"Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.”
-Boris Pasternak
Wow I just won a travel package for two worth $5500.00 and the travel agent mentioned if I didn't like the destination I could change it to where ever I wanted to go.
To think an hour ago I was having a really crappy day now my biggest decisions are where, when, who (I'm single)and finding someone to take care of my cat!
Monday, December 01, 2008
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
I’m Perplexed
“Sometimes I'm confused by what I think is really obvious. But what I think is really obvious obviously isn't obvious...”
--Michael Stipe
Inundated each day of late with news of economic doom and gloom I find myself in the rather odd position that rather than feel the fear that I am sure some legitimately feel all I find myself experiencing is a sense of confusion.
So rather than wonder if I’m going to have a job next week I find myself asking:
1)If about 20 months ago when the price oil first hit 50 dollars a barrel why no one complained and in fact were more or less jumping for joy but now that it is once again at the same level everyone is complaining?
2)I ask myself that since at least up here (Canada) we have yet to have even a single quarter of negative economic growth how can people be saying we’re in a recession?
3)I ask why is it that the media constantly brays about how bad things are yet in each of the last 2 months at least up here (Canada) they have also had to grudgingly admit that the economy created 10 times more jobs than expected and that retail sales despite all the doom and gloom increased at near record levels with car sales leading the way.
4)Why is it that certain countries so dedicated to “free markets principles” can’t or is it won’t allow those same “free market principles” to do exactly what they should be doing to those companies who in the face of the staggering greed, incompetence, poor management and planning are now facing especially when “free market principles” dictate that what is happening is exactly what should be happening.
Keep in mind that I am not for a moment suggesting that a recession hasn’t happened in some countries or that it can’t or won’t happen up here, I merely observing that at least for the moment it hasn’t up here.
So while it may not be my place to say this, but let’s try to keep the panic to a minimum at least for now.
--Michael Stipe
Inundated each day of late with news of economic doom and gloom I find myself in the rather odd position that rather than feel the fear that I am sure some legitimately feel all I find myself experiencing is a sense of confusion.
So rather than wonder if I’m going to have a job next week I find myself asking:
1)If about 20 months ago when the price oil first hit 50 dollars a barrel why no one complained and in fact were more or less jumping for joy but now that it is once again at the same level everyone is complaining?
2)I ask myself that since at least up here (Canada) we have yet to have even a single quarter of negative economic growth how can people be saying we’re in a recession?
3)I ask why is it that the media constantly brays about how bad things are yet in each of the last 2 months at least up here (Canada) they have also had to grudgingly admit that the economy created 10 times more jobs than expected and that retail sales despite all the doom and gloom increased at near record levels with car sales leading the way.
4)Why is it that certain countries so dedicated to “free markets principles” can’t or is it won’t allow those same “free market principles” to do exactly what they should be doing to those companies who in the face of the staggering greed, incompetence, poor management and planning are now facing especially when “free market principles” dictate that what is happening is exactly what should be happening.
Keep in mind that I am not for a moment suggesting that a recession hasn’t happened in some countries or that it can’t or won’t happen up here, I merely observing that at least for the moment it hasn’t up here.
So while it may not be my place to say this, but let’s try to keep the panic to a minimum at least for now.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
The Perfect Gift
“The excellence of a gift lies in its appropriateness rather than in its value”
-Charles Dudley Warner
A tradition in our society is that when we have a friend or loved one in hospital we bring them a gift. A little something to let the person know that they’re being thought of, that their missed, or as a means of encouraging them to get well quick. Also to some it’s a tradition to give the staff directly caring for someone a little token of esteem to say thanks for taking such good care of my loved one or perhaps more to the point: “thanks for putting up with their crap” (both figuratively and literally as the case may be).
It’s such a tradition in fact, that regardless of which motivation prevails for most people that hospitals as a rule have taken the time to set up gift shops usually run by volunteers that are almost always conveniently located near the main entrance of just about every hospital I have ever walked into. Jammed packed with the old standbys of flowers and candy at prices that would make most airports shop keepers jealous they may be the one thing that allows a hospital to be profitable.
But sadly this tradition like any great idea will sooner or later be used in a situation where perhaps it shouldn't be.
Enter the hospital I’m working in!
It seems the food and nutrition department has decided it needs to expand its usual offerings in one of its smaller cafeterias by adding gift cards.
Yup! Gift cards!
Not just any gift cards mind you! Gift cards that let you buy food from the very same cafeteria you bought the card in!
Now I don’t want to offend the hard working people in my hospitals food and nutrition department (yes Shaun I’m talking to you) but one has to wonder what the thinking is here.
