Vacation, Work Grind, Vegetation (not the green kind)

Alex and I went on our first bike camping trip of the year last weekend. On Thursday, I packed up all our camping gear, a couple of changes of undies, warm clothes, and a toothbrush, and loaded it all on Marge (my trusty 8 speed mixte). When Alex got home, he did the same. On Friday, we took the Amtrak  train to Mt. Vernon, then rode our bikes out to the Anacortes Ferry Terminal. We've either biked or driven this route many, many times, and biking it is by far the better deal. Most of the riding is off the highway, through Skagit Valley farm country and then along the water into Anacortes. There are plenty of places to stop and snack on Skagit Valley berries and berry products (namely, strawberry ice cream). From a car, you see a blur of green and brown brush on post-industrial, semi-vacant lots. You see a lot of land yachts, fast food, and gas stations. From bikes, you see winding country roads with wild daisies and sweet pea, a creepy abandoned circus, and a very dramatic oil refinery (for fueling all those awful RV's). Part of the ride is actually over a bridge through a marine preserve, where birds are constantly dropping shellfish on the trail to crack their shells. And that's just the utilitarian part of the ride! The real experience starts on the island. Also, driving onto a San Juan Island ferry is a) very expensive (about $60 for our Yaaaaris-say it like a pirate!), and b) a very iffy proposition time-wise. In May, we sat in the ferry terminal for 3.5 hours waiting to drive onto an Orcas Island ferry. And we got there three hours early, making a total of 6.5 hrs in ferry time. On bikes, we rolled into the terminal 15 minutes before the boat left, paid $15 each person, and rolled out bikes right on. No muss, no fuss. Even though we got rained on, it was still a much better experience than driving.

On the ferry, we drank a couple of Red Hook ESB's, read the NYT, chatted, and took in the beautiful view of water and islands. It's about a 40 minute ride out to Lopez Island, on a route wending it's way through the narrowgreen and blue channels of the San Juans.




On arrival in Lopez (or on any island) it's best to pull off the side of the road after you get off the ferry and let the cars go past first. All ferry terminals (except Shaw) have a steep, long climb out and it sucks to be honked at or buzzed for hosing up traffic. So we pulled over and ate some 'yogurt' covered raisins. Delicious, but I doubt that sweet, chocolatey coating has any relation to yogurt. But you know, it says yogurt on the package, so I can chalk it into the healthy food category, right?

The ride from the ferry terminal to Spencer Spit State Park is surreally beautiful. The air smells like sea and pine baked in the sun, the shoulders of the roads draped in wildflowers. There are neon green fields, robin's egg blue sky, and lots of quirky mailboxes. There were hawks hunting the green fields, and one flew down just a few feet above us, close enough to startle me. What there is not a lot of is cars. We were politely passed by just three on our 14 mile ride to the park. The route isn't flat, but is rolling enough to be exciting (all that speeding down!) without being exhausting. After a beer on the ferry, I was glad not to exert myself too much. This is a vacation after all. Though it had been raining in Anacortes, just a few miles away, it was sunny and warm on Lopez, which gets just 13-23 inches of rain a year, making it a fairly safe bet for spring and early summer camping.

Spencer Spit is a historical homestead site that sits on a spit jutting out into the Lopez Sound. There are about 5 campsites right on the beach, and several more discretely tucked into the woods above, including one hike-biker site on the beach and six in the woods. The hiker-biker sites are non-reservable, first come first serve, and cost only $10 per night. At most state parks the hiker biker site is one large camp site with a central, shared picnic and fire pit area. At Spencer Spit, they are very private, individual sites, with a shared picnic table and fire pit. We had the entire hiker biker area to ourselves the first night, and were joined the second night by a couple who was touring from Port Angeles all the way up to BC. They were so quiet and shy, or else exhausted, that if we hadn't happened to see them roll down the dirt road toward the back of the camp, we would never have known they were there. Overall, in fact, the park is very quiet and peaceful, in sharp contrast to many state parks that feature blasting car stereos, the roaring engines of RV's, and packs of screaming children.

