Nighttime gardening and other novelties

So, my crazy landlady came and got her stuff the other day, which was a really good thing.  My cute little house was furnished when I moved in, we recently got the bedroom stuff moved out, and the other day, all the rest.  Aside from what the real estate lady, who is going to buy the house, bought from her, mainly the desk and the bed in the upstairs bedroom, and a few random objects which she gifted to the house, like about 50 white towels.  And a really ugly little lamp.  And a lot of holes in the walls, because the crazy land lady has apparently never heard of 3M strips.  And trust me, the crazy land lady is crazy.  Its  a long story, but there's no way around how crazy she is.  Her getting her crap out is a really good thing for two reasons; because I can then furnish and decorate to my own taste (she has dramatically different taste than me; I can sum her's up as 'pink and teal' or as 'bad'), and because it means she is stepping back from the house and really going to sell it to the real estate lady this time.  Unlike last time, when it didn't end up happening.  Then I can be free of the crazy land lady and only have to deal with a slightly scattered but sincerely nice real estate lady, who will then be the land lady.  Without having to become a home owner myself, which I am just not ready to do.

My new bedroom set.  Yay, I'm a real adult!  Pillow shams and everything!

I am in the process of removing the golf theme from my upstairs bathroom.  *eye roll*

Speaking of golf, the US open will be here in about a month.  There is a lot of road work going on, and I'm pretty sure there are some big fines involved if they don't get done on time.  Because unlike the russians (if you didn't hear about the numerous fiascoes involved with the recent olympics, you should google it), people in Pinehurst are really invested in putting their best foot forward.  This would be why the road work is continuing at night, with big lights.  I personally think that having a concrete deadline like this is probably the best way to get road work done...

I have a really odd work schedule this month, because I am going to Italy next month, and getting it all to work out involved some adjusting, and last week I forgot that my work schedule was about to get weird.  I realized at about 8:15 pm on Saturday that I was starting a seven day stretch on monday. Oops.  I had just bought some of the stuff to grow tomatoes in pots in my yard, as well as to get the home-owner-special sprinklers in my yard to be more useful, and I was planning to come back on monday to buy the pots, soil, and tomato plants.  Instead I put the stuff I'd just bought in my car, and headed back in to get the plants and such.  Then I turned on my porch lights and did a little late night gardening, including planting a vine to grow on my trellis, planting the tomato plants in the big pots, and installing an automatic drip system to water them, since I learned two lessons the last time I tried to grow tomatoes; deer love tomato plants (so far I have not seen deer come this far into the housing area, or this close to the train tracks), and I am bad at keeping them watered properly.  So far, they are doing very well, already growing and looking good.  I am very excited for home-gown tomatoes, as they are one of the best things in the world, and soft enough that I should be able to enjoy them without difficulty.

One of my pots of tomatoes, after one week of growing, the automatic timer in the background.  

Speaking of enjoying things without difficulty, I mentioned that I had gotten braces.  I have since had two teeth extracted for the braces, and one of them (a trouble maker from the start; it had already had a root canal and an apicoectomy) decided to get dry socket, which is pretty painful and makes it hard to eat anything or even sleep.  I got the teeth out on a thursday, and, while they didn't feel great, I could fool myself into thinking they were doing ok as long as I was just chilling at home.  Then I started a new work week the following wednesday, and about 10 hours into my day came to the stark realization that things were not ok.  After an urgent consultation with Mom and Dad's dentist, which Mom facilitated (thank you)(also my former dentist, and, oddly enough, the one who did the root canal on the tooth in question back in the day), I was able to get in contact with my dentist who did the extractions.  She had actually provided me with her home and cell number for emergencies, but I had not brought the paper they were written on to work with me, so when I did call, it was about 10:00 at night.  She was very nice, confirmed it was probably dry socket, and made arrangements to meet me the following evening to take a look at things.  Which is how I ended up sitting in the dentist office at 9:00 pm getting scraped and drilled and thinking 'I have to work tomorrow, how much is this going to swell up?'  It actually didn't swell up, and she packed it with gauze and some fancy dentist goo that tastes weird but really helped it feel better.  I got to change the packing every night for about a week and a half until it finally got enough better to go without, and was basically on a liquid or very-soft food diet all of the that time.  So that was fun.  It did actually result in some weight loss, so yay for the 'braces/dental extractions/dry socket' diet.

Now I am off for two days, trying to physically recover from sleep deprivation, and emotionally recover from having a few patients die.  I did nothing to contribute to their death (I imagine it would be even harder if I was feeling responsible), but its still hard when you can't save someone.  Sometimes the families are the hardest to deal with (actually, that would be 'most of the time').  There is just nothing like someone's (adult) child bursting into wild, uncontrolled sobbing and running out of the unit to make you feel like you should be doing more, even when you're already doing everything.  So I'm feeling emotionally drained, and may have developed an obsession with the song 'Into the West,' which is about not being afraid of death...