So early in the morning, and yet still so late at night.

I finally get to go to the station. Two hours left of my shift. And 0
hrs of sleep so far.

I guess this one never got sent

The kids are feeling photogenic tonight.

My other kitty

I am in Heaven!

I don't even remember how I came across this. I rarely ever get on the Amazon website anymore. It has proven too dangerous for my checking account. Hello, my name is Liz, and I am a bookaholic. But somehow, providence guided my mouse clicks to exactly where they needed to go, and I stumbled across the Kindle. As a child, when I was first learning about computers, I wished they had one that had all of the books in the world on it, that I could read whenever I wished. Then, in college when I got my first PDA, I wished I could put a book on it and take it with me. But then it was impractical. Now it is reality. I will have one. As soon as I have a spare $400. But hey, I don't have a car payment anymore, and my credit card is paid off. So feel free to buy me Amazon gift cards for birthdays (anyone's), graduations, christmas, hanukkah, and kwanza. And I will fill my soon-to-be-my-very-own Kindle with books galore. This is yet again proof that God really does love me. And I never have to worry about whether so-and-so particular book will fit into my purse. They all will. All of them at once.

Oh, and my job interview at BUMC went well, and I got a call today for a second interview with the HR department for next Thursday. Hey, if I can charm my initial interviewers, then I can charm the HR guy or lady into a good pay rate. ;) So my birthday party will also be a Yay I Got A New Job party.

I have managed to keep up with my email lately. I bought an iPhone. It's the best phone ever. It does everything I need except acting as a portable modem, but I can live without that because my iPhone does everything that I would want to do on my computer. Yay. And I finally have my desktop set up with wireless internet access. I no longer have any excuses to not update my blog. There you go. Lets see if I can do it.

A position finally came open at Baylor Dallas, and I interviewed yesterday evening for that ER tech position. They said that the HR lady that I have been conversing with a lot lately, Lisa, will be getting in touch with my by the end of the week. Hopefully it will be a good offer. No one at Careflite, except Marty and Molly, know that I interviewed yesterday, so as not to jinx myself. I might be working nights, and I think that would be cool. I have a blackout shade for my bedroom window that I bought from IKEA, so I can sleep during the day. And I would go to the gym in the morning after getting off work. Of course, it would mess up my ability to hang out with Rachael and Joey, especially now that summer is coming up. Well, I think either way I will be happy. I liked working nights before when I was at Medstar. It had it's advantages.

I had a doctors appointment yesterday. I have been seeing Dr Stevens' nurse practitioner, Mindy for the last couple of appointments. I like her a lot. She explains things better and discusses things more with me. We decided to check all of my labs that have been abnormal in the past, to see if any of them have corrected. We discussed what meds I might have to stop or start again, depending on the test results. Then I mentioned that mostly I was concerned with my potential for weight loss. Dr Stevens had told me that once my thyroid hormone was corrected, I would just start losing weight, but all that has happened is a weight gain of 20 lbs since they started treating me. Mindy told me about this diet that has been studied and evaluated by multiple doctors, that they (Fibro and Fatigue of Dallas) have been not only placing patients on but have been using amongst themselves. It is called the hCG diet. HCG is the hormone that women's uteruses release during pregnancy; the hormone that pregnancy tests detect. She told me to go home and research it, and I talked to one of their nurses who used the diet. In this diet, you take hCG either orally, or through a cream that you rub on your wrists, and you follow an ultra low calorie diet (ULCD), approximately 500 calories/day. The hCG activates your body to use fat stores for energy, and the ULCD prevents the fat cells from immediately filling back up. But the hCG also prevents hunger and cravings, and improves mood and stress from not eating anything. You can only be on the diet for 45 days at a time, then must be off of it for at least 45 days. The nurse I talked to said that she lost 34 lbs in 45 days. The average weight loss is 1-2 lbs per day. From what I have read about the diet, no side effects have been found. They want to put me on this diet as soon as my thyroid hormone is at the level it needs to be. How about them cookies?

I know why I can't stand Hillary

Hillary reminds me of my mom. The way she looks; they way her cheeks are too big and end unnatually too far down her face; the way she talks; the way you can't trust anything she says. It all reeks of my mom. I realized that today when I was watching all of my Tivoed programs about the primary election from last night. I am glad Hillary won Texas and Ohio, because that means that we are in for some Democrat priamary fun. I would have gone and voted for her too just to make it harder for Obama to win if I hadn't been working yesterday and sick with the flu all through early voting.

