Balance

Its taken several months of soul destroying work. Dragging myself out of bed every morning with no real incentive past the desire not to be beaten. Going into work and coming home feeling aweful. But I have finally found a balance. The negative aspects of my work are still present but I have somehow found myself happy again recently. I am not taking my work too seriously(past the life or death decision making). My plan is still to leave this ward as soon as I have reached the one year mark. One years experience is invaluable in nursing and it is the stage at which newly qualified nurses are expected to move on to new areas in order to expand their field of experience.

I have discovered one or two new hobbies. Astronomy being the first. Following several hours in a dark field a month ago with a friend and an expensive camera I suddenly realised how mind blowing some aspects of astronomy can be. With the naked eye you can actually see other galaxies, entire clusters of solar systems with light that has taken hundreds of thousands of years to reach us. Many of the stars visible may be long gone. unc

I have also started working on my family tree with the use of various local records and internet sources. Fortunately I have a fairly uncommon surname ....infact most of the surnames in my family tree range from uncommon to rare. Theres a lot of interesting stuff in there and I have dug up a few photos of my family from many generations back and I have even found a hand written letter, written by my great-great-great-great-grandmother. Between the spelling and the handwriting its taken me nearly a month to decipher it.

I've also managed to find my great-grandfathers world war two RAF dogtags. The trouble is I am still fairly new to this so I cant figure out where I can search for records with just a surname and service number.

In addition to this I've also rediscovered my geeky side. I've spent a week off fixing laptops, PCs and coding in perl. Its been incredibly therapeutic. Although I have to admit one of the laptops is bothering me. I'm still not entirely sure what was wrong with it, or how I managed to fix it.....but its working now. This is a perfect example of how my mind works I am never satisfied with a solution if I dont have a complete understanding of the problem.