Work called and offered me a job some half hours' drive away. Normally I say no to anything not within about 20 minutes--my own usual cut-off point--but I had a look at where it was, halfway out to the country, and decided, hey, why the hell not.

The reason I'd been asked to do the respite shift was that the husband needed to go do some work, and his wife was prone to wandering off if left to her own devices. I parked my car at the bottom of the hill and then breathlessly climbed the mountain road that led to their house, and was greeted by the lady, picking up sticks and fallen bark strands, which she deemed a hazard to walking.

Their property was huge. I thought that it was a shared driveway between a couple of houses, but no; all the other buildings were just outbuildings for their firewood, or a summer house, or pool house. I was, frankly, quite agog at the amount of money these people must have, which wasn't quite to obvious from their house, which was quite modest. And once inside, in the nautical style: I felt nothing more like I'd stepped into the inside of someone's old wooden yacht, with the dark panelling and the bronze timepieces, rich jewel-toned velvets, and weathered leather furniture.

( she took me for a walk, and then, we danced. )

I hugged the little old couple goodbye, thanked her for the tour, and her dancing, and left. I'll probably never see them again.

My last day of placement was the most hectic. I'd been in the same room as the patient before, but Elena* hadn't been under my direct care; we were expected to take a patient and be in charge of them for the duration of our shift.

Elena had dementia, and the previous time she'd been in the room, I'd spent chasing her down the corridor with her two wheeled frame to shove in front of her and make certain she was stable, before trying to head her away from other people's rooms and back to her own four-bed room. That she had dementia was bad enough; that she also spoke very little English made things worse. She defaulted back into her language of birth, and although I used Google Translate for a few phrases which I wrote down -- "you must be feeling tired, want to sit down?" all the way to "sit down, now", on the last day, when my patience was expired.

She was recalcitrant and noncompliant--trying to get her to do anything always had her say "no", and my attempts at reverse psychology ("do you want to sit in the chair?" "no!" "you aren't allowed to sit in the bed, so you have to stay in the chair!" "no!") didn't really work. Eventually we gave up and just manhandled her around while she shouted no, and struggled against us.

"It's not always like that," said my RN, when we had a moment to take a breath. "We don't make people do things they don't want."

( Read more... )

At any rate, the hospital placement is over now, until October--I made my choices for the end of year today, and I have eight weeks running from about October through to December, of unpaid full-time placement, during which I hope I learn to amalgamise my theory all that much better!

*not her real name

"Don't worry about all that, girls," said a registered nurse (RN), tapping on a pile of incontinence pads. "You just need to know where these are."

With that, he was gone, leaving myself and a fellow student behind in the ward storeroom, where we'd been looking around to get a feel for where things were kept. We were on our first day of hospital placement, and all but clutching at each other in nervousness and in feeling lost.

It's now been a week of being full-time within the hospital, where we've been following around a different buddy nurse each day, putting what we've learned in theory into practice.

( Read more... )

Sometimes it boggles me that we need a bachelor's degree to pop pill packets open and help people urinate, but then an RN like the one on Friday comes along, who seemed to know everything, even down to why one particular laxative agent was being used rather than another, and how each one worked on the body on a cellular level, who makes you realise what a good nurse is like. While the other nurses were all right, did what they were supposed to, this particular nurse was inspiring.

I want to be her. I will be her--someday.

It's been a couple of weeks since I've made the transition to Melbourne; a hectic drive from Brisbane, straight after work, and then over two days of continuous driving to make it in time for the first class of the bridging course prior to semester start.

My friend Pilar, whom I most memorably met back in 2010, drove down with me.

The last two weeks before coming down were incredibly hectic. I was working full-time, and also had to study full-time for the anatomy and physiology short course, and pack, and meet up with people before leaving. For the last, I had a party the Saturday before I left.

"Who's going?" people at work kept asking me.

"I don't know. Whomever wants to come say goodbye, who don't see me often. Not like you," I told one guy, "I can't wait until I never see you again, oh my god."

He made a face at me and made threatening gestures, and others in the room laughed.

( Read more... )

I was out with some friends, about to go see a movie, when my phone buzzed. Aware that I was being a bit rude, I pulled it out to have a quick squiz--and possibly put it away--when I saw who it was from.

"Oh my god!" I said to my friends, "I got in!"

( Hello, three years of my life! )

There was still the interstate universities to wait upon; five o'clock on the Friday gave me the answer for South Australia: no go. Victoria was on the Monday, but not getting into any of the other universities with graduate entry had me convinced that ACU was where it was at, and I scoured gumtree, the local classifieds, for rooms available.

