weeks, prototypes of what he'll soon be able to introduce to the flow arts community at large.  It's amazing work, but time consuming and demanding of much of his energy.  There are circuit boards to be burnt (in the dark room, aka our shower), new LEDS to experiment with, programs to write and processes to streamline.  I'm very proud of him.

I work part time, and on paper that really sounds like I should be plowing through my To-Do lists on a daily basis with time to spare.  But somehow I am always behind.  I don't think it's a matter of poor time management... I multitask like a pro.  But still the laundry is never REALLY done, there are constantly dishes to be washed in the sink, fresh produce in the fridge waiting to be cooked, consumed or preserved, and weeds crop up almost as soon as my hand plow passes through the soil.

And there's aphids.  Slugs.  Chicken/cat/skunk poopies to be mucked out.  Inherited cold compost that hasn't been turned in two years, recently turned by my Honeybunch only to find infestation with horrible, awful pests that I shall not even name here!  Suddenly there's a need to construct an entirely new composting system, the tomato and pepper bed is in SERIOUS need of mulching in this hot weather, we run out of homemade laundry soap (AND out of the supplies to make it... what store did we find the washing soda at again?).  Oh yes, and I'd like to build some mosquito-proof rainwater barrels, please.

What really frightens me is that this sense of being overwhelmed comes when we're living in an APARTMENT in suburbia, with a few backyard garden beds and just under a dozen chickens.  How will we handle it all when there's a house to manage, hay to bale, a flock of sheep who need their hooves trimmed? 

I am trying to be kind to myself and believe that it's okay to be scared and overwhelmed, that this is a practice run and I'm new to the processes involved in building self reliance.  It's easier to eat vegetables that you've unceremoniously stripped of their sheer plastic garments, to wash your clothes with goo from a brightly colored plastic bottle, to eat pizza out of a cardboard box.  It is simpler to live a sterile life with no soil to scrub from beneath your fingernails, no animal feces to scrape off the bottoms of your boots, no little creature lives depending on you to close up the coop at night to keep them safe. 

I am not choosing this life because it is simple or easy.  I am choosing this life because it feels better, it tastes better, it is healthier for us and for our planet, it is guiltless (though not painless), more connected to the earth and the rhythms of nature, more fulfilling and challenging and fruitful.  I ache in my heart when aphids attack my lettuces because I am happiest seeing life spring from the good black earth that I've worked with my own hands.  I am not crazy, nor am I a masochist, and the benefits far outweigh the cost.

This is what I need to remember when I feel overwhelmed.