What I Hate About My Job

On both hands, maybe toes too:

• Dealing with crazy people, with no support -- none -- from my boss -- everything that happens, I should've done something different
• Dealing with crazy people, with no training -- none -- except what I came by naturally, and it's not all that effective.
• Having to carry and answer the pager every other week. Staff and clients call with emergencies, or sometimes situations that aren't even urgent. Even when the other staff member carries the pager, I still have to respond when she calls me. It's like I'm never "off."
• The "life & death" nature of the work we do. There are some clients that need us for their very survival, have no family, no friends, no one but us. Someone's car breaks down or their kid gets sick, and this client has no food in the fridge and that client may fall trying to get to the bathroom and the suicidal one may finally do it.
• The way it tests my faith every single minute of every single day. I have to come face to face with my lack of belief in people, and my lack of belief in myself, and my lack of belief in any real pattern that the universe operates by. If you ask me in other situations about all those things, I would say, of course I believe, I believe in the people who work for me, I believe in my ability to at least learn what do in most situations, I believe the universe is orderly and runs on real, often-easy-to-observe principles. But this job tests every one of those beliefs, and today I don't feel like dealing with the struggle at all.

Here's how it goes: I'm doing my job, matching caregivers to clients, scheduling, re-scheduling, re-re-scheduling, building and re-building my little house of cards, and a client and caregiver get into a disagreement. Each one says, "I can't talk to her, tell her this" or "I can't talk to her, tell her that." Against my better judgment I get pulled in, and I'm not good at handling mentally-unbalanced people. The debacle du jour involves a bi-polar woman who periodically goes off her meds and gets mad at everyone, just like today. Only in the past she's called to apologize and said she's going to a hospital, to get her meds adjusted, and we all forget about it. Today, instead, she's made an appointment with my boss. I know where I'll come out, on the shit end, because he seems constitutionally incapable of supporting me. "Oh, yes, dahling, it's a terrible job" is the extent of his understanding of where I am.

OK, I'm finished venting, I'm going to lunch.

What I Love About My Job

On the fingers of one hand:

• The view from my office window (trees and a bit of the Noyo harbor)
• A regular paycheck (after deciding each month which bill to defer, it's nice to pay them all)
• The things I've learned (how to think more linearly, how to organize a to-do list, how to make a lot of phone calls without thinking about it)
• Seeing the same people each day and hearing continuing stories

Today's Tight Itinerary

This morning I got new eyes at 8:45. Glasses AND contacts are now updated, so I can see the world again. Whew, all that foliage out my office window -- I was missing that.

Work has its usual share of bizaare-nesses -- a client and a caregiver feuding, with me in the middle. The last supervisor did all the communicating between client and attendant, I prefer to let them talk to each other. Whatever I do, I'm wrong anyway, so tra-la-la.

At 1:30, I go for a brain-drug check. My anti-depressant and anti-anxiety meds are working well, so I'll tell him that and get charged $45 for the 5 minutes.

But after that, things get interesting. I have a job interview at 2:30 with the Mendocino Art Center. They need someone to do publicity. I know the executive director from another context (I babysat her 40 chickens, pot-belly pig, and several dogs and cats a few times). Hopefully the image of me with mud and chicken feed on my jeans will be erased by my current gussied-up state!

The bottom line is I have to believe in the work I'm doing, and the more I see around here (at the home health company) the less I want to be associated with it, the more I want to have an organization I can respect and be proud of. I know there will be challenges anywhere, I'm just looking for a place where I don't feel morally challenged on a daily basis....

As The Rooster Crows

Baby Huey is a rooster. And as such, he has decided to crow each morning. Frank heard him first and tried to describe it -- humorous -- but when I heard it myself I doubled over laughing. Huey jumps to the top of the big wire cage we have in the chicken yard, stretches up to his full 14-inch height, flaps his wings and emits a sound that is something like

• a crowing harbor seal
• someone messing with a comb and tissue paper
• someone playing a kazoo.

It's missing a syllable too. Err-a-ruh.

Somehow the hens are not impressed and run after him pecking.

Pictures soon.

Critters: Hazel the Cat

I met Hazel 3 days before Christmas, 2003. She was about a year old and living in a posh cage at the Humane Society in Fort Bragg. When I let her out and picked her up, she drooped over my shoulder with loud purring, leading me to think perhaps she's part "rag doll," a breed that's bred to relax when they're picked up.

