Catching up doesn’t need to be hard to do

Michelle — Sun, 08 Jul 2012 05:12:22 +0000

What’s new with Michelle these days?

Well, apparently I managed to avoid posting for most of June.

I’ve been working since mid-June. Which means that I get to see Clay on a mostly regular/weekday-daily basis. Which is fantastic. He works a lot… He’s always worked a lot. But now I’m working too. And hey, once I’m in nursing school, we’ll both be incredibly busy (and that makes me quite sad). Work was going pretty well – there was a bit of a thing and… yeah. More on that later – probably in a private/password protected post. I’m a temporary full-time employee (as per usual) and I’m working in customer service again, but I do go from department to department as the need pops up. I’m not the biggest fan of answering calls, but I’m always cheerful when chatting with people on the phone.

My volunteering supervisors (the always lovely L, J and M!) sent me a thank you card (!) for my nearly 4 years of volunteering with them. It was a super cute card that I ended up putting on my bulletin board – it also included a gift certificate for a date night at the movies (!) which I thought was super generous. 2 regular adult admissions, 2 regular soft drinks and 1 regular popcorn. Nom nom. Now I just need a certain someone to not work long enough for us to take in a movie!

In my continuous preparation for nursing school, I’ve renewed my CPR certificate. It’s a clinical/school requirement, but it’s also something that I’ve kept up since 2009 and it’s a great skill to have. The HCP [1. Health Care Provider] version of CPR is the one for nurses, care aides, firefighters, doctors and other health care providers. Learning CPR is a fantastic skill. Everyone should know how to do it, along with standard first aid (or emergent first aid) training. There’s a whole host of different kinds of CPR classes – for care givers (of infants, children), for pet owners (not joking!) and for people who just want to learn. Even if you never use the skills that you learn, at least you’ll have it in case of emergencies. And that ends that PSA!

Last night I ordered my stethoscope! I’m getting the Littmann Classic II S.E. in orange (ORANGE!) with my name laser engraved onto the bell. I also ordered 3 more books for school (including the 2013 Delmar Nurse’s Drug Handbook that is on backorder). For fun things, I ordered seasons 3 and 4 of The Big Bang Theory ($20/ea!) to add to the first two seasons that I already own. The only things I have left to buy for nursing school is a penlight and a watch with a second hand. Oh, and $5 to go to my school to get 2 official name tags. They somehow couldn’t find $5 out of our tuition and assorted fees to go towards the name tags (seriously?). I did manage to off-set the costs a bit with gift cards for Amazon that I had redeemed for from Swag Bucks (search engine where you randomly get points for using it, you redeem points for gift cards and tangible goods). Dear Nursing School, why are you so expensive?

Today I went out, it was a nice summery day but omfg – I hate being in the car because my dad’s a horrible driver and anti-air conditioning for some stupid reason. My mom is at least more reasonable and will turn on the AC when the situation calls or it, or at least doesn’t yell at you for opening the windows. I went thrift store shopping with my sister! I found a lion bookend for her (it was a yellow Zuny bookend – matches one that she already had!) for $5. I also found a first edition copy of The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, a whole bunch of buttons/badges/pins from the 2008 Olympic games and two fantastic pieces of vintage Pyrex for my collection:

Thrifting, couponing and dolly meet

Michelle — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 04:47:07 +0000

I’ve gotten over the shock of having short hair now (amazing what a week does!) and I have gotten used to it to seeing it short. It still feels weird because I keep reaching for hair that’s just not there anymore, guess I’m just used to having long, long hair! But it’s a nice change (or maybe I’ve just forced myself to adapt to to change).

Work for the last week has been busy, gotten a lot of work done while trying to keep sane. Keeping sane involves a lot of tea drinking and I keep having late lunches – I don’t like that one bit. But such is life and the sacrifices made for work… I get a little testy when I haven’t had food for a while, so I’ve been bringing lots of little snacks to have throughout the day. Apparently hearing me munch of on apple slices is distraction (but then, it’s probably more acceptable than me snapping at people so I ignore the fact that people find me munching on apple slices to be distraction).

On Saturday I spent a lot of time in stores, heh. I went to two thrift stores and got some things… At the first store, I got a vintage queen-sized pillowcase with absolutely no wear to the fabric or to the tag (score!) at $1.99. Then there was two pieces of pretty Pyrex. White divided serving dish was $2.99, JaJ ‘Harvest’ casserole dish was $3.99 (missing lid but the pattern is in amazing shape and I should be able to find one for a dollar though).

Then at the second store I picked up a bunch of vintage Singer books. The two propped up (knitting) are actually for machine knitting, but a lot of the techniques that they talk about (especially regarding shaping!) can be used in hand-knitting ($2.49 each). Then there are three sewing books (prices from left to right are $1.99, $0.99, $1.99)

My sister D and I had also gone into Zellers because they have Campbell’s soup on sale at $0.54 and she had 6 coupons (yes, 6 – her condo gets newspapers delivered twice a week, they’re put in the lobby and whoever wants them can snag them. She snags some of the extra inserts only if there are good deals and if there are papers left over the night before the next delivery date.) for them, making it $0.04 a can. Zellers has it in their coupon policy that the phrase “one coupon per purchase” means “one coupon per transaction”. All other stores that my sister and I had ever shopped at took “one coupon per purchase” to mean “one coupon per item” as a purchase is for an item and a transaction is for all the items. But the cashier was quite snippy and was all “You can only use one coupon per transaction it says so in our coupon policy” (but she couldn’t actually show us the coupon policy – I looked it up later and it was true that they’re kind of whacked with their definitions). So my sister just smiled at her and said that she could ring them up. Individually. And we didn’t even have to wait in line 6 times either.

So six cans, six receipts. $0.04 per receipt. It would have been a lot easier if she would have just rang them all up together (and would have saved paper too).

Today (Sunday), I headed out to see the local dolly enthusiasts! It was such fun, I got to do a little bit of shopping first at this great store in the mall and then we hung around the food court. Some of the security guards were a little concerned about us being there (did we get permission, why did we need three tables?) but one of the ladies I was with explained to them that we were shopping at the mall and eating at the mall and we had about 3-4 people per table – much like the other similar-sized tables in the food court and we weren’t be loud/disruptive and hadn’t had any complaints from other mall patrons, so they left us alone for most of the time after that. It was fun though, getting to see people again and there were new people (yay!) that I hadn’t met in person before so it was neat getting to meet new people and their dolls.

pyrex – Imaginary Sunshine

Catching up doesn’t need to be hard to do

Thrifting, couponing and dolly meet