It struck me hard, those three days, how much more expensive it was to live on that side of the river--and what utter holes the same amount of money gets you on northside as compared to where I've been living these past number of months. I came away reeling at the sort of dives I was going to have to live in for three years, and still be having to make each dollar stretch to make ends meet.

Monday night I went to look at another room, in another divey apartment, but I felt good about it: the young guy I was interviewing for was pleasant, geeky, and we spent about an hour talking about anime and computers. It'd be a good fit. I came away with an assurance that the room was pretty much mine, although his friend had first dibs if he could get the money together by the next day.

Getting ready for bed, I remembered that the results for Victoria were released that afternoon. Suppose I better check, I thought, and logged in.

( Goodbye, three years! Hello, two! )

It's been a fairly quiet year. Things of note:

MY NEWS!

1. Finally graduating.


It's been nearly ten years since I left university without a completed degree, and upon contacting the university to see how I could put that to a close, it was found that I apparently had graduated, but slipped through the cracks. In July, I finally got my piece of paper, a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology.


2. Applying for graduate-entry nursing


The impetus to get my degree was deciding one day earlier this year that I wanted to go into nursing, and so towards the end of this year, I spent ages writing applications to universities all over Australia for graduate-entry nursing; I am still waiting on the January intake to find out if I've been accepted to any, for the rather sad results of my first degree means that it may not happen. Fingers crossed.


3. Buying a car.


While I don't really need one, there were twofold reasons to do so; one, so I wouldn't keep paying oodles of money for driving lessons, and two, so that I would feel stupid if I had a car sitting outside the house and not have a licence, and therefore not chicken out yet again out of finally getting a licence. I also opted to do so through a loan, so that I'd develop a line of credit, seeing as I'd never bought anything with a loan, nor had a credit card, before.


4. Getting my licence.


Third time lucky--I failed the test the first two times I tried, at the nearest centre in Brisbane, but for my third I used my own car and got a fellow co-worker to drive to the next city; google-fu told me that it had a higher pass rate and the wait time was only three weeks instead of two months. I scraped through a pass, and that whole day became a thing of drama--I only just made the appointment, by minutes, and then we got lost afterwards... I should write an entry about it, for posterity.


5. Moved!


It was time to move away from the area I'd been in, and during a house party with Harry when I'd partaken of lots of codeine, and then loaded up on alcohol--and passed out, several times--I discovered that one of the residents was moving out. This household had a wall of fantasy and science fiction novels as you walked in, and when I rejoined the land of living, I got the house manager's number and moved in shortly afterwards. This proved to be one of the more excellent decisions of 2011, and took about one hour of moving boxes with the assistance of a couple of coworkers and the Sailor.


6. Seeing lots of live music.


One of the reasons I moved to this area was that it was closer to work and closer to a friend I was spending a lot of time with--although he soon got a girlfriend and forgot that anybody else existed. That was fine; I made friends with his housemate, who proved to be most knowledgeable regarding local live music, and hardly has a week gone by without my going to a gig, or play, or something. A lot of my paycheck goes into this. (And alcohol, accordingly.)


7. Completion of a crisis telephone counselling course


There were only 25 slots, and most competitive, with rigorous interview questions, and then telephone interview, and lots of invitations along the way to continue on to the next phase--but I persevered, and went to every class, and started on a volunteer telephone crisis counselling line; possibly the hardest thing I have ever done.

OTHER PEOPLE NEWS!

1. Uma sobrinha nova!


My niece was born the weekend I was intending to go to a science fiction convention--it was tough, but she won out; I saw her only minutes after she was born, all little and wrapped in clean flannel. Sophia, new to the world. (She's growing so fast!)


2. Launching of Inara.


The Sailor finally put the boat into the water, and sailed up to the Whitsundays, where he's been having a grand time; it brought a big smile on my face to hear him on the phone, and hear the happy in his voice.

Unfortunately I wasn't there for the launch--not that I probably could have made it, because of work commitments, but I went down soon afterwards and was on board for the inaugural sail up the Richmond River.


3. Mother news :(

On a sadder note, my mother was forcibly hospitalised in the Northern Territory, put into the psychiatric ward and injected with drugs, as she would not take them. This time it was through my brother's actions, not my own; she was spiralling down into an especially bad place, sending people all sorts of sad, threatening, letters, throughly losing touch with reality. She sent me some, and they went into the bin unopened--she called my phone, and it went unanswered, voice messages deleted unheard.

Instead, I implemented a call-dad-weekly thing, and I look forward to talking to my father. I have spoken to my mother so few times I could count it on the one hand. It's sad, and I sometimes feel bad about not wanting to have anything to do with her anymore; but I lived it last time, and I cannot do it again.

Which kind of makes it amusing that I'm doing crisis counselling. Bizarre, but it's easier.