I have a new partner at work. His name is Marty. He's a county boy, a firefighter-EMT, very confident, always smiling, usually very pleasant, easy to talk to. No one else at work likes working with him, and I can't imagine why. I think they think he's cocky. But transfer EMTs are a different breed from 911 EMTs, and he and I are the latter kind. We had our third shift yesterday. We got a few hours of sleep, then we got a call around 4am that we finished around 5:30. Since we were going home a little while after that, we decided to just go get breakfast at IHOP. We had a great conversation about religion and salvation and the afterlife, just sharing our differing religious views with interest. It was a great conversation. I was kinda sad it had to end. And the other sad thing is that he is expecting to be offered a job at a fire department soon, so he will be leaving me soon anyways. I just finished my application to be an ER tech in the Baylor system, so hopefully I will be leaving soon too.

Well, I said I would start blogging again. There you go.

Angry all the time

I have been feeling such anger over the last few days. First, my anger at my mom has been rekindled by some of her recent behaviors. And now, I am incredibly angry at my partner, Aimee. Anger is so exhausting, and it drains me, but it is also a great motivator to get changes made and fix problems.

My mom has been creating drama in her own life continuously since I started having a relationship with her again, and I feel like she is using me as a weapon against Jerry. She has also been completely making up problems and telling them to me to get sympathy. For example, last weekend, I had to get the starter on my car replaced, and my mom had to drive me to work on Saturday and help me drop off my car at the shop. When my car was ready, I gave the mechanic my credit card info over the phone, and my mom and Jerry were supposed to go pick up the car for me since I was at work. Well, my mom complained to me that Jerry was not cooperating and refused to make time in his schedule to help, and then she could not find anyone of her friends to help her get the car. And, of course, this was Jerry's fault. I had a very long talk over things with Jerry, and he said that he offered several times to help my mom get my car, and to try to work with both of their busy schedules that day, but nothing was good enough for her, so she refused any further help from him. My mom also admitted to me that she did not even ask any of her friends to help her get my car. She only asked Jerry then complained that no one in the world would help her. Therefore, she gets to make Jerry look bad, and she gets to be the victim. Also that same night that she told me that, she also made a comment about how she and Rachael were never going to have a friendly relationship. I told her, again, that that was completely up to her, and that it was HER job to foster a friendly relationship with her daughter. My mom continuously refuses to admit her role in the bad relationship, her responsibility for hurting Rachael, and the legitimacy of Rachael's feelings. All she wants to do is blame Rachael for hating her and not immediately forgiving her for years of emotional and some physical abuse. Now, I find out that my mom is using me as weapon for hurting Jerry. She sent him an email yesterday claiming that he had hurt me greatly my not helping her get my car and making me do it myself (not true), and that if he did not want to consider me and Mitch as his children anymore, then she was going to make Scott move out of her house (He is living with Mitch in the old house). So my mom is trying to hurt Jerry and is inventing reasons to be a victim. Jerry in reality is trying to leave her alone, so she has to create things in her brain to convince herself that Jerry is a villain. It makes her feel better. But if one thing really gets me it's the victim mentality.

