Kate Standard Time

...is still a bit off. Much like the rest of me.

Last time I was on night float, it took me a week to recover my usual sleep schedule and not feel like I was barely getting through the day alive. I'm hoping this time will be easier, because on the whole, this time was easier. I fairly steadily slept from noonish to eightish. I actually ate meals this time, or at least I was better at it, rather than during my week in September when I never ate. I managed to get darkening curtains hung in my bedroom (albeit poorly, and with little spring-loaded rods, despite actually having the hardware and the real cafe rods), which I think helped a lot with the sleep. And the patient load wasn't overwhelming, which might be a function of volume, practice, exhaustion, or any combination of the above.

So, the week in recap...

The party last Saturday was awesome. Eva, Matt, and I were a marvelous model of the psyche - Matt pulled off the Clark Kent-esque inception of the Superego quite nicely. As I mentioned, Peng provided his cape:

Snazzy, huh? We also have great pictures of him in the muscle shirt I made.

Eva augmented the t-shirt I made her with spiky blue hair, really fabulous lace tights, stiletto heels, and...a big blue tutu. No, none of us are sure what, exactly, that has to do with the Ego, but, hey, she looked good. Her husband came wearing one of her slips, with pictures of Freud safety-pinned to it. He was, of course, a Freudian slip.

My costume consisted more or less of this:

I know, I know. Matt wasn't even out of his car yet (we got there at the same time) and he was like, "Wow. Wow. I'm not sure I've ever seen that much cleavage, ever. If you added up the sum total of all the boobs I've seen in my lifetime..." And then he kept trying to do things like set his beer bottle down in my cleavage all night. Eva was somewhat more direct...she just kept coming up and poking them.

We were a good team.

Other than that, though, and some overdone makeup (which wasn't actually all that garish, looking at the pictures) and purple glitter in my hair that ended up being more subtle than I thought it would be, I ended up not looking that much different from how I do at work. I wore jeans, because I couldn't find the skirt I wanted, I had my standard black sweater on, because it was cold that night...apparently I don't tramp up as well as I thought I was going to. Shucks.

There were a lot of other good costumes, too. There were three Sarah Palins, including Ed's wife, Georgia (Ed came as Todd Palin, so, she gets extra points for accessorizing), and Sparrow, who was such a dead-on Palin that I came close to breaking my no pictures of people on the blog rule, because, holy freakin' wow. I will break said rule, though, and show you Tyler's costume:

Yeah, low risk rule-breaking on that one, I know. It was a darn good time, though.

What else...the "disciplinary action" for invading my own privacy turned out to be a verbal warning. The very rude woman who emailed me initially and thought my "altering my record" by making sure my meds were up to date was such a heinous misuse of my access had cc'd her boss on the email. Who was much more reasonable. He and I had a nice sidebar in which he assured me that the actions I'd taken to give myself permission to view my own record were sufficient. Although I wonder if she heard about that, because in the email that followed all of this she ended it with this line: "Please do not contact me or Mr. Boss about this again."

Okay, so my initial reply to all this "disciplinary action" nonsense was rather scathing. In that incensed, over-intellectualized, sesquipedalian manner that I have (don't bother looking it up. It's a big word that describes the habit of using big words). Dude, whatever. It was MY chart.

The dimwit who cut herself on Wednesday actually did need a psych consult, by the way. It turned out to be a heck of a slash job. I had a similar "oh, I CANNOT believe they're calling us about this one!" consult on Thursday night ("This girl overdosed three days ago, although she's denying suicidality now, can you come see her?") which had a similar feel to it - I figured I'd give her the crisis service card and be done with it; instead, I talked to her for an hour and a half. I had the time, so...

Thursday night actually turned out to be the roughest, which may in part have been because I spent a reasonable portion of the evening wrangling a sick Ruthie ("Go to bed!" "No, I have to see this patient!" "No you don't, that's what the night float person is for, go to bed!" "Noooo!"). We did, however, get possibly the dumbest consult I've gotten, from the ortho service, on a guy who happened to be a State Hospital patient. Who, incidentally, was doing really, really well - a little demented, but, who isn't at his age? - until he fell and broke his hip while playing basketball. They called us, and were like, "Can you take him on your service?" Ruthie actually laughed at him. She was like, sure, if you want us to screw up all that work you did in the OR. We, uh, don't exactly take care of a lot of post-op hips on the psych wards. Not to mention, he was doing really, really well from a psych perspective. But, you know, by his very nature as a psych patient - scary.

::sigh::

Friday itself was an amusing day. I hung around at work until, like, noonish. I chatted with Karla, she and I talked politics with Matt and Kevin (both of whom are close to being "right-wing nutjobs," as Matt describes it). But they're both really intelligent guys and I like to talk politics with intelligent people who can stay rational and explain their differing points of view. Kevin, to my woe, actually voted for McCain. Because, you know, Obama isn't really "qualified" enough (He's over 35. He's an American citizen. That's all the "qualification" you need in this country. As for whether or not he'll be an effective leader - that's an innate quality. I suspect that his intelligence and practicality and perspective, not to mention that he will likely do a fine job filling his cabinet with good people, will serve him just fine. Indeed, the fact that he's not as steeped in Washington politics may well be an advantage. But I digress). Matt, on the other hand, made solid choices most of the way around, but did let me down just a little by voting for Liddy Dole. Who, you know, I used to support, back when she was head of the Red Cross and early in her stint as NC senator. But, wow, has she been a disappointment, particularly lately (If you haven't read about the ridiculous and libelous mudslinging she's been doing against opponent Kay Hagan, click here. It's completely disgusting).

I then wandered back towards my office to get my day planner, and got assaulted in the hallway with a needle by my friend John. Okay, fine, so it was a flu shot. No, literally, he was wandering the halls of our department giving people flu shots. And a darn fine job he did of it, too. I almost always insist on getting mine in my hip, since the OB nurses in med school taught me that hurts a lot less, but in the middle of the hallway? Not so much. But it was pretty painless. What can I say? The man's good with an IM.

I managed to stay up until almost 9pm Friday, which has also helped with the schedule reversal. My weekend's been pretty lazy, which has been rather nice, frankly, because I'm still really tired. But I haven't been totally useless. I made it to the Whole Foods yesterday. Jonagold apples - my very favorite up north - are in season, although down here they aren't quite the same. But that didn't stop me from buying a whole bag of them.

Wonder why they're chilling out in my laundry basket? Here's my sink, at the time:

Yeah. It looks better now, but I've since found at least another sinkful of dishes I missed. It was a long and delirious week.

Today I went out and shot ninety-some-odd environmentals at State Hospital. I'll put some of those up soon, but they need to be tweaked a little. The sun was a little too strong, so the lighting is off, and the fall colors weren't as good as I was hoping. I might wander down the road to Chatham county this week, see what I can find. I stopped at Target on the way home, because they had some really good deals in their ad this week. Including - finally - I got a new iPod. Now, it's not yet a real replacement for the one that's dying, it's just a little iPod shuffle. But it was, like, $40, they finally had it in pink, and look how cute and tiny it is!!

It holds like 200 songs and will be more than enough for my "commute" to work. I also got a new flash drive to replace the one Little Maxine used as a chew toy the last time she was over. It was $12 and holds two gigabytes. Remember when having a 1G hard drive was HUGE? Huge!!! Now, you can get twice that for the price of lunch and it's smaller than my pinkie.

So, that's the story, folks. Oh, and I still haven't picked out my next knitting project. Suggestions from the peanut gallery?