Easy First Night 🌙⭐️💫

When I got to work at 8:00 pm, the awful caregiver left. The ladies were already in their nightgowns. I asked each one individually if they wanted to go to bed, and they all went straight to their beds and zonked our immediately. 

The awful caregiver told me that there is only one medication to give in the morning, and it’s a syrup. I looked at the medication logs, and each client has 8 or 9 meds that they have to take at 7:00 am. 

I don’t know what’s wrong with her. 

Cool Protesters 👅 🗿 🌴

I watched a protest in New Zealand that showed a group of locals performing a Haka.
I’ve never seen a Haka being done before and thought it looked interesting. I searched for more footage on it and discovered that the Maori people use it as a battle move. It’s also used as a Welcome. Watching it brings out some giggling and also some strong emotion for some reason.
I suppose if one was going to invade an island and come upon people doing this on the shore, they’d turn back.

Last Training Day 🤗 🌻 💊

The final part of my training involved the company nurse, who showed me precisely how to dispense medication to the clients.
It was difficult to follow along, because the more she looked through the medication boxes and documentation, the more medication errors she found. There were controlled substances missing, and the nurse became choked up over it.
Finally, I calmly suggested that she should come over to the house one day soon and overhaul all of it. She agreed to do this on Wednesday. I’m glad.
The caregiver who works on the night shift is a major problem. I can already tell. She’s supposed to be “in charge” of the house, but she’s doing a pitiful job.
Two hours after she left, she texted me and asked me to clock her out. I was like, sorry I can’t. That can get you fired immediately.
Then she dropped by before my training with the nurse and angrily demanded to know why I was washing dishes in the dishwasher. She exclaimed that the dishes that were in the sink were clean. They clearly were not clean. There was a crusty pot and cereal bowls that had old milk in them. Does she think I’m an idiot?
Then, the boss got with me to give me a schedule. She gave me two overnight shifts. The problem coworker has been working seven nights a week and therefore getting overtime. My presence means no more overtime for her. She was outraged.
I’m definitely going to have to stand my ground with this bitch. I spoke to the boss about some things that she got mad about me and the training caregiver doing, such as letting one of the ladies sit on patio chairs in the back porch (as long as we can see her). Problem night caregiver said not to let her outside at all, and both the boss and the training caregiver said that since it’s her house, she has a right to go sit outside.
I also threw out a ton of expired food in the fridge. All of the expired food filled up one 13 gallon bag. There was also raw chicken sitting in a container with chicken blood since Thursday. Me and the trainer threw out everything nasty (including jelly that expired in 2016).  I have a very strong feeling that night caregiver is going to be outraged about that too.
I also went to the grocery store with the boss. She didn’t hesitate to put anything in the cart that me or the trainer said the house needed.
It was a fruitful day. I can’t wait to see what happens with this awful woman.

Free apples 🍎 💰 🍏

There are several beta testing jobs this week and weekend. There were four items I couldn’t find, but still got the pay without reimbursement for saying the stores didn’t have them. The items that Evita and I really scored on were apples and discontinued stress vitamins. 

We were able to go to several locations for the apples. We were reimbursed up to $2 for the apples and $6 for writing a review. In total, we went to 7 locations. Three apples cost a little over $2, so we have 21 free apples and $42 in pay. ($40 ish if you consider we only got reimbursed $2, and the total was $2- something at each place).  

The other job had to do with going to three Walmart locations, buy all the remaining bottles of anti-stress gummies, get reimbursed and paid $5 above that. We went to all three Walmarts, got 10 free bottles of these gummies (which are really awesome by the way) and $15 in pay. 

Evita came with me and had a blast. She has not been out of either of her houses since March. 

I drove her back to her dad’s house at 5:00 pm. The next time I see her, she’ll be a teenager!! 

Happy Birthday Mom 💐 🎂 👵🏽

Better Today...?

My training day today started with the night caregiver telling me to please give the ladies showers, as she didn’t do it the night before. She left when the training caregiver showed up, and she basically said “Oh hell no”, and that the evening/night caregiver had plenty of time to give them showers. So they didn’t get to take showers. When I finish training on Monday, I’ll be working alone, so there won’t be any of this pettiness. I can just do what I need to do without some large and in charge person telling me exactly what, when and how. The night caregiver literally told me not to listen to the trainer, and the trainer literally told me not to listen to the night caregiver. 

