My 2 tiny peeps are finally here!
I'm a part time nurse and a stay at home mom who loves to blog, tweet, and take pictures.
I'm trying out this space for awhile to see if I can live here and break my addiction to wordpress.
I will admit I was reluctant to get it. A couple years ago I was the flu shot nurse at a local hospital. It seemed like health care workers came from out of the woodwork to tell me their vaccination horror stories. Then, I blogged about it and heard even more horror stories in the comments. I typically am one to go by statistical evidence rather than anecdotal evidence, but I have to admit, the stories spooked me. So much so that I haven't gotten a flu shot since then.
And I didn't get vaccinated because I'm a nurse. I haven't actually worked since July and don't intend to go back to work any time soon. No, I got it because I'm pregnant. Previously I was very reluctant to get it. My rationale was that I'm healthy and I rarely leave the house. Plus I'm one of those people that question everything, especially the safety and efficacy of drugs. What made me change my mind? Simple. The doctor said, it's the only way you'll be able to transfer immunity from the virus to your babies. So I got it. Because it's not about me, anymore. It's about the babies. And if I end up having my own vaccination horror story? I'll be sure to blog all about it. Cross your fingers I won't have to.
The eco-pawprint of a pet dog is twice that of a 4.6-litre Land Cruiser driven 10,000 kilometres a year, researchers have found.
Victoria University professors Brenda and Robert Vale, architects who specialise in sustainable living, say pet owners should swap cats and dogs for creatures they can eat, such as chickens or rabbits, in their provocative new book Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living.
The couple have assessed the carbon emissions created by popular pets, taking into account the ingredients of pet food and the land needed to create them.
"If you have a German shepherd or similar-sized dog, for example, its impact every year is exactly the same as driving a large car around," Brenda Vale said.
"A lot of people worry about having SUVs but they don't worry about having Alsatians and what we are saying is, well, maybe you should be because the environmental impact ... is comparable."
In a study published in New Scientist, they calculated a medium dog eats 164 kilograms of meat and 95kg of cereals every year. It takes 43.3 square metres of land to produce 1kg of chicken a year. This means it takes 0.84 hectares to feed Fido.
They compared this with the footprint of a Toyota Land Cruiser, driven 10,000km a year, which uses 55.1 gigajoules (the energy used to build and fuel it). One hectare of land can produce 135 gigajoules a year, which means the vehicle's eco-footprint is 0.41ha – less than half of the dog's.
I noticed via twitter a few of you getting your cherished google wave invites so I figured I'd set up an outpost for nurses to connect.
There are a few ways to get to my little outpost:
First, Try this link. (It will only work if you are signed in to wave.)
If that doesn't work, open up a search query while you are in google wave using this format:
with:public title:nurses
Still getting your feet wet, or just getting started? Try some of these helpful links:
Google Wave Extensions (Robots and Gadgets)
And definitely read Phil Baumann's take on it, A Clinical Infusion of Google Wave. He has some great ideas about how we might be using wave in the clinical setting.
Once you make it to the nurse's wave, leave a blip, and feel free to add me as a contact. For now it's just me and a bunch of robots.
Happy waving!
So I wrote this whole post which was basically a side by side technical comparison of posterous to wordpress and yadda, yadda, yadda. It really just comes down to two things so I'll spare you the post:
Surprisingly, the most important thing I think I've learned from switching blog platforms has nothing to do with the technical side of it. The real problem was that I wasn't that thrilled anymore with being a nurse blogger. Consequently, I let PixelRN suffer from serious neglect and it got hacked. What I really wanted to do was to start a blog and let it morph into whatever it wants to be. I know that goes against the grain of what you hear on sites like problogger...Find your niche and write about it! Keep the personal posts to a minimum! Think about what your readers want to hear from you!
This camera looks so sad. Maybe it's because there's no film left in the world for him. He thinks about iPhone apps like polarize and feels bitter. The world isn't just changing - it's already changed.
My friend Michael and I rescued him from a house we were cleaning back in 1998. I don't think he really belonged to anyone. We were cleaning the house so it could be put on the market. The house itself was a perfect time capsule replica of 1978, and the camera was a precious specimen that was left behind. Michael and I had a few qualms about taking it. We justified it by believing that the camera was purposely abandoned because who in the 1990's was actually taking polaroid pictures? Anyway, I'm no pack-rat but I think I'll keep him. After all, he took one of my favorite all time pictures:
It's the Springfield Mall parking lot on a Sunday evening, sometime in 1998. Ever heard of the Springfield Mall in Pennsylvania? Probably not unless you remember Sylvia Seegrist. She made the mall temporarily famous by going on a shooting spree there in 1985. The Mall means a lot to me because it was were I had my first job, scooping ice cream at Bressler's 33 flavors.
In the near future bees are extinct—until one autumn when five unconnected individuals, in Iowa, New Zealand, Paris, Ontario, and Sri Lanka, are stung. Immediately snatched up by ominous figures in hazmat suits, interrogated separately in neutral Ikea-like chambers, and then released as 15-minute-celebrities into a world driven almost entirely by the internet, these five unforgettable people endure a barrage of unusual and highly 21st-century circumstances. A charismatic scientist with dubious motives eventually brings the quintet together on a remote Canadian island. But their shared experience unites them in a way they could never have imagined.Generation A mirrors the structure of 1991’s Generation X as it champions the act of reading and storytelling as one of the few defenses we still have against the constant bombardment of the senses in a digital world.
I am so excited for this book to come out.
They had me at "it champions the act of reading and storytelling."
Remember when blogging used to be about that?
