IF YOU SING IN THE SHOWER,

Please do not take offense…

WHO SINGS IN THE SHOWER? Thankfully, I’ve never been in a house with someone who is taking a shower and singing…I think it is TV commercial hype…this was on my mind this morning while showering…. when I take a shower I either have ping pong thoughts or I’ve been known to condition before I shampoo because I’m totally thinking about something else and not paying any attention to what I”m doing.  In fact, there is no where I can go where I get better thinkin’ done. 

I’ve heard the debate several times about one partner having an extramarital affair and the decision whether or not to tell the spouse to clear the conscience becomes a mind exploding, hand ringing decision. Does it do any good to tell the spouse?

Do you owe someone an apology if you speak negatively about them…or if you have spent many years speaking negatively about someone that you actually know nothing about?  Does it matter whether or not they know you have been dissing them?  Does talking about someone behind their back just scream insecurity?

Until next time…

Every day is a learning experience.
My biggest learning curve seems to be listening to my own lip service and act accordingly.
Roll with it.
If it is really important to you, speak up.
If it really is not important to you, deal with it personally and move on.
Ban the negativity from your mind and daily life. 
You are what you think.
Give things as much mental attention as they deserve and not an ounce more.
You can’t make bad drama good.
If it is not worth saying, don’t say it;
if you don’t care what someone else thinks…don’t ask.
Be kind, be gentle, don’t judge and don’t believe everything you hear

Until next time….

Sometimes validation is all you need.  You can believe the way you think you are believe-in…but every now and then we all take a step back and wonder if we are skewed one way or the other…that the filter we use may need a cleaning…and that is where validation out of left field can make you say hmmmmm…so I’m not the only one…

I really have an issue with yes people.  Vulgarity warning.  Those people who would not say shit if they had a mouth full.  You know who they are.  They ride on the coat-tails of others agreeing with everything thing they say…ya.  Everyone knows who they are….and so do they!

Then there are the clueless and I will lump these folks together with the “What are they thinkin” folks.  Totally clueless about who they are, how other people see them, why they are always victims…yes.  The clueless..at first you feel sorry for them and then you just avoid them and feel contempt.

I feel better getting that out!

Until next time…..

Something to analyze…thank goodness…I’d almost run out of issues!

I shared a communications class with the Colfax and Mingo EMS last night.  It was a blast.  I’m never nervous to speak to a group when my topic is something I believe in.  EMS and marching band so far…Too bad I didn’t know this 45 years ago, I might have chosen another career…say standup comic…or rabblerouzer/lobbyist.

Found a new doctor today.  I received a letter from the clinic of my former doctor, whom I adored, saying she was leaving the clinic…I assume they didn’t share her future plans because they didn’t want to lose clinic clients.  I had my first appointment today at a branch of the clinic closer to home.  So far so good…I was starting to get pent up sitting in the room for 30 minutes but the minute she walked in the door, I knew it was going to be worth it.  Damn, I came close to walking out.

Physical therapy scheduled for my back..blood pressure pill change due to different health insurance.  The old one had no generic…she said the difference is like a
Red Delicious and a Washington apple.  She seems very thorough too…maybe this is just the Mercy Hospital Clinic way…I love their overall approach to my health and my appointment rather than in and out with a pill for what is ailing me at the moment.

I have two more days off…my intention is to not leave the house.  I love these blessed escapes from reality..just me and the critters and him. 

May order new cell phones…think we are going to go with galaxy III and not Iphones?  just the way I’m leaning.  If you have one or the other and have an opinion, I’m all ears.  Probably going with Verizon instead of US Cellular too…I know someone has to have an opinion.

Until next time…..

I have a story to tell you

Make no mistake…this is not a happy story…  The multitudes who are not associated with the emergency field simply have no idea…somewhere there is a place we go to download stuff no one should ever have to see or know about.  This is the story of one call on a Saturday afternoon that is now in my psyche and will roam around in there for years to come.  It was a single car fatal traffic accident…it’s one of those calls that we get from only a couple of people so we don’t get that immediate adrenalin rush..in fact, I really thought it was going to be one of those typical Iowa winter calls with a car in the ditch…especially when the 2nd reporter advised it was in the ditch upside down in the creek and looked like it had been there awhile.  Unfortunately the deputy arriving on scene found that there was someone inside..it didn’t really matter at this point how long it had been there.  Put yourself in the place of the deputy who rolls up on the scene, the volunteer ambulance service (our neighbors and friends) who roll up…the paramedics….. and the wrecker driver who generally has to just deal with hookin’ and towin’.  So…now we have a couple handfulls of folks who are seeing things that no one should have to see and this gruesomeness has to go somewhere.

My partner and I now had the plate number of the vehicle (which was out of state) and the owner’s name..because of experience, we began the task of digging to find information for notifications and identification, etc.  We now know that somewhere there is a family whose life is about to turn tragic and they don’t know it.

We turned to Facebook.  There he is….and there was a picture of the car that matched the license plate check.  At this point, my partner says..yup this is probably him..hopefully some dirt bag stole his car and it just hasn’t been reported yet.

Nope.

Our victim was recently married, recently became a father, was in the military and had just come home around the 27th of December.  The thing that about brought me to my knees was his post on the 27th saying not to miss loving and hugging the “shit” out of your family over the holidays because family is everything.

Ref my blog the other day about the importance of the social media and reading that your Great Aunt Matilda had died and sending good karmic vibes to your family.

I’m sending good karmic vibes to his family. 

I hope the other emergency crews have an emotional outlet…this isn’t the first and it won’t be the last…God have mercy on us!

