The Magic of an Ordinary Day

Fly fishing

I remember briefly learning to fly fish as a teenager. I remember going with my brother Al, playing around with the rod in the driveway, practicing casting.  But mostly I remember getting caught up in the branches a lot, giving up early and sitting on the bank looking at the water, reading or doing something to otherwise occupy myself while Al finished up fly fishing.

A few months ago I read the book Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis and I became interested in it again. Our friend Don fly fishes and I asked him if  he wouldn't mind showing me how on our next trip up to Fenton Lake and he agreed.  Even better, after a practice afternoon in the river around Fenton Lake we spent a whole day fly fishing in the beautiful trout streams in the Jemez Mountains.

  

We started in a slow-moving area on the Cebolla so I could get my casting down.  I was unprepared for the horseflies that practically carried me off as we walked to the stream.  Thirty seconds into it, I was running towards the car in search of the DEET but was all good after that. Yes, I know Don is a lefty and I'm doing things backwards but I'm getting my grove going here.

An hour or so later we move downstream a bit to where the water was swifter, rockier and wider.  We had moved up to the Guadalupe and switched to dry flies.  It was actually my favorite part of the day.  There were more trees to pay attention to but Don caught more fish, I hooked a few, missed a few and generally had fun.  It was a great learning experience and Don didn't have to pick my line out of TOO many trees, rocks and other lines. 

 

My patient and extremely knowledgeable guide, Don:

 

We then went to the third spot of the day, which was some tough going.  Don said it was hard for an experienced fly-fisherman and it just wore me out.  Big slippery rocks, deep swift currents, steep banks... I spent most of my time concentrating on not falling on my ass.  I'm not sure if that it was tough terrain or that we had already been fishing for about six hours but I totally hit my wall down in that stretch of the Guadalupe.  We climbed out of that canyon after about 45 minutes and headed home.

 

 

 

 

What an awesome day, and a great experience!  I was just so happy to be out there, learning something new, having fun, being outside.  What a blast.

 

 

We're back from Fenton Lake. Stories to follow.

Father's Day

It's a busy day here at Casa Frijole.

I am finishing up details on a NICU flight that's going wheels up at 0630 Monday.  I'd just as soon have all my ducks in a row so there are no early morning surprises for anyone.  This kid is pretty sick, and I want to make sure everything is smooth for the transfer.  Since I'm on call until I get to work tomorrow morning I'd like to do the work now and hopefully sleep tonight.

I'm packing/organizing/cleaning in preparation for our trip to Fenton Lake tomorrow. I'm going into work in the morning, then will hopefully leave a bit early and meet our friend Don out there.  Can't wait.  Hannah, meanwhile, has decided she likes my sleeping bag better than hers and has been holed up in it for awhile.

 

 

We had a mini-fathers day celebration this morning when Dwayne got home from work.  He was home late after he needed to go down to the cath lab at change of shift to help with a critical patient.  It was the whole enchilada: arrhythmias, defibrillation, intubation, pulmonary edema, plummeting blood pressures, going pulseless, etc.  Dwayne came home and said "yeah, that patient was bad ass but I did all that stuff last week in the back of an ambulance.  This guy didn't scare me."  Flight nursing has a way of making you more confident in your skills even when you are at the bedside.

I gave him a margarita with his breakfast burrito.  He deserved it.

Heaven on a cooling rack

I played the part of a flight nurse yesterday (yeah me!) and flew a patient to Phoenix at 4 a.m. yesterday.  It was a nice quick trip and I was back at the office by 8 a.m.  Unshowered, baseball cap in place but in the office.  So I did some essential stuff that I needed to see to and left about 12:30, pretty tired out.

But the great news is that I got to come home and spend the afternoon with my family!  I took a quick power snooze in the hammock while Dwayne took Hannah for a ride in her wagon then had a huge hankering for oatmeal cookies.  I was all energized by my half hour nap so I got busy making cookies.  Yes, I know it's summer and it's hot (it was 75 degrees when I was in Phoenix at 0530...yikes!) but it's so nice and breezy up here in the mountains I can get away with it.

Now I have been on a quest for the perfect oatmeal raisin cookie and I think I have found it.  I tweaked a recipe from Epicurious.com and came up with this winner.  They are perfectly yummy, chewy and spicy.  Try them at home, they are totally worth it! 

 

Oatmeal Cookies

• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• dash ground cloves
• dash ground nutmeg

• 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 3/4 cup (packed) dark brown sugar
• 1/4 cup honey
• 2 large eggs
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
• 3 cups old-fashioned oats
• 1 cup golden raisins
• 1 cup craisins
• 1 cup chopped pecans

Preheat oven to 350°F. Line 2 baking sheets with foil; butter foil. Blend first 8 ingredients in medium bowl.

Using electric mixer, beat butter, vegetable shortening, and both sugars in large bowl until fluffy. Beat in honey, eggs, and vanilla. Gradually beat in flour mixture. Stir in oats, raisins, craisins and pecans. Drop batter by tablespoonfuls onto prepared sheets, spacing mounds 2 inches apart. Flatten cookies slightly.

