Back to work!

I hope this finds everyone doing well!  These past two weeks have been me getting used to the new units and being oriented to them.  I know I may have said it a few times, but, I am working the Ambulatory (which basically means "outpatient") Treatment Infusion Center and it's sister unit, the 23 hour observation surgical floor at Stanford.  The pace is very different from an inpatient oncology floor and presents unique challenges.  Each hospital, each unit, each specialty is challenging in different ways.  It can be refreshing but can also make you feel incompetent until you learn the system and flow of care.  I have enjoyed my coworkers very much so far!  They are very positive, encouraging and helpful.  I think I will enjoy the units and the patients, although I am missing oncology.  It feels great to be back to work and I was reminded this week of how much I really love nursing.  It can be a really fun and neat job!

We have had an interesting week, weather-wise!  It's been raining for a week, combined with snow on the mountain tops, and even a few tornado warnings and funnels!  The cliffs at Pacifica (about 25 miles NW of here) are falling into the sea from the rain and surf pounding on them, threatening some cliff-top apartments.  No flooding in the towns here, that I've heard, but many rainy commutes!  The rain is nice, but, I have discovered about 3 days is my limit!  We are on day 8.  The sun has been playing peak-a-boo some.  I almost drove under a full rainbow today, framing the Diablo Mountains, topped with snow, covered in lush, green grass and trees.  Although we are all a little bummed and blue from the rain (all my inn-mates and I are laughing about how pouty the rain makes us), the hills are so beautiful!  I've never seen such a rich green! My drive home from work is on the foothills of the coastal range (Santa Cruz mtns) and the views definitely make up for a long day at work!

There is no other news this week, so I'll leave you with some of my favorite pictures from the drive home from LA when I went to visit Derrick (my brother) for an evening!  The drive back (with stops) took about 11 hours but it was worth every second!  I highly recommend making the drive within your lifetime at some point!  If you need a good reason, come visit me and we can do it! : )

Enjoy and God bless!

Hundreds of elephant seals hauled out (resting) on a beach,

here for mating/birthing season.  The males (the big guy there)

are up to 1,500 lbs!

Do you see the road way up there?

Life at the Inn

This has been such a fun and interesting experience so far--travel nursing that is.  I will say, when I pull out some clothes I haven't worn in a while and they smell like Extended Stay America, I do dry heave a little bit.  Three months in hotels was plenty, thank you. And, Sacramento was a little lonely for the first three weeks, until my friends in the Bay would encourage me to meet them halfway or come hang out with them and their friends from home any time some were coming to the area and I finally felt like I had friends at work.  So, that helped take care of much of the loneliness and lack of social life in Sacramento.  On the positive side of things, I am blown away by all of the awe-inspiring and breathtaking sights there are to see here all within such close proximity.  I haven't gotten bored yet in the Bay--there's always somewhere we can go, something we can explore, something new and exciting to experience and that will take our breath away and fill us with child-like wonder.  It seems the interesting experiences will never cease.  The people in the area are very different from home and even from one another here.  It's extremely diverse; it's always interesting.  (I hope the diversity doesn't become monotonous.)

A new, interesting experience, in the two weeks I've been here, is living at my bed and breakfast inn.  It is owned by a middle-aged couple.  Theresa, my inn-keeper, grew up in London and spent her summers in Ireland.  Her husband is from Arizona, I think.  They restored this Victorian home and opened the inn in 1986.  Built in 1890, the house has six rooms: four on the first floor; two larger rooms in the basement (which is really the ground floor); we have a parlor and a sitting room adjacent with a fireplace.  There is a small dining area and a kitchen on the ground floor. Theresa has decorated the home with antique furniture and it has a rustic Old West feel in some areas and an English cottage feel in others.  We have a nice pool and jacuzzi in the backyard, with a lovely patio and BBQ firepit.  And (this may be the best part), Theresa bakes chocolate chip cookies and leaves the little bits of delight on the table just outside my door for the guests to eat!!!

