Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Wombat in Flight...sort of

I'm exhausted.
Another long night of back-breaking work. Even so, as I slip on my leather jacket and grab my helmet, my hand finds the key in my pocket and a small smile crosses my lips.

Once I'm clocked out and the helmet is on, I actually grin as I turn the key in the ignition and the bike growls to life. The aches, the weariness of the night's labor all start to fade into the background. As I drop it into first and release the clutch, I feel my heart begin to beat a little faster.

I quickly navigate the local streets and hit the country road as the sun breaks the horizon. With the bike at 'cruising' speed, I cannot resist the urge to weave back and forth in my lane. Gone now is the exhaustion, replaced with child-like abandon. My motorcycle is the closest I come to flying.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Sleeeep...

Sleep. What is it? It’s been so long since I have had a good night’s sleep. 3 hours of sleep yesterday, 2 the day before, 3 before that. God, I hate insomnia. Working overnights is just…wrong. I’m not a praying man, but I pray to God, Allah, and Odin that I can actually sleep for eight hours when I get home today

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

The details so far...


OK, Here’s the details. As you may recall, I up and moved out here to bumfuck Illinois because I was jobless, and about to be homeless. I had reconnected with my HS sweetheart, BikerNurse, and she invited me to come reside with her here. After overcoming all the hostility directed at me from her two adult children (BikerNurse married at 18 after HS), or more correctly, while in the midst of overcoming all the hostility directed at me from her adult children, one of the girls read my blog and ALL the blogs I had linked to my page. DaughterNurse, as she will be henceforth named , she is also a nurse but was a year behind her mom in school at the time, Discovered a mildly flirtatious post I had made on someone’s blog after I had first visited BikerNurse. Well, hoping to get rid of me quick, she instantly pointed it out to her mom.
At this point, I should mention that BikerNurse has been married twice, and cheated on both times. The last guy cheated and then hit her when confronted. Needless to say, she does NOT tolerate even a hint of me flirting with anyone, up to and including farm animals. What enraged her the most was this person’s continuing to post comments that she deemed were suggestive to my my d-land blog. So, long story short; I took the blog down. Say what you will, but at the time it seemed a small sacrifice to make to stay with the woman of my dreams. However, like Judd mentioned, I had not accounted for the driving need I have to write and be read. I do not think I am as talented as some of the folk I read, but I know I am as driven as some. If I draw new readers and they stick around to read more of my rants and other crap, it gives me a sense of satisfaction that I crave. So, to satisfy that crave and to avoid the potential train wreck, since I cannot really control my readers (though I would like to, much like Simon Bar Sinister tried to control the weather before Underdog beat him down.), I now am going to post without her express consent. I love my wife dearly, but she doesn’t understand the ‘why’ of why I write. To her credit, I do not get the ‘why’ of why she continues to play the saxophone she payed in HS, even though she doesn’t want me listening.
OK, so there’s the explanation out of the way. BTW, it took me more than 20 minutes to re-learn how to link text like I did up there with Judd’s name. So here’s the more in depth history of what’s benn happening since the lights went out. First, I got married, and now how two lovely daughters, age 21 and 23. They have gotten over their initial mistrust, and have come to love me as their step-dad. The youngest is DaughterNurse, who herself married and accidentally fathered our grandchild, The Dominator. The oldest, and another reason I took down D-Land Wombatcity, we’ll refer to as HolyDaughter. She is an ultra-religious young lady, and though we love each other, we do not always quite see eye to eye. This is the primary reason I could not post with impunity on MySpace, I felt restricted by not wishing to offend HolyDaughter’s beliefs.
