Ain't chicken.

How I Spent My Monday Night -or- Not A Happy Thing: When the E.R. Nurse Really Enjoys Her Job

So...I walk into the E.R. apparently looking so crappy the the triage nurse says, "Miss, are you having chest pain?" to which I reply, "No, I'm just trying fill out this freaking form without puking all over it and you."

I should have said yes - maybe I wouldn't have had to wait an hour to be seen (and I'm sure everyone else in the waiting room would have been grateful to see me leave sooner, too).

Finally they call my name and I think FINALLY! Phenergan!!!

But no, it's a Second Level Of Hell er...triage II. They give me a bucket to puke in and ask what's wrong....I start out by saying "Well, I had cheese enchiladas from Taco Cabana about 6pm, then I pretty much passed out cold at 7pm. I woke at 9pm and started throwing up and finally came here at 11pm." The nurse's reaction? She whooped. Actually whooped, like in those bad cowboy and indian movies. The laughed. "When will we learn? When will we learn? You wouldn't BELIEVE how many people come in here sick from eating at Taco Cabana."

My thought? Gee, I could have used that informatin about 6 hours ago. I wonder how long I'll have to sit on hold with the health department tomorrow, now that I can sit up and dial a phone again. THANK GOD FOR GOOD MEDICAL INSURANCE.

OK well now I'm just pissed.

"We", the Americans, raise holy living freaking hell if ANYONE dare parade around a picture of dead Americans as proof that they're big and bad and can kill us (hell - they don't even have to be dead - remember how we condemned the Iraqi government for showing pictures of GI's they had taken as POW's?), but SOMEHOW it's alright for us to parade around pictures of those two dead asshole Hussein boys.

THIS is the kind of stuff that makes the rest of the world hate "We" Americans so much:

We tell the various inhabitants of the world that THEY can't do this or that THEY are wrong for doing that, but then, when it's convenient or percieved to be advantageous to "We" Americans, well, that's a whole 'nother kettle of dead guy pictures!

This is wrong, wrong, wrong.

I get to my office every weekday morning generally between 8:00 a.m. and 9:00 a.m.

If I am on time (much closer to 8 than 9), I get to witness the Daily Doodlebug Migration On The First Floor Tile.

I've worked in this same building for six years now, and every morning it's the same thing. From the middle of the building, anywhere between four and ten doodlebugs come out from wherever it is that they hide all day and they head east. I first noticed that we had doodlebugs when, while coming into work one morning, I notice two smushed flat doodlebugs. I then started looking at the floor when I got to work and noticing how many days I saw a few of them going towards Mecca (or maybe it's Beaumont they're headed for).

I started off, like all right-wing bleeding hearts, to try to save the little rolly bugs. I would toe them over towards the baseboards, hoping that they could continue their journey out of the main traffic areas. Eventually, a few people who saw me doing this started to comment. It didn't worry me because I have never been intimidated by the unusual and darned it, bugs are people, too. (At least the cute, curly ones are - not the flying, biting ones or the cockroachey ones. Or crickets, if they're in the house chirping when you are trying to sleep.) But finally, after viewing so many bugs smushed and noticing no shortage of new bugs each morning doing the migration, I gave up. Also, I noticed that some of the bugs I tried to save turning around and heading back into the fray, abandoning their initial destination. Hey - you can only help a bug if it wants help.

So I step around the doodlebugs every morning, but I don't try to save them anymore.

Fun Bug Fact*: Doodlebugs are not insects. They are crustaceans. (Try to imagine tiny itty bitty little landlocked black lobsters with no claws.)

*Bet you didn't know there was such a thing as a Fun Bug Fact. That just goes to show you!

You may or may not have noticed that over on the side of the page I have a few email links to some folks you might not normally think to sit down and dash off your opinion to. One of them is George Bush, the current President.

I am certain that the White House appreciates that I email them now and then with my very valuable opinion.

I was really pissed off and distressed to read recently in the New York Times (can't link you to the original story but here's the story as published in the local Houston Chronicle) saying that the old stand by president@whitehouse.gov email address has been, for all intents and purposes, been done away with and replaced with a byzantine web site based form mail that requires all sorts of canned information be given, starting off with if you're sending a positive or negative email and then force feeding you all sorts of information that is required for you to continue through the process. A short quote:

"Under a system that was deployed on the White House Web site two weeks ago, those who want to send a message to Bush must now navigate as many as nine Web pages and fill out a detailed form that starts by asking whether the message sender supports White House policy or differs with it. The White House says the new system, located on the Web at whitehouse.gov/webmail, is an effort to be more responsive to the public and offer the administration "real-time" access to citizen comments."

Well, dear readers, I sent an email to the old stand by free form email address that I've always used and I got back the old stand by auto-response thanking me for my input - but - it also told me about a new ADDITION read NOT REPLACEMENT email tool that is being made available so that IF you want to send an issue specific email and have it be easily counted in the for or against piles that they make up there at 1600 Pennsylvania, to please feel free to use the new system. Not a peep about the old stand by email address being trashed or ignored or anything else. Nothing telling me go away and don't darken this email adress again.

