NOLA Pics

Joc and her crawfish experience... it was a large plate, a lot of work and a little fish in return...
Bourbon street, Friday night... I wish this had volume because people are yelling, clubs have stereos on, jazz bands are playing in other bars, bouncers are trying to get people into bars, crazy, just crazy
Having a beer at the only NOLA brewery... I found a coupon for one free entree, yeah to saving $24!!
Laffette's (spelling is wrong) bar, was an old blacksmith shop where a couple pirates lived and worked, it was also part of the haunting tour... somebody's ghost lives here...oooohhhh!
There are a lot of famous people who live in NOLA, Nicholas Cage has a couple houses, of course everyone knows Brad and Angelina have a house, John Goodman has one, the Manning family lives there, and this house, it may be familiar if you saw "Benjamin Button" it was the house he grew up in... This is in the Garden District- most of the houses look like this, big, old, beautiful, historical, awesome. Many movies are shot in New Orleans, many are shooting now... a couple houses along our tour were pointed out as movie sites...
Just a street in the garden district, pretty very pretty there
One of the many above ground cemetery... it's a cool process for burying the dead I can explain it to you sometime... it's like recycling the dead
Cafe de Monde is pretty infamous, powder sugar donuts and coffee, it was good, if you can see the powder sugar on the ground next to me... they are coated in the sugar just coated. They were tasty!
Just a street in NOLA, it was quite beautiful there
In front of Cafe de Monde- our first full day in New Orleans
Patty O'Brien's is famous for their hurricanes, we made it in, had a couple drinks and stumbled out... they pack a punch! (c:
A picture on our walking tour of the French Quarter- I was the tour guide, very informative! (c:
Cafe du Monde (we only went once...these pics are all from that trip)
This is a haunted mansion in the French Quarter- a lady was tourturing and killing slaves... it's a freaky story...
The muffelatta- a big round sandwich, meat, cheese, olive salad, drenched in olive oil... an experience, very filling and if you don't like olives it might not be a favorite... New Orleans tradition.

NOLA

Let me translate that, since it took Joc and I a few days (and Joc even longer as I had to explain it to her straight up). NOLA= New Orleans, LA (get it? NOLA...) Creative, we thought!
Joc has bid me farewell and I am now comfortably settled in my conference hotel room and taking a day off, #1 because I have to prepare what sessions I'm attending for tomorrow's conference, #2 because it's raining pretty steady eddy and my raincoat sucks and #3 because the edema in my feet has finally decreased and I no longer look like a 9 month pregnant woman with cankles! I'm revelling in my "skinny" ankles again. Which brings me to my thoughts on the south... when they ask, where ya'll from? and you say, Michigan one of the first questions they ask is, "so you think it's hot, huh?" like we live in the artic... like we never get above a cold rain or light snow? I'll give them one thing, it is hot and muggy here and from what locals have said, it gets worse in the next couple months. I'm glad I won't be here for that experience, I really wouldn't want to see my cankles at that point! (c:
NOLA has been fun, we saw much of the city, did three tours of the place, learned quite a bit about the history (and it has a rich history!), road the streetcars (not trolley's) and walked a lot. We found a couple bars, not on Bourbon st, that we really enjoyed and shopped a bit. We ate local cuisine, Joc finally had crawfish last night which is a big local eatery... think larger than shrimp but smaller than lobster... couldn't tell you what they taste like I didn't have the guts to try them. We even had muffelattas (which are huge sandwiches with an olice salad topping... not big olive fans but they weren't too bad actually). We walked down Bourbon St, experienced it on a Friday night and then promptly left... funny how when you do that much walking and sightseeing getting drunk and being obnoxious just aren't a priority. Sort of like Ireland, you want to stay out and get pissed with the locals, but you've done and seen so much that your bed sounds much more appealing. That was us on Bourbon st, we decided if we had come down with the full intention of getting drunk and staying out all night then Bourbon street would have been more appealing. Loud and crazy are two words I would use.
I'm going to post pictures from our trip, I'll do it in a seperate posting, just so I can be more controlled on the captions and organization. Hope you enjoy the pics and my quick write up, now I'm here for learnin' from Monday-Thursday when I head north, back to the "cold" as these southerners think!
Funny note: I was wandering in the huge conference center trying to find the registration for my conference and I found a huge sign that said, "REGISTRATION" so I go in line but was confused when it said something about a gold card... I asked the chick behind me who was like, "honey you need to ask someone... it's a vendor card, you get it from the state" I was like, I must be in the wrong place..sure enough, that was a jewelery convention! OMG was I in the wrong place! HA! I heard her whisper to her friend as I was leaving that I must be lost and she hopes I can find my place... interesting, very interesting...

Gotta pee!

