When it rains

We make out in it? NO...when it rains, it pours, of course. Literally (for us and especially for the Midwest) but figuratively as well, in that we go almost a week without posting and then, within the space of 24 hours, we have posted not one, not two, but three updates. Has our life changed substantially, or have there been any interesting developments?

Nope, not really. The simple fact is that we just have more time to post on the weekends.

I've now officially survived my first full week of law school and lived to tell about it. Things are still doing really well on that front; I feel like I'm learning a lot, the workload is intense but doable, and I'm getting more comfortable speaking up in classes. I still really enjoy my professors as well as a number of my classmates. However, by the end of the week, I was starting to feel a certain--not depression, really, but slightly disconcerting numbness that I think comes from existing in a very cerebral cycle of reading, listening, and writing, with very little meaningful human interaction woven into it. It's like when you spend an entire day alone and realized you can't remember when you last spoke. It's a very inward, kind of isolating feeling and in this case it's not my own actions and ideas I've been focusing on--it's a third-party kind of introspection that I think will naturally broaden over time as I become involved with activities and organizations beyond the dictated first-year classes. I'm looking forward to that, and it's also something that makes me glad I haven't up and quit my job yet; because, whatever else nursing has riding against it, I've always felt grateful that at least you don't have to fight to make it meaningful. You're tending to people at an intimate and vulnerable point in their lives and as long as you pay a reasonable degree of attention, it's hard to make it not meaningful. Although I'll admit I've seen people who have.

On that front, Friday and Saturday I worked at the hospital again. Chaos still abounded but I feel like I'm getting down a system that works for me. That probably includes leaving out a lot of the paperwork details that I should be doing, and it doesn't include talking to anyone or actually taking a meal or a bathroom break in order to get out on time; but at this point I feel like my practice is only as good as my training, and I'm doing the best I can. In terms of patient care and nursing knowledge, I feel like I've been trained pretty well; as far as the idiosyncracies of this particular hospital, two haphazard shifts were hardly enough. Anyway, suffice it to say that I actually really enjoyed the opportunity to be a nurse again, felt like I connected pretty well with my [10-12] patients, and am not dreading too terribly the requisite two shifts I need to work a month.

In smaller news, someone gave me The Ornamental Grass Kit awhile back and the day before yesterday I finally gotten around to planting it. I'm thrilled because where yesterday morning there was nothing, today I have four fresh shoots! (Matt saw them last night but wanted to let me discover them on my own. Awww). Here they are, in all their glory:
Yes, welcome to the city, where four shoots of grass feel like a modern-day miracle. They live on our kitchen windowsill, next to the basil plant which you can just see in the corner of this picture. The window is also where a multitude of ants seem to be finding their way into our kitchen. We heard that a natural way to repel ants is with clove oil, leading us to spend some entertaining moments corraling a few with Lincoln-log-esque enclosures made from whole cloves, but we ultimately concluded it was a little too labor-intensive a solution for a problem of the magnitude that is ours, and so have conceded to using ant traps. Yes, we are the people who objected so strenuously (to our own detriment, as you'll recall) to the idea of extermination, but this is on a much smaller scale.

Otherwise, our biggest triumph today was finding an Aldi's. We have been disappointed to find that our painstakingly created Iowa food budget wasn't exactly cutting the mustard in DC. We were shopping mainly at Safeway due to reasons of proximity, but this weekend were finally fed up with shelling out over $50 a week for a gallon of milk, a tub (well, maybe two tubs) of sour cream, and the few other things we aren't getting at the Eastern Market and so we plotted out the route to the closest Aldi's, about 5 miles (or around 15 minutes) away. We've realized that, in general, if you want to shop the yuppie/pricey stores, go to Virginia; for solid, working-class bargains for folks like ourselves, it's Destination Maryland.

At Aldi's, we were overjoyed to find that even after stocking up on eight (in our defense, they were only a quarter apiece!) bags of organic blue corn tortilla chips (after an impulse buy at the EM that included eight or nine different varieties of chili peppers for a mere $3, salsa is most definitely on the menu), a ton of dairy, a number of baking staples, two bottles of olive oil, some snacks, and some produce, our total was still only the $50 we would have spent at Safeway for far less. We also found a Target in the same neighborhood and were able to pick up a coffee grinder (necessitated by our desire to make pibil and the fact that what we were previously using for a spice mill crapped out...so we relegated our current coffee grinder to a spice grinder and upgraded to what we hope will be a sturdy investment for grinding coffee) as well as a shadowbox for our large, unconventionally-sized, giant-starfished-and-thus-quite-delicate wedding certificate so that we can finally finally take that out of storage and put it into decorative circulation--ALL made possible compliments of the generous Target giftcards we were fortunate enough to receive as wedding/going-away presents, largely from my very kindhearted former co-workers.

So anyway...I'm happy to report that even after working the rest of the weekend, our day today was a relaxing one of sleeping in, coffee drinking, paper reading, shopping, and, of course, COOKING--so I think we're both actually feeling pretty refreshed and ready for the week ahead.

Tell me--when, as a night nurse, did you ever hear me say that?