Silly me, believing the Media. Oh gosh! Not only did I believe the Media, I believed the freaking New York "Making It Up As We Go Along" Times!!!

Political Rant:

I (along with more than 50% of the voting public not including the Supreme Court) did not vote for George W. Bush for president.

I don't believe that left wing liberals control the media in this country, nor do I believe right wing conservatives hold that power.

I have a problem with hypocrisy, and that's what I'm seeing all over the media these days regarding the whole Niger - Iraq Nuclear Materials deal that the Shrub talked about when he was State of The Unioning us into this war in Iraq.

The Media is roasting the man - beyond toasting the man - saying that he sent us to war on flimsy, inaccurate, unconfirmed 'intelligence' information, part of which was this British broo-ha-ha over the Niger deal

BUT

This is the same Media that roasted - beyond toasted - the man for NOT sending us to war based on flimsy, unconfirmed 'intelligence' information to prevent the September 11th attacks.

Do they think we don't remember when they were blaming him for the attacks, saying he could have - should have - prevented them if he had just taken a bunch of unrelated, sketchy, questionable intelligence information from widely varied and questionable sources and patched it all together with strapping tape and used it to read the minds of a bunch of Third World Zealots and stop them from stealing those planes?

I get about 20 spam emails at my personal home email address each day. Of those, about 1/4 offer me Great Low Interest Loans! and about 1/4 offer me Cheap! Cheap! Viagra!!. About half offer me the opportunity to Get A Bigger One.

What I don't understand is this: I'm a girl, which means I don't have one in the first place. So how am I supposed to Get A Bigger One?

No matter who you are, where you live, or what you do; no matter how ugly or pretty, smart or dense, rich or poor, lucky or cursed you are; regardless of your lot in life, if you're not this guy, your life just can't be that bad.

Goats. Now it's goats.

I pulled out of my garage yesterday on the way to my boss's house to celebrate Independence Day with the traditional burgers, hotdogs, beer and margaritas, only to be greated with the sight of goats. Please understand - I live in a typical close-in suburb, lots of families and churches and schools, but no grazing land or barns.

I have a neighbor four houses down who I call the Houston Police about at least once a week. Today, as usual, it was because of their parking habits (illegally parking in the no parking zone that the Houston Police created specifically to try to control these people's abuses). Yesterday it was for goats. As I left our little circle, I saw a trailer in the front yard of their house with two nice big white and black goats in the back. This isn't not a good thing to see. I figured they had one of two plans:

1. Put the goats in the yard to save themselves from having to mow (too much like work).
2. Turn the goats into cabrito for the holiday weekend.

I tend to think the first was the most likely because these were big goats (about the size of a full grown Rottweiler but much more stinky) and cabrito is best made from baby goats, but with these folks there's no telling.

Two Problems: It's illegal to keep farm animals in the City of Houston (so they can't use them as lawn mowers) and it's illegal to slaughter animals in the City of Houston without a permit from the Health Department (because it's disgusting and filthy and nasty and dangerous bacteriologically).

If you want to have an average of 10 cars (in various stages of disrepair) parked around your house leaving big ugly oil stains on the street which you have no intention of cleaning up, with a constantly changing cast of residents (including your son who the Texas Rangers are looking for on a felony warrant) that exceed all occupancy limits coming and going, play loud Mariachi music at all hours of the night, sling your drying laundry over the fence so that your wet underwear is out there by the street for all to see, set up a temporary swimming pool in your front yard but only clothe the children playing in it in their (now wet and very pendulous) underwear instead of swimsuits (including the ones still in diapers), then maybe you should move somewhere rural, as opposed to a nice, quiet suburban neighborhood where people plant flowers that color-coordinate with the colors of their homes, keep their lawns nicely groomed and support their local civic club.

ALMOST makes me wish we had a Homeowner's Association instead of a Civic Club. But only almost. I guess as long as they stay there, I'll just keep the Houston Police non-emergency number on my cell's speed dial.

The Houston Chronicle isn't known as a bastion of liberal investigative reporting, but they do have Thom Marshall. He recently wrote a column talking about the Houston Police Department's Internal Affairs division's Citizen Review Committee. It stuck in the back of my head for a few days and I finally sent an email to Hizzhonor Brown's office.

Yesterday I got home to find a voice mail from my husband telling me I had a message from a police officer. Normally that's not a good thing!!! But it was just Lt. Collman, calling to tell me about the committee. I submitted a request to be considered for the committee today. He told me it takes 2-3 weeks to hear back about this sort of thing, so I'll just have to be patient.

The thing that really got me was that Lt. Collman said that I was the third person who had expressed interest in being involved. The greater Houston area has about 6 million people. So if we're really conservative and say 500,000 see the paper every day and even more conservative and say 100,000 read Thom Marshall, 3 is a pretty sad number of people who care about the outcome of issues relating to the conduct of our police department. Have these people never heard of Pedro Oregon? The K-Mart Raid? The DNA Lab? I mean, all the way back to Free The Moody Park Three - sheesh!

If you want to read what Mr. Marshall had to say, click here.