Swayed by pressure of millions of peers

On the way home

Originally uploaded by notratched

I can’t believe it (no one else has trouble believing it), but I crossed the chasm to iPhoneland. I am still partial to BlackBerries, but there is no denying that iPhones are kewl. I was swayed because (a) the firmware upgrade just came out that caused people to be happy with their new phones, (b) Mobile Me started working right, and (c) I reached a critical level of frustration with Sprint’s crappy reception and call quality. I had to move a conversation to four rooms because my dad was saying, “What? What? Why are you breaking up so bad?” I have put up with this for years because the service is cheap, but I suppose you get what you pay for. Anyway, I figured AT&T couldn’t be any worse and might be better. I’ll probably blog a ton about the iPhone, but for now suffice it to say that I’m duly impressed. I took pictures to commemorate my trip to the Apple store, and I think it’s very interesting that none of the employees found it odd that someone would take pictures of a store! I guess people do that a lot. The Cult of Mac, indeed. More later.

“Doh” tip for studying

I suspect I’m not alone in having some areas that I just can’t seem to remember no matter how often I stare at them. When I get practice questions on these areas, I automatically assume I’m going to mess it up because I just can never remember. Unfortunately, these areas for me are pretty important—like onsets and peak actions of insulin. My mind blocks don’t follow any patterns, either. I can remember any number of obscure facts and figures with no problem.

Last night a bolt from the blue floated across my consciousness, and I thought, “What about audio flash cards?” I tried it, and it works well for me. Right now I’m immersed in cardio and respiratory conditions and pharmacology, so I made a list of the factoids I break into a sweat over (among them: proper digoxin levels, normal and therapeutic PT and PTT values, onset and peak time of CK-MB and troponin I…) and hunted through my BlackBerry for the voice recording app I knew must exist. I fired it up and made a file of the pattern “question, 5-second pause, answer.” It’s hard to wait the 5 seconds, but the first recording I made didn’t leave me enough time to go, “um, um, um, no, wait, I got it….”

I had an app called Switch.app on my Mac that will convert the BlackBerry file into an mp3 that could go on an iPod or anywhere else, but I hardly ever use my iPod anymore so I’m just leaving the files as-is. I can now review my most difficult NCLEX areas wherever I am…no toting flashcards around! And they say it’s best to learn things through a number of different sensory pathways, so now I have visual and aural.

The calm before the storm

At first I wrote “the clam before the storm,” but I noticed it didn’t look quite right. Clearly my eagle editorial eye remains undimmed. I am deeply appreciating my erstwhile boss for taking me off the schedule unbidden yesterday and today, because my energy level hovers around 2 on a scale of 1 to 10, where 0 is dead and 10 is Energizer bunny cray-zee. Not only do I feel sicky-poo, but it’s like DAMN hot here. It’s the kind of hot where you walk outside and feel that you’ve entered a sauna. I’m certain this is the hottest place on earth right now. Even with the AC burning up dollars, I sweat and stick to the sheets. Pioneer girl I ain’t. Can you imagine heat like this while encased in a long-sleeved long-skirted dress with no fans or AC? Egads! Good thing America wasn’t relying on the likes of me to blaze new trails. I would have been a non-starter.

School starts in about 2 weeks, and typically I already have a bunch of stuff to do, in addition to continuing to study for boards a little each day. I shock myself every day when I keep sticking to this goal. Who’d-a thunk it? It just shows what quitting your job and sleeping 14 hours a day can do for you.

One of my tasks is to read the surprisingly-long-for-nursing-school book Three Cups of Tea. It’s a real (nonmedical) book assigned for my community nursing class. I am absorbed in it. This is good, because it’s a long and dense book; if I didn’t like it I’d be whining a lot. It is about a nurse who builds a bunch of schools in, mostly, Pakistan, in a nutshell. It is giving me an interesting perspective about life, the universe, and everything.

Other than that I have been laboring over my school portfolio. This exemplar of my nursing education has specific guidelines that require much organizing, writing, and bullshitting—all of which are areas in which I shine. Still, I am getting through it at a snail’s pace because I just…lose steam. I have about 60% of it done, I figure. I’ll be patting myself on the back big time for doing it early, halfway through the semester when I’m too busy to work on it and it’s due.

Mac/Gcal/BlackBerry scheduling nirvana

Despite all my free time of late, I’ve engaged in surprisingly little geekery. I just haven’t felt inspired. However, Google made a small change recently that I think will make a giant difference in the world of Mac scheduling, so I feel compelled to spread the word.