I delayed my decision till Christmas Eve day, when I decided I had to have her, because if I didn't I'd be thinking about her and regretting it. They were closed on Christmas Eve day. What if someone had already adopted her?

The day after Christmas I went to the mobile adoption fair in Mendocino to see if she was still available, and there she was, ready to become mine, as much as a cat ever can.

Hazel turned out to be a bit of a comedian. When Trudie arrived, Hazel sniffed her tail and then smacked her nose, sending Trudie yelping away. The dog never fully trusted her after that, rarely looking at her directly, but Hazel was comradely in her superior position, and when I opened the garage door after a long day, she and Trudie would run down the hall together toward the kitchen. Hazel would hear the jingle of Trudie's tags or the click of her toenails on the kitchen floor, and she'd crouch down just out of sight around the living room corner and jump out at Trudie with a body laugh. She later did the same thing with the 2 big chickens, just to see them flap.

(When we got the baby chicks we had to start squirting water at her when she stalked them. She's gotten the idea, I hope.)

Playing "mighty hunter," Hazel has brought home her share of dead little trophies, sometimes making the gesture of sharing them with me -- the headless gopher on the front porch, for example -- but mostly she enjoys her kills in solitude. The songbirds (about 4 in the time I've had her) always make me feel sad and conflicted. I rescued one from her, setting the poor shaking thing in a bush next door, but I held out little hope it would live.



For a long time she didn't know her own size when her veldt fantasies took over. I saw her stalk a raven, the huge black bird nearly twice her length. When it flew up to the feeder board on the back deck and scolded her, she got up on the railing and swatted at it. My heart was in my mouth because the beaks on those things are about 3 inches long and the birds are known for their ornery ways. That one flew away, but a few days later I was watching some deer browse in the back yard, and saw Hazel start to creep up on them! I wasn't close enough to hear, but the little buck swiveled his ears at her and I got the feeling she was talking some trash. He came closer to her and she rolled over on her back. I had the feeling he was going to stomp her, and sure enough, a delicate and precise flash of the hoof and she beat it back under the deck.

When Frank first brought his dog over, Hazel wanted to play with Sturmz as he dozed on the floor. Frank, unsure about how Sturmz would react, bellowed at her, "NO!" For months she remained offended, glaring at Frank at every opportunity and spurning any attempt he made at friendship. (Now she deigns to let him pet her.) Meanwhile she went through a phase where she viewed Sturmz only from the roof. Then she came down and made her way past the big black nose to get where she was going, stopping to sniff his brushy tail and bat it once or twice. It's an unresolved relationship, one in which Sturmz seems to see "prey" and Hazel seems to see "playmate." We try to keep them both safe, but sometimes it feels like touch and go.

Sometimes Hazel can be patient and forebearing -- I've seen 7-year-old Beth, my Little Sister, pick her up and haul her around like a sack of potatoes while Hazel just purrs. Sometimes Hazel acts a bit more like a dog than a cat -- she comes running to meet me when I drive up.



There are times when I look at her and she takes my breath away, the lines of her body or the sapphire of her eyes. I tend to fret if she doesn't come in before I go to bed, realizing how much I love her and how I'd miss her if she didn't come back. Trudie awakened my compassion, but Hazel opens my heart.

Link to Frank's website. (He's famous!)

www.frankhartzell.com

He's used to being more in the spotlight than he is up here, people telling him off and praising him over his controversial editorials. The picture is from before he lost all that weight, but the writing's still splendid enough to make Rush Limbaugh sit up and take notice, even if His Ditto-ness did put us on the wrong coast.

Critters: Trudie the Dachshund

Trudie, the little Prussian as I called her, was 9 years old when I got her from a small-dog rescue group in January, 2004. She was 10 1/2 when I had her put down in May of 2005. The final episode was a diagnosis of pancreatitis, an extremely painful condition in which digestive enzymes get backed up and start to digest the pancreas. In dogs this shows up as a puke-and-poop-fest with extreme dehydration, outside every 20 minutes all night, and she had it 3 times in 6 weeks. (It may have started with the way her original family overfed her -- she was quite obese when I got her -- but later the vet was thinking tumor and blockage.) Each time she had it, restoring her cost me $500. The second time, they sent me home with an IV setup and showed me how to give her subcutaneous fluids. The third time, I'm afraid, was the charm.

