Homeowner Lessons

As a newer homeowner, here's some lessons I've learned:

1. Home inspectors don't catch everything.

2. Turn off the water before disassembling a faucet.

3. Measure your PVC pipe before tackling that new garbage disposal install.

4. If you fail to measure that pipe, you won't want to brave a blizzard because its 1/2" short.

5. I hate plumbing.

6. Snowblowing in the wind: An exercise in futility.

7. If your wife won't let you buy a toilet plunger because "we can get one when we need one", try to convince her that's not good reasoning. Its embarassing for the house guest who creates the "need".

8. If swearing is not your vice, and you wish to keep it that way, avoid plumbing, dryer vents, and all other projects requiring tools.

9. Replacing outlets is easy, anyone can do that.

10. Replacing ceiling fans seems to be more difficult for me.

11. A Dremel is quite useful.

14. Don't cheap out on an electric drill.

15. Forget flowers, dinner, and cards. Actually finishing a long promised project around the house scores just as many points with the wife.

16. Its easier- and maybe even cheaper- to replace an entire doorframe and door rather than one piece, should a dog choose to eat half of said frame.

17. Pop in the garage in the winter = a mess on your clean new door and frame.

18. Store unused potatoes in your small basement laundry room with high humidity. Then watch em' grow and take over a small, forgotten corner.

19. Measure twice, cut once.....I'll still screw up.

20. Measure three times, cut once, tweak the cut a little.....still wrong.

21. Measure four times, cut once, return to hardware store for more wood, call father and father-in-law for advice, measure 6 times, walk away, eat some toast, return, measure twice more, cut once ever so delicately......ahhhh there we have it!

22. Your wife has the best opinion on decorating.

23. I hate plumbing.

That's all for now!

The Logic of Instruction

Stuff like this kills me. I bought a Shopvac for my little dryer vent problem at my new house.

I get the shopvac out, pop the wheels on, and I notice that the box says I need to install the wheels per the included instructions.



But there are no instructions......



Oh, the manual must be in the actual vacuum tank. I take off the top lid of the Shopvac to find instructions and 4 screws. Here's the instruction manual:

Okay, so step one is instructions on how to open the vacuum tank. Problem being: the instructions that contain step one are inside the tank that they are assuming you don't know how to open!

I love this stuff!

Congrads! You're a Homeowner! PS- your dryer is broken.

Not sure what I paid my home inspector for right now. A couple days into being excited about my first home (which is fairly move-in ready), I noticed that the exhaust vent had become disconnected from where it fed out of the house. No big deal. This looks like a job for H.I.T.

While looking it over, I noticed it looked wet next to my dryer. I couldn't really see, as it was dark, so I grabbed a flashlight. That's when I found that the tubing leading from the dryer exhaust had been torn, and the dyer had been spewing hot, wet dyer lint all over behind the washer, dyer, and into the storage area below our steps.

How long it has been doing this, I do not know. I pull out the dyer, begin to look at things, and realize that though the vent is torn, all the tubing is still completely clogged with lint as well. Not to mention the dang this is set up with several sharp turns = fire hazard.

Just found a great excuse to buy a Shopvac.

What slays me is that just before closing, we asked the sellers to install a radon mitigation system. The system was put in just adjacent to the dryer. So either the home inspector missed the problem, or whoever installed the mitigation system didn't bother to bring it up, or both. Nice.

As I went about rectifying the situation, I vacuumed out the tubing and piping that vents the dryer. A couple pipes were hard to get at to see, so I took pictures to check the progress. In that process, I found my inner endoscopy nurse. These look a little bit like images from the Tin Man's last colonoscopy.

Everything looks fine Mr. Tin Man. Just a few small polyps. That's normal for your age. Some new aluminum foil flexible tubing, some aluminum tape, a few clamps, and good vacuuming, and you're on your way.......

Now That's Handy......

Hmmmmm......wonder if I can get one of those installed.........

Kindered Idiots

It was 6pm when I finally strolled into Target today, Valentine's day, to get a card for my fiance. A gentlemen in his 50's approached the cards the same time as I did. We slowly gave each other a sideways glance, made eye contact, and smiled.

"We were supposed to be doing this a lot earlier, weren't we?" I remarked.