One of the clients is schizophrenic. She is always, always talking- sometimes to you, but mostly at no one in particular. She picks up on everything, though. As soon as she picked up that two different people were telling me two different things, she constantly had to loudly ask me if I was going to do it the night lady’s way or the trainer’s way. It was actually pretty perfect. I loved that it was so obvious what was happening that a client literally wouldn’t let it go. Both of these caregivers are nice to me- they just butt heads with each other. If the trainer didn’t tell me Oh Hell No, I would have just given them baths. 

Training ends Monday. I’m off this weekend. Tomorrow, my mom turns 75!  Cutting it up since 1945! I can’t believe May is almost over. Sunday is Pentecost. Monday is June 1 already!  

2020 has been insane. First loosing my dad, then a global pandemic, and now Minneapolis is burning down. It’s hilarious to me that they’re out there among the flames and the tear gas wearing face masks to protect themselves from Covid19. I feel so “over it” with everything going on that the rioting scenes on the news didn’t bother me. I actually said “sweeeet” to some of the more terrifying scenes. I must be so fed up with things that entire cities in disarray don’t phase me. 

Violations 🚨 📝 ⚠️

The group home that I started working in has an ungodly amount of state violations. 

The caregivers were off yesterday and today. The woman who I shadowed has been a caregiver with this company for 18 years, but she is “the trainer” and has only worked in this home once or twice. (There are many other group homes). 

A lot of the things she had to show me were in the many binders of documentation. As she went through the binders, she kept mentioning that everything was not only out of place, but a lot of documentation hadn’t been done for days. 

She was supposed to show me a fire hydrant, but there was no fire hydrant anywhere to be found. 

We did a fire drill, and she said there was supposed to be a poster on the wall with an escape route, but there was none. 

There is no vacuum in the house. So it’s safe to assume that they just haven’t vacuumed. 

The showers don’t have hot water, so we wonder if the ladies are just always taking cold showers. 

The night staff locked the bathroom doors from the outside, which they can’t do. 

One of the ladies seems to never brush her hair. There was a massive rats nest in the back. When the training caregiver went to fix it, she discovered an old braid in the back, and the entire braid came off of the lady’s head. 

The ladies all have horrible breath. Do they ever brush?  We could not find toothbrushes. 

The groceries in the house are completely unorganized. There is nothing to make a full meal. There’s hamburger helper, but no ground beef. There’s spaghetti sauce, but no spaghetti. There’s just random ingredients that you can’t really put together. Finally, we agreed to just make them sandwiches. I saw some yogurt in the fridge that they could have with the sandwiches, but most expired in February or March of 2020.  

They kept asking for Coke Zero, and balked at the idea of water. 

There’s a TV, but no cable- not even the basic channels are set up. There’s a DVD player with only two movies- Sister Act and Marley and Me. (Which really set off the water works in my eyes!)

The lightbulbs from the bedrooms were all blown out. 

I’m probably forgetting something. The training caregiver had to report everything to the boss and actually called in several work orders while I was there. The boss came over later that evening with some of the required things that were missing. We found out that one of the ladies gets a $500 food stamp card every month. But where is it?  A trip to the grocery store is in order. The trainer said more than once that she was embarrassed to show me the place in such bad shape. I wish she wasn’t, though. They are taking care of the many issues, and that’s the main thing. 

Nice to get out 😷🙌🏼

Is anyone else’s blog refusing to upload photos, or is it just me?

I finished my training today for the new job. I did three audits on the way there. It was really nice to leave the house and have something to do for a change. Staying home is getting old.

There was another new person there with me- only she is just starting her training, and I’m just finishing. She’s 19 years old, but she seems way more immature. I really hope I don’t have to work with her. If I do, I have to remind myself that I was once the 19 year old employee with a 40-something coworker barking down my ass.

Garden, 2013

This is how my garden looked 7 years ago. 

No Puppy for us 🐶 😞

My mom decided that she wanted the puppy tested for heart worm before we decided to adopt her. I offered the woman to meet her at the appointment and pay for it while there. The woman said she “didn’t have time for all that” and that’s why she wasn’t charging for the puppies. So I had to tell her that we were going to pass.
My mom keeps telling me to keep looking for a puppy, but I’m done looking. I didn’t realize the emotional investment that went into looking for a dog.  Mom is asking me, because she doesn’t understand modern technology like I do. (Like the internet as a whole). I don’t mean to be mean when I say this, but I’ve shown her enough in the way of computer skills over the years. She can figure out how to look for a puppy if she really wants to. It’s not that hard, just go to any social media site and search “Houston Puppy”.  She knows what a search bar is, and can find one if I’m not around, but if I’m around, she’ll be like, “How do I search?”

