we are colour people.

yup, we're in our new house and our internet is finally hooked up. but no phone yet. we're busy trying to settle in, yet not too much since we're still in the process of painting all the walls. our bathroom is "steel wool". our bedroom is "moroccan sands" and will get some "chocolate fondue" yet. ryan finished the last coat of "garnish" in the kitchen and then the living room will be "relish". eventually, the office will "ocean breeze" or something like it.... that's the most descriptive i'm gonna get right now - you'll have to figure out the real colours yourself until i have some more time to post some pictures. haha! i had a 12-hour shift today and it's time for bed now to be ready for another one tomorrow. after tomorrow, i just have 3 night shifts left in my senoir practicum and then i'm DONE!!!!

We moved into our new house! Our internet isn't hooked up yet so I'm typing this on the wii & mooching off someone's internet connection. more to come

i could hardly sleep last night....

today we are doing a walk-though of our house and signing papers!! crazy! they say it should all be ready by this afternoon. we've been peeking in the windows lately and the progress has been amazingly fast these last few weeks. this is what it looked like 2 days ago. so i guess they were going to do all the siding yesterday?? i guess i'll find out this afternoon.
i'm glad ryan went inside the other day and saw our kitchen. we ordered black appliances, and we erroneously assumed that they would think to put in a black hood over the range. not so. i guess the hood is installed by the builders, not the appliance company. that would have looked just lovely, all black appliances, dark countertops, light wood cabinets and then - WHITE range hood. (but my fantastic hubby made a ton of phone calls yesterday and got it all cleared up.)

i'm working for the next 4 days, so this whole moving thing is crazy. but we have our appartment until july 15, so we can move in slowly. with this amazing weather we've been having, we've been enjoying the pool at our apartment. anyone want to come over and splash around a bit?

working nights

we have windows! we have doors! we have insulation and drywall! unfortunately, the doors are locked, so i guess we can't go inside anymore to check out the progress. and of course i forgot to take pictures of the outside of the house with the windows in place. we're supposed to be able to move in on july 1, and it seems that everything is still on track.

i'm about half way through my practicum and it's still going well. i'm still learning a lot of new stuff every single day (or night) so it's pretty tiring. i don't mind the 12-hour shifts that much and working nights isn't all that bad. on my ward, it gets really quiet at night, when, ideally, the patients are sleeping. the quiet part balances out the tough part of working nights.... the day before your night shift starts is shot because you have to nap in the afternoon in anticipation of not getting a decent sleep in the next 3 days. after a night shift, you sleep during the day, but inevitably wake up around noon, hungry for lunch, even though you snacked all night and you're still so tired you just want to get back to bad. after a light lunch, you go back to bed, and hopefully get a few more hours of sleep before your next shift. and the day you get off nights is shot because you sleep for about 6 hours during the day. and then you go to sleep again at night because 6 hours really isn't enough and since it's night time you're supposed to sleep. the next day (which is today) is weird because you're still kind of tired, but you're not sure that you're supposed to be tired anymore so you try to make plans, but you really don't feel like doing anything so you sit at your computer and blog about it.

gee, i didn't know we had any pets....

i was sitting at the computer earlier today and i noticed movement out of the corner of my eye. i turned. there was a cat. it was walking down the hallway in our apartment.

we don't have a cat.

earlier in the week we had received notice that they would be replacing the carpet in the main hallways (but not in our suites), so they would need to open our doors. this was odd enough, since the carpet looked fine to me, but our 30 year old kitchen appliances still weren't replaced like they promised when we first moved in. earlier today, they had unlocked and opened our door - of course, they did this without knocking first. next thing i know there's a cat curiously exploring our little suite.

then i realized that our door was still propped open, even though the workers were working loudly somewhere upstairs. everyone else's doors and the doors to the stairwells were wide open too. okay so the cat belonged to a neighbour, but i had NO idea whose. so... i just let it be. it went back into the hallway and i shut the door.

sometime later, i heard the neighbour across the hall. i went out and asked if they had a cat and yes, they did and he was pretty upset to come home and find his door wide open, no workers around, and his cat missing. okay, so it was theirs! had i known, i would have put the cat back and closed their door.

later yet, as in 5 hours after they first opened our doors, i hear someone trying to open the door again. i guess coming back to finish the job. so i went and opened it for him. he mumbled something and i told him that i wasn't too impressed that they would just leave my apartment open like that all day. whatever. i'm glad i was home at least, on my one little day off. what a weird day off.

rolling along smoothly....

i can relax now for a few days. i have 6 days off, which will be absolutely wonderful. before you start thinking that i'm all so lucky, just know that i worked 104 hours in under 2 weeks. did i mention that i'm not getting paid? yeah... a paycheck... i've heard of those things. they sound nice. and i'm told that i'll eventually be getting those for the work i do. now THAT will be a glorious day.

anyways, my senior practicum is going really, really well. WAY better than any of my clinicals. i'm up to about a 50% patient load (50% of the load that a nurse on my ward has), and i'm thinking that i'm ready for more. perhaps not more patients, but maybe more complicated ones. or maybe i need to be doing more "thinking", not just "doing". more thinking like a nurse. what does his blood work tell me? why would her condition cause her feet to be so swollen? why exactly is he on that med? etc.

i'm getting some good practice starting IVs. i wouldn't say that i'm getting good at it, but i've got a few in. the last one i did went really quickly and without a hitch (my nursey friends - you know how good that feels!). it was kinda fun.

in other news, our roof is on our house, our stairs are in, and even the bathtub is in! so exciting!

quick update

i survived my first week of practicum. it went really well, despite the fact that it was 3 12-hour night shifts. i'm back on days tomorrow. i've already learned a lot and had a few adventures. one night, I went to the ER to help out with resuscitating a patient. it's not like on the sensationalized tv shows where it's so crazy that everyone has to shout to each other just to hear anything and it's all chaos. it was calm and organized and we were all prepped on the patient before the ambulance even arrived. someone has to chart every single thing that happens and the exact time it happened, and that fell to me. this was very interesting and at first i wasn't sure if it was a good idea for me to be the one since i didn't know everything that was going on - but i was surprised that i knew as much as i did. anyways, the team was really great and would tell me anything that i had missed. and i felt comfortable asking for clarifications. it was a good experience for me, since i'll be in the ER for my last 6 weeks of practicum.


our house is coming along really quickly now. the basement is poured, the walls are up and if you look closely in the window, you can even see our shower/bathtub in the bathroom. haha! we are SO EXCITED! we bought the house so long ago now, that it had already come to a point where we were wondering if it was actually going to happen or not. we said to each other, "hey, remember that time that we bought that house? yeah... that was fun. good times...." but now i think that it might just be finished one day and then it will be ours!! sometimes i feel so materialistic when i think about all the new things i'm going to have in 2 short months from now - new washer, new dryer, new stove, new carpet, new paint, new fridge, new countertops.... etc. etc. i can't wait!