Way back in the day, my HPS* had a dog named Horus. Actually, what she had was a dog shaped moose named Horus. He was actually a very sweet 100+ pound puppy. Playful and rambunctious and he *loved* his Mama, Kim. Not too much with the smarts, though.

One day became apparent that Kim was going to need knee surgery. Let’s just say that a couch was involved and it spun her patella around to the side!!! of her leg. Being the intrepid soul that she is, she leaned on it til it popped back in place. And then she went to her job at the printing press. After about an hour of binding books, she noticed that the discomfort in her leg was getting to a place where she couldn’t really ignore it any longer. So, she hobbled off to the ladies room and attempted to yank her jeans down to have a look. However, there was a problem. Her leg had swollen so much that she couldn’t pull them down past her thigh. That was when she decided that probably ought to go to the Emergency Room.

The nice doctors, to their credit, only blanched a little and then made her sign a waiver so she could go into emergency surgery.

After her stay in the hospital**, Kim went home to convalesce. The nice doctors put a big, blue, …alien thing around Kim’s leg. It went from crotch to heel and rendered her for the most part immobile. At least it ensured that she wasn’t easily going to go horseback riding. (yes, she asked. yes, i said “no”) That may well have been the purpose of the damn thing. What the MD’s said was that it was to circulate a mixture of alcohol and ice water around Kim’s knee to keep the swelling to a minimum. Seems she had done pretty horrible damage to herself (cracked patella, anyone?) and the swelling was being compounded by the edema in her legs. “For god’s sakes! keep her from jumping around. let her heal! at least for the first few days!” quoth the surgeons. I shrugged. They obviously did not know my HPS like I did. But I was happy to lend an arm, a (oof!***) shoulder, and all the mobster movies she could stand.

Now…remember the big dog? The giant, playful puppy of a dog who loved nothing more than to climb into your lap for lovings. Because he was a tiny lap puppy, so far as he was concerned. Yeah. He did NOT grok the concept of “Fuck off, dog – you’re gonna hurt the Mama!” So I did the only thing I could do in an attempt to keep the collateral damage to a minimum. I locked him in the kitchen to sleep.

Now, I am a restless sleeper. I have been all my adult life. So, I got up several times in the night to check on Kim and help her out. I also checked on the dogs while I was up as they were both convinced – no matter how I tried to convince them otherwise, that they were in trouble. Why else would they be banished to the kitchen if they weren’t in trouble?

At one point during the 2nd night, Horus, in an orgy of remorseful guilt was found with one of Kim’s house slippers. He had managed to turn it inside out and was busily licking the now-exterior of the shoe. I could almost hear him say, ‘love the mama…miss the mama…love the mama…”

Poor guy.

* High Priestess
**legend has it that it was only for thirty minutes although it could’ve been as much as two days
***Kim is a big woman, six foot something in her stocking feet and outweighed me at the time by about forty pounds.

More ramblings related to my previous post…

I think I am tired of the software field. Of course, I have been saying this for years. The problem is, of course, that where I am in the software world, I make better than decent money. Not OMGIneedAnapkin! money but, enough to make my bills and have enough left over to be comfortable. And there is the undeniable fact that I would like to send the Girl to private school next year — which would also be a serious financial strain (the one I’m looking into is 585.00 per month!). So, honestly it would behoove me to stay where I am at.
But…yeah.

So, in no order of preference – ideas to ruminate…

**Take 12 CEU hours & pay fee to reinstate massage license. I could do this while still working where I do now. I could then work massage on the weekends to round out the bills and give my brain a break from the grind of SQA.

**From here I could take the 2nd Semester (probably next year) to get my national certification in massage therapy. At that point, I could work for any spa, any where while building my own client list. I could also use it as a jumping off place to go to college full time using massage to support me. The drawback is of course, that I would make considerably less money while doing so. Private school for the Girl would be difficult at best.

**Take the coursework necessary to become a doula. And then use the money from doula-massage work to put self through nursing school with an eye towards Midwife/Nurse Practitioner in the future.

**Stay at current job. Enroll in St. Ed’s New College (for working adults) for a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology. This is appealing because it offers the money that I am currently at, so my QOL wouldn’t change all that much. Except in the arena of *time*. I would not have ANY free time at all as I would be going to school on nights and weekends. Between school, work and the Girl I would disappear.

There are several permutations to these, of course, including where I live, go to school, etc. But these are the basic premises that I am juggling. Somewhere in there I would also like to not be so brain fried all the time by stress and work and fatigue to work on my writing again.

There is no future where I am now. No advancement. And there is no appeal for me for jumping from job to job to job ala contract workers. I did that for the last 10 years. I am more or less done. I don’t want to be a computer slug. I don’t mind working on computers. I just wish sometimes that my job didn’t require me to be at them 8-12 hours a day.