After finding our site in the woods (the one on the beach having been snatched up by an earlier arriving bicyclist), we went about making it cozy. One of the many beauties of bike camping is that setting up camp takes a grand total of maybe 15 minutes. You just can't bring all that much stuff with you, so all there is to set up is the tent. You throw your pad and sleeping bag in, and maybe fire up the camp stove for some afternoon coffee. After that, the day is yours. Alex settled into the tent for a nap, and I meandered down to the beach to breathe the fresh, salty air. I wrote in my journal and ended up taking an accidental nap on a huge, white driftwood log in the sun. The log had a wide, smooth groove that I felt swaddled in, with the sun warm on my face and the breeze blowing over me. It was an excellent nap. I was awoken by a very happy golden retriever out for a walk.

That night, we warmed up a pouch of paneer curry and made some 5 minute brown rice. It was deliciously warm and spicy, and hit the spot in the way that food does when you've had exercise and fresh air all day. We sat around by the campfire and talked, about nothing much in particular, just enjoying each other's company. We let the fire burn until just a little after it got fully dark, which wasn't until about 10. Then we retired to our tent, and slept very well thank you very much.

The next morning, I hurled myself out of bed at 0829 to sprint down to the ranger office and pay before they closed for the day, since the ranger that came around and gently scolded us for not paying the night before said the rangers station would only be open from 08-0830. I got up to the little shack breathless and dissheveled and happily blurted out to the ranger, "Whew! Made it just in time!" He looked at me with a very confused face, and when I told him my understanding of the hours he chuckled and said he staffed the booth until 9:30. I think that other ranger pulled one over on me.

A couple of locals on the ferry had tipped us off that the farmer's market in Lopez Village was this morning, so after a hot oatmeal breakfast and coffee, we pedaled off into town. The ride was easy and the farmer's market was lovely. It was a real farmer's market, with the actual farmers and their goods, not tons of useless junk for tourists. We bought ingredients for hobo stew, and incredible spicy pork tacos from Adios Tacos for lunch. It started raining, so we pedaled over to Isabel's Coffee for some Americanos and newspaper reading, and eavesdropping on local gossip. After an hour or so, the rain slackened to a drizzle and we set off to circumnavigate the island by bike, which is a total of about a 30 mile ride over rolling hills, with a few steeper climbs. The views were just as fantastic as the ride on the previous day, green fields, old farm houses, and sheep scattered about. We stopped for a hike out to Shark Reef Preserve, and snacked on salmon berries, explored tide pools, and watched boats getting pushed through the channel by currents to fierce that most of the boats were making good time and not even running their engines. Later in the ride, we stopped at a tiny general store and got oranges and nuts for snacks, which we ate leaning on the bike rack outside.

Back at camp, we walked down to the beach with the fancy beer we had picked up at the store, and watched a lovely sunset over the sound and islands.  That evening, we settled in around the fire with our hobo stew, and more curry, and stayed up late hanging out with each other.

The next morning, we slept in, then walked down to the beach with our coffee. Then we packed up and headed back to the ferry, then reversed our ride to Mount Vernon, caught the Amtrak home, and schlepped our bikes up Yesler street home.

I went to work on Monday, and it was a rude push back into the real world. The families I was working with were absolutely lovely, but there was a real lack of team work with the providers and it ended up with me being so frustrated I actually teared up in the OR. Also, I worked 14.5 hrs, instead of 12.



Yesterday, my first of two days off, all I did was make a hair appointment and consume a lot of refined carbohydrates. Today, I vow to do better. And I have! I've eaten reasonable things and written on this blog, so accomplishments can already be checked off. I still have to do about a bajillion other things, including exercising so that I don't lose my mind, and cleaning the raw, rotting fish fillet out of the fridge. But, I'm off to a better start.













 Miscellaneous other pictures from Lopez

Ch-ch-ch-changes.

That's right! It's been over a year since I posted anything. Here I am, starting again for essentially the same reasons I started again in 2013: to make myself practice real writing, and to make my life worth reading about.

Last time I wrote I said that my writing life had degenerated into chart notes. At this point, chart notes don't really register for me anymore, but I spend an inordinate amount of time on to-do lists. I think that to-do lists are really almost as good as a real journal. I write them in my journal, actually. Looking back at the lists of yesteryear reminds me what my priorities were back then, what was on my mind, and what I still have not freakin' done! But, I digress.