Bake cookies until golden brown, about 10 minutes. Cool completely on sheets. (Can be made 2 days ahead. Store airtight at room temperature.)

Enjoy!!

 

Just a pretty photo today.  Happy Sunday!

It's over

For better or worse our CAMTS inspection is over. 

They were in our facility Thursday and Friday and I was on call Thursday night, during which time my dear hubby acquired his own "balloon pump flight from hell" story that truly eclipses mine.  And while I was at home, coordinating, pacing the floor knowing my crew was in deep shit with a horribly unstable patient I had a moment of clarity.

Our program isn't about if our safety committee has a proper paper trail to the quality assurance committee and whether or not we have written protocols about building evacuation and fire drills.  It's about this:  at 10:30 pm while I had had not contact with my crew while I knew they were working that patient I had absolutely no doubt in my mind that there was no one out there with better clinical judgement and experience.  I knew they had the tools they needed, physically and mentally to do the job they needed to do.  I trusted completely that they were making the right decisions.  If it were my family member on that tarmac I would want that crew working on them. 

That's what our program is all about.

And I let go of all the rest of the other stuff.  Did I want it to be perfect?  Of course.  Did I wish there were things about my department they didn't want to see improved? Absolutely.  But the important stuff, the stuff that makes a difference in the middle of the night, when you are coding a patient, working as a team and managing in the worst circumstances to save that patient's life, that's what is important.  And I'm good with all the rest.

So I'm taking the weekend off to spend time with my family.  We are going to put up the tent tonight and sleep outside (if it doesn't rain), make s'mores and just kick back.  I'll be back in the saddle on Monday, working on our improvement plan.  But for now I'm good with it all.

Work, work and more work

We are having our CAMTS inspection next week and I have been so busy at work getting things in order.  We run a good organization so there is nothing drastic to do but there is just so much... checking that all the training and orientation is in the employee files.  Going over the dispatch manual and all our dispatch policies.  Double checking that PM (preventive maintenance) has been done on every single piece of equipment we have, and arranging for last minute maintenance on a few stray items (and a few shipped in from our Vegas base). Prepping for my interview with the inspectors and prepping my chief dispatcher for his interview.  Finding files that had been mistakenly put into the storage facility. Updating the cardiac medical protocols.

Which would be okay if my everyday duties involving being the administrator of our health plan, quoting, coordinating and launching flights, refereeing dispatcher squabbles, teaching classes and taking care of our transplant contracts would just cease so I can take care of these other things.  Unfortunately, that's not the case. 

So Hannah and I will be heading into the office this morning after a quick stop at the library so I can get some work done.  I'm on call today anyway, and would much rather go in while it's quiet and bang out some work while Hannah has a fresh stack of books and movies.  I really don't mind, and will rest much easier knowing this stuff is done.

They are visiting our Vegas base on Wednesday and our Albuquerque base on Thursday and Friday.  Which means that by this time next week this will all be over!  Now that's something to look forward to!!

Oh, and when it's over we are going up to Fenton Lake.  That will make me feel better. 

One Thing

I have recently started reading the good human and once a week he writes about doing one thing every week to improve the environment and live a greener lifestyle.  I like that. It breaks things down into manageable chunks and makes any task less overwhelming.

Although I've always been a recycler, I compost, grow my own vegetables and try to do things as environmentally consciously as possible, we realized as we continued to remodel the house that we could take that further and try to green things up there as well.

So here is my one thing: the laundry. 

When we rebuilt the laundry room we bought a new energy-star front loading washer.  Yes, it was pricey at the onset but front-loading washers use 40-75% less water and 30-85% less energy than typical top-loaders (15 gallons vs. up to 40 gallons, and 120-560 kWh/yr. vs 800 kWh/yr.). 

Front loaders are also:

•  gentler to your clothes, causing them to last longer (savings)
• the capacity is larger because there is no central agitator so you do less loads (a time and energy saver)
• they clean better and enable you to use cold water instead of heating your water (a whopping 95% of the energy used by a washing machine could be going just to heat the water!) 
• they spin at faster rpm's so the clothes dry faster if you dry them in a dryer (savings)

And speaking of drying, since I live in beautiful, sunny and low-humidity New Mexico I have gone to line drying everything that I can.  Honestly, it dries much faster on the line than it did in my old dryer anyway.

 

Notice the cute clothespin hanger?  My Grandma used to have one like it, and I remember hanging laundry with her on the lines in that big yard in Bruce, Wisconsin so many years ago.  I found it at this cool Etsy shop .  I also have a retractable clothes line (you can see it mounted on the tree) so the line is up and strung between my trees on laundry days and hidden from sight the rest of the time.  

I use my dryer for perhaps an 45 minutes a week, for towels that I really prefer to be fluffed up. It's an awesome system that works for me.  Our utility bill has gone down 34% last month which was when I implemented the "all line drying all the time" system.  Some of that may be from our furnace being off , so I can't ignore that variable but that's a pretty  sizable drop and I'm very pleased.

Now if we could only afford that solar system for our electricity we would be sitting pretty!