skittermagoo!

Yawn.

Here are some things you might not know about going to a Sleep Lab:

1. You probably won't sleep. And as soon as you get to sleep, one of the electrodes they hook up to you will fall off and the technician will have to come in repeatedly and wake you up and reattach it, and then it will take you another hour to get back to sleep.

2. They don't tell you this, but some of the electrodes get attached to your scalp via a big glob of sticky glue. This glue will not come out of your hair until you shower, despite the fact that the paperwork the lab sends in advance says "many of our patients get up and go straight to work after the sleep study".

3. Even though the samesaid paperwork states "bring everything you would need to spend a night in a hotel room away from home", they will not supply towels. Bring your own. Likewise, you will need your own cup for rinsing after brushing your teeth.

4. Again, the paperwork states "if you need to get up and go to the restroom during the study, this is no problem. You will be able to unplug easily from the monitor to do so". They lie. It is not an easy task, and the electrode box, which you have to carry with you, will almost fall in the toilet. Twice.

5. There is a dim light in the room that never turns off. This will prevent sleep.

6. Also preventing sleep (as if the electrodes and wires aren't enough) is the noisy crunchy plasticy matress pad. Which makes one wonder if they do bedwetting studies in the sleep lab. This also prevents sleep.

7. After you leave the sleep lab (at 5:30am) and go to work wearing a bandana kerchief to hide the glop in your hair, you will proceed to spill the entire scalding contents of a very large coffee all over your desk, the floor, and yourself.

Consider yourself warned!

Whoa, nellie!

Where, oh where did the last two weeks go? If someone knows where I lost them, please let me know -- I seem to be missing them!

I have been knitting, and I have pictures on my camera to show, but this stupid PC is incapable of accepting photos directly for some reason. And I keep neglecting to bring my card reader to work, which probably won't work on this dumb computer anyway because I don't have the driver installed or somesuch.

Can you tell that not having DSL at home yet is really pissing me off?

Anyway.

It's been a busy week, both at work and away from work; last night was the only night so far this week that I got to be at home and relax. And tonight? The bad news is that I'm going to miss my usual night of knitting and hysterical, tear-producing laughter, but the good is that I get to see some friends I haven't seen in a long time, and hopefully will get some hysterical, tear-producing laughter there. I need my weekly dose of mirth. The other bad news is that after I see those girls, I get to spend the night with a bunch of electrodes stuck to my head, trying to sleep so that they (the proverbial "they", in this case Medical Professionals) can figure out why I'm not sleeping. Or why when I do sleep I (apparently, according to The Hub) snore like a yak. Okay, I don't know for sure that yaks snore, but "yak" is a funny word, and much more appealing than, say, "water buffalo". By the by, The Hub also snores, but I don't see him going to get it figured out by Medical Professionals.

Here's what I want to know. If I'm not sleeping when I'm at home in my own bed with my own Hub and cats and such, how the hell am I going to sleep in a strange room with electrodes stuck to my head? Hm?

So, with that, I'm off to drive home, pack up my stuff for tonight and tomorrow (because after they wake me up at the sleep center tomorrow morning, I get to get dressed and come straight to work), and head back out.

I'm so glad tomorrow's Friday.

In which we discuss multiple miscellaneous things

Wow, Friday already! Where did the week go? Actually, I know where it went, and at the time it seems to have gone very slowly, but allofasudden it's Friday and almost the weekend! On a side note, my weekend was supposed to have started early (two hours ago, to be precise), but my lovely boss initiated a bit of confusion that requires me to possibly meet with him at 2:00, but maybe not, because it's 1:30 and he's currently in surgery, and his assistant doesn't think he will be out by 2, and she has scheduled meetings for me and my other lackeys labmates for Monday morning instead. I'm confused. So is the assistant. So I'm going to show up at 2:00, and if he's not there, I'm outta.

Ah, the job. The mention of the job brings me to one of the miscellaneous subjects for today:

Appropriate Footwear

Let me preface this by admitting that I am by no stretch of the imagination a fashion plate, and on any given day I'm probably wearing sneakers of some sort. This isn't really a discussion of footwear in general, but of footwear in a specific context. That context being scrubs.

Where I work, I see a lot of people wearing scrubs. All different colors and configuration of scrubs, as a matter of fact. And recently, I've noticed that a number of the people I see are wearing shoes that are not exactly, erm, what you would expect to see in conjunction with scrubs.

I expect to see clogs, or any kind of sneakers (I'm a big fan of converse lowtops with scrubs), or even birkenstocks with scrubs. After all, most of the folks wearing scrubs are on their feet for many hours at a time, so all of these make sense, if not in the purest sense of the word "fashion", then at least in the sense of function and comfort.

However. There are some things that just aren't right.

Flip-flops with scrubs. That just screams "hygiene issue" to me (do you want your surgeon wearing flip-flops in the OR? I think not.). Flip-flops with scrubs is just wrong.

Then there's the woman doctor one floor down from me, whom I regularly see wearing scrubs and dress pumps. Dress pumps!! That's not functional OR comfortable. That just looks like she forgot to bring her "scrubs shoes" with her that day and had to change from a dress into scrubs and had nothing else to wear on her feet. The first time I saw it, that's exactly the scenario I envisioned. But after the second, third, and tenth time, well, I just thought it was weird.

But the strangest footwear/scrubs combination I have witnessed happened this morning as I was walking in from my car. I saw a man crossing the plaza in green scrubs and lizardskin cowboy boots. Cowboy boots, people! With scrubs! Something about that just isn't right.

Okay, so yes I live in Texas, and there is definitely a time and place for boots. Not that I own any, but here boots are much more widely accepted as general footwear than in a lot of other places. My dad wore boots with his dress suit at my wedding, par example. But with scrubs? NO! Please, no. It's just too, um, yeah.

Okay, so that's it for my footwear rant. For today.

Always a step behind

That's me, these days. Time just seems to be sped up lately . . . I think it's a combination of summer and the whole house-dominating-my-every-waking-moment thing, but it just seems like I don't have enough hours in the day lately, and the result is that I'm a day late and a dollar short with lots of stuff.

Case in point, here's the sock I've been working on:

Pretty cool! Except that I've already finished it and am about to cast on for sock#2. But I don't have a "finished sock" picture because I'm a step behind in taking the sock pictures.

And here are my cousins Haly and Sarah

I saw them two weeks ago, when they were visiting my mom. I'm a huge step behind with this one, because they flew home yesterday.

I could go on and on, but won't. Because it's time to go see if the meeting with my boss is on or not, and then I have to go take some actual current photos to share with you on Monday (at which point I will only be a couple days behind).

Have a great weekend, y'all! And if you wear scrubs, I'm watching to see what kind of shoes you have on!

Argh.

Stupid software . . . I had a nice long blog entry written, with photos and knitting content and everything. It may have even been funny. And then Moveable Type ate it and I couldn't get it back. Grrrrrr.

So now I have to try and remember all the things I wrote, and reupload the photos and stuff. But instead I may just go home and take new photos and try again tomorrow. Yeah. That's it.