the snow: is melting, taking on a new shape, less scalloped by the wind, having been previously whipped to high peaks. it has softened, as the temperature rose to 25 degrees yesterday.

the birds: came out of hiding, a great number of them hitting the feeder in the bush right outside my office window, chattering and eating, spraying bits of seed everywhere and taking up so much bird space on the feeder, they have toppled it a bit. it sits now, off kilter, nearly empty in the bush.

the school bus: will be here any minute.

ali would rather: still be in bed.

the alarm clock: i get to set it for a 2-hour nap that i will pile onto the 2-hour nap i had in the wee hours of this morning, and this i get to call "a good night's sleep."

the er: was busy last night, at my desk and in real life. decided to run paul to the er last night because things just didn't seem quite right. seemed a lot of suffering, far beyond what the yellow discharge instruction sheet (patient's copy) suggested to be the norm. turns out he has an infection on one of the excision sites, his blood pressure was too high, and so iv antibiotics, fluids, and a whole mess of new prescriptions. a dramatic change after the iv push.

surgery last night: none for paul, but during the course of my evening shift, i sawed off a woman's leg and then got stuck in a massively complicated heart surgery. the heart surgeon chose to document the complicated 5-vessel!!! bypass by dictating with the phone in her shoe or up her sweater! it was very difficult to get every word just right, but worth it because it's not every night you get to take a teeny, tiny woman apart, steal veins from both her teeny, tiny legs and stitch her back together again. and this woman was teeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeny tiny, barely 5 foot tall and just barely 70 pounds, soaking wet, which she was with cold cardioplegic solution while her heart was in la-la land during the surgery. it was like transcribing the reconstruction of a fairy. went to bed with a dent in my head, and had no choice but to get up this morning. tinkerbell was returned to cardiac intensive care in critical but stable condition. 

vinegar and brown paper: it worked for jill when she mended jack, so i'm mixing up a batch at the moment, and will restuff my brain back into my head and hold back the mess with vinegar and brown paper.

drying time for vinegar and brown paper: hope it only takes two hours.