Tuesday I finish my training for the new job, and then I shadow someone for three days.

Our New Baby

Mom decided a couple weeks ago that she wants a dog. She’s only open to getting a girl dog, because in her words she “doesn’t want to have to look at the penis all the time.”  She will not get from a breeder, which is understandable, but will also not adopt one that is older than just a few months old. She believes that an older dog would have issues. A puppy will be quick to adopt you as her “pack”.  

I found this one woman on Facebook. She lives here in Houston. She says that she was at a gas station in a really ghetto area and found mama dog, already pregnant, and looking kind of needy. She decided to take mama home and keep her. It’s an option to spay a dog who is already pregnant, but this lady said she couldn’t bear to do that. The puppies were born on Valentine’s Day. 

I messaged her and asked if there were any girl puppies left. She sent me this picture of the last girl. Mom and I are going to see her tomorrow, and she is insisting on naming her Stella. Since she was born on Valentine’s Day, her middle name will be Valentine. 

I found a few puppies online that I sent her the ads for. She said no to all of them and was being quite picky. It seemed to me that she either wasn’t really ready, or she just wanted a clone of Queenie. This is the first one she was open to, and I believe it’s because this puppy has light brown fur on the face with dark brown ears, just like Queenie had. Mom said that it’s definitely time for another dog, as Queenie has been gone almost 25 years, and she wants it for the protection factor. 

I’m going shopping tomorrow for a crate, puppy food, pee pads, and some toys. I can’t wait!!  I just think Alex will be jealous!  

We are going to see her tomorrow evening. 

This sounds like a Nightmare 😩

Above is the concise version of the CDC’s guidelines for reopening schools in the fall. I don’t know about you, but this looks absolutely horrible. Have these people ever been to a school?  Schools will definitely need millions more staff to make this happen. A lot of people who never considered homeschooling before are now insisting on it. 

This includes me and Evita. We talked about it this morning. She doesn’t want to have to go to school like this, and I don’t want her to either. We decided that she will most likely be homeschooled for 8th grade, if her dad agrees. 

My mom announced to me this morning that she has !finally! decided to retire. She will be 75 years old on May 30th. She did retire for a while 10 years ago, but couldn’t handle being around my father 24/7. Throughout the years, she has always maintained that if she retired with my dad, that the two of them would kill each other. They definitely would have. My mom’s job has kept her sane, and work has always been extremely important to her. She did not believe in women staying home and being homemakers. She has always been adamant that women needed to work outside the home.  

She was into medical office management for the majority of her career, and she also did some accounting. For the last ten years, she has been a PBX operator in a hospital. 

I am kind of relieved that she finally decided this. I have been worried about her exposure to coronavirus, but she insists that since she works in a small room off to the side of everything else, there isn’t as much exposure. When the pandemic started, she and all other hospital employees were required to have their temperature taken before clocking in. 

She works on the second shift, from 1-9 pm. At 9:00 pm, another woman in her 70’s relieves her for the overnight shift. My mom for some reason has decided to hate this woman for no reason. In the past few months, my mom has really let this woman’s little comments and actions bother her. I had to lecture her not to let this woman bother her so much. She would come home livid at her for the most minor things. Some of the things I can understand- this woman does have a habit of calling out with very little notice. That would get under my skin, too. But she hates the way she talks, walks, wears her hair, and so on. 

She also has been getting phone call after phone call at the hospital from people who think they have Covid19. She has been saying the last few weeks that coronavirus is all she ever hears about anymore and she is extremely sick of it. I have been asking her to consider retirement for a while now. Without my dad, she has no one to fight with at home. She has the Arizona house money, a 403B, and she gets social security. She’s set. She does have a lot of close friends at the hospital, however. There are two other women who work in the switchboard besides the dowdy overnight one, and my mom is very close with them. About half of the people that attended my dad’s funeral were her coworkers. 

I want to have a party for her retirement, but parties are such a no-no right now. My cousin suggested a zoom party, but that strikes me as extremely lame.  

As for me, I had orientation for my new job at the group home, and have been doing online trainings that they require. Tomorrow I have to attend an in person training. The group home that I’m going to work in is 17 miles away and is small, with only three ladies who live there. I’m optimistic.