Riding the Waves

I got the jo-ob! I got the jo-ob! :) I'm now officially the new admissions counselor at a private psychiatric hospital down here in New Orleans. The very same place that I've been wanting to work at since I graduated. So good things really do come to those who wait. It only took a year... I actually start working on May 27th. My salary's even higher than I was expecting! I love the hours too...3-11pm monday-friday and every other Saturday and Sunday from 7am-3pm. But when I work the weekends I'm off on friday and monday to adjust my sleep schedule. The best part is I know a lot of the people who work there from when I did my internship there and I'm already familiar with the hospital. So excited about this job! Met with dad's surgeon this morning and he's really good. He went over everything with us and explained the surgery and my dad's condition in detail. It was reassuring in a way...stressful in a way...but I feel like he's in good hands. The big bummer of the day is that they can't do the surgery until next Friday, May 23rd which seems like an awfully long time to wait when his blockages are as bad as they are and his health has been as bad as it has been since this happened. But that's the soonest the surgeon can do it. We just don't have the resources down here since Katrina...a fact that the doctors will tell you. They're just short handed. I think he'll be ok though. We're all helping him through. It'll be rough starting a new job right after his surgery, but with the evening hours, It'll work out good with me having some time to visit with him during the day before I go in and someone else can be with him at night while I'm working. I've been forgetting that this is a book blog with everything else going on! I finished Life as we Knew it by Susan Beth Pfeffer WAY earlier than I was supposed to for Becky's Online Reading Group. It was such an incredible book and so captivating that I really couldn't put it down and as much as I meant to pace myself to keep up with the pacing of the group I found myself turning the last page of the book in no time at all. It's written in the form of a diary kept by a 10th grader named Miranda. At the beginning of the book, life is normal and we are shown the everyday life of a teenage girl. Then there is talk of an asteroid that is supposed to collide with the moon. No big deal, it's supposed to be a fun event that's supposed to be visible with the naked eye and everyone has gathered their lawn chairs to watch the event happen. But when the asteroid collides the moon suddenly jumps in the sky towards Earth growing luminous and huge. In the following days tsunamis, earthquakes and volcanoes begin destroying the world as we know it and life as we knew it disappears. Food and water become scarce as does life. This was a terrifying but ultimately hopeful story of survival, humanism, love, and companionship at it's strongest. It was one of those books that was so well written that I couldn't help but ponder for a long while how I would handle some of these same situations. I felt trapped in the book sometimes even when I wasn't reading it wondering if the moon looked just a little bigger or even though the thermometer said 80 I couldn't help but shiver a little bit. Does that ever happen to anyone else when a book is so well written? You actually carry the experience with you...get lost in it? Maybe I just had too much stress going on last week and I was losing it :p Anyhow, this is definitely one to put on your list if you haven't read it yet. It's fantastic! She really could've made this one of the most depressing books that I've ever read and I thought for awhile that she would. But it's not and I'm glad that it wasn't because I wouldn't have been able to handle that last week. It was a story of hope and survival when it seems like there's none to be found.