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Aww I have the best boyfriend! He went to my apartment while I was at work and left a dozen long stem roses for me on my kitchen table with a really sweet Christmas card and The Beach Boys' Little Saint Nick playing on repeat. I can't stop smiling about it. I love that boy :) 12*20*07 I seem to be going a little nuts with the Christmas shopping. It doesn't help that for everything I buy one person, I buy at least one thing for myself. I hope I still have money in my bank account! I'm scared to look. Patrick and I are taking a ferry to New Jersey Saturday afternoon and staying until Christmas night. I'm not entirely sure what we'll do the whole time we're there, but I have some things in mind. Mostly I just hope to visit a few friends I haven't seen in a while. Patrick will finally meet my infamous brother on Christmas. Hopefully all goes well. My mom seems really stressed out with work. She's still really struggling to make ends meet and has to work all the time. We're not really exchanging Christmas gifts this year because of that (her request), but I'm still going to get her a little something. I've been eating like a cow lately. All the doctors we work with keep sending treats to us and I seem to have no will power around this time of year. I'm looking forward to walking vigorously on the boardwalk when I get to Jersey in an attempt to make up for my gluttonous ways. I swear I'll be good after New Year's! Speaking of which, I think Patrick and Brook are going to have a party at their place this year. It will be a nice change. I have a feeling we're not getting Christmas bonuses this year. That really pisses me off. Hopefully I'm wrong. I'll see in another week I guess. We just hired three new people, so I suppose that won't help with the bonus situation. However, a lack of a bonus might inspire me to move ahead with requesting a raise in the amount we receive per donor. Patrick is visiting me at work tomorrow. My newer co-workers will finally get to meet the man behind the myth...whatever that means. I can't thrill him with eyeballs though because I did that last time he visited. Perhaps the new flat screen tv in the conference room will do the trick. Stay tuned. 12*17*07 I cannot wait for this week to be over. I started today off with a donor in Southampton which is over a two-hour drive away. I was not pleased. Not to mention traffic this time of year is atrocious. When will tourists learn that driving into Manhattan is never a good idea?! Take the train damn you! Anyway, I suppose the only good thing about work today was that I had my donor at the beginning of my shift and didn't have to work late because of that. Patrick got his flat screen TV Friday night. Once he got his HD cable box hooked up on Saturday the picture looked gorgeous. We kept watching the dumbest stuff just because it was HD. Saturday morning I went to the library to look at their selection of travel guide books. Afterwards I pretty much finished up my Christmas shopping. Saturday night Patrick and I went to a friend's party for which I made three batches of my aforementioned brownies. They were a big hit even though they weren't pot brownies (I was asked a few times). I'm starting to feel older now that I'm making baked goods to bring to parties...and because I found my first gray hair today :( So Patrick and I are planning another trip for his spring break. I'm jumping the gun as usual and obsessing over details. Our tentative plan is to fly to Seattle to visit Patrick's friend, then rent a car and drive down to San Diego with stops in Portland and San Francisco. Hopefully we'll have time to visit some National Parks as well. I'm really excited about it. Actually I'm mostly just tired right now. I think I'll take a nap. 12*13*07 We had our holiday party at work today. For the most part our parties are pretty lame and I skipped out on it last year. But this year I attended since it was during work. They had some karaoke game and as soon as most people left the room, about 4 or 5 us stayed for about an hour just going through the song choices and singing really loud and obnoxiously. And all this without liquor! So I actually ended up having fun. Plus I made my now famous brownies which people said were the best yet. I can't really take the credit since I just use Duncan Hines's Double Fudge recipe/ingredients in a box. But I'd like to think I have some extra special touch in making them because of all the rave reviews I keep getting. I think I'm officially out of shows to watch. I was into Lost and they made the genius decision to air the next season nearly a year after the third one ended, but I at least had Gilmore Girls. Then they ended that for good. So then I got into Dexter which I just finished the last episode of season 2 for. And I've also watched all of Heroes. What else is there? I know there are more shows out there, but those were pretty much the only ones I had a huge desire to watch. Poor me. We had to give a family back their dead family member's corneas yesterday. Apparently one family member consented (and it was all completely legal etc.). Then some other family members found out and called us freaking out and saying the other family member had no right (she did) and we "dismembered the body". Unfortunately I had the bad luck of having to deal with all these phone calls. It was ridiculous. On top of all that, the woman who consented was telling her other family members she never did it, so they thought we were lying. Of course we had the consent recorded, so if it came down to a lawsuit (which they