When I first got her, she was diagnosed with a bladder tumor, which turned out to be a thickening of the bladder wall due to chronic urinary tract infection. She announced that by peeing blood on my carpet.

Even when she wasn't mortally ill, she seemed extremely depressed. The only times she appeared happy was certain moments running with Frank's dog, Sturmz, and Betty Lou's dog, Ruby. She didn't particularly like either of them, but she loved running with a pack. Looking back, I think she must've been in pain most of the time -- if one of them accidentally stepped on her or bumped her, she'd go into "land shark" mode, snapping and snarling but never making contact.

The way she appears in the picture was pretty typical. She loved the oval, sheepskin-lined cat bed, and as she was always cold, she also loved Mark O'Brien's old plaid blanket. The bed was like home base for her, and she'd race over to it and jump in, even when I wanted to take the bed in the car.



Quirks she had: She'd never come to me. I had to turn away from her and start walking, and then she'd follow me. She growled at men with loud voices (my landlord) but didn't mind women or men with soft voices (my landlord's Mexican helper and Frank). When I first got her she lay in the recliner chair all day every day for about 3 months. I had to put the leash on her and pull her out of the chair to get her to go outside. She was so completely inert that when I mentioned to a house-call vet that the adoption people had said she was "no trouble at all," he said, "Well, neither's the carpet." (She came out of her shell a bit after those 3 months, but she was never truly happy.) She was seldom affectionate with me, but she kept a close eye on me at all times, getting anxious when left her sight and often following me back and forth from room to room. Toward the end she got very close to Frank too, keeping track of him as carefully as she did me.

I felt terribly guilty about the thought of putting her to sleep, but after I made the decision she seemed to come out of her fog of illness and on her final beach walk the night before, she raced up and down the dunes like a puppy for about a half-hour. She seemed genuinely joyful that I was going to set her free.

That man o' mine

I love telling people this: Frank and I met on Yahoo! Personals.

He found me. My search criteria had the ages settings set to exclude him (he's 9 years younger than I). His opening (email) line was "You have very alluring ... words." Turns out he's a newspaper guy from way back (reporter in Ohio and Yuba County, CA, and managing editor at Napa Valley Register) and a former college professor (journalism at Dominican College in Marin County).

When we met for the first time at a Fort Bragg cafe, I thought, "This is a face I would like to look at for a very long time." He likes Christmas and baseball and animals, and had just moved to the Coast a couple of months before we met. He was living 2 1/2 miles from me.

On our second date, I went to an abalone barbecue at his mom's house and met several visiting relatives.

The stats: He's 6'8", 275 lbs (he's lost 60 pounds in the past year on the low-carb approach), red hair, blue eyes. He laughs with his whole body, and he laughs often. The phrase "gentle giant" was coined for him, but there's a confidence about him, perhaps from years of athletic training as a football player in high school and college.

We have words, digital photography and gardening in common, as well as having moved around a lot as kids. We are far too much alike in many ways. Both of us often have trouble recalling where we put things (keys, wallets, gardening tools). Makes for some interesting living conditions. Politically we're both lefties, though he has a touch more anarchism (is that a word?) in his philosophy than I do. Although he is the youngest child (by 9 years) he acts like an oldest, no problem taking charge of various situations or having a game plan for any eventuality. He's wildly intelligent and maddening absent-minded. We have fun giving voices to the various critters we have (his dog, my cat, the chickens).

He spent more and more time at my house (had been living with his mother after Dominican) and when we bought the chicks together it was more or less official, we're living under the same roof. It works out pretty well, now that we've done some rearranging and he has the spare bedroom to use as an office. (Since I've been working full-time, I have no desire to be on my computer at home.) It's still a small two-bedroom house, but the price is right -- I pay less than half the market-value rent of $900 by trading several hours a week looking after my neighbors' brain-injured son and spending the nights next door when they travel. Frank pays for a lot of the groceries ("I eat the most," he says), and it works out.

Right now he's working at the local weekly newspaper as a reporter; for the Fort Bragg schools as a middle- and high-school substitute teacher; and occasionally drives County mental health clients from Fort Bragg to wherever there's an in-patient bed for them. He recently got his real estate license and is looking for investors for buying a local motel to convert to a board-and-care facility for elderly folks.

Ever since I really got to know him I've felt like we are "forever." He's helped restore my faith in a future. There's a steadiness about him, along with that whacky humor, that is just perfect for me. He's brought a lot of fun into my life, and he's a great cook.

