recovered from terrible horrible no good very bad day

The days after the terrible horrible etc etc were actually OK - I finished off my week of being hospital rounder in reasonably intact fashion, and even got to send nearly all the patients happily home to their nearest and dearest.

I had a quite lovely day yesterday - I was scheduled to be in baby resuscitation class all day, which means that even though I'm technically working I am allowed to wear jeans, which is always good for a surreptitious thrill (wow, my life must be really boring if wearing jeans to work is exciting). When I arrived, I was pleased/terrified to see that the teacher slated for my group was the hospital's most legendarily ferocious neonatologist, a man who strikes terror into the heart of any resident who has the misfortune to ask a stupid question in front of him (I ran afoul of him many times as a resident) BUT here's the thing - he is ferocious because he really really really wants to scare everyone around him into being competent, and if you work hard and pay attention he is disarmingly sweet. So even though having him put you through your plastic-baby-resuscitating paces is bowel-looseningly scary, he also makes sure that you think about every single tiny little thing. Most of the instructors just make you go through the algorithm - baby not breathing? use the ventilator mask. heart rate under 60? start chest compressions - which 99% of the time is all you might need to know. This guy makes sure you know how to do things like recognize when your suction tubing is broken and the oxygen tank has a leak in it and someone's accidentally turned the valve off and the heater on the table isn't working properly and you blew a hole in the baby's lung by ventilating too hard and the baby's still zonked from the heroin that the mother used right before arriving on the labor and delivery floor that she didn't tell you about and oh by the way it's a baby who's three months premature and you are the only person there with no help - god forbid that ever happens to me, but if it does I will (I hope) be slightly more prepared to deal with it as a result.

Then, in addition to having the terrifying teacher whom I actually really like, we were done by 10:30 a.m.!! so I got to go home early and prune my wisteria and put the cardboard down in the back garden in preparation for the arrival of more mulch (this is a vain and desperate attempt to eradicate the crabgrass from my back garden in an eco-friendly sort of a way. The gardening guy thinks I am mad for not just soaking the whole place in Roundup, but I have a vision of my little organic food-producing Eden that I am loath to let go of yet.) Ooh, speaking of the garden, I harvested another crop of raspberries off the raspberry bush... there were three! (don't laugh. they were delicious). I am definitely buying more raspberry bushes next year.

After garden maintenance and lunch, I went up to nice friend's house to take the babies for a walk around Spring Lake, which was lovely (and hot, I think nearly 90 degrees yesterday). Afterwards we sat and fed them and chatted and it was so cosy and comfortable and I nearly fell asleep with one of the twins on my chest so so so sweet.

In the evening, I went with other nice friend to a documentary about Christo & Jeanne Claude that the brother of a friend of hers had just made that was being screened at the Charles Schulz museum, about the Running Fence project that Christo did in Sonoma County for two weeks in 1976. The documentary was cool - they interviewed all the crusty old-time ranchers whom he persuaded to allow this slightly loony project to be built on their land - and there was some BEAUTIFUL aerial footage of Sonoma county, which really made me think, wow, I live in a really magically beautiful place. (On a totally unrelated note, there was a lot of talk by the people who introduced the film about what an artistic visionary Charles Schulz was, which always puzzles me. For those not in the know, Charles Schulz (creator of the 'Peanuts' comic strip) was from Santa Rosa, and there is this perception here that he is a major cultural icon responsible for singlehandedly revolutionizing pop art in the twentieth century and that his work is deep and profound and meaningful etc etc etc and I am always like, er, idongeddit. I think Peanuts is stoopid. But anyway.)

OK, hi ho hi ho, it's off to work I go...