Out of Focus - the diary of a student radiographer.

Sunday, February 29, 2004

Making babies

I just looked back at my blog and I could have sworn I mentioned somewhere that I work as a Healthcare Assistant in the maternity dept of my local hospital. Well, I can't find it, so I guess I didn't.

I work as a Healthcare Assistant in the maternity dept of my local hospital. When I first took up the job, Adam's colleagues ribbed him about it, saying I would get all broody being amongst all those babies. Well, I can tell you now there is no chance of that. Working in maternity is an excellent way to put you off having babies for life. I honesty wonder why anyone bothers. So I am going to offer a service - anyone reading this who is undecided about whether to have a baby, can come to me to be thoroughly put off the idea. I shall offer no further details here, as there may be men reading. Men tend to not be happy to read about the gorier things in life, I find.

We get a nice range of clientele through the doors here. Not too many of your green welly brigade but plenty of nice, ordinary people, our fair share of Chatham Girls and a few women so hideous you wonder how they got a man to go near them long enough to get pregnant. Some people are a bit odd. Yesterday evening there was a couple who had their 2 year old daughter in the delivery room with them while the woman gave birth. I felt sorry for the poor kid as her mother was screaming loud enough for the whole ward to hear. Then they wanted to go home in the middle of the night - the midwife was quite appalled at someone wanting to take a newborn baby outside on a night forecast to be about minus four degrees. I think they were persuaded to stay the night.

Saturday, February 28, 2004

Needling

Well, I picked up my new, shiny, green car yesterday and I am indeed a happy bunny. I'm pleased to have power steering, electric windows and central locking which I've never had before (except on a hire car). I'm having to get used to looking below the speedo for the time instead of beside it - there's a rev counter on this one which is pretty bad at telling the time. Also the speedo goes up 140mph instead of 110mph (I think) on the old one, which means that the legal speed limits aren't as far around the dial as before. I'll have to watch out for this as I got used to where the needle sat for certain speeds - the old 30mph position is now 40mph - if that makes sense.

Also, the speedo and rev counter needles glow red when the lights are on, which I'm especially pleased about.

Thursday, February 26, 2004

Toffee, footballs and vomit

A busy and fairly blog-worthy day was had yesterday. I had to go into town to do a few errands and couldn't resist popping into my Favourite shop. I had noticed on their website that they had a new product so I wanted to see if it was in the shops yet. They did - its toffee and chocolate scented and smells good enough to eat. I nearly drooled over it in the shop. I bought two.

Back home my next task was to, erm, mumble, vacuum out the car. It only took a few minutes, honestly. I then cleared out the junk from various crevices within the car. The glove box yielded many interesting items such as 5 years worth of tax discs, a couple of tapes I thought I'd lost (Evita & Chicago) and a half eaten bag of cola bottles. This all took place to the sound of some little oik kicking his ball against the end wall of the house opposite. The rhythmic thud, thud, thud made me want to strangle the little c**t. It went on for well over an hour and I could still hear it when I went indoors. Why couldn't he do what other kids of his age do at half term and stare at the box, or play on his Xcubestation or whatever they have nowadays?

The rest of my afternoon was punctuated with one of our cats, Tasha, throwing up. I kept having to grab her and run into the kitchen with her before she hurled (the kitchen has a vinyl floor, the rest of the house has carpet, 'nuff said). A couple of times I didn't make it in time. Luckily she was OK after the fifth or sixth chuck, acting as if it never happened.

My evening was rather cathartic. My usual Wednesday evening rehearsals with my little am-dram group. I'm playing a wronged wife and the part involves a lot of shouting at my hapless 'husband'. A rather satisfying end to the day.

Tuesday, February 24, 2004

Underground, overground

I've had a busy day and I'm too tired to write a proper blog, so meantime I'll leave you with this for a little light relief.

Sunday, February 22, 2004

New, shiny and green

We went car shopping yesterday. Mostly it all went to plan and produced nothing blog-worthy. We knew what we wanted ('like our old car but newer, please') and they had one. The car was green which pleased me - normally such things as the colour wouldn't bother me but I've had 3 cars and all of them were red so I fancied a change. We test drove it - all was peachy.

Then the car salesman chappy wanted to inspect our current car as we wanted to part-exchange it. He went off to do so armed with a huge sheet of paper full of tick boxes to fill in. This surprised us because, as far as either us can remember, when we were in the same position about 5 years ago, all the car got was a cursory glance and 'we'll give you £500 for it'.

The reason this concerned me was, we had been geocaching in the Yorkshire Dales a couple of weeks ago and the car had got filthy inside and out. I'd got around to cleaning the outside but the inside was full of mud that had come off our walking boots. When the saleman chappy came back he didn't say anything about the mud but I could just tell he was thinking what awful, dirty, low-lives we must be and not at all the sort of customers he normally got in his nice, clean car showroom. Glancing across the desk at the sheet of paper he had filled in I could see the word 'Dirty' written in several places on it. I was so embarrassed.

Anyway, we bought the nice, shiny green car and I am going to vacuum the inside of the current car before I go to pick up the new one. Daft, I know.

Saturday, February 21, 2004

Spoof or American?

Occasionally I come across a website where I'm not sure if it's a joke or there is an American behind it who is being deadly serious. NewScientist.com pointed me in the direction of one such site. Decide for yourself, dear reader.

Friday, February 20, 2004

Mad numbers-obsessed fool

I had the day off yesterday so I decided to go geocaching in London. Adam decided to take the day off and come along too.

We did this partly because I am a mad numbers-obsessed fool, partly because I wanted to get a Thing done and partly because neither of us had been to Regent's Canal (apart from the bit at Camden Lock). We had a great time and walked nearly the whole length of the canal but the day was cut a little short due to the number of GPS satellites in the sky gradually decreasing throught the day, which was poor planning on someone's part. By 7pm we were down to seven, which might have been OK had we been in the countryside, but was no good in the land of tall buildings where you can only see about a third of the sky.

Dunno where they had all gone. Maybe there was something interesting happening in Australia.

Wednesday, February 18, 2004

Farmer Giles

I just heard on the radio that the family of Johnny Cash are angry that the makers of a haemorrhoid cream want to use his song 'Ring of Fire' in an advertisment. I like the way they think. :)

Legs on backwards

I have to be realistic, there is no way I'm going to be able to write a blog every day. Mostly that's because nothing interesting happens at work. The trouble with not working in an office is that I can't happily write tales of my terminally incompetent collegues. As far as I'm aware most of my collegues are competent. I can't even write about terminally incompetent suppliers/customers. My customers (and suppliers, I suppose) are the mums having the babies - a lot of them don't know what they are doing but that's not very interesting most of the time.

Anyway, I worked a late shift (1pm - 9pm) yesterday on the post-natal ward and the only thing of note was there was a baby with malrotation of the hips on the ward. That means that apparently it looked like his legs were on backwards. I say apparently because I didn't have a ligitamate reason to go see this baby and I couldn't exactly go up to his mum and say 'Excuse me, I heard you have a deformed baby and I want a look'. That wouldn't be professional.

Tuesday, February 17, 2004

It's a blog and it's pink

Well, I gave into temptation and started blogging. That sounds like it was a spur of the moment desicion but it actually took ages of tweaking to get the colours and stuff sorted and I'm still not sure I'm happy. I'm not even happy it's pink. I would value your comments, dear reader.