Google Calendar has a bunch of fab features (I lust for the natural language support if I’m using iCal), but you can’t use it offline, so I’ve ping-ponged back and forth between it and iCal for a while. I’ve spent money on tools like Busy Sync that are worthless because they work only MOST of the time, and MOST of the time isn’t on if you need to know where you’re supposed to be ALL of the time. But lo! Google has introduced CalDav support. In a nutshell, this means two-way syncing between Google Calendar and iCal. It has some holes in it, and they could be deal-breakers if you need those features, but happily for me I don’t really care about any of them.

You have to poke around in settings files a bit, but it took me less than 5 minutes to get everything up and running, including testing the two-way sync part. I threw some complicated repeating events at it, and even those went over well.

It dawned on me: this is wicked cool. It’s cool even if you just have a Mac and want to use Google calendar, but if you meet those conditions AND have a BlackBerry, keep reading…

I have a BlackBerry and a Mac, which has the potential for causing loads of problems with syncing, but I’ve headed them off by using Google Sync over the air and not messing with wired syncs. So far it hasn’t missed a beat, unlike when I used Pocket Mac or Missing Sync, which puked up duplicate events and other annoyances onto my BlackBerry from iCal. If I make a change on either Google Calendar or my BlackBerry, it is shortly the same in both places (not true push, but “shortly”).

Therefore, I can now use iCal or Google Calendar or my BlackBerry to schedule something, and it will shortly be the same in all three places: sans wires or manual syncing. Dead brilliant! It sounds kludgy, but it’s not that difficult to set up and requires no maintenance. It might take an hour or two at most for loads of saved time and hassle in the future. Here’s how to do it. It assumes you have only one iCal calendar, but you can interpolate for more. Do the steps in this order, or you’ll end up tearing your hair out. Trust me on this one.

1. If you are using iCal, export the iCal file to your desktop. Wipe your Google Calendar clean and import the iCal file into it. This makes Google Calendar your master calendar. Delete the iCal calendar from iCal (you’ve got a backup now; save it!).
2. If your BlackBerry already has calendar events on it, you have to delete them. You have to use Windoze so you can have the Desktop Manager software. I ran mine with VMWare Fusion, but if you have to borrow a Windoze machine for a half hour, it’s probably worth it. Start the Desktop Manager software, connect your BlackBerry, go to Backup/Restore –> Advanced, highlight Calendar, and click Clear. Now you have a clean BlackBerry calendar and a clean iCal calendar and all your stuff is in Google Calendar.
3. Now download Google Sync onto your BlackBerry. Fire it up and feed it the appropriate login info. After it syncs the first time you can choose which calendars you want synced. You can choose how often it syncs (”Automatic” works great for me) and how far into the future to have events synced. Now you can just hide that icon and sit back; changes made on Google Calendar or your BlackBerry will now be automatically reconciled. Good times.
4. If you also want to be able to use iCal, follow Google’s instructions for setting up CalDAV with iCal. It has instructions for setting up multiple calendars. Now lean back and schedule away, any way you want. No wires, no fuss.

Just to sweeten the deal, download the Google Calendar dashboard widget for a clutter-free agenda view. And while you’re putting cool productivity tools in your dashboard, grab Remember the Moof, which brings your Remember the Milk tasks to the dashboard. And did I mention that you can wirelessly and automatically also sync tasks between your Mac and BlackBerry with MilkSync for BlackBerry (costs $25 per year…about $2 per month for task-tending bliss)?

Work/mono update

My work situation has finally been ironed out in the best of all possible ways. My boss took me off the schedule for the next 2 weeks even though I still officially work there during that time. This way I can stay in bed but will be eligible for rehire in the future. I had originally planned to slog through the shifts while gritting my teeth and hadn’t even asked for them off, so this is a real boon.

Mono continues unabated. It’s like I am in menopause; occasionally I am overcome with a fever so high I feel like a coal. All I can do is creep to bed and sleep it off. I don’t know whether it’s a relapse or whether I’ve been this sick all along but have refused to acknowledge it—I’m prone to doing that. I take “mind over matter” to truly absurd lengths. At any rate, I’m gratefully taking the time I’ve been granted to lie around. I can get up for a few hours at a time to play video games, study for boards, or do some Wii Fit yoga if I’m truly inspired. If I’d rested when I first got sick perhaps I’d be raring to go by now!