"Well, at least we're here, right?", he asked.

Right.

Sugar Buzz

Let's see here.....

Late night, no patients in the unit. Check.

2 cans of diet Mountain Dew. Check.

1 large heart-shaped monster cookie delievered by fiance. Check.

2 generous pieces of apple crisp. Check.

.......Yup. I've got a bit of a Sugar Buzz goin'.

There is some insulin about 20 feet away from me..........Nah.

No Comment

Found at a local museum in a silverware display. Made me giggle. Typical man I guess.

Man Nurse

My great-grandma, bless her heart, always refers to me as a "Man Nurse".

"Are you still going to be a Man Nurse" she would always ask me while I was in school.

"Yeah Grandma, its the only kind they'll let me be"

She would reply with an approval because all those women need someone to help lift, people are just too darn heavy now.

I can't say my main motivation to take up nursing was to help other women lift stuff. What is it about nursing anyway- this reverse sexism thing?

There are male nurses but never female nurses.

I thought maybe the world was getting over that until I started working in the PACU. The first time I was in the locker room, I headed over to a rack of scrubs and found this:

Man Nurse = Man Pants. Now where is that Man Top.....

New Blog

Well, I have mulitple people that want to read my "funny" blogs but dont' want to sift through the "gun stuff". Thus, The Beehive has been born. Check that one out if you want a laugh.

Gym. Rats.

I decided I better have one of my semi-annual trips to the gym today so I can justify my $40 a month membership. Also, I'm just getting fatter so its not a bad idea.

As my sebaceous glands pour forth a fountain of sweat, I take stock of the situation around me. Old lady on my left. Pregnant women doing aerobics on the basketball court. A decrepit older man crawling off a weight machine with help from his cane. A host of buff, muscular men hefting very large amounts of metal.

Still I feel good about myself until I lock eyes with the man I'm calling Herman. Herman is easily mid-60's with thick brown plastic frames surrounding his very large glasses. Those glasses are older than I am. He wears a large orange sweatshirt and brown pants. He holds himself up by his forearms on an apparatus which suspends his legs and supports his weight in such a way that his neck has disappeared. He looks like a 65 year old Simon Birch.

He locks eyes with me and holds the stare for a moment as he effortlessly raises his legs forward and up in a sort of backwards mid-air sit up, demonstrating far more abdominal strength than I.

And I feel ashamed.........

Changing My View

Recently I was going to be receiving a patient. 58 year old with Down's Syndrome, Alzheimer's, Personality Disorder, OCD, and a history of being combative.

Very quickly we decided not to recover this patient in the usual open PACU bays, but in one of our private rooms.

The patient is brought in, he is intubated, and while be for awhile. He is still completely out of it after receiving ketamine, midazolam, and anesthesia. He is 100% unresponsive. I settle in close by his side where I can monitor him and his airway. I chart away, thankful for a chance to do paperwork right away, but also with an ominous feeling that when this guy wakes up it will be with bravado. I have gloves, a syringe for the ETT, and suction on standby. His caregiver arrives, sits in a recliner and turns on the TV.

She is watching ABC's "The View".

Have mercy! Could there be any worse show on earth? It is torture. The slow, rhythmic, misty breaths coming from my patient's T-piece puff off as a time keeper. Each breath is chalk mark on my cell wall reminding me that this is going to be a long recovery. Anything has to be better than The View. I can't believe women watch this.

I feel like I'm sitting in the hen house listening to five old birds cluck. No words, just angry clucking....

Creepy Massage

I was just musing about my first massage. It was a birthday gift in college. But I'm pretty excited for it. Who doesn't want a massage? I check into the Salon ready to go, but already feeling a bit....odd. I mean, for me, its a bit invasive.

I'm ushered into a small massage room. Its what you expect. Dim lights, cheap fountain in the corner, reeks of incense. There's a shower in the corner full of stuff....I hope its not for me.

"Go ahead and take off as many clothes as you want. A lot of people go naked, but some people just strip to their underwear."

...