did threaten), we would have had proof. I'm not really sure why my boss told them they could have the corneas back, and I'm not really sure why they thought that solved the problem, but she did and they did. It's not like we sewed them back in or anything. If their problem with the whole recovery was that we "dismembered" this person, the person's eye still had the incision there. I don't see what that solved! I can't wait for the weekend! Patrick's last class is Saturday and before you know it it's Christmas. I only have to work two days the week of Christmas. I'm really looking forward to that. Right now I'll settle for my warm bed. 12*11*07 I think I'm losing interest in internet communication...at least when it comes to responding to e-mails and updating this site. I don't know what the deal is. It's not like I don't have the time to do these things after work when I get home. I guess I'm in a funk of sorts. I haven't even been watching my Netflix movies regularly anymore. And I'm usually super strict about rating every movie on Netflix once I've seen them, but I don't even care right now. Well, that's not entirely true; I care that I'm behind on rating movies, but not enough to take care of it. Anyway, I've been super busy at work lately. For some reason or other, everyone has decided to donate their loved ones' eyes in the past few weeks and we're completely overwhelmed with donors. Over the summer we had a two month period where we practically had no eye donors at all. Now we have more than we have technicians to take care of the recoveries, not to mention more donors than we have patients on our schedule who need cornea transplants. For probably the first time in the two years I've worked at the eye bank, we're actually exporting tissue to other eye banks. In the end I'm just glad the tissue isn't going to waste. I just don't know what's going on with all these donations though. 'Tis the season I guess? Unfortunately one of our technicians stopped doing recoveries over a month ago because she's pregnant, and she had her baby over the weekend (a month early). Somehow even though my boss has known my coworker was pregnant for months, she never felt the need to prepare for having one less technician. So here we are months later up shit's creek struggling to keep up with the work flow. I had a momentary lapse of sanity last month and decided I'd take two 12-hour on-call shifts back-to-back this past Saturday to make some extra cash for Christmas. Unfortunately at the time, we didn't have donors stacking up like we do now, so I didn't know I'd pretty much have to work the whole shift. I had maybe 3 hours of sleep throughout the day. When they called me in for the last donor I started crying. I kept saying no amount of money was worth how exhausted I felt. But now that it's over, I'm looking forward to my paycheck!!! For Patrick's Christmas present, I'm pitching in to buy him a flat screen TV. I found a pretty good sale online at Best Buy Monday, so he went ahead and ordered it already. He'll have it by the end of the week. I was hoping maybe I could wrap it and he could maybe wait until Christmas to open it, but he's practically rabid to get this thing so that's not gonna happen. Don't ever come between a guy and his tech toys. He said I can tape a piece of paper to the box and he'll rip it off for me. I suppose I'll just have to settle for that. Talk about a Kodak moment! 12*03*07 I know it's been a few weeks now since Thanksgiving, but here's a quick recap: Some of my extended family joined my mom, her boyfriend and me at her house. I haven't seen most of my mom's family in a few years...mostly because they're nuts. Senility has pretty much taken complete hold of my grandmother; she kept calling me Bunny (some distant relative I've never met) for most of the night. I also saw my brother for the first time in almost two years. I've been a bit apprehensive about seeing him given the last time we saw each other we almost beat each other up. But nothing too noteworthy happened between us. He did, however, end up leaving early after my mom's boyfriend told him not to interrupt him in the middle of a sentence. Oddly enough that's what I said to him two years ago which started our feud. Anyway, a lot of the day I felt like a little kid again--wanting to run away from my crazy relatives. At one point I went into the basement to escape them, but my mom came to get me telling me I better talk to my grandmother because she'll be dead soon. No pressure. Hopefully Christmas will just consist of my immediate family and Patrick. I've been getting a steady flow of donors lately which is helpful with Christmas approaching. Perhaps I can work at chipping away my credit card debt after the holidays. It's not too out of control, but I should probably take care of it sooner than later. I'm working a double on-call shift Saturday. I wouldn't mind having a few donors on my shifts, but I just hope it's not more than I can handle. Even if it is, I suppose my bank account will thank me in the end. Patrick and I had a stupid fight that lasted most of the weekend. In the end it amounted to me realizing that I suppose I have to go back to therapy at some point to deal with certain issues I have that just don't want to go away. I just need a good therapist and someone to finance my sessions. Any takers? I had such a nightmare commute home today. I was so fucking furious I thought my head was going to explode. The MTA really needs to get their shit together or they're gonna have to deal with more blog rants from me! That'll show 'em.
This girl is a nerd, get me outta here |