Self-Evaluation

• I'm proud to announce that I have not been beaten by the boxes of death. I finally made myself buckle down this week and finished unpacking every single one of them! Hiiiiyah! Take that! (Actually, what I meant was, I unpacked every single one that needed unpacking. The rest are neatly stacked in the guest bedroom closet. Bottom line: they are put away, and I don't have to look at them anymore. And that makes me very, very happy!)
  
• I still have a few more pictures to hang up, but at least all the major ones are up. I literally spent hours pacing about the apartment, trying to figure out where to hang stuff up. Sometimes I think I might over-think things a tad much. (Of course, it might have been the too much free time thing too.)
• The guest bedroom is now open and ready for visitors/people who are too drunk to drive home after partying it up with us. We'll have to have a get together soon!
  
• I actually did meet my exercising goal for the week, including the running a little bit part. It turns out that I am even more horribly out of shape than I ever imagined, and my body did not hesitate to let me know that. On Monday, I ran maybe a mile, and I could not squat or bend down without groaning until Wednesday.
  
• Today I went to Emory Hospital to scope out: 1) how long it takes to get there, 2) where to park, 3) where to meet for orientation, and most importantly, 4) where all the hot residents hang out. I am now ready to start my new job tomorrow!
  
• I am definitely having my share of the usual "new job jitters," but for some reason, I'm just not as nervous as I used to be when starting a new position. The first couple of days are always easy, because all I will have to do is learn about policy and procedure type stuff. (Boring, but easy.) The real test will be when I actually start working on the unit, either at the end of this week, or the beginning of next week. I haven't studied yet, but I do plan to review a few things, before I start taking care of patients again.
• And the best part is..... I don't have to be there until 11am tomorrow! I guess they are starting us off easy this time around.
• Yay, I actually have something productive to do tomorrow! :)
  

You Gotta Start Somewhere

So it turns out that when your primary mode of transportation is no longer on foot, your skinny jeans, that you easily and fabulously slid into while living in Boston, no longer fit. They have now returned to the status of my "I can get into these with a whole lot of hip wiggling and shimmying" jeans. And even when I finally get them on, there will be no eating or sitting down in them. :( Super sad.

So this past week, I have been trying to eat a little better and working on ramping up to some sort of an exercise routine. So far I've just been taking 45-50 minute walks around the neighborhood. The weather was so nice last week, I really didn't have any excuse not to. Plus, it gives me something to do and gets me out of the apartment, where the boxes of death have been continuing to taunt me.

Now that I only have one more week of unemployment left, I'm hoping that I will feel a little more motivated to get some things done around here. As the Queen of Procrastination that I am, part of the reason why we are still not totally unpacked is because I know that I can do it tomorrow since I know I don't have to go to work. But realizing that life will be a little busier once I resume working again, has definitely made me eye those boxes with a little more determination.

Goals for the week:

• Exercise for at least 45 minutes at least 4 times. Maybe I'll even progress from walking to jogging a little! (Could I be any lamer?)
  
• Figure out exactly what I want to unpack and what I don't. Then put the shit away, somewhere, anywhere, where I don't have to look at it anymore!
• Study a little, in preparation to get my mind back into nursing mode!

I'll let you know how it goes....

If Only I was a Dog

So we've been back in Atlanta for a little over two weeks now, and I gotta say, things for me are just kind of "blah." I'm so tired of unpacking boxes I could scream. In fact, now that we have the necessites out (kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom stuff), the rest of the unpacking has come to a squealing halt. I have absolutely no motivation to unpack the books, the pictures or any of the other miscellaneous boxes that we still have lying about. For some reason (I can't imagine why), I really just don't feel like unpacking stuff that has been sitting around in a storage unit for the past year, especially when I really haven't missed it. Not to mention the fact that it will just sit around for another six months until it has to be packed up yet again so that it can be moved again. Uuugghhh! It makes me cringe just thinking about it.

I'm also extremely restless and stir crazy. This is about 99% due to the fact that I have been basically unemployed for the last four weeks. Apparently the travel nurse market in Atlanta is either very saturated or just nonexistent right now. This could be due to one of the following: 1) There are just too many travel nurses in Atlanta right now, 2) Permanent staff nurses are taking up all the jobs, so that there is no need to hire travelers, or 3) Even though hospitals may still be understaffed, they may just be too cheap to hire travelers (which cost more than permanent staff). Whatever the reason, I finally got my first interview on Friday. Normally, I start interviewing for the next contract a month before the current contract ends. So basically, things are running about two months behind!

Today I went ahead and accepted the position that I had interviewed for, but I'm not exactly thrilled about it. It's a 12 week night shift Medical ICU (MICU) position at Emory University Hospital. MICU is probably the area that I have the most experience in, but I've also been getting very, very burned out on it. The patients tend to be very complicated cases with several different disease processes that compound each other and just tend to make things worse. They tend to be very sick with high acuities and tend to have long hospital stays. These patients can be very labor intensive. Don't get me wrong. It's not like I'm not willing to work hard, but it's just that it tends to be very stressful and physically laborious at times. I'm also not too thrilled about the night shift part either, but I kind of had to take what I could get.