An update is on order. It feels like my lens on the world has a new filter on it since I last wrote. My Dad died of ALS on Christmas Day, 2013. It still feels very surreal to write that. I was expecting his death for so long, and I am still shocked that he died. ALS is universally fatal, so when he was diagnosed in May of 2011, you would think that I would have started expecting him to die. But it was a very gradual change in thinking. At first, there was just no way that he could die. My Dad was a superhero, after all. He was super strong and super smart and super loving. He loved me since the moment I was born, refusing to leave my side when the nurses took me away to the nursery. He loved me in a way that was so powerful, so unconditional, that I don't expect to ever feel that kind of love again. But, over the course of his getting sicker, I did start to expect his death, in a way. In his last six months of life, he would have breathing crises periodically that were so bad that each one seemed at the time like it could be the thing that killed him. In August he was hospitalized with several pulmonary emboli, which can be fatal to people without pre-exitsting respiratory compromise. But he survived all of that. So, when he really was dying, even in the last hours when he had decided he was going to die,  there was still a grain of doubt. We had been down this road before, and made it through alive, so would that last day really be the end? It was. He died on Christmas at about 7pm. I will always, always remember those last hours with him. He was his truest and best self. He really had nothing left to lose, and he was the kind of person who, in that case, just let all his love hang out. He told us that he had only ever given us drops of love, but that he had oceans of love for us. Imagine: all that love that I felt from him, my whole life, and it was just a glimmer of what was there. Maybe I'll understand how that's possible when I'm a parent. I miss him. I learned so much from him, and I learned so much from his dying too. It's all precious.

I spent a lot of time in 2013 in Tennessee and flying back and forth, and being in Seattle wishing I was in Tennessee (agonizing, really, over not being there), and being in Tennessee worrying about my life in Seattle. It was hard on my marriage, and I worried about my job. In retrospect, my job is great and all but in the face of being with my dad in his last months, my job can go jump off a cliff. The irony here is that my dad was a nurse, and he never called in sick. In fact, one of the few times I can remember him not going to work was when he was a patient on his own unit (an ICU). So I think it freaked out me and him both a little, that I was taking FMLA and not going to work. Although I'm still very dedicated to my job-and I love it-being forced to take time off to participate in the huge moments of my own life was a growth experience in itself. I think I came away with a more nuanced view on the trite phrase 'work-life balance.' It's not so much a balance of two equal but opposite weights. It's more like a weaving, back and forth, of threads of my identity.

I still work at the same hospital. I still love the patients, and I keep enjoying and respecting my co-workers more and more, too. Today we had a major 'bed dystocia' on postpartum, so I had a chill day just taking care of one mother-baby couplet on L&D for 8 hrs. In my time since I've started I feel like I've had some bad, bad things happen and at the time I hated it, but in retrospect, I feel like I've become a little bit seasoned. One of the gifts of working in a high risk facility is that I see rare things that I might not otherwise see until year 30 of my nursing career somewhere else. So, 3 years in and God knows what's to come!

Bringing this up to the present:

Yesterday I went canoeing with a friend from work. Every time we hang out we have some unexpected adventure, and I LOVE IT. Our very first time hanging out we went on an epic bike adventure to Canada. We laughed, she cried, we soaked in rain and hot tubs and bummed a ride and changed a flat and generally had a freaking blast. The second time we hung out, we stayed out drinking at a very cool, secret feeling bar until WAY past my bedtime. I was planning to stay until about 7pm, and I looked up at one point and realized it was almost midnight! My abs hurt from laughing so much the next day, and I also learned that I am far from the only L&D nurse who has some food phobias resulting from her job. Scrambled eggs smell like amniotic fluid and it makes me want to gag. Other nurses are hung up on raw meat, correlations not to be mentioned here on this innocent blog.

So yesterday: I rode my bike out to a mall where we ate approximately 30 dumplings between us. Then, we drove over to the university boat rental place, where you can rent a canoe, sail boat or rowboat for $7 a day. As we were launching our canoe, Bekah's keys fell in the water. We puzzled over what to do for a second before Bekah borrowed a fish net from the office. After about 20 min of poking around in the duckweed and silt with the fishnet: no keys. That's when the real fun started! I got to jump right into Lake Washington and dig around with my toes, like some sort of terribly orchestrated archeological dig. Found: a lot of cheap beer cans. I got it on good authority that canoeing at universities is also known as caboozing. Other things I found: a pair of hip sunglasses with leaches on them, lots of sticks, a dead fish, and the KEYS! Honestly, the rest of the canoeing was very beautiful, magical even. But it wouldn't have been as fun without getting to jump in!

