"Life's Just a Cocktail Party on the Street.."

Whatever the situation, whatever the race or creed,
Tea knows no segregation, no class nor pedigree
It knows no motivations, no sect or organisation,
It knows no one religion,
Nor political belief.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3rxNCzzJpY



Embedding is disabled for some reason. ?

Heading to St. Pete tomorrow for Mike Dixon's 50th Birthday. How fitting that it should be at Skipper's, which is where I first met Mike a couple of years ago at a Cracker concert. :) We've since attended several other concerts together.. but it's been a while since we last saw each other. I'm looking forward to the festivities. (and some beer-boiled scrimps!!)

We're planning our route to also incorporate some geocaching and.... I'm thinking about hitting the Dali Museum again just because I love it so much. We'll see how things pan out. Too bad we're not there tonight. The Museum is hosting "S'Real Friday Happy Hour" every week this summer where you can view the summer exhibits, hear live jazz, eat complimentary munchies, and purchase hand-rolled cigars. And oh yeah, there's a cash bar. Sounds like my kind of outing. :)

But a hands-down definite for Saturday night after Mike's shindig.... The Tampa Fun-Lan Drive-In Movie Theater!! Rawr!! Inglorious Basterds followed by Peter Jackson's District 9.

Awww yeah.

My Thursday... 08.27.09

8:12- Arrive at work to find pediatric case with anesthesia just starting in my assigned room, which is the size of a closet. There is no room to move anywhere. Room contains two anesthesia carts, our nurse, our nurse trainee, an anesthetist and her attending doctor, my tray full of sterile instruments, the portable ultrasound unit, an IV pole, myself, my attending, one regular garbage can, two biohazard trash receptacles and two dirty linen depositories. Extension cords are trailing everywhere.

8:15- I don my superstar lead skirt and vest and scrub in to case, wearing sterile gown and gloves so that I can assist my attending physician. My patient is 14 years old and has just been diagnosed with cancer. We are placing a portacath so that she can begin receiving chemotherapy next week. She is plump and rosy-cheeked and quite adorable.

(My own son turns 14 in 2 months.)

Fastforward to 11:30AM- Next patient is mid-60s. There's a problem with the chemo portacath, but we sort it out without having to do anything invasive. SCORE!

2:00PM- 4yo. on her 3rd liver transplant. Again with anesthesia in a tiny, tiny room. So much equipment, so many people, SO LITTLE ROOM to move around. 3rd LIVER TRANSPLANT on a 4 year old and our evaluation shows that the third liver is not taking well.

I seriously wonder if I'm in the right profession.

9:22PM- There's a certain irony in the fact that I regularly drink myself into oblivion so that I can go to work the next day and work on tiny livers on their 2nd, 3rd, or 4th go-rounds...

But then again it's really no wonder at all that this is difficult.

And then I return home in the evenings to my wonderful family cheerfully inquiring how my day went.

"Fine," I say.

Because how could I possibly explain? And why would I want to bring them down?

So I guess I'm semi-quasi-explaining it here instead. If you can't handle it, stop reading.

8 Count

from my bed
I watch
3 birds
on a telephone
wire.
one flies
off.
then
another.
one is left,
then
it too
is gone.
my typewriter is a
tombstone
still.
and I am
reduced to bird
watching.
just thought I'd
let you
know,
fucker.

Charles Bukowski

It sure looks like SUMMER! Check out what some of my friends have been up to.



*Click the image to go to Flickr where beneath the mosaic each image has a link back to the photographer's original post.

**ETA: Oops. I guess next time I need to do a 5x5 grid so I don't squish the last column! ;)

We shared a house with some friends and went scalloping last weekend at Steinhatchee, FL. It was tres fab! I loved the little drive over to the coast, the place we stayed, the day on the boat, and the evening's meal of "Scallops Diablo". It's great to get away for a day or two like that with friends when you can. It really helps to "re-rack" one's general outlook. It sure did mine anyway!

I took a lot of really killer photos if you want to check them out @ my Flickr page.

And, of course, we geocached on the drive home. :p Yes, I know. The geocaching is getting entirely out of control. haha! But we love it!

So anyway... to TOTALLY change the subject...

I've been thinking a whole lot lately about the state of online social expression. It seems (for me) it's becoming more and more fractured. Several years ago I blogged at LiveJournal. I spent about 5 years there and really enjoyed it. Then I discovered Mog and subsequently Multiply. I loved the interface at Multiply so much (and still do) that I left LiveJournal behind and started blogging exclusively at Multiply. A lot of the interaction at Multiply was music-related for me, so I created a Blogger account for strict blogging. Then I signed up at lastfm for more music, and now I have Facebook and Twitter accounts too. I also joined some photography groups at Flickr and there's a lot of interaction there. Oh, and I created an account at FriendFeed also, to check it out except I keep forgetting to go to it to look around.

Where does it all end?! Obviously I'm stretched so thinly at this point that I can't keep up thoroughly ANYwhere and a lot of my friends are in similar situations. I've noticed that many of them have started sync'ing their posts across platforms so that what they post at Twitter also shows up on Facebook or what they post on Blogger shows up on Multiply and they post a link to the same material on Facebook, etc., etc. I've never been a fan of that because if you're following that person in multiple places it sure gets old seeing the same thing posted 14x at various locations. I actually make an effort to try to keep my content DIFFERENT at each site, but I'm beginning to wonder why. I mean... it's got to be a fairly small percentage of people who follow me at multiple sites... so what difference does it really make?

I know the obvious solution here seems to be to pick one platform and stick to it, however, the problem with that is that I have different clusters of friends/family using several different sites and I would really like to keep in touch with them all.

This is driving me batty! How do YOU do it?