It could be as simple as someone’s being creative and trying to cash in on the aforementioned proven gift giving trend at hospitals to generate more revenue for the department. Good thinking I suppose especially when one considers the distinct possibility that if the powers that be try to raise the prices still another time on what is being passed off as food at the hospital, there could be riot.
But I got to say that if I’m a patient recovering from an illness and have just started to get my appetite back the last thing I want is a gift card that allows me to get still more the Soylent Green on those nightmare trays so gleefully provided three times a day. Hell I’d rather eat army food again! Give me road kill! The ass meat out of a dead skunk! Anything but that!
Worse is the potential impact these cards could have if they are used by families as thank you to hard working nurses especially when one considers that most nurses myself included can’t let a free meal pass. Gorged with sandwiches made from the hoofs and beaks remaining from the animals of what healthy people from the outside world get to eat I can hear the sick calls coming in now!
Nurse: I got a gift card I can’t come in tonight
Boss: Oh my god you should know better! PLEASE get well soon!
In the end I am left with three questions:
1)If used as gifts to the staff are these cards a thank you or f$&k you?
2)If I’m a patient do I have to believe that nothing says I love you like a gift card from the hospital cafeteria?
3)As staff could we consider one of these cards and occupational hazard and if so can we claim disability if we get sick from one of them?
-Charles Dudley Warner
A tradition in our society is that when we have a friend or loved one in hospital we bring them a gift. A little something to let the person know that they’re being thought of, that their missed, or as a means of encouraging them to get well quick. Also to some it’s a tradition to give the staff directly caring for someone a little token of esteem to say thanks for taking such good care of my loved one or perhaps more to the point: “thanks for putting up with their crap” (both figuratively and literally as the case may be).
It’s such a tradition in fact, that regardless of which motivation prevails for most people that hospitals as a rule have taken the time to set up gift shops usually run by volunteers that are almost always conveniently located near the main entrance of just about every hospital I have ever walked into. Jammed packed with the old standbys of flowers and candy at prices that would make most airports shop keepers jealous they may be the one thing that allows a hospital to be profitable.
But sadly this tradition like any great idea will sooner or later be used in a situation where perhaps it shouldn't be.
Enter the hospital I’m working in!
It seems the food and nutrition department has decided it needs to expand its usual offerings in one of its smaller cafeterias by adding gift cards.
Yup! Gift cards!
Not just any gift cards mind you! Gift cards that let you buy food from the very same cafeteria you bought the card in!
Now I don’t want to offend the hard working people in my hospitals food and nutrition department (yes Shaun I’m talking to you) but one has to wonder what the thinking is here.
It could be as simple as someone’s being creative and trying to cash in on the aforementioned proven gift giving trend at hospitals to generate more revenue for the department. Good thinking I suppose especially when one considers the distinct possibility that if the powers that be try to raise the prices still another time on what is being passed off as food at the hospital, there could be riot.
But I got to say that if I’m a patient recovering from an illness and have just started to get my appetite back the last thing I want is a gift card that allows me to get still more the Soylent Green on those nightmare trays so gleefully provided three times a day. Hell I’d rather eat army food again! Give me road kill! The ass meat out of a dead skunk! Anything but that!
Worse is the potential impact these cards could have if they are used by families as thank you to hard working nurses especially when one considers that most nurses myself included can’t let a free meal pass. Gorged with sandwiches made from the hoofs and beaks remaining from the animals of what healthy people from the outside world get to eat I can hear the sick calls coming in now!
Nurse: I got a gift card I can’t come in tonight
Boss: Oh my god you should know better! PLEASE get well soon!
In the end I am left with three questions:
1)If used as gifts to the staff are these cards a thank you or f$&k you?
2)If I’m a patient do I have to believe that nothing says I love you like a gift card from the hospital cafeteria?
3)As staff could we consider one of these cards and occupational hazard and if so can we claim disability if we get sick from one of them?
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
A time of remembrance!
“In war,there are no unwounded soldiers”
-José Narosky
This was sent to me last week via email and given that Remembrance Day is upon us I thought it appropriate to post. I understand that this article was written by one Kevin Myers and it originally appeared in the Sunday Telegraph in 2002. Despite the time that has passed since its debut I think it does as well today as it did than!
For those in uniform both past, present and future my blessings and prayers.
A Salute to a Brave and Modest Nation
LONDON - Until the deaths last week of four Canadian soldiers accidentally killed by a U.S. warplane in Afghanistan, probably almost no one outside their home country had been aware that Canadian troops were deployed in the region. And as always, Canada will now bury its dead, just as the rest of the world as always will forget its sacrifice, just as it always forgets nearly everything Canada ever does.
