Well, I made it through my 24 hours on-call pretty easily, in my opinion. The other 4 complain so much about their days on-call, you’d think it was total hell on earth! I started this job 3 months ago and have been on-call twice, so far…both times on weekends. I don’t find it to be all that horrible. Maybe my perspective is a bit different. I come from being a Director of Nursing for the past ten years - - - all ten of those years with a pager strapped to my hip, on-call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I guess I grew accustomed to it - have pager, will travel! With this job I have now, on-call is minimal. The schedule for November and December reveals that I am on call a total of 9 days over the next 60. To me, that is absolute heaven!

Although, when my microwave beeps - - I still jump for the phone! Old habits die hard - it’s been very different getting used to the life I have now, compared to the ball and chain I wore for the past 10 years. I’m happier for it - - more settled and at peace, professionally. That is a very cool thing.

Did you know that if you type this: .oO it looks like little thought bubbles?

Ever wonder why it is so difficult, sometimes, for people to just call a spade a spade. To look at things for what they are ~ rather than what they want them to be? Why is it so difficult for some to just come clean with things - - instead of getting all wrapped around things like what the definition of is is? Things like crime. A crime is a crime is a crime.

The sniper. Murder is murder. I don’t care if he had a hard childhood. If he was abused. If he ate a steady diet of honey and crackers. All those things are all well and good for research - to find out what brought that person to this place in their life. However, when it comes to conviction and sentencing - why is it that you get a bunch of special interest types that spout off about how hard he had it in his life? He’s a victim of this and a victim of that. As if being a victim of anything makes it okay to do what he did. Nothing makes it ok. Nothing makes it alright. There is nothing anyone can say that would bring me to a point where I would even begin to understand and rationalize why he did what he did.

Politics is the same. I love it as much as I hate it. This being a pretty heated election week - I’m all kinds of stressed. Why? Because I am an American and have ideals, views, devotions and ideas on the way I think things should be - or could be. Why not call a spade a spade? Why not call it voter fraud? Why not call it ballot-stuffing? Why not say that it’s against the law to pull out of a race after the deadline when you’ve realized that you’re going to lose anyways - - - and then make it ok to appoint a new runner in your position? Why not just come right out and say the whole Wellstone Memorial/Rally was just the wrong thing to do? Why try and convince the public that abandoning your party and signing on with another party is SO painfully obvious when your Senate seat is the one and only one that is the deciding vote on who has the majority? Why try and pass that off as a totally innocent thing to do? (coughJeffordscough). Why not call it purchasing votes when you send a major player from your party into the inner city to sell cigarettes to homeless people in exchange for their vote on an absentee ballot? Why is it ok for one candidate’s campaign manager to host a free Bingo event at a local home for the mentally-disabled…give away free ‘gifts’, feed them, offer them drink - - and then scoot them off into a backroom where the campaign manager ‘assists’ these mentally-disabled patients in filling out an absentee ballot for the ‘candidate of their choice’? Why is it ok to file fraudulent Native American absentee ballots in the state of South Dakota? The list of these types of things goes on and on and on….and yet, they are continually over looked and not reported on in the liberal media. Yes, all of the aforementioned things happened - and they all happened within the Democratic Party Lines.