We sometimes play the "what if we'd only met when we were younger?"game, but the answer is always the same -- we wouldn't have been ready.

What all this means
One evening during the worst of my recent cold and sinus problem, we were eating dinner and he said, "How come we never talk about getting married?"

"Ubh....." I said, acutely aware of my complete unattractiveness at that moment -- my red nose, stuffy head and yucky cough -- and was immediately also very moved. We enjoy spending time together, value one another's opinions, already feel "committed."

We don't feel like there's any rush, but we've been talking about getting married.....


Frank with his nephew Jack and Frank's dog Sturmz

Anyone can comment now

I reset the "comment" setting, so anyone can enter a comment without having to join and create a blog of their own....

The Grumpiness Factor

I've been even grumpier than usual lately -- I've been sick and the office manager has been on vacation, so I've had to answer the phone every day, all day. I feel like I have a head full of porridge still, but my voice is back. It's fun to croak out, "Caregivers, can I help you?" when someone calls, as in "I'm at death's door, but I can help you with your home health needs. Just let me come over for a few minutes and hang out and in a few days Grandma won't need us anymore."

Also, it's raining. It's June. We never have rain in June. Usually it quits in April, early May at the latest. Eveyone forgets from year to year, though, and there are many discussions about this everywhere I go. Rain in June here on the Coast would be like snow in June other places. Rain is a winter thing here. Time for it to stop.

I was glad not to have to water the yard tho, and, actually, the landscape is incredibly beautiful in the mist. The cypresses that lean inland away from the sea breeze have lost their tops in the fog, and the fields near my house have a silvery-dewy look.

The young chickens don't seem to care about getting wet, and were foraging merrily when I left, stopping to shake themselves every few seconds. Negrita looked the worst, her little ostrich plumes drooping down sadly. We've determined that Baby Huey is a rooster. We took him and a Brahma hen from Frank's mother's flock and gave her LaVerne, the brown Americana, and LaVerne's best friend, another Brahma.

Huey's first public relations move after he was dropped into the new flock was to attack every single hen, and he was pecked back without remorse. Even tiny Negrita flew up at him, to his utter surprise. When it got dark everyone but Huey went inside the coop, and he sat in the pen cheeping miserably. "Betcha wish you'd been nicer to all these girls," I couldn't resist telling him. We've instituted an intensive taming program for him now. Clipping his wing was the first step, and now we catch him regularly and carry him around the house and pet his comb a lot. (Their combs and wattles are the most sensitive parts of their bodies.) We are trying to keep him from becoming the kind of rooster that terrorizes small children and pecks cats' eyes out. Time will tell.


Next: How this man ended up in my house, my life, my heart

Spot the omitted paragraph

My first encounter with this client was her yelling at me over the phone because her caregiver had asked to be taken off her case. The second encounter was when she complained about the replacement's "attitude problem" when faced with cleaning up 8 weeks worth of cat hair and uncleaned litter boxes. The client sent a scathing evaluation of me ("send susan to intensive people-skills training") and suggested that I had ruined her relationship with her previous home helper. By the way, this client is not disabled or elderly -- she collects insurance money from an auto accident several years ago for people to wash her hair and vacuum her house. But you'd never know anything was wrong with her physically. In response to the evaluation my boss and I agreed I'd write a letter to try to salvage this account.

Can you find the paragraph I didn't include in the final letter?



Dear MV–

When H asked me to read the evaluation and letter you sent, I could feel your frustration coming off the page like heat waves. It was quite eye-opening and humbling for me to see the impression I made on you when I was a brand new supervisor.

I'd like to chop your body into little pieces and feed them to piranhas. I’d like to tie you up and roll you on your cat-hair-covered rugs for about half an hour. I’d like YOU to have to clean up someone else’s pet-shit and 8 weeks of accumulated fur and see if you could do it with a smile on your face. You won't even clean your own house. You are totally unreasonable, and every caregiver knows it. The fact that L could be nice to you was just evidence of how good a liar she was because she knew just as well as anyone how many caregivers you burned through just to keep that bogus insurance payment coming. And don’t blame me for ruining your relationship with C. I’m sure you were capable of doing that all by yourself. But because you are the client and no one backs me in this job, it is up to me to eat shit and come up smiling. Soooooo…..