As much as I want? What I want to wear is a goose down parka while some stranger caresses my jiggling body. I want to not feel like a beached whale and have someone I don't know start feeling me up. But, I suppose the massage will be less effective that way. And lets just come out and say it. At this point, I'm in college, doing the saving-yourself-for-marriage thing, and I'm the v word. That's right virgin. So virgin Chris is stripping to his skivvies, crawling into a bed in the middle of the room, and waiting for a burnt-out hippie named Marge to come rub him down.

And in walks Marge.

You think the burnt-out hippie part was a joke? No. 50-something white woman. Frizzie hair adorned with dreads and beads. A dress that could only be made of hemp, or possibly the beard hairs of a goat. You know, the kind of lady that only drinks from a Mason jar, doesn't own a car, makes her own soap, and works by the light of a natural beeswax candle.

In a sultry, dusky, Mary Jane influenced voice she coos, "Is this your first massage?"

"Yeah".

"Oh, that's wonderful. Would you like some music on?"

"Sure."

"What do you like?" At this point, I had just joined the college jazz band.

"Well, I like jazz"

"Okay, I'll put some on".

Apparently, we have miscommunicated at this point. To my horror, Kenny G begins floating ominously from the $25 boombox on the counter. I shiver slightly and decide its okay.

"How's that?" She asks. "Uh....great. Great. He's good" I sputter.

"Okay, I'm going to begin." Oooookay.

I begin to be rubbed and massaged and kneaded by Marge. Kenny G wafts seductivly through the air as Marge engages in oil-laden strokes of my legs. Kenny sings to us......Ba da da ba da ba da, ba da da doo....... It does feel nice. However, full body means....well a lot of the body. 90%. But you know, even if you don't drive to Houston, you can still feel a little country at the Texas border.

Suddenly, my body is confused by mixed messages and she rubs my thighs.

Mmmmmm....

Mmmmmm....

MmmmmmMARGE! SICK! No! Retreat!!

Ba da da ba do be da, ba doo bee dwoo da.......

You are not helping me here Ken!

And yet, it feels good. Thighs being rubbed....good......Marge touching me....bad.....Baseball, cold showers......

Fortunately, its time to flip on to my stomach. She's now massaging my back and its feels good. My face is in the little open donut thing facing down, but my eyes are closed. I'm oblivious for a moment to the word. Hence, I don't notice as she sits on a stool facing me, her legs under my face. I don't notice that her hemp-dress-concoction has a slit in it. I don't notice that the slit in her dress is really quite high, that perhaps her woven wonder has fallen to each side of her legs. I don't notice I'm the in the lap of.....luxury.

Until I open my eyes...

To a suprise....

Margie's thighs.

The Burning!! The pain! Why doth thy dress part in such high flight? My nose is in the holy of holies here, and I want out! Suddenly, "Danger Zone", the theme song from Top Gun is flying through my head and I'm wondering if its possible to get "the clap" in my nose.

But suddenly, praise my maker, the massage is over. Like an embarassed youngling I wait with the covers pulled tightly until she leaves the room. I get dressed. I'm given a water bottle. Apparently they notice the sweat on my brow. Should I be smoking or something now?

I'm ready to leave and before I can get through the door Marge fires out, "Hey, what are you doing right now?"

No way. This lady did not just ask me that......

"Uh, not much."

"Could I get a ride somewhere?"

You've got to be kidding me. I am finally free of a rather awkward hour, and its instigator needs a ride. But I'm a nice guy. "Sure."

I give Marge a ride to the mechanic about 10 blocks away, she thanks me, and reminds me to drink plenty of water or I'll be sore. Yeah but what about the psychological damage lady? As she gets out of the car, I feel like I should be asking,

"So....do I call you sometime?"


...I choose instead to say thank you, and pull away a bit faster than the speed limit.

You know You're a Male Nurse If....

You know you're a male nurse if......


...the "Personal Care Kit" (aka first aid/med cupboard) for the employees of your unit has more space dedicated to feminine hygiene products than anything else.

....there are pumping rooms for your co workers. And its not for pumping iron.

Life Skills

Recently, a new Nursing Assistant joined our department. She is in the Air Force reserve. She is a jet mechanic.

You know, sometimes you hear people trying to sell the military: "Join the military, and you'll learn all kinds of useful skills for life."

So I asked her, "how's that jet mechanic thing helping you out?" It of course is not. I asked if any skills transfered like fixing a lawn mower or someting. Nope.