May the new year be filled with surprises!

The in-store radio has been broken for ages at work, and so because of that, we've been pumping out our own music over the sound system--or, at least, the store manager does; nobody else is game to do so while the store is open. She is especially partial to Nickelback and Michael Jackson. It only takes a couple of songs before something comes on to cement the ipod as hers.

When the store's closed is a whole other story.

I brought my own speakers and ipod in at first and whacked it on random, only loud enough for those in the produce department to hear what was playing. That is, just Lachlan and myself.

At first there was some embarrassment on my behalf, but when I didn't get raised eyebrows from him at what was playing, I relaxed. He even bopped along with some of the offerings, and we grinned at each other over the tomato bay at some especially old pop songs--and sometimes sang along with them.

"Oh, I like this song," he said one morning, heading over to the speakers and cranking it up.

( yay, music! )

* bonus points if you get post title

A few people ahead of us began jogging across the road, and I thought they had the right of it, but they stopped far too early, only steps into their jog. I started sprinting, and behind me I heard the other two do the same. I was wearing slippery leather-soled soles, and even with the fear I would slip over, still bounced off each step further, kept going, past the other people who'd stopped in their run.

The other two kept up, and I soon heard other people start running with us, and not stop this time, calling to their friends to keep up.

"Come on!" I heard, in various fading distances, encouraging calls all along behind us, with the pounding of footfalls along the road.

"You're running a lot further than I thought you would," my brother said from behind me as we neared the steps to the entrance.

"Of course," I said, "I ride 15km of hills every day," only to come to a stop at the bottom, because of their slippery tiles. My brother and his friend ran on past me up the steps, and the others motivated by us ran on past me in a flood.

We stopped inside the doors, looking around at the various doors. "Which door did she say it was? Who did she leave the tickets with? She said a woman ..."

There were no women. The others whipped out their phones and tried to contact their respective other halves, and I sidled up to one of the gate attendants. "Do you have any doors staffed by women?" I asked him, chest heaving.

"They all are," he replied, and I darted off to any woman to ask if she had the tickets for our family last name.

"Gate five!" one of them called out, and we started running again, and as we rounded the corner we could see a woman standing guard, looking our way, calling out our name.

"That's us!" we chorused, and collected our tickets mere moments before lockdown.

( the show must go on... )

( before the show; after the show. )

It's been a long time from the first line of pencil upon MDF to create the mould for the first hull--or even before that, when the shed first had to be built. For months the Sailor and I sourced second-hand tin for the roof, making i-beams, and setting supposedly cured posts into concrete, and buying blue metal aggregate for the floor of the--eventually finished--shed.

For the first month or so in Ballina, those years ago, I bummed around--and as money got low I went out and found work, with the same company I now work with. The Sailor got to marking out the plans and hitting the phones to find a source of cedar to start laying out the first hull of the catamaran he wanted to build.

( A progression in through time. )

A couple of weeks ago I took a bus down to Ballina to have a look at her. It won't be long now before the Sailor hies off for the more welcoming shores of tropical Queensland up north, where he can use the boat for charter purposes and finally go sailing after being landlocked for so long. He's got the idea to take backpackers with him sailing, and hopefully source them as income as he takes them from one tourist town to another--namely, Airlie Beach, the holy grail after Byron Bay and Bondi Beach when it comes to unsuspecting tourists. If only they knew that the supposed beach at Airlie is mud and rocks and little else; but then again, I guess the party culture I so enjoyed while there more than makes up for it.

"Shall we go down the river?" he asked as the day wore on, and clouds came in from the south-east, the direction of prevailing winds.

( She is ever so delightful. )

My brother was a little late, but that was all right--we headed on down during the remains of my lunch break anyway, my nephew bouncing on my shoulders.

Now, I wanted to buy a car, but nobody around me apparently knows anything about them other than you put fuel in and they go forward. This wasn't all too helpful, and all the googling in the world didn't give me much more to work with, other than to narrow what I wanted to:

• hatchback
• late model
• low kms
• white, or pale coloured (because of the fierce Queensland sun)
• A.B.S. brakes

I was talking to my bro over the phone on Friday evening, as I idly scrolled through various car sales websites, ebay, and gumtree, bookmarking the ones that looked promising so I could try my hand and dragging a friend around on the Sunday, looking at them. Not that I'd know what I was looking at, other than vaguely car-shaped objects.

"Oh, hey, this one looks good!" I said while on the phone to my bro. "It's at a car yard just outside my work! I might have a look on my lunch break tomorrow." It looked ok: a white Hyundai Getz, 2006, 50,000kms, 1.6L 3-door. Less doors, less things to break?

( suddenly I have debt. )