While reading your evaluation was painful for me, I’m glad you wrote it, because it gives me a chance to try to correct my mistakes – a chance everyone would want, and which I hope you will give me.

I want to assure you that I have heard your concerns and will do anything I can to restore your relationship with our care agency. This includes attempting better communication (for example, I have passed on all your messages to C) and prompt return of your phone calls. I am willing to work with you on any problem that I am aware of (for example, if a caregiver is consistently late, I cannot address the problem unless I’m notified of it).

I’m very sorry we got off on the wrong foot, and I intend to do better in the future.

Sincerely,

Long-Weekend Fallout, The Exploding Breakfast and The Great Chicken Chase

Long-Weekend-Fallout
So Memorial Day, Monday May 30, was the my second full day off since I started with Mendocino Caregivers on February 21. (Weekends I get my neighbors' brain injured son out of bed and ready for the day. That's a trade for part of my rent on the great 2-bedroom cottage with the fenced yard and "white water" ocean view, which Frank now shares with me.) After I slept in on Memorial Day (aaahhhhhhh), Frank and I went to Orr Hot Springs to soak and to Montgomery Woods State Reserve to hike, and it was all glorious and sunny and I could feel my real self coming back, and then on Tuesday I got to work and it was like I had never done the job before. Scheduling program? Never seen it before. Phone calls? Oh, well. I swilled around for a while and after an unpleasant meeting with my boss, who seemingly speaks to me only when something has gone wrong, I realized, "Square peg, round hole, I've been here before," squashing my artistic sensbilities into the tight box of the bureaucrat or the narrow slot of the "helper." That night I had a dream about some sick, dissapated people who were trying to rip me off, and on Wednesday I applied for a publicity job with the Mendocino Art Center. It closes June 10, so I'll keep you posted.

The Exploding Breakfast
I had left my car at Frank's mother's house and he had an early meeting at the Fort Bragg Advocate News, so we were in a hurry this morning. I got out of the shower to the smells of bacon and boiled eggs (Atkins diet, dontcha know). Something was humming away in the microwave as Frank made his dash for the shower, and then *pop* *BAM* something happened inside the microwave. I opened the door to find a fine mist of boiled egg yolks and chunks of whites sprayed all over the inside. It felt good to laugh so hard so early in the morning.

The Great Chicken Chase
Lest the only story be told on Frank:
When I got home yesterday, some of the chickens were in the yard, some locked in the chicken house run. We keep the tiniest ones in there all the time so they don't fall prey to one of the neighborhood cats or a hawk or raven. The others are big enough now to put up a fight.

I got it in my head that I would put them all in the run before I left for Frank's mother's house to meet his best friend from Iowa and his wife and their baby.

Now, chickens have basically three thoughts -- "food," "brood," and "panic." All their interesting behaviors stem from variations on these three things.

Ours aren't laying yet so they are too little to be "broody," which happens when they decide to try to hatch eggs. They become coo-y and soft and sit in one place and talk to themselves and they also become very defensive of that spot and chase other chickens away. Which leaves "food" and "panic."

We've conditioned ours to associate food with "Here chick, chick, chick" or "Here chook, chook, chook" and it works. So I got my bowl of chick scratch (coarse corn meal) and scattered some at the open gate to the run, saying the magic words and they came running -- from both sides. The ones who were in came out and half the ones who were out went in. The other half of the ones who were out continued to pick at the clover like nothing was happening.

I made a big, slow circle and shooed the ones who were out toward the gate, while the ones who were now in ran flapping out. Hazel, my long-haired Siamese decided this was a good time to get in on the action and did a butt-wiggling crouch followed by a pounce that sent the ones headed for the gate into "panic." They scattered.

This time the big, slow circle netted me 2 in and 4 back out, and I caught my pants on some chicken wire that was patching a hole at the bottom of the fence. The next attempt resulted in the tiniest ones out and the 2 biggest in, and I caught my pants on a zig-zag piece of barbed wire that was protecting some new vegetable plants. Then I swore at the top of my lungs. Big Mistake. PANIC! Chickens in all four corners of the big yard, racing past the open gate and into the little cul-de-sac by the deck, cowering in the corners of the deer fencing. I finally resorted to catching them one by one, and to their shrieks of indignation and protest, tossing them into the chicken house run, closing the gate after each toss.

I used to say of something chaotic, "It's like herding cats." I think from now on it'll be like herding chickens.