I can just see it now....

"Honey, I asked you to fix the vacuum"

"I did"

"It sucked the carpet off the floor..."

"....So?"

"It shot it out the back and fired off a missle!"

"Yeah, we've been having trouble with that....."

Meet the Parents

Ever seen that movie "Meet the Parents"? Its always been relative to me because of the male nurse jokes. I've even had a 70-some patient call me Gaylord once. Nice.


Now its relative to me for a new reason: the parents! I've never had very good luck with parents of girl's I've dated, particularly the father. In fact, I dated a girl in college who, despite a year and a half relationship, never gave me the time of day. Oh well.


For the past 16 months I've been dating a great girl named Nicole. I met Nicole's parents a year ago or more, and they are great people. Very welcoming, very nice, over all a good experience. With one exception....they are exercise freaks.


I am not.


A great portion of their life seems focused around exercise, health, and sports.


Much less of mine is.


I'm terrible at sports. Terrible. Horrendous. Its just not in me. I watch a track meet and get winded. I see a basketball game and sweat. Get the picture?


I do enjoy some of them though. Recently, my girlfriend bought me a tennis racket. I've never touched one, but we went out to the court and tried. After an initial hour of rage, I began to enjoy myself.


And that brings us to today's story.


We spent the weekend and my girlfriend's parents, and they wanted to play tennis. I've turned them down on their various offers to join them in the basement for Saturday workouts, so I figured I'd give them a game of tennis. Should be fine. After all, in my family if we say "let's go play some tennis" it really means "let's go leisurely hit a ball around". I can do that.


Wrong.


"let's play tennis" means "lets play tennis". Doubles, all the rules, right into it. Chris can barely swing a racket, and he's playing doubles. With the sports family. I don't even know the rules or how its played!

"Chris, switch sides"


"Chris, switch sides"


"Chris, switch sides"


"Deuce"


"........What?"





Is tennis made up by drunk people? You do one thing right and you get 15 points? Where does that come from. And Deuce, Love, Advantage? Aren't all of those heartworm medicines?

So Chris is swinging his racket, looking like a foot. The ball goes 1 of 2 places. Straight into the net, or over the fence and halfway to the car. I served at least 15 times before I knew where I was serving to.


"Out."


"Out."


"Where the heck is out???!!!"





At this point, I can't help but feel a bit out of place. We finish, and they are very good about it all. I go down to the room I'm staying, and for the first time really notice the sports themed wall paper boarder, the posters of sports stars, and the designs for basketball shoes sketched by her brothers when they were young.

"One of these things is not like the other, one of things just doesn't belong".......I think it might be me. Suddenly, I truly notice my gut and my scrawny arms. I'm realizing, I hope they are cool with me the way I am, because I'm sure different. I can play the guitar better than average, I sing pretty well, I understand medicine, and I am on okay shot with a gun. But I'll always be a little bit like the guy from "Meet the parents".....not quite sure where I fit in!

Lunch with Big Mike

The other day everyone at work was clammoring about Michael Phelps and his diet. He has to eat 8-10,000 calories a day.

"How does he eat that much?" They say. "He must eat all the time and be so sick of it."

Apparantly, no one has heard of Big Macs and Ben & Jerry's. 10,000 calories? No problem. Suck down some of that stuff and you've hit the mother load. Seriously. I sat down the other night with a little bit of ice cream.....1200 calories before commercial time.

Heck, a double cheesburger, large fries, and large pop gets you to 1870. Wash that down with a small tub of dairy product and you're at 3,070! Three meals a day = 9,210, and we haven't even snacked yet people!

So, all Mikey has to do is hit McDonald's and he's hit his calories, no big deal.

....of course, there are possible side effects:

1. Horkin' cookies in the pool. 5/10 point deduction.

2. Slower speeds due to drag coefficiancy created by bat-wing underarms.

3. Over lubricated intestinal tract leads to embrassing incidents with razor suit.

4. Occupation of 2 lanes in the pool not encouraged

5. Dead by 30.

Other than that, I think I've solved ol' Mike's dilema.

Asian Menus

You never know what an asian restaurant will serve.

Note you can get Crap for $3.95......

....Guess that explains the price of gas.....

I just want to know: How many pieces do I get?