Above: The perfect autumn morning on my street... clear days like this are few and far between in this climate!
Good morning and Happy Thanksgiving, friends!
I'm a bit tired, so if I start rambling, I'm sorry. The mice in our walls have been waking me up almost every night with their surprisingly loud chewing and scratching. This morning I was woken up around 8 after not going to bed til after 2 AM (my own fault for going to bed so late, but still... argh!). They've stopped venturing out into our house and seem to be just nesting in the walls now. I don't know what they're living of... I think I'd better talk to the landlord again. I did tell them they were in the walls but they haven't really done anything about it as far as I can tell. Although, I don't think there's a whole lot one can do with mice in the walls... short of sealing the house, filling it with carbon monoxide and staying in a hotel for a week. And that's starting to sound pretty appealing right about now!!
Anyway! A relatively minor inconvenience, though I sure would like to stop being allergic to my own home. Pretty sure it's the mouse dust that we're breathing in that's making us both constantly sneeze/sniffle/be congested.
I realize now I haven't mentioned our recent experience with the hellish rodents in our house. Well, I don't want to go on too much about it, but to sum up... I've lived here for 4 years now and this is the first time I've ever had a mouse in the house. I've heard various sources saying it's a "bad year" for mice (well, bad for us, anyway), so perhaps that's got something to do with it. In any case, we started seeing little droppings around the kitchen and bathroom, and finally we saw the thing scurry across the floor.
We finally managed to catch the culprit using a combination of the element of surprise and sticky traps. It was too wily to touch any of our snap traps or sticky traps until the Fox surprised it one day by coming out of the bathroom into the kitchen while it was on the floor, and it ran straight into a sticky trap out of panic. It turned out to be a vicious little creature! Tried to bite him as he picked up the trap. The sticky stuff didn't actually hurt it, and we were too soft-hearted to guillotine the little beast, so we took the time to drive it out into a park a ways away and fling it into the woods.
I thought that was the end of it, but as it turns out everyone else was right -- where there's one, there's more. Now, we don't see any more droppings, but I hear them!! And it's one of the most infuriating things ever. They seem to live in the wall right behind the head of my bed (of course), so I can hear them doing their stupid chewing directly behind my ears. Ear plugs don't block it out, at all. I have had to resort to using a white noise app on my phone at night (you know, like rainstorm sounds and whatnot), which doesn't always work to block the noise out either, so... it's been annoying.
Anyway. I will talk to the landlord about it today and make sure they know what's going on, because it can wreck the wiring in the walls if it goes on too long. If only we could rent a cat for a week or so...
So, in other news, I'm in school!
My program (which is MLA training, by the way -- Medical Laboratory Assistant training) is going well so far. I'm in a cohort class of 24, and weirdly, we're all female (including all of our instructors). Apparently this is an occupation which does not attract men for whatever reason. My classmates seem like good people; it's an interesting mix of younger and older. I'm somewhere in the middle! There are quite a few women with children who are either coming back to work or switching careers (mostly from the service industry), and some younger women who are looking for a good job or who have other goals in the medical field and want to use this as a stepping stone. There is one other like me, a fellow creative who can't pay the bills with her craft (hers is bellydancing) who is looking for more stable income.
** Notice: the following will contain descriptions of phlebotomy (blood collection), needles, and similar things, so if that bothers you, be warned! I'm not particularly squeamish about it, which is lucky considering my choice of training ;) **
By the way, if you are not exactly sure what an MLA is, they're those people who collect your blood when you go to get a blood test done, or give you a cup to pee in, and that sort of thing. They also take care of a bunch of behind-the-scenes stuff like preparing specimens to be tested and a bunch of organization and paperwork. Basically the lab rats who run around doing all the stuff that the actual lab technicians are too busy to do. Specimen collection seems to be a very big role.
Everyone in my class seems pretty nice, which is good because we will be getting very close to one another in the coming months! And by that I mean we have to practice phlebotomy and ECGs on one another. Yes, we have to poke each other with needles multiple times. Fun! In order to learn how to collect blood one has to actually collect blood from real live people. And ECGs involve taking off your shirt, so there will be no secrets between us all.
Of course, collecting blood is easiest when one has big veins... and I happen to be that one person with the huge, bulging, obvious veins in my arms!! Unfortunately for me, I also happen to be that person who bruises easily and carries that bruise around for eons. My left arm is still black and blue from one of my classmates' learning experiences on my veins last week. Haha.
It's kind of funny, because we had to introduce ourselves at the beginning of the program, and as we got into learning about the anatomy of the arm it became apparent whose veins were the most prominent and visible, and so now everyone knows me as the artist with the glaring veins...