It seems that Canada's historic mission is to come to the selfless aid both of its friends and of complete strangers, and then, once the crisis is over, to be well and truly ignored. Canada is the perpetual wallflower that stands on the edge of the hall, waiting for someone to come and ask her for a dance. A fire breaks out, she risks life and limb to rescue her fellow dance-goers, and suffers serious injuries. But when the hall is repaired and the dancing resumes, there is Canada, the wallflower still, while those she once helped glamorously cavort across the floor, blithely neglecting her yet again.
That is the price Canada pays for sharing the North American continent with the United States, and for being a selfless friend of Britain in two global conflicts. For much of the 20th century, Canada was torn in two different directions: It seemed to be a part of the old world, yet had an address in the new one, and that divided identity ensured that it never fully got the gratitude it deserved.
Yet its purely voluntary contribution to the cause of freedom in two world wars was perhaps the greatest of any democracy. Almost 10% of Canada's entire population of seven million people served in the armed forces during the First World War, and nearly 60,000 died. The great Allied victories of 1918 were spearheaded by Canadian troops, perhaps the most capable soldiers in the entire British order of battle.
Canada was repaid for its enormous sacrifice by downright neglect, its unique contribution to victory being absorbed into the popular memory as somehow or other the work of the "British." The Second World War provided a re-run. The Canadian navy began the war with a half dozen vessels, and ended up policing nearly half of the Atlantic against U-boat attack.
More than 120 Canadian warships participated in the Normandy landings, during which 15,000 Canadian soldiers went ashore on D-Day alone. Canada finished the war with the third-largest navy and the fourth-largest air force in the world.
The world thanked Canada with the same sublime indifference as it had the previous time. Canadian participation in the war was acknowledged in film only if it was necessary to give an American actor a part in a campaign in which the United States had clearly not participated -- a touching scrupulousness which, of course, Hollywood has since abandoned, as it has any notion of a separate Canadian identity.
So it is a general rule that actors and filmmakers arriving in Hollywood keep their nationality -- unless, that is, they are Canadian. Thus Mary Pickford, Walter Huston, Donald Sutherland, Michael J. Fox, William Shatner, Norman Jewison, David Cronenberg and Dan Aykroyd have in the popular perception become American, and Christopher Plummer, British. It is as if, in the very act of becoming famous, a Canadian ceases to be Canadian, unless she is Margaret Atwood, who is as unshakably Canadian as a moose, or Celine Dion, for whom Canada has proved quite unable to find any takers.
Moreover, Canada is every bit as querulously alert to the achievements of its sons and daughters as the rest of the world is completely unaware of them. The Canadians proudly say of themselves -- and are unheard by anyone else -- that 1% of the world's population has provided 10% of the world's peacekeeping forces. Canadian soldiers in the past half century have been the greatest peacekeepers on Earth -- in 39 missions on UN mandates, and six on non-UN peacekeeping duties, from Vietnam to East Timor, from Sinai to Bosnia.
Yet the only foreign engagement that has entered the popular non-Canadian imagination was the sorry affair in Somalia, in which out-of-control paratroopers murdered two Somali infiltrators. Their regiment was then disbanded in disgrace -- a uniquely Canadian act of self-abasement for which, naturally, the Canadians received no international credit.
So who today in the United States knows about the stoic and selfless friendship its northern neighbour has given it in Afghanistan?
Rather like Cyrano de Bergerac, Canada repeatedly does honourable things for honourable motives, but instead of being thanked for it, it remains something of a figure of fun.
It is the Canadian way, for which Canadians should be proud, yet such honour comes at a high cost.
This week, four more grieving Canadian families knew that cost all too tragically well.
-José Narosky
This was sent to me last week via email and given that Remembrance Day is upon us I thought it appropriate to post. I understand that this article was written by one Kevin Myers and it originally appeared in the Sunday Telegraph in 2002. Despite the time that has passed since its debut I think it does as well today as it did than!
For those in uniform both past, present and future my blessings and prayers.
A Salute to a Brave and Modest Nation
LONDON - Until the deaths last week of four Canadian soldiers accidentally killed by a U.S. warplane in Afghanistan, probably almost no one outside their home country had been aware that Canadian troops were deployed in the region. And as always, Canada will now bury its dead, just as the rest of the world as always will forget its sacrifice, just as it always forgets nearly everything Canada ever does.