Thursday nights, Theresa and Ralph (her husband) cook us wonderful dinners and we sit around the firepit, sharing dinner, wine, our stories and getting to know one another.  Dinner was delicious this week:  scallops wrapped in bacon with salad and asparagas (yes, mom, I liked it all!) and another rice, onion and cheese dish that I can't remember the name of.  We also enjoyed a nice dinner in the sitting room on Tuesday, around a robust, crackling fire, having great conversation.  We are now all studying wine since we have a budding sommelier in our midst!  I'm afraid I'm not a very good student and doubt I will remember the technicalities, but, it's a very fun topic and everybody enjoys discussing it (much more complex than I realized). : )

Currently,  five of us will be staying as guests for a few months:  one very pleasant man who has just started a new job at Yahoo and is in the "in between" making the move up here and selling his house at home;  a nice young couple about my age--the young woman a couple years younger than I is studying to be a  sommelier (a "wine steward") and her fiance is a small plane pilot looking to establish business in the area.

The neighborhood is interesting.  San Jose is an old city, with old beautiful Victorian homes dotting the streets, surrounded by some not-as-old, not-as-well-kept buildings from the years following ('60s, 70's, etc), so it's an interesting contrast that doesn't always seem to flow well.  But, the older buildings still maintain their classic Victorian charm, if you can disregard some of the stale "modern" buildings around them.

Some more pics of the place:

The parlor, to the right as you enter the house.

The parlor.

My little room . . . 

My desk with my little heater . . . 

I feel like I'm in a movie much of the time!  These lodging accommodations are indeed old-fashioned and I am sharing a house with five people!  But, it's very fun and everybody is very nice/interesting.  The scenery in the area is still wonderful, especially when the days are so clear you can see the outline of the branches of the trees on the mountains silhouetted against the blue sky and sunlight. Or when you stand on the edge of a 100 ft cliff and stare off over the Pacific with the waves crashing and roaring below. Or when 30 of you couldn't wrap your arms around a tree 2,000 years old!  I don't mean to over-romanticize it, but, I can't help it.  I am a romantic.  And, I see from His creation, my God is also a romantic.

I hope you are all being romanced as well!

Now, THAT, was an earthquake!

My last entry about earthquakes was written a couple of days ago and I had still not felt any shaking.  This morning around 10:10, I was sitting on my bed, as I still am, facebooking, and my bed started "shaking," but felt more like rolling from side to side, I looked up at my jackets hanging on my door, they were shaking, and my water was shaking.  I would say the bed was moving from side-to-side about 6 inches or so, lasted about 10 seconds and I heard a very low rumbling for the duration of the shaking and for several seconds after the shaking stopped.  It took me by surprise and I did not have time to think about getting off of the bed to a doorway!

As I was checking the USGS earthquake website here to see if they were showing a new quake, the tv show, "The View" (don't judge me--I have limited channels!), was interrupted with breaking news as they said, "If you think you've just felt an earthquake, you have!  We just had an earthquake about 6.1 miles NE of Milpitas with a magnitude of 4.1."  Milpitas is about 10 miles northeast of Santa Clara (my town).  No injuries or damage has been reported yet, but, no doubt, people were and are alarmed by the quake.  The news folk are saying the quake was on the Calaveras Fault. They are saying on the news we should have around 20 aftershocks in the next 24 hours and that magnitude 4 earthquakes happen "several times a year" in this area.  BART officials shutdown the subway to check the rails.

If you're interested, you can see where the quake was (near Fremont) at the above website!  It was neat to experience . . . once.  Hopefully that will be the full extent of my earthquake experience!

Here's a short news article from the news channel I was watching:  http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local/south_bay&id=7206030

Earthquaaaaaaaake!!!

No, I haven't felt one yet.  : ) I was just getting your attention!   I've been reading up on them and have become more interested in them, especially after flying over the region a few times and being able to visualize the ripples in the land the sliding of the tectonic plates causes as well as being able to see faults from the air.  There are also many speculations of our sea lions fleeing the docks at Pier 39, of which there were about 1,500 when I visited last, because "the big one" is coming.  I became increasingly more interested, so here are the results of my internet research. : )

Quakes are happening all the time around fault-lines, just most are not felt.  In fact, there have been several in the Bay Area just in the last week and a few within the last day.  You can visit this webpage to see the United States Geological Society's latest mappings of earthquakes in the Bay Area and this webpage to see all in the US and world (this is an excellent website and fun to explore!).