Until next time…..

During the Algebra year of math, I had a teacher named Mr Gritton…he was a crazy perverted bastard.  He threw kids against the wall, dumped them in trash cans, picked pencils off the floor in order to look up girl’s skirts…on my Facebook friend’s page for junior high and high school, there are still kids talking about how horrible he was..and the worst part…I couldn’t get algebra because he was such a horrible teacher.  I will never forgive him and I’m sure there are a lot of people who feel the same as I do.  I hope he is burning and spinning as we speak!

Belle E Button is finally making her way out of the basement on her own.  She comes up and sits by the basement door in the kitchen and hisses…she’s eating big kitty food with her brothers …. she continues to hiss but they look at her like I look at people who have a perpetual bad attitude.  She’s cuddling with us on the davenport while we watch TV.  I’m lovin’ it.

I’m seeing all of these pictures of friends and family in Hawaii, Cancun and Florida.  It is killing me.  I’m trying to build up some time off for Baby Callaghan but everyday, I check flights and hotel rates and decide to make a decision tomorrow.  That may get me thru but I sincerely doubt it.  He is not any help at all…when I bring up a destination, he always says…well, you know I”m game.

It’s time to work…it’s a cold, windy Saturday…hopefully it will keep everyone in bed and away from their phones!!!!!!!

Until next time….

Stay with me here….

Don’t get pissed and click on the deadly red X. in the top right corner.  I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of days and am now going to attempt to put it into words.  First and foremost…Katy is a teacher.  A teacher of deaf students.  This is a total passion she has followed.  She earned her bachelors at Kent State University; then, went on to earn her Masters..she is an advocate for the deaf and hard of hearing and has become involved in several societal organizations to enhance the life of deaf people.  She received an unaffordable education all the while saying this is what she wanted to do and she was going to go for it.  She makes a typical beginning teacher’s salary although she did get a bump after earning her graduate degree.  Apparently and obviously, she is willing to be a teacher…a specialized teacher…. whether or not her pay is good.  She is following her passion. She is enveloped in personal satisfaction and I hope to God she doesn’t burn out one of these days and raise holy hell because she is so lowly paid for the job she has done….but regardless, I say…IT IS NOT FAIR>

One of my very best friends was a teacher.  He taught life skills and band to his students.  He was an incredible teacher of his high school age students and his high school age student’s parents.  He, like Katy, was following his passion and would have continued some form of teaching regardless of his pay.  What took him were the politics of our sick society and lymphoma. 

When I was growing up, my teachers, in general, were worthless.  That’s the way I felt then and the way I feel now.  Sure…there were a couple of teachers who had passion and wanted me to learn something..but for the most part, I learned to read and write and spell and at one point, knew my grammar.  But I had a totally lame educational upbringing.  I used to wonder how teachers thought they had it so bad.  Goodness.  They worked 9 months out of the year what did they have to complain about?

I’m torn by my belief that good teachers….really good teachers…are going to be really good teachers no matter what they are paid.  Truly bad teachers are going to be paid exactly the same and be truly bad teachers.  Merit pay…in theory in a perfect world..absolutely, but determined by student scores…No..I don’t think so…determined by the administrator…no…absolutely NOT…I believe most merit pay is based on the sucking up factor rather than the job done.  It happens all of the time…

Teachers are the people hired to teach our children the fundamentals…Parents are still needed to raise the children.  Do we pay teachers a liveable wage and glow when they exceed expectation and ignore when they are bad teachers?  Isn’t that what we, as a society, do anyway.  We have an expectation of those receiving high salaries to do high level work for their pay…so is this a money issue or a societal expectation and acceptance issue.

Until next time….

This HAS to be one of the cutest pet pictures EVER!  Bennie curls up around Marly every night during prime time.  Mainly he curls up in that little space between his front legs and his chin…seriously…they are so close to the same color that unless you notice Marly has a strange new lump, you don’t even know Benny is there….They are both sound asleep in this picture 🙂

“sound asleep” what exactly does that mean?

He is off to work…I seem to be in mundane, non-disciplined nearly comatose mood the last two days.  I must accomplish something today or I’ll go back to work tomorrow irritated because I will still have the things from last week hanging over my head.  But first…I see Ed Hicks has passed me in Angry Birds Friends tournament.  It’s Ed Hicks fault if I don’t accomplish anything today…….

Until next time….


It’s a boy…I’m going to have a grandson.  While I’ve always thought we should have tried for one more child so he could possible have a boy, I knew that in reality, I couldn’t afford another girl!  Then I always really thought that the natural conception selection…say that three times fast…knew that my body probably wasn’t able to carry a boy *tongue in cheek.  So when I found out that Jenny was having a male child, I was rather speechless…I’ve not been around that many male babies…Oh..goodness…how do you raise them.  And then with the help of Kimba…I realized just how ignorant that sounded.  Regardless of the sex, this child is going to be amazing!

I did my winter bug/flea bomb treatment of the house this morning.  I send the cats out to the garage…I thought it would be like an amusement park for them with new things to crawl on and under, new smells, lots of boxes.  Someone looking in the window would have thought I beat them!  These are not your normal cats.  Then I gave them their quarterly Frontline treatment.  The human cuts open the little plastic dispenser and squeezes it on their back between their shoulder blades…I might as well have used a needle and syringe.  At this point, they see me coming and take off running.

I ate boxed, generic mac and cheese for lunch…you know the boxed kind with the little tiny mac and the powdered cheese.  It barely gets better than this!

……hahaha….and I’m gonna be a gramma.

Until next time….