Author Archives: electricnurse

Women’s Health Luncheon-(quick recap)

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In reference to these two posts: post one      post two

So I know it was forever ago but I did promise I would write about how it went. I was terrified. Absolutely horrified. If I liberally used profanity it would be undoubtedly inserted here. I was that scared. That morning when I rounded seeing patients at the hospital before clinic the director of nursing stopped me and asked if I was ready. Heck yeah! That was my story that I was sticking to as of 8:30 am but then she told me about how once when Miss Nebraska came to speak at the luncheon one year she performed a piano concerto.

I stared blankly….I had nothin’. Nada. I began to picture Sandra Bullock in that movie where she pretends to be in the beauty pageant and is playing music on water goblets. I’m thinking to myself~how hard could that be? Maybe that could be my talent.

9:00am~I’m sitting in my suv behind the clinic about to puke and my nurse texts me as she knows me so very well. “If you are sitting in your car freaking out come in so at least I can help you through this”. In I went to discuss my lack of talent.

Noon~It all starts. It went amazing. My nurses told me I was very pale at the beginning but as soon as I got my rubber duckies  (oh…yes, I did complete with stories and all~made a great ice breaker!) and set them out all around me my color came back and I was fine from there. I could feel that I had the audience’s attention the entire time which was great and I knew the content (bones, calcium, vit d, osteoporosis, etc) as it is an everyday thing for me in medicine so I was able to walk around while I spoke so I think that helped with my nerves. There were many questions afterwards, someone even asked about my Husband! ALL the comments were good. I received thank you cards in the mail (go figure~and I did no talent show and didn’t do the talk on sex like initially contemplated!!!).

HOWEVER.

I don’t want to ever do that again. Never. Ever. Even though there were 150 people that may have thought I seemed like a natural speaker~nope. Not me. The scary thing is that I have heard it from several people and my primary nurse has too that they are already thinking of asking me to speak again next year since all of the women enjoyed me so much.

No, thank you.

Janna (my every-day-but-Tuesday nurse), myself and Renee (my Tuesday nurse)

What am I?

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At the beginning of the summer there was nothing here and quickly this vine started shooting up around our mailbox. We’ve helped it (barely) with two twist-ties. This week these gorgeous flowers appeared. Anyone know what this is? I love it!!! (and kind of want to make sure I don’t kill it like I do most other plant-like things)

Happy Birthday!

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I’m 29 again today! This is how my morning started….I hear the dog’s tags clattering and then a large man with a camera jumps on the bed and says “Happy Birthday” and takes this photo. Thankfully it is Adam, a photography maniac. I’m very proud to have a new Birthday buddy today, too. His name isZiah!!!

Thanks, Adam for the lovely photo shoot to commemorate this day!

Show me your funnel!

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My brother and I yelled that….”show me your funnel”. After what happened in Joplin recently it isn’t nearly as funny sounding now. Two years ago Adam, Jesse and I went storm chasing and periodically Jesse would stick his head out of our suv and scream “show me your funnel!” to the wall clouds as we were driving through the tornado warnings. We were crazy stupid, yeah.

Where we live has a high water level so not many homes have basements and the ones that do tend to pay for it….big-time when it rains with a flooded basement. This was one requirement when we were shopping for a home. No basement. Being in tornado alley however we wanted a nice crawl space. We just didn’t want to use it twice in two days in what I am told is an unusual stormy season for Cozad. This past bad storm the sirens hadn’t gone off yet but our weather radio had. It said our county was in a tornado warning but I don’t think our city sirens go off until there is a sighting. Adam and I were upstairs in his office looking out the windows. The rain was sideways, hail too. All of a sudden the main set of windows in his office started making a sucking noise and literally was sucking in and out a little. These are good windows, folks. Promise ya-the real deal and all~Pella. He went over and leaned on the windows and re-locked them even tighter and said he thought even though they hadn’t sounded the sirens we should go to the crawl space on our own.

Right then, the sirens went off.

Everything is fine. No damage just everything is filthy dirty with a fine layer of dirt but check these pictures out! I had heard that afternoon that there were a bunch of “storm chasers” heading to Cozad and hanging out all over I-80 but check out this picture! This is on a friends’s property.

I casually mentioned this to Adam last night about how this TIV car thing with some guy named Sean was at her house and he got all worked up and said “NO WAY! STOP TEASING ME!” Apparently this guy is big time. His is the funky looking grey car on the end and has red bars on each side of the car that anchor the car down so that he can stay in the middle of a tornado and capture film. He has just recently released an IMAX film from this I guess and he is the one on Storm Chasers on the Discovery Channel and Adam saw the IMAX film while he was in Pittsburgh on business and and and….just kidding. I’m just sooooo out of the loop. Obviously.

These next pictures are cool, too. They were taken from our neighborhood. If we had to guess they were taken before the sirens sounded probably right when we felt that suction-like feeling upstairs as that is when the rotation was starting.

Apparently this is the start of a rotation....

The main house you see there is our neighbors house (we are to the left of them). Immediately to the left of their garage you can see the rotation coming down.

There are too many trees in the way to really get a good view of our house but you CAN see our roof so this is to just put things into perspective. Adam took this picture yesterday evening when it was nice out of course!

And, this is down the road further where it continued to develop and strengthen....not sure that it ever completely touched down! A very good thing!!

Oh, and for the record…our crawl space isn’t scary. I told my sister we’d been there twice this week and I think she had envisioned something scary. There is a built-in metal ladder, cement floor and brick walls. I can stand up pretty much-Adam has to duck. There is electricity of course and lighting, outlets, etc. Our water softener and heater are down there and we have  other things stored down there (like our emergency kit). The biggest pain is getting the animals down there-the dogs especially. Adam is working on making a ramp that they can just go up and down and we can just store the wood in the garage because that is where we access the crawl space by the way, in the garage. We’ll need the ramp thingy if we get hit and it happens to land on a Thursday or Friday when Adam is always in Lincoln for work because I cannot handle the dogs myself. All in all, good practice runs. AND, glad we have our own weather radio.