Eeee-NUFF

I had an “enough!” moment the other day. I woke up with a high-ish fever, again, on Friday and moped around all day, brooding about how wretched I felt and dreading work the next day plus the semester ahead. Then the “enough!” moment occurred. How, I realized, is this semester going to be any better than last semester if I don’t make any changes? If I have to lie around and rest all the time to get this stupid mono to go away and quit relapsing, then I’d best do that, because “mind over matter” has spectacularly failed. It isn’t really doing anyone any good for me to keep going to work sick. I’ve been sick with rare 1- or 2-day exceptions since APRIL. I can barely drag myself through a 12-hour shift. Heck, I can barely stay awake for 12 hours when I’m sitting at home not even doing anything. My concentration sucks. My brain feels like it’s wrapped in cotton. And in this state I’m supposed to bust my way through my last semester in a BSN program and pass boards? I don’t think so.

I called in sick for the next day and e-mailed my boss to give 2 weeks’ notice. No point taking a leave of absence when I have no idea when I’ll be “cured” and will be applying for RN positions shortly anyway. I feel twinges of guilt leaving this job, but if I don’t take responsibility for my own physical (and emotional) health, no one else is going to do it. I want to reach December ready for boards and excited about starting my career—not dragging myself through the gate in last place, gasping for air.

I’m fortunate and grateful to be in a position where I can feasibly quit my job and don’t have to do it to put food on the table. I’m going to take advantage of the gift and rest up. Since Friday, when I have “given myself permission” to be sick, I have all but collapsed. I’ve slept and slept. I creep off the couch to read a little or watch a movie, and then I sleep again. I hope this is mono’s last hurrah. I’m resolving to take better care of myself in the future so that nasty critters don’t get this much of an inroad. Important lesson: self-care is not just a myth. It’s a necessity.

Now I OFFICIALLY feel like crap

This is my official position lately. Horizontal. With cats packed around me. I finally had mono officially diagnosed with the big expensive blood test (I was past the Monospot point), and I feel weirdly vindicated by it. I was starting to wonder if I was depressed and/or lazy, neither of which would fit with my personality up to now. If my calculations are correct, I’ve had it since the end of April, so I could have a few months to go. Bummer, but it’s still making me feel better to know there is a physical reason for my exhaustion and burnout. Weird psychology!

I was inspired by my friend M to start doing 50 practice NCLEX questions per day and have kept up with it. I think it will help a lot. I’m also making baby-step progress on my giant portfolio project that is due halfway through the semester. With my low energy level, this stuff is about all I can manage. I figure baby steps are better than NO steps.

Tomorrow I work a 12 and am trying not to project disaster. I’ve been making it through shifts for months, and I’ll continue to do so. I keep dreading them progressively because of how exhausted I am by the end of the day, but I am approaching work with a new attitude—notably, this feeling is time limited and not caused by any personal failure. Plus maybe I will get an EA (excused absence). They have been overstaffed lately. Miracles never cease.

If dogs tweeted

OK, I know this indicates an overload of free time, but I thought it would be funny to make. Yes, that is a picture of my dog!

Steeped in EKG interpretation

I was finally motivated to start studying for boards. I have a computer/book combo, and I did the most obvious thing to decide where to start: I opened the book randomly. It opened to the cardiovascular system, so I’ve been boning up on EKG interpretation, cardiac caths, angioplasty, and cardio drugs galore. I recalled two amusing videos on the subject and went in search of them:

I can’t figure out how to embed this one, so you’ll have to go there and look at it. It’s a cute video of a nursing dean and students tap-dancing out EKG rhythms.

Then there’s the ever-famous Wenckebach video:

Hey. Ya gotta put some fun into studying for boards. Interestingly, rather than increasing my burnout, cracking open these books has made me feel a little more interested in nursing again. Perhaps it is just reminding me that there is more to it than wiping butts.

I met the future me, and I am Geek

I met a 90-year-old geek yesterday, and I thought, “OMG, that’s going to be me in 50-odd years if I live that long. I will still be all excited about my new gadgets!”

She was rummaging in her bag, and I watched with the boredom of having nothing better to do, figuring she’d unearth some knitting or something, but she whipped out a gadget. I was immediately interested. She punched some buttons and then fidgeted in that way people do when they’re waiting for something to download, so my curiosity shot way up and I edged over closer to her. I rarely see little old ladies download anything. They’re usually afraid of their cell phones. She eventually settled down and started to read on the thing, so narrowed it down. I edged over to her. “Is that a Kindle?”

She looked up, surprised. “You know what this is?” Our gazes connected in an instant of mutual geek recognition and appreciation. Me: “Yeah, I’ve heard about it on a couple of podcasts and stuff.” A discussion of the finer pros and cons of the Kindle followed. This lady could have her OWN tech podcast. In fact, I should have asked her; she may have!