Since I've already been in kind of a funk lately, I'm trying not to focus on the parts that I know I'm not going to like about it. There are some good things too. One being money. It's been a little sad watching my bank account dwindle, so I'm definitely looking forward to getting paid again. Also, this position happens to be the highest paid position that I have ever found in Atlanta, by quite a margin. (I'll be making as much as I was in Boston, if that gives you any perspective). I'm also excited about working at Emory Hospital because it will be nice to be working with intelligent people that actually know what they are doing, as opposed to those that I worked with in coughHighPointcough. While working at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, I realized that I really enjoyed working in the teaching hospital environment. Not only did I learn alot, but I also liked having residents around 24/7 that could come and check your patient in the middle of the night (instead of having to call and wake up sleepy, grumpy community hospital doctors). Furthermore, this contract will end December 22....yay! I won't get stuck working on Christmas yet again this year!

My first day of work won't be until October 1st, so I still have two more weeks to burn. I never thought it could be true, but it seems like it really is possible to have too much vacation time. Oh well, I guess now I really won't have any excuse to not have everything unpacked by then....darn!

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggety Jig

Despite Thursday's decidedly disappointing turnout, things were looking up on Friday. All I can say is the four ceiling fans that the previous occupants of our apartment installed probably saved our asses on this one. And I gotta hand it to Post for getting the carpet guys and the maintenance man there early in the morning to get things under control for us.

We arrived around noon with a truck chock full of furniture and all of the other junk that we've had in storage for the past year. By that time, the carpet guys had already sprayed mildew killer on the carpet and treated the ventilation system, and the maintenance man had replaced our thermostat (which apparently was broken, and probably part of the reason why the carpet didn't dry properly.) When we walked in, the carpet was dry, there was no scent of mildew to be sniffed, the majority of everything we had moved in the day before had mostly dried out, and it was nice and cool.

We unloaded the truck in record speed with the help of our buddies RS and WG. (Thanks again guys! We could not have done it without you!) Even the humongously heavy and awkward sleeper sofa was moved in the easiest that it has ever been moved. By 3pm, our incredibly large amount of stuff was all inside our apartment, we had returned the moving truck, and we had checked out of our storage unit.

Thus, we were left with this:

When Saturday morning came, we had to balance our priorities: dive into the mounds of stuff everywhere and try to make some sense out of them? Or take off to Athens for the first UGA game of the year? The choice was clear..... and to Athens we went!

So yesterday we actually started unpacking a few things, and certainly made a dent in it, but we still have a long way to go. I'm not worried though. We'll get it all done eventually. In the meantime, we have really been enjoying being back in our old hood. We have already been to two different restaurants we missed while being gone (Mellow Mushroom and Lettuce Souprise You), and today we revisitied our good old friend, Publix!

Aaaahhh...It's good to be back!

No Joy in Mudville

Well, as it turned out, we did have a bit of a rocky start to our move...

We did a good job of pre-packing my car and the truck the night before leaving Greensboro, so that we could be as ready as possible to leave the next morning. Thursday morning, around 11am, we said goodbye to the land of strip malls and began the final leg of our journey home. The drive home was uneventful, although trafficky, and we did get sprinkled on a few times. Neither one of us were worried about the few sprinkles of rain though, because My Favie had painstakingly (AKA it was a bitch) tied the tarp down over our stuff in the back of the pickup truck.

As we drove through spaghetti junction, the skies were mostly clear with just a few puffy clouds. We thought we were home free. However, sometime during the signing of our lease paperwork, the skies opened up and monsooned on our poor little truck. Before we could rush our boxes inside, just about every single one of them was completely saturated on the bottom. Some were even saturated on both the bottom and the top. About all we could do was unpack all the boxes as quickly as humanly possible before the exisiting water saturated through. (Most people know that I only move quickly when forced to... this was definitely one of those times!)

Wet boxes were not the only problem either. When we entered our apartment, it smelled like mildew, and the carpets were completely damp. Apparently the carpets had been shampooed, but had not dried properly afterwards. We immediately alerted the management of the problem, but since it was late in the day, the carpet guys would not be able to take care of it until the next morning.

Soooo, we couldn't put anything on the carpet because it needed to dry out some more overnight. Plus, we had unpacked all of the boxes so hastily, that we had junk strewn everywhere. There was no order or organization to it whatsoever. (No good for a bean!)

Exhausted and frustrated, we hung up the wet stuff on every towel bar/shower bar/clothes rack we could find, turned on every fan in the apartment, and turned the thermostat down to 65. That was about the best we could do at that point, since it was after dinnertime, and we were both tired, wet, hungry, and not to mention stinky!

We left our supposed new home that night with little optimism about the whole situation. The one good part was the dry, comfy bed offered to us by two of our best peeps: Beer Pong and Georgia Girl. (P.S. We still can't thank you guys enough!)

to be continued...