As it turns out, having nice big veins doesn't always mean the phlebotomy will be a success. We had the spring class practicing on us a couple weeks ago and I got poked four separate times without my pokers getting a single tube of blood out of me. Our instructor nicknamed me "Rolly" after that (some veins have the tendency to "roll" out of the path of the needle!).
Anyway, I've drawn blood twice now, on two different classmates. I seem to be fairly good at it so far, though I did have to troubleshoot on both occasions as I put the needle in a little too deep and had to slightly withdraw it to get the tip right in the vein. But once I did that I got the blood flowing.
It really doesn't bother me to poke someone else. I don't really like other people poking me, mostly because I know they're all beginners like myself (and I don't always know who's been paying attention in class and who hasn't)! I trust myself more than I trust other people, I suppose! But our instructors are always there keeping an eye on things, especially with our first few tries at it, so nothing too awful is likely to happen. Besides the nasty-looking bruises of course.
The ECGs are simple to do; they just involve a lot of feeling around for the right spot to put the electrodes (they have to be stuck on certain places between certain ribs and such like). Basically feeling up your patient. Ha. A little awkward, but it'll be fine in the actual workplace.
There's a bunch of academic/written work as well, but it's all practical stuff like learning the names and abbreviations of different lab tests and going over basic anatomy and stuff about the body. I don't think that will be an issue for me, as I've always been good at the ol' book-learning. (She said confidently, knocking on wood.) That being said, I do need to study this weekend! Luckily it's a long weekend due to Thanksgiving so I should have enough time to review what I need to. Providing I keep away from the video games for the most part. Ha!
So all in all, I think it's going well. I do think I've made the right choice in signing up for this program and getting into this field; I had a lot of terrifying thoughts right before I started, like why am I doing this and do I really want to do this and should I be trying harder to become a professional artist and am I giving up on my dreams. A bunch of nonsense. I've talked about this rather extensively in previous blog posts, so I won't go into it yet again, but really, this is the best thing for me.
And guess what -- I am already enjoying doing my art much more! I'm participating in "Inktober" this month (or trying to anyway), where artists all over the world make an ink drawing for every day in October and share it online. I've missed a couple days, but I'm having fun and enjoying it, and that's the important thing for me. Now that I have set aside the "dream" of living off my art, I feel so much less stress and anxiety about it. Really, I don't think it matters how I actually make a living (I mean, as long as I'm not selling crack under the bridge), as long as I keep on doing what makes me fulfilled. I'm back to doing art for myself for fun again, like I did throughout my childhood, and I think that's healthier than doing it for other people for money. For me, anyway. Other artists might love working for others, and that's awesome -- all the power to them! -- but I just want to do my own thing now.
So anyway, in other news, the Fox has landed a contract job! It's not related to either video games or assistive technology, but it is related to technology and programming. It's for a local company who needs a bit of temporary help as one of their employees will be on vacation. And there is potentially the possibility of more work if it turns out to be a good fit. So, yay!
He's pretty happy about it. Of course, since he hasn't been able to work for over a year. The tech field here is really hard to get into if you don't have a certificate/diploma/degree of some sort and the right connections/networking, so it's been hard for him to try and crack into it. This opportunity was actually the result of us giving a ride home to a guy he met at a game jam earlier in the year -- the guy is well connected in the industry and actually called the Fox about the job. See, it pays to give people rides home (as well as it being a nice thing to do)!
It will be difficult for him because of his vertigo but he's told the company about that and they are willing to work with him and see how it goes. They said he might be able to do some of the work from home. Since the company is located very close to my school, I'll be driving us both in the mornings and picking him up after we're done. That worked out very handily! I think it'll help because the bus/Skytrain is really not good for his vertigo and I think it would be very hard for him to have to bus it to work and then try and focus on a screen while the world spins around him.
So anyway, that's good. I hope that it works out really well, because if it does then we won't need to rely on the disability benefits (we just sent off the completed re-application yesterday), not to mention the Fox will feel much more fulfilled and productive. If it doesn't, that's ok too, because even just getting that experience will possibly open the door to more freelance/contract work for him.
Today is Thanksgiving Sunday, but our family dinner is tomorrow. I need to go to the store and pick up some ingredients for the dessert I'll be taking, but I'm afraid. It's going to be busier than Times Square on New Year's... argh...
I should get going though, the sooner the better I guess. I also need to do laundry, and study, and probably have some more tea, because I need tea after those damnable mice woke me up so rudely...
Anyway, that's all for now, lovely readers. I hope you all have a lovely weekend and a great Thanksgiving! Until next time, merry part.