Many of you are probably already more aware of the presence of earthquakes in this area than I am. I was only 6 when the Loma Prieta ("Dark Hill") quake that collapsed the Bay Bridge, the Cypress-Street Viaduct double-decker highway and portions of other highways (hwy 101 and I-280) I drive often. As many of you probably remember, the latest big quake occurred during the World Series between the Oakland A's and San Francisco Giants at Candlestick Park on October 17, 1989.  The first few seconds of the quake were captured live on international television, with no substantial damage to the stadium or injuries resulting.  Fans cheered the end of the 15 seconds of shaking ground and rippling wind-screen when it was over, not knowing the extent of the devastation they would encounter as they emerged from the stadium.  The epicenter was 30 miles south of where I am currently living, near Loma Prieta peak.  The damage extended from San Francisco and Oakland down to Santa Clara (my new home) and further south to Santa Cruz (on the coast).  The quake resulted in 63 fatalities, 42 from the collapse of the Cypress-Street Viaduct double-decker highway in Oakland, and 3,757 injuries, of which only about 700 were serious.  As a result, the double-decker highway was demolished and is now a single level highway and other highways were improved structurally to better withstand quakes in the future.

There are 8 fault-lines around the Bay Area:  the San Andreas, responsible for the Loma Prieta and 1906 quakes, is filled with lakes and a reservoir which you can see from I-280 and traverses the SF peninsula; the San Gregario, which runs right by/through Half-Moon Bay; the Hayward fault, which runs through Oakland; the Calveras Fault, which stops short of Oakland to the south; the Rodgers Creek Fault, to the northeast of the Bay; the Concord-Green Valley Fault, to the NE of Oakland; the Diablo Thrust Fault, just south of the Concord-Green Valley fault; and the Greenville Fault, to the East of Oakland.  With all of these fault-lines, there is a "63% chance for one or more magnitude 6.7 or greater quakes from 2007 to 2036" (www.earthquake.usgs.gov).  The Loma Prieta was a 6.9.  The earthquake of 1906 was a 7.8, lasting 20-25 seconds, with a slip or movement of about 20 feet horizontally, with the Pacific plate moving northward.  The faults credited to having most potential for rupture and ability to cause damage are the San Andreas and the Hayward faults.  The San Andreas fault is believed to have a 1906-type quake (with a slip of 20 feet or more) every 200 years.  The Hayward fault is thought to produce a large quake (7.0 or greater) every 140 years, so the Hayward fault is thought to be the next source of a potentially devastating quake in the Bay Area.

My friend and I were discussing the quakes and all the disturbance about where our sea lions went when she picked me up from the airport.  She said, "and with the next earthquake, isn't the peninsula supposed to fall off into the ocean???"  I've been looking it up and couldn't find anything that states so, friend!  YAY!  The ground beneath Marina District in SF, built on the man-made landfill, is believed to have a very high potential for liquefaction (the soil becoming liquid-like during the quake as a result of the type of soil and materials beneath the surface), however, so maybe we should avoid the Marina District for the next 26 years?!
 : )


My conclusions:  1. I miss the sea lions, but, I think they just went on vacation to San Diego and wanted to try their hand at out-swimming the Great Whites! (I think they just found them off the coast of Oregon, according to the BBC's website.)  2.  The house I'm staying in was built in 1890 and has survived the 1906 and 1989 quakes, not to mention all the little 6.0's in the meantime, so I figure I'm good, even if it turns out to be haunted!  3.  I live on the East side of the San Andreas fault and Coastal mountains, so the rest of yous on the west-side, good luck if/when the coast falls into the ocean (and I'll just throw in, if a tsunami comes from a quake near Japan--I don't foresee one overtaking the mountains . . . although it may come up from around the peninsula and through the bay . . . that should take some time, though, right? I'm a good swimmer . . . I'm good . . . right?);  3. Quakes only last 20-25 seconds and I like not knowing when they will hit!  Much better than hiding in basements or flying around outside in really scary tornadoes!

I hope you are all doing well and weren't too bored by my dweeby post. : )  Pics of the new place coming soon!  Be blessed and happy 2010!






Now for the improper citation of my sources:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Loma_Prieta_earthquake  (yes, I consider Wiki a scientifically reliable source!!!)


http://earthquake.usgs.gov/regional/nca/ucerf/ (this is a very neat website and will probably answer any question you have about quakes)

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/regional/nca/1906/18april/othereqs.php 


http://seismo.berkeley.edu/outreach/faq.html  (good faq sheet about quakes)