Back in the saddle!

I went to finally post a new post on my old blog today, and it's been so long that I have no idea what my log in is! Oh well. Time to start fresh. I am starting blogging again for a couple of reasons. First and foremost I always hope that by sharing bits of my life with all you good people (whoever the intertubes send here) I will be inspired to make my life more worth sharing. Second, I am really losing my writing skills (as you may be able to tell). Mostly what I write these days is something along the lines of "Pt in tub. Vocalizing with ctxs. Requesting epidural. Anesthesia MD notified." Not exactly enthralling. Really, there's very little room for pizazz with charting...

Perhaps a very quick update on my life is in order. Last I wrote, in March of 2011, I was in my last semester of nursing school. Then shit got real. Real job, real patients, real crazy. This is probably part of why I stopped writing, actually. I graduated and got my dream job on a high risk OB unit at an academic hospital. It is still my dream job, but it is way harder than I could have possibly imagined. In my first weeks I kept catching myself saying things to patients like, "I don't know, let me get the nurse." It has gotten easier in some ways. I certainly feel more confident in the routine patient care part (if there is such a thing as 'routine care' in a place where you're as likely as not to be taking care of a Class F diabetic with endocarditis who's having quads-I'm only barely exaggerating). Now I am starting to focus more on how I can contribute to the larger unit, not just care for my individual patients. It's a new challenge. I am not particularly good at playing politics or even, truth be told, working on teams. I suck at following beureucratic procedures. So that is where I personally need to grow. This year, I am hoping to be much more involved in our unit Local Practice Council, which does rad work on improving procedures, work flow, and nurse education. I would love more drills, a reinvigorated new grad/new OB nurse orientation and mentorship program, and maybe even to do a little baby research project myself.

In my home life, things have also changed. Hubs and I were the last people to move out of the beloved Brick House Collective. Four of the original six housemates moved to Canada! Baby Bird's family is living the dream in BC, and just welcomed a second little bird! Baby bird herself is now 5 years old (!!!) and in kindergarten, which she hates. Why? I asked her that too, and she pointed her little finger and stomped her little foot and said "Because you just do what you're told, do what you're told, do what you're told!" I think that about sums that issue up!  Ben started an ice cream business making the absolute most incredible ice cream EVER to cross my lips. Cognac ice cream people. Seriously. And you can buy it off a freezer on the back of a custom bike.

So, Hubs and I moved to a new neighborhood, near downtown. We have a little one bedroom apartment that we pay an outrageous amount of rent on. Stubby lives on. The move to an apartment was perfectly timed with his old age and senility setting in. Hubs works a lot as a director at a non-profit serving veterans.

One last bit of update that will likely factor large into this blog: I got a new bike in August! My red Schwinn 21 speed got stolen from in front of the hospital in my first week as a new grad nurse. Whoever stole it literally snatched away my best coping skill-jerks! Fortunately, a kind friend loaned me a cute bike named Frenchie for an entire year, until I was in financial shape to buy the bike of my freaking dreams! Her name is Marge. She is a baby blue Public mixte, internally geared 8 speed. This makes me sound like I know more about bikes than I actually do. All I really know is this: she's gorgeous, she's great for Seattle hills, my chain never has and will never fall off, and I can ride in skirts without giving anyone an eyeful (of cellulite). I will doubtlessly be posting many pictures of her, and from my rides on her. I ride to work almost every day, and one of my goals is to start riding home-the uphill part of the commute-in the mornings. Sunrise, sunset!

In very recent news, Hubs and I went on our best EVER Valentines Day date. We saw the Atomic Bombshells Burlesque at the Triple Door. It was amazing. I didn't realize ahead of time that they actually got down to pasties and g-strings-oo la la! The costumes (when they were on) were outrageous, the music was fabulous, the dancing was quite skilled. I never would have guessed that going to, essentially, a strip show with my hubs would have been so fun! I really wish I had gotten my picture taken with them. Also, I wish I had bought a rhinestone g string and some pasties to match. Next time! After the show we got dessert and more alcohol at Il Bistro under the market. So romantic. I  had a total of  two vodka martinis and a glass of champagne, which I have been feeling the effects of all day.