It seems that Canada's historic mission is to come to the selfless aid both of its friends and of complete strangers, and then, once the crisis is over, to be well and truly ignored. Canada is the perpetual wallflower that stands on the edge of the hall, waiting for someone to come and ask her for a dance. A fire breaks out, she risks life and limb to rescue her fellow dance-goers, and suffers serious injuries. But when the hall is repaired and the dancing resumes, there is Canada, the wallflower still, while those she once helped glamorously cavort across the floor, blithely neglecting her yet again.
That is the price Canada pays for sharing the North American continent with the United States, and for being a selfless friend of Britain in two global conflicts. For much of the 20th century, Canada was torn in two different directions: It seemed to be a part of the old world, yet had an address in the new one, and that divided identity ensured that it never fully got the gratitude it deserved.
Yet its purely voluntary contribution to the cause of freedom in two world wars was perhaps the greatest of any democracy. Almost 10% of Canada's entire population of seven million people served in the armed forces during the First World War, and nearly 60,000 died. The great Allied victories of 1918 were spearheaded by Canadian troops, perhaps the most capable soldiers in the entire British order of battle.
Canada was repaid for its enormous sacrifice by downright neglect, its unique contribution to victory being absorbed into the popular memory as somehow or other the work of the "British." The Second World War provided a re-run. The Canadian navy began the war with a half dozen vessels, and ended up policing nearly half of the Atlantic against U-boat attack.
More than 120 Canadian warships participated in the Normandy landings, during which 15,000 Canadian soldiers went ashore on D-Day alone. Canada finished the war with the third-largest navy and the fourth-largest air force in the world.
The world thanked Canada with the same sublime indifference as it had the previous time. Canadian participation in the war was acknowledged in film only if it was necessary to give an American actor a part in a campaign in which the United States had clearly not participated -- a touching scrupulousness which, of course, Hollywood has since abandoned, as it has any notion of a separate Canadian identity.
So it is a general rule that actors and filmmakers arriving in Hollywood keep their nationality -- unless, that is, they are Canadian. Thus Mary Pickford, Walter Huston, Donald Sutherland, Michael J. Fox, William Shatner, Norman Jewison, David Cronenberg and Dan Aykroyd have in the popular perception become American, and Christopher Plummer, British. It is as if, in the very act of becoming famous, a Canadian ceases to be Canadian, unless she is Margaret Atwood, who is as unshakably Canadian as a moose, or Celine Dion, for whom Canada has proved quite unable to find any takers.
Moreover, Canada is every bit as querulously alert to the achievements of its sons and daughters as the rest of the world is completely unaware of them. The Canadians proudly say of themselves -- and are unheard by anyone else -- that 1% of the world's population has provided 10% of the world's peacekeeping forces. Canadian soldiers in the past half century have been the greatest peacekeepers on Earth -- in 39 missions on UN mandates, and six on non-UN peacekeeping duties, from Vietnam to East Timor, from Sinai to Bosnia.
Yet the only foreign engagement that has entered the popular non-Canadian imagination was the sorry affair in Somalia, in which out-of-control paratroopers murdered two Somali infiltrators. Their regiment was then disbanded in disgrace -- a uniquely Canadian act of self-abasement for which, naturally, the Canadians received no international credit.
So who today in the United States knows about the stoic and selfless friendship its northern neighbour has given it in Afghanistan?
Rather like Cyrano de Bergerac, Canada repeatedly does honourable things for honourable motives, but instead of being thanked for it, it remains something of a figure of fun.
It is the Canadian way, for which Canadians should be proud, yet such honour comes at a high cost.
This week, four more grieving Canadian families knew that cost all too tragically well.
Monday, November 03, 2008
Just once!
“You should set goals beyond your reach so you always have something to live for”
-Ted Turner
If I had a goal for what it would take to make my career as a nurse complete it would be to just for once when someone shows up at emergency claiming their meds where lost or stolen that it would be for a medication other than narcotics!
Is that too much to ask for?
“Excuse me, can you help me? Someone stole either my suitcase or purse and it had my lasix and metoprolol in it and I need some replacements to tide me over”
In the end though I suspect that the chances of that happening would be the same as one of patients who does show up because they’re medications have been “lost” or “stolen” admitting what their real problem is.
-Ted Turner
If I had a goal for what it would take to make my career as a nurse complete it would be to just for once when someone shows up at emergency claiming their meds where lost or stolen that it would be for a medication other than narcotics!
Is that too much to ask for?
“Excuse me, can you help me? Someone stole either my suitcase or purse and it had my lasix and metoprolol in it and I need some replacements to tide me over”
In the end though I suspect that the chances of that happening would be the same as one of patients who does show up because they’re medications have been “lost” or “stolen” admitting what their real problem is.
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