I don't know why I never thought of this before, but I can totally blog at work! OMG, I cannot believe I havent' done this before. (c:
Working my last night of a four night stretch, I have been really tired the last three and tonight I'm feeling pretty good and it's already 1130 so I'm almost half way done. It's been pretty busy, I've been the IV queen tonight, already started 3 on a couple different floors. I really enjoy starting IVs, the calls to start them are a bit annoying because the nurses always start by saying, "are you busy?" in this really cutsy voice and I just know that that is why they are calling. I told one nurse to not sugarcoat it, just ask me straight up and I'll tell you if I want to or not, or if I can or not! My biggest complaint isn't that I don't have the time or desire, remember I like IV starts and if I'm busy and it's not an emergency I tell them I don't have the time. But my biggest complaint is that often, I find at least one bulging vessel or a couple different options.... which tells me that they either didn't take the time to sit down and actually look for all the possible options or they never turned on the lights or they told me they did try and actually didn't. That's my biggest complaint. I'm no expert, hell I've only been a nurse for 4 years... I just take the time to sit down and look.
AND!!!! 2 day shifts are posted and one of them better be mine! I emailed my boss, and I'm almost 100% certain I have one of them, starting the third week of June, almost there, almost there. I think I can, I think I can...
Leaving for New Orleans tomorrow, for a week and a half. I'm pretty excited to get out of MI for a bit, it's been since Colorado that I've been out of here and it'll feel good to board that plane tomorrow. Joc is coming for the first four days, we'll do the tourist thing then I have a nursing conference to attend. That's the real reason I'm headed South, it is Monday through Thursday and I'll be home in time for Memorial Day and my friend Kelly's trip back to MI. (She went to nursing school with me and worked at Saints until she left to travel last September) We are all going out Friday night to see her, looking forward to it really.
I really do have to pee, I didn't just title the entry that way, I seriously do but there's an environmental services guy cleaning and he wears WAY too much cologne and it is making me nauseous so I'm thinking I'm going to be walking down the hall to another facility.
Lovely, well I'll post some pics when we get back or maybe while I'm there... I'm not going with anyone to the conference so I'll have some nights that I'm not too busy.
Thanks for reading,
Jenn

Monday

It's quite amazing the difference at the hospital from weekend to weekday. There's a quiet on the weekends that seaps away around 6am Monday morning, not to be felt again until Friday night around 7pm. The buzz that ignites with the doctors rounding, the med students looking at charts, day shift arriving and night shift holding onto the last hour of their quiet night. I prefer the buzz, I look forward to that energy to revive me for that last hour of wakefulness that some nights I just don't possess.
So starts another week at the hospital, but this place is not a Monday through Friday gig, we don't hold the hours of 8-5. Most days I'm glad for the break a three day work week provides, other times I wish for shorted shifts. Some shifts, 12 hours feels like one hour and other 12 hour shifts feel like 24 hours, just depends on the patients. Tonight was a mixed bag.
I'll leave you with those thoughts.

Life update

What's the point of blogging anymore with Facebook? I feel like my life is no longer as exciting as when I was doing the travel thing so to blog about it is uninteresting. That's why I don't blog much anymore, there's not much to blog about!
This is a picture of me and a couple friends, Jody and Nicole, at Tulip Festival in Holland, MI. We decided to venture out and see what it's all about since none of us had even attended. Let me say that I believe that it's a big deal to people who have been involved with it since they were kids and are now passing on the tradition to their kids. It wasn't too exciting to us four, liberal, non-Dutch gay Catholics! (c: There was a dancing thing in the street and these girls (all girls) were dressed up in Dutch outfits and doing a Dutch dance but that was about it. We spent the majority of our time grabbing a bite to eat and a cider at New Holland Brewery, now that was worth it! Ha!
Any way, I'm about to take my final exam for my class. I'm off for the summer so I'm looking forward to that, just being free of required readings and postings and writing for a couple months. I start clinicals in August, I will be student teaching in a Nursing program! This I am looking forward to. And I will be teaching at my alma mater, Aquinas/UDM with a professor I had back in the day (4.5 years ago) Sister Linda. I'm a bit excited to get into a classroom and see what it's all about from the front of the class, I definitely know what it's like to sit behind a desk and sleep through lectures (c:
In other news, Joc and I have pretty much completed a landscaping project that was pretty HUGE by our standards. Last weekend we had 6 yards of river rock delivered (yes 6 yards and if you don't know how much that is, it's A LOT), see in the backyard we had a "flower bed, scrubbery area" that Joc cut out all the trees and dug up all the day lillies a year or so ago. She spread mulch and planted five of those decorative grass thingys but the rains washed away much of the mulch and it was constantly muddy and looking bad so she decided that river rock would look nice there. So we carried all 6 yards of river rock back there, spread it out and it looks great. That wasn't the end of the project, we also made a ring around a tree in the back, put rocks around that and the biggest thing we did was lay sod in the back. 3 yards of top soil, spread out over the clay we had for dirt, topped off by 3 pallets of sod now cover our yard. It looks fabulous, if I do say so myself. I'm watering like a mad man or woman, it took me about 3 hours yesterday to water the whole yard and it rained last night, so I can do it all again in the evening. Have to keep it pretty wet in the first week or so, to allow germination or whatever it is. Here's hoping it takes!!! We took before and after pictures so I'll upload them and post them soon, so you can get an idea of the magnitude of work it was. My body was so soar the day after, it's getting better though.
I started off saying there was nothing to blog about and here I am rambling. Off to take my exam, wish me luck!!