Walked into work today. Swiped my time-card in the computer. Took a gander at the assignment sheet. “Karl–Pod 3 trauma unit.” Picked up my stuff and walked down to my patient rooms….so what do I see….4 DuPage County Sheriffs in my patient’s room. *mental note — this can’t be good, text Gabi and make sure life insurance is paid up* So I was assigned a 30 year old guy who I actually admitted several days ago for a suicide attempt. He had taken a whole bunch of Xanax. Apparently, on my off days he was discharged and that night he tried again to kill himself, this time with Xanax, Vicodin and Trazadone about 60 pills in all. Again he was admitted, this time he is combative and is admitted in full four point leather padlocked restraints. The jolly bit of this is that he has been neglectful in paying his child support and has a warrant for his arrest. So my patient at all times has two Sheriffs to keep a watchful eye on him until he is transported to the Inpatient psych unit.
Actually, it was quite nice having them there considering my last little adventure with a psych patient. I also have quickly learned to make friends with the sheriffs. So I made sure that every set of sheriffs had refreshments, food trays and the TV remote with listings.
So much fun,
ta, KB
And now the skin peeling begins…..
KB
Owwwww..my face is a hurting today. Not as bad as I thought it would but enough to be annoying. Slathering of Solarcaine and many milligrams of Ibuprofen have helped. I have loads of little blisters all over my face, mostly on my nose, which are leaking a yellow serous fluid…yuck.
Gabrielle and I were invited out by Naomi, a friend of mine from work. She is a hospice nurse and a great soul. The three of us and her husband Paul went to Zanies comedy club in Venon Hills to see John Pinette. He was freakin hysterical.
This weekend was so strange, in that it encompassed rain, Scotland and somewhere along the road Gabrielle out of nowhere started talking about gastroenterology. All of these things were part of John Pinette’s act today even the gastroenterology, so strange.
The act was great, but it definitely cracked my face causing the need for more slathering and ibuprofen. After the show, we headed to Buffalo Wild Wings for a nice dinner.
This is a bit late but I am trying to keep this blog updated (especially for Jess — a faithful kiltedbehemoth follower). So this morning, Rich and I got back to the site and the damage to the tent was more extensive than we thought. There was no way we were going to be able to fix the tent. Surveying the other vendors pretty much everyone took damage to tents and product. We decided to make the best of it and took the tent down and faced the 90 degree fully sunny day. Rich and I were able to sell quite a bit, so hopefully there is enough profit to offset the losses of the weekend. I wish I had pictures to show but my camera phone pretty much sucks.
Right around 1pm, Rich looks over at me and says “Dude you aren’t looking so good, you look like an overcooked lobster.” He was right my face was badly sunburned (2nd degree on my evaluation at home). Unfortunately, nobody was selling hats or sunblock otherwise I would have gotten something. Of course, I didn’t bring anything because I thought we were going to be able to patch the tent. Sigh….and now the pain is setting in…the next few days are going to be interesting.
ta, KB
Hey all,
So Went to the Highland Games to help Hearthstone Art sell some pottery. Mike developed a fever so Rich stepped in and he and I handled things today. Things were going pretty well, however we were dodging some nasty weather throughout the day. Well, mother nature decided to hit us and hit us hard. Around 6:30pm we were hit with a micro-burst and Rich and I were lucky to get out unharmed. Lightning was striking all around and the winds picked up maxing out around 70 MPH according to noaa.gov. The tent collapsed and a large rip has nearly split the tent in two. One of the mug displays flew about ten feet across the tent set up and unfortunately several pieces of potter were either damaged or destroyed. We are tentatively estimating losses at a few hundred dollars, especially since several of the pieces damaged were the hand painted.
Essentially all the vendors took severe damage. There were T-shirts and souvenirs strewn all over the field. Not only were the pup pop up tents new atmospheric displays but the large heavy tents with thick hollow tube aluminum tent poles with ratcheting straps took to the air. One of those actually took to the air, poles and all and came right toward Rich and I in that 70 mph wind. Needless to say, we did the running dive to the ground to avoid getting hit then the flying pottery came…we were lucky to leave unharmed. There were people hurt and several ambulances were on scene. As we were running the MILE (literally) to my car we could see (through our wet foggy glasses) the rows of portable potties all overturned. I REALLY hope no-one was in on of those then they were blown over.
After telling the significant others of what happened. Gabrielle lovingly had dinner waiting for us and all the comforts of home at the ready. We are now safe, joking around, fed and generally feeling lucky to not have been hurt in this very scary ordeal. We are going back tomorrow early to take account of everything and if the fair is still on we’ll be there. Come on out and see us. That’s it for now cuz I’m tired and stil drying off.
Kilted 
Hey all,
I’ll be working for Hearthstone Arts this weekend at the Highland Games in Brookfield….come on out and say hi and see some cool Scottish games.
http://chicago.timeout.com/events/city-picks/60725/scottish-festival-and-highland-games
see you there,
Kilted
Karl is totally in love with this:
check out the video…it runs for 1hour 20 mins but is sooooo worth it.
ttfn
Wow…ok so its been awhile since I’ve posted, but I’m hoping to correct that now that some things have calmed down…er…sorta kinda. I wanted to take a second to post about a website I found called www.beepmystuff.com. This is a free online personal library database. It allows you to use your web-cam to scan the bar-codes on your DVDs, music, video games, books, etc and it compiles a library for you with all the pertinent information. The site searches Amazon using the 12 digit bar-code number (not the ISBN number) and pulls out all the info on your product and neatly organizes it for you. BeepMyStuff even has a lending function to help you keep track of who you lent items to. For awhile I had been considering an open source software called Koha suggested from John Wohlers. However, as John had pointed out to me this is an intensive system primarily designed for library technicians at facilities and educational institutions. The BeepMyStuff site is much simpler and gives the user multiple routes to add their items to their personal library. It not only allows you to scan the barcode, but you can search the net by Title or EAN/UPC (12 digit code) or if you have a very rare item not easily found on the net it has a manual description page that you can fill out.
The scan function is a bit tricky to use but that may be due to my crappy webcam which lacks autofocus and has a low frames per second rate. I was able to get a couple items by scan but I mostly gave up on my webcam and just used the search functions. Even abandoning the scan feature, I was able to load up 24 DVDs and books in under 5 minutes so things went very fast.
The webpage is nice and clean and easy to understand. If you use OpenID that is supported on this site for my more technical friends. BeepMyStuff also has an API in case anyone cares to do some developing. Another nice feature is the friends RSS feed which I think is a great way to let friends know what’s the new book, movie, CD etc that you are enjoying and giving them all the information they need to get that same item because it is in the RSS feed.
If anyone tries this let me know what you think…of course my library is under… kiltedbehemoth
ta — (not what you are thinking Gabi)
Ok…haven’t posted in awhile sorry about that. I’ll post more later but I thought this was very cool.
Karl hates it when his patient losses his airway and need to be intubated and placed on life support. 