As some may recall, I was out here and planning on going to school to study History, with the goal of becoming a professor at some college somewhere. I am a huge history buff, but of the teaching...not so much. Once I moved out here, I got a job with a company that grows ‘seed corn’. What is seed corn, you ask? Why, it’s corn that’s been genetically engineered to grow high yielding, yet sterile corn plants. Farmers here in the mid-west pay big bucks for this seed corn, and this company was rapidly growing. So I was working at SeedCornCompany and enrolled in the local community college to start taking some classes. I took some history classes, a Government of the US class, and an Intro toTheater class. Why Intro to Theater? Well, I was quite the accomplished thespian in HS.- it means ACTOR, you feygs, and I thought the class would be a breeze, and I kinda needed all the credits I could get. Well, for grades in the class we did not have tests. Instead we had to do these project on certain things, like cast and design an outfit for a certain role, perform a skit with your group, and then we had to do a presentation about some facet of theater, or cinema, that we were interested in. I found, during the semester, that I hated these presentations. I could not put my finger on it until, during the midst of my last one on censorship in American film and the arbitrary film rating system, I realized that I hated how 3/4 of the class was ignoring the presentation! Another epiphany quickly followed; I realized that this is what professors feel like every day! Ok, teaching was out for me.
That very night-I swear I could not have scripted this better- my wife came home complaining about how some nurse at her new job was trying to show her how to give a shot of a certain drug that was different from what she had learned in school. I calmly informed her that the nurse was correct; administration of said drug had been changed from IV injection to Subcutaneous injection. What? How did I know? Well, BikerNurse gets this magazine every month about nursing, and I just happen to find that my most intruiging... shall we say, throne-time reading material. BikerNurse just stared at me for a minute, then asked, "How do you know that?"
"Hon, it was in the March issue of your magazine." I calmly replied.
"You read that thing? She asked.
"Yeah, " I replied, warming to the subject. " I never knew nurses had to know so much...medicine."
"You’d make a great nurse," she said as she walked away.
Epiphany 3 happened shortly there after. Why not be a nurse? I liked helping people, nurses make good money, it’s medical without the torture and expense-not to mention responsibility- of a doctor, and it’s fascinating on a level that history is not for me. A few weeks later, I changed my major.
So, that was April of last year. BikerNurse and I enrolled in the Basic Rider Course for motorcycle riders last may, and got our liscenses. We had both always wanted bikes, and she had driven quite few while I had never even sat on one, but neither of us could legally operate one in the Land of Lincoln. After the course, we both wanted bikes, but she was set on the ridiculously overpriced Harley, and I wanted something more in our budget. We were constantly discussing (arguing some would say) about this when we were making our wedding plans. We decided to have a simple ceremony on top of Sunrise Mountain, in NJ since we both had our family on the East Coast. We drove out with DaughterNurse and StepSon, the Dominator, and HolyDaughter’s HolyFriend. We also flew HolyDaughter up from SC, where she was finisshing out college. The wedding was great and we had a blast. Imagine our surprise when, as I was writing the check for the reception, my folks bestowed their gift on us... a MONSTER check!
I had not expected much of anything from them, certainly not the 5 figures, albiet low 5, that they bestowed upon us. Well, once we got back with that unexpected loot, we paid a lot of bills off and put a down-payment on our babies. (That's them at the top of the page, I'm having a bit of difficulty at trying to imbed the link, and I"m too tired to do it now. )

It’s a Suzuki Boulevard s50, 2007 model. 805 cc's and they are identical except for color. Mine is, as you might have guessed, the black one. That's our new rental house, and the bird feeder I built, smothered in Morning Glories that Biker Nurse planted. Ok this has gotten long enough for now, I’ll work on a part 2 entry detailing my new job and my first semester of patient care.

Monday, February 25, 2008

I'm Back!!

It's been just about 2 years since the lights of Wombat City went dark over on Diaryland. I tried doing the family friendly thing on (shudder) MySpace faithfully, but I just could not write freely with my wife and step-daughters reading every word. Yes, I said wife. BikerNurse and I got married this past August. I love her dearly, but she takes the comments on the blog too literally and was getting angry at comments made on the D-land site. So, I shut it down, but now I am back, covertly to spread my special brand of angry sarcasm amongst those of you who dare to read.

So, what's been happening? Too much for one little post, that's for sure! I got married, now have 2 adult stepchildren, not to mention a 4 year old grandson, lost almost 90 lbs!!!!! BikerNurse and I actually have motorcycles! Oh, and I am going to college to be... a nurse! I'll explain that one shortly, when I have the time. Right now, I'm going to post this, and then go link all my old friends and send some comments to them about my return.