The Days I Grew Up

As an Occupational Therapist I have worked in several different settings. For the past 7 years I have worked in Home Health, where I go to peoples’ houses to treat them when they are not sick enough to be in a hospital or a nursing home, but it would be too difficult to bring them to an Outpatient Rehab place. For a few years before that, when I lived in Tampa, I worked as a Rehab Manager for an Outpatient Place (I usually refer to them as “Their Name – That Horrible Company” – they’re the ones who demoted me on my birthday and then fired me 8 days later. I later found out that the official reason they let me go was downsizing but instead of saying that that I was downsized, they preferred to tell me that I didn’t have what it took. B@stards. Oh, and by the way, I got a new job 20 hours later. Take THAT, motherf*ckers! But I digress.). When I lived in Staten Island, I worked full-time on a Psychiatry unit of a local hospital for 11 years and for 5 of those years I also worked on an “as needed” basis, at a Home Health company. However none of those sorts of jobs were ever in my original career goals. Nope, not even close. Originally, from when I was 13 years old and decided to be an O.T., until I was almost done with college, I was going to work in Pediatrics.

But something went terribly, terribly wrong.

It took years before I was comfortable telling this story but when I was

A Conversation With My Dog

Our toy poodle, Dobby, will be turning 2 next week. And let me tell you, she is one SMART little girl. Smart enough where she can even be sneaky. See, she has this “thing” about stuff she finds on the floor – if it’s on the floor (or hell, not even just on the floor – just within her reach!) it’s hers. Paper, pens, dryer sheets, socks (oh, does that dog LOVE socks!) plus whatever other tiny little stuff she finds that we didn’t even know was on the floor. Like the time someone dropped a

The 2011 New York Trip

Joe and I try to get back up to New York every year or two – besides giving us a chance to go “home” (Joe’s from New Jersey and I’m from Brooklyn and then Staten Island – although we’ve lived in Florida for 10 years now and love our adopted state, things just always feel more “normal” when we’re in Manhattan – the pace, the accents, the attitude – everything that I didn’t like about NY when I lived there (OK, except the weather – I still HATE the cold) gives me a happy sense of nostalgia when I go to visit), we get to eat “good” pizza and bagels, delight in drinking water straight from the tap and pack in as many Broadway shows as we can into a long weekend. With Anything Goes, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and The Book of Mormon all in previews, we decided now was a good time to go. So we made reservations for a Thursday to Sunday trip.

Of course, things can never go as perfectly as planned and this trip was no exception – we got the news that

The Birthday Question

It was my birthday yesterday. It was a generally low-key day, which, except for “big birthdays” (I’m halfway between 2 “big ones” right now) is how I prefer it to be. My original plan was to go to my spa of choice (read: the one where I had a nice amount of gift cards) but it turned out that they’re closed on Mondays. Plus Joe and I couldn’t go out to dinner because

Flash Mob Much? (Part 2)

Yesterday I talked about the flash mob I got to be involved with as a part of “celebrating tourism in Orlando.” That entry can be found here. Today I’m going to describe the flash mob I got to be involved with, thanks to my new choir, just about five weeks after that one.

After leaving our old chorus last autumn because, well, because of a lot of reasons, Joe and I joined a new choir in December. Rehearsals started in early February and so far it has been

Flash Mob Much? (Part 1)

How many people get to say that they were in a flash mob? Nope, not many. You have to know the right people, be available to be in the right place at the right time, you name it. Please allow me to toot my own horn for a moment…I was involved in not one but TWO flash months in the course of five weeks!

The first one was set up on, of all places, Facebook. Yep, that love-it-or-lump-it bastion of

I Think I’m A Hoarder

Joe and I have begun what will be a complete re-decorating of our master bedroom. New paint, new flooring, new furniture, a new closet system, you name it. Of course, the first thing we needed to do was empty the room of furniture, which took up most of our day on Sunday. It was a multi-step process, which included removing every drawer from every chest of drawers. However my armoire had three “cubby” style spaces, each about 18” square, that needed personalized attention in the form of taking out each piece of “stuff” and putting it into a box or a garbage bag.

Those three cubbyholes were very much catch-alls or junk drawers so I got to sort through a bunch of items that I hadn’t seen in a long, long time. Part of me enjoyed the task because it was a trip down memory lane. However the rest of me is pretty sure that

Finding the Humor in Colonoscopies

During my last physical, my doctor reminded me that, not only will I be due for my annual boob squishing mammography (Meh…I always do that one even May, like clockwork – gotta save the tatas!) before my next visit with him, but that I would also be due for another colonoscopy.

Oh, joy!

Now, because my father passed away of

Welcome, Foolish Mortals

By request (hello, Kat!), this blog entry is a “retweet” of a writeup I did for two online sources nearly a decade ago, of a Disney dinner event we attended at the Haunted Mansion.

Way back when, Joe and I were huge Disney fans and were at a time in our lives when we went to just about any Disney-sponsored event that came down the pike (unless it was Princesses. Screw the Princesses). During that time frame, when Disney restaurants hadn’t been “dumbed down” to (A) save them money

Dumb Things I’ve Said, Done and Thought (Part 2)

I wrote a blog entry a while back about some of the dumb things I’ve been known to think, do and say in my adult life. Of course, stupidity never ends, least of all mine, and so I now offer you “Part 2”.

— Joe had some music playing from his iTunes…it was an old song from the 60’s, “Lonely Days,” and he asked me if