So, hey, um, when I started writing here again, I DID mention that since November I have been assuming my former identity of Registered Nurse on a part-time basis, right? What? No? I didn’t mention that?

Ahem.

GUESS WHAT. Last October, once all our kids had been in school for a couple of solid months, I decided that I needed more to do all day every day than watching DVR’d episodes of SVU while blog surfing and Twittering and having pretend conversations with my two dogs and two cats and not surprisingly our bank account and Rob agreed. As did the two dogs and two cats.

I applied for and was awarded a position (I like to say “awarded a position” as if it were winning the lottery. Because to our bank account? Exactly like winning the lottery.) at a hospital literally five minutes from home, in a specialty department that was brand new to me. And it’s been going REALLY WELL. The work is interesting and challenging and I am engaging in this thing we nurses call PATIENT CARE, which may sound strange to point out, but consider that I spent the first ten years of my career in operating rooms with patients who were totally unconscious doing what I liked to call SURGEON CARE. Which kind of sounds dirty but wasn’t.

The best part of my new job is that I have made some friends there. ACTUAL IN-REAL-LIFE HUMAN FRIENDS. Friends who make me laugh almost every day, who text me when I’m at home sick with The Black Lung, who have nicknames for me, and who share their interesting life stories with me. IT IS A CRAZY CONCEPT THIS IN-REAL-LIFE HUMAN FRIEND CONCEPT. But it’s grown on me.

The two main negatives of returning to work I have been dealing with are: 1. Getting reacquainted with the hours in the day that occur before 9am, in light of the fact that I am not now, nor have I EVER been, nor will I EVER be, a morning person, and 2. Feeling pretty tired at the end of the day. But a GOOD tired.

And sadly, I have developed some bad after-work habits that play out over the course of nearly every evening Monday through Thursday nowadays, a few of which I blame on the fact that it has been a VERY LONG WINTER, what with all the below-seventy-degrees-Fahrenheit-weather for the past four months, and a few of which I blame on the fact that I must now restrict my watching DVR’d episodes of SVU while blog surfing and Twittering, not to mention having pretend conversations with my two dogs and two cats, to the hours between 6pm and 2am 10pm.

LIFE IS HARD, Y’ALL.

Anyway, I haven’t left the house in the evening in four months a while. Which is bad.

And while I’ve been enjoying writing again on this here website, something’s gotta give because my kids are all Flowers in the Attic pasty. SERIOUSLY.

I’ve been mulling this over for the past few days and at the same time I discovered that Tulsa now has (or maybe has had all along, hell, what do I know, I haven’t left the house in a year) a very well-organized Digital Photography group, which, hello, I LOVES me some digital photography. Yeehaw. And also my Canon Rebel xT has been sitting neglected on the top shelf of the Closet Under the Stairs. Plus Katelynn is STILL not really sure how to smile for a camera since I pretty much stopped photographing her at age six months.

DON’T GIVE ME THAT LOOK. This website is called CRASH TEST MOMMY for a reason, people.

So I think the compromise here is that a) I start getting out with the kids in the evenings especially since the end of Nucleur Winter appears to be in sight, and b) I take my Canon Rebel xT on these outings and partake of the Digital Photography-ing that I hear is all the rage so that c) I will have something to show my future new friends in the Tulsa Digital Photography group when I d) go to a meeting some time in the near future, meaning e) I will have yet another reason to LEAVE THE HOUSE.

I’m betting that textual updates here will probably start to be limited to one or two a week, so I hope you like to look at pretty pictures of shiny things!

The ramifications of this whole Get-A-Job thing were more far-reaching than any of us could have predicted.

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EDITED TO ADD:  Rob read this post and was nice enough to remind me that I didn’t actually spend TEN WHOLE YEARS as an operating room nurse because according to him when you deduct the time off I took to [carry, birth, and raise] Emma and Katelynn, it equals more like five and so I responded that I call it ten years because IT FELT LIKE TEN kind of like how our nine-year marriage has FELT LIKE THIRTY and then he shut up.