This is the part where I tell you about my visit starting with a relaxing morning on the Burgdorf's front porch. Unfortunately, the other photos I uploaded have disappeared!
Well, I am frustrated at trying to blog. About a gadzillion photos that I uploaded to blog about disappear as I try to write! And I certainly can't arrange them on the page once they are uploaded! Even when I try to move a tiny photo into a huge white space it won't move. Then when I look for the rest of the photos I uploaded, they are gone!!
So I am certainly not finding this a user friendly site! This makes it hard to convince Christie and Noel to assist Cayleigh and Aiden to blog. Even if it does help their creativity and story telling skills!
Any tips to help me would certainly be motivating. As it is, I am not sure how much future blogging I will do. Unless I upload the photos one at a time I guess.
So I will post another blog with the family shot of Christie, Noel and the kids.
This is my friend, Karen. I am sure you all remember her. We met when Christie was about 4 and her daughter, Jessica, was in Little Church with Christie. Then, when the girls were in St Christopher's School, we were much younger than the other mothers in the class so we ended up hanging out together. Karen also has a daughter one year younger than Christie and Jessica, April. Then she has a gap like I do.
Her son, Jeffrey, went to school with Joseph. Jeffrey is the one that was born with a major heart defect and ended up in Janet's unit at Children's Hospital with major heart surgeries. He also had to have a pacemaker placed while he was a teenager. Fortunately, Janet's team did a great job! Jeff is doing great! Living a normal life! In fact, he has a young man's dream job: playing video games for a living. He is a beta tester for one of the game developers!
Anyway, when Jeff was born with all his medical problems, Karen needed a nurse to translate when she went to visit the doctors. Enter me. Well, Karen ended up going to nursing school and becoming a nurse herself. She and I started the BSN journey together in the 90's. Karen finished in the 90's. I finished in 2006.
I continued on to the Master's program. Karen did too. We both finished our Master's in August of last year. However, when I finished, I was finished. Karen took a much more difficult route. She is now a Nurse Practitioner! She called me last Thursday to tell me she passed her state boards! Above is a picture of Karen standing by the door of the office she shares with the physician she now practices with. The empty space on the door is where her name will be very shortly!
And here we are celebrating!
This is what I have been busy with lately. I had to renew my BLS and ACLS as they expired at midnight last night. So Thursday night after work for 3 hours I was in class renewing Basic Life Support and yesterday, Saturday, I spent the entire day renewing Advanced Cardiac Life Support. We do not get paid for doing this. It is a "condition of employment." Unfortunately, we renew in the month they expire, we can't work without them, and the renewals weren't offered until the end of the month. Nothing like waiting until the last minute!
Hey, I'm lucky to have a job in today's economy. And fortunately, I love my job!
The educator half of my job is the most creative and fun. It's the part that meets the need to nurture the next generation. We hold a critical care symposium every year. This is the first year I have been on the planning committee. (Confession: I joined after all the work was done. Don't think I"ll get away with that next year.)
Last night I went to Piano Piano, a new place in town. It is a dueling piano show that really gets the audience going. The show is totally based on audience requests. Teams of 2 to 4 musicians take requests from the audience and tips can determine how quickly they get played or if a song gets killed altogether.
This lady being serenaded by one of the piano players was celebrating her 86th birthday. Of course, her family went wild. Gave me thoughts about two 87th birthdays coming up.
As the night wore on, it got pretty lively. You can see we were sitting on the "party side." Defintely an entertaining evening!
Shopping for groceries at Stater Brothers. It rained as we got home. The plan was to go out to Riverside for lunch. Aunt Dorothy would like to see Uncle Gene's grave. She's so cute. She said they didn't leave enough room for her! The gravestones are all too close together. She will have to be cremated.
Aunt Dorothy insisted I get in the picture too!
It's always so pretty after a rain. This morning I took this shot as I pulled out of the driveway leaving for work.
It started getting gray when I got to West Covina. This shot was taken passing the West Covina Fashion Plaza.
The sun came out again. This is the parking lot behind the hospital. The white tower is full of liquid oxygen. 
I had to go over to our other campus in Covina, Inter-Community for a meeting.
A strange site for us Pacific coasters. Even Christie says she is still not used to seeing the Atlantic Coast Highway!
Well, I am frustrated at trying to blog. About a gadzillion photos that I uploaded to blog about disappear as I try to write! And I certainly can't arrange them on the page once they are uploaded! Even when I try to move a tiny photo into a huge white space it won't move. Then when I look for the rest of the photos I uploaded, they are gone!!
This is my friend, Karen. I am sure you all remember her. We met when Christie was about 4 and her daughter, Jessica, was in Little Church with Christie. Then, when the girls were in St Christopher's School, we were much younger than the other mothers in the class so we ended up hanging out together. Karen also has a daughter one year younger than Christie and Jessica, April. Then she has a gap like I do. 
And here we are celebrating!
This is what I have been busy with lately. I had to renew my BLS and ACLS as they expired at midnight last night. So Thursday night after work for 3 hours I was in class renewing Basic Life Support and yesterday, Saturday, I spent the entire day renewing Advanced Cardiac Life Support. We do not get paid for doing this. It is a "condition of employment." Unfortunately, we renew in the month they expire, we can't work without them, and the renewals weren't offered until the end of the month. Nothing like waiting until the last minute!
Last night I got together with some of my classmates to celebrate six months of being Masters! We had a great time catching up and supporting each other in our career challenges and aspirations. Michiko came all the way from Japan! Since our class has such a cool graduation date: 080808, we decided to get together on our anniversary: 080809.
This one was worth another post!