Now, I have to deal with all this crap with Aimee at work. I guess tensions have been building up for a while. I don't exactly know what her complaints are with me, but I have had complaints of my own. I have been frustrated for weeks over how much of a control-freak she is, how hyper-critical she is, and that she treats me like I am an incompetent idiot at times (granted it's not always). Aimee is an EMT-basic, and she is an FTO (she trains new employees), so we very often have new-employee third-riders on our truck. There are two sets of keys to the truck, and three people. She always gets a set of keys (and she HAS to have the set with the remote on it) and the new-hire gets a set of keys. I don't get one until the new-hire goes home, even though she is everywhere that the new-hire is and they ride in front or back together so she can keep an eye on him. That would frequently leave me locked out of the truck. After several shifts of this, I found an occasion when she wasn't there, and I went to Wal-mart to get a copy of the cab key made. I can't get a copy of the box key made, but at least now I'm not locked out of the cab. I also am not allowed to have any role in teaching the new-hires how to do their jobs. If I say anything of training value to them, she immediately says something to undermine what I just said. And she is constantly reprimanding me for doing my job, because she thinks that the new-hire should have done it. But I am not allowed to train them, so when I see them NOT doing something that needs to be done, and it is traditionally my job, I do it. And then I get in trouble. But Aimee does the exact same thing. So it's ok to do it when she does it, but not when I do it. Anything is ok if it is Aimee's idea, but when it's my idea, it is a hassle or she finds some reason why it was wrong. For instance, we frequently stop for food on our way to a call, since we are always on our way to a call and we need to eat sometime. So, when Aimee says it's ok, we actually go inside a restaurant and sit down to eat while we are "enroute" to a call. This can take up to 45 minutes at times. Well, one night at about 2 am, I was starving and getting sick to my stomach. I hadn't eaten in over 10 hours, and I wanted to stop at a Taco Bell just down the street from the hospital where we were picking up our patient. There was a long line at the drive thru, so it took about 15 minutes to get my food. It was not her idea to stop, so she bitched about it the whole time. She kept saying, "this is taking a long time, can't you eat after we run this call?" "I really hate delaying our enroute time." "You know how much I hate taking forever to run these calls." And on and on. And yet, when she is on the phone with one of her kids or her husband, she sees no problem with sitting outside a hospital where we are picking up a patient talking on the phone for 20-25 minutes while I am waiting to go upstairs and start doing my paper work and pick up my patient. So it's ok when she wants to do it, but not when I want to do it. All of this has been annoying me since I started working with her, but I don't say anything, because that's just the way she is, and I want to keep the peace. I know I can be controlling at times, so I try not to fault her for it. I generally can get over this stuff. But last night we had an incident. We didn't do anything until 11am, when we had a false call for a neonate transport. We got posted in various locations then got sent on another neonate call. Aimee wanted our trainee to drive so I was in back for this neonate transport, and I wrote the chart for it since I had nothing else to do. Linda (trainee) wrote the charts for the next two calls and I drove. She and Aimee were in back the whole time, even when we weren't on a call. When we got our third call, it was from a residence so it was automatically a paramedic level call making it my call and my decision who runs the call. From the description I though it sounded very benign so I thought it would be good for Linda to do the initial assessment- it wouldn't be anything over her head. But I was tired of driving, my eyes hurt, I was sleepy, and I was bored, so I planned on still riding the call into the hospital. We went into the house, I started the chart while Linda assessed this lady's knee and got vitals. I collected all the pt information and got the story of what happened from the woman running the group home. So I asked Linda what her assessment was of the pt, and Aimee said, "I'll ask her that. I can take this call" basically telling me that she was now running this call because it did not require ALS care. Whatever, so I was driving again. Aimee didn't even let Linda run the call, although it would have been good experience. So after the call, at the hospital, I got in the back, and when they came out of the ER Aimee asked "who's driving?" I said, "Not me. I need a break from driving for a bit." Instead of asking why or what was going on, she started yelling at me. "Oh, so now you can't run calls AND you won't drive! I've been training Linda all day and you haven't done anything, and now you can't drive either!" So I got defensive and shot back that I had been working; I had been driving continuously for 6 hours with no one to talk to or keep me awake, and I didn't say that I wasn't going to drive anymore, I was just asking for a break. I had taken a call, even though it was "only" a neonate call, and SHE was the one who decided that she was taking that last call after I had already started writing the paperwork for it. She pulled out of the hospital (which she claimed she knew how to get to and tried to give me directions to when I was driving) then she started screaming at me "Liz! Are you going to tell me how to get out of here since you can't do your job and drive! Linda, you aren't supposed to have to drive after you run a call so don't ever let any partner treat you like that." So I yelled back the directions to get to the highway, thinking she had already turned onto the street, and she interrupted me yelling back, "Just tell me which way to turn!" And she is the one who knows everything and talked down to me because I didn't know how to get to this hospital and she did. Well apparently she knows how to get to it but not how to get out of it. Or else she was just being pissy at me because she wanted to ride in back and talk on the phone and I beat her to it. And all I did was turn the lights of and rest my eyes, just as I intended.

But I am so tired of it. I don't let my mom yell at me; I certainly am not going to let her yell at me. Especially not because I needed a break from driving because my eyes hurt and I was falling asleep. I am not her child and I am not her subordinate, and yet that is how she treats me. We had one fight before that I started because I didn't like how she treated me, and she apologized later. This time there was no apology from her. We had to run two more calls after this incident before we got to go back to the station, and she tried to make small talk as if nothing had happened. I just did my job exactly as I always do, and I didn't talk to her unless it was necessary. I gave her the cold shoulder. I think she expected me to just go on as if nothing happened, forgive her by pretending it didn't happen. I won't. And I won't do it next shift either. The only way I am going to get this to stop is to just have it out with her. I am under no obligation to forgive her without her asking me to. And I'm sure she'll come up with some complaints on me too, so we just need to get it all out. But oh it pisses me off just thinking about it. I know what to do with my mom: I'm going to write her a letter, make it as nice as I can, but be truthful, and be there when she reads it so my thoughts and arguments are clear and concise, but then we can discuss it if she wants or she can disown me again if she wants. But with Aimee, the same thing won't work. I don't quite know how it's going to go down. But I hate it.

sorry so verbose, but you know me.