I realized that my virtual space needed remodeling when a little Googling one boring night showed me that there were far too many entities out there known as “A Well-Rounded Woman,” some even pornographic. And my tendency toward perfectionism made me feel like I wasn’t living up to the title or web-worthiness. So I lost some motivation to write. The rainy, dreary weather was (and still is) wearing on me. I turned to my favorite food for comfort: cake. Cake is always wonderful: for comfort, pure dreamy goodness, inspiration, extra padding around the middle. A post I wrote about cake inspired my move toward a more personal and positive blog.

So that’s it. A Well-Rounded Woman is now Dawn Eats Cake. Yum.

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Today is my husband’s birthday. He hates it. I love it.

First, and most importantly, I love any excuse to have cake. Second, I love any excuse to torture my partner-in-crime. And believe me, he deserves it. I am too easy to tease. Third, his birthday kicks off the Birthday Season in our family. Lastly, and most importantly, I love the guy and love getting to celebrate him for a day.

My husband has been 29 since the day I met him. Well, maybe two or three years ago he thought he might be 32. Obviously the numbers bother him, but he’s such a child at heart that they really don’t matter. He also doesn’t like being the focus of attention. Anyone who knows him would laugh at that statement, he loves to make people laugh. He has a hard time accepting compliments and gifts, too. In fact, he delights in giving surprisingly thoughtful gifts to his loved ones. One day a year can’t be too horrible to force him to celebrate his awesome-ness.

So today I am cleaning the house, baking a carrot cake with raisins baked in and real cream cheese frosting, filling out a cheesy birthday card, wrapping his birthday gift, and actually styling my hair … All for the man I love to love and laugh with.

My vicious golden retriever is barking and lunging at the door with tail wagging and tongue flapping as I open it to two nondescript 19 year-old missionaries in their new suits. It’s a windy, rainy morning and I have a toddler and the dog both trying to escape through the open door. And Lu is naked, but that’s not unusual.
Me: Hey guys! How’s it going? Oh it’s cold, come inside.
Elder 1: Umm, is there another male here?
Me: A what?
Elder 2: A-a-nother man in the house like your father or brother.
I forgot that I look young wearing pajamas and no makeup.
Me: Uh… no…
Elder 2: Well there’s a … um … rule that we can’t be alone with a woman.
I thought my vicious dog counted as a male, even though he is neutered and homosexual.
Me: I didn’t know that rule.
Elder 1: Uh yeah.
Elder 2: We’re surprised at how many people we’ve been catching at home today.
Small talk about the economy, weather, and the Pacific Northwest continues as I get colder, my toddler gets even more antsy, and the dog gets bored and goes to sleep. 

Lu is pulling on my pant leg while I’m rubbing my arms attempting to cover my obvious bra-less-ness. The missionaries are increasingly restless, and then unable to look me in the face or at my person all anymore. I glance down to see if I’m immodest in any way. Only then do I realize my too-thin tank top reads: VERY SEXY tease-slow burn-sweet seduction-booty call-pussy cat-body heat-lust… and so on. A listing of all the Victoria’s Secret lip products from years ago when I sold cosmetics there, if you’re interested. But the combination of my cold-exposure and the lusty wording had apparently gotten to the boys. Add to that the too-tight pre-pregnancy yoga pants I’m wearing and the bit of pale belly spillage over it, and anyone could tell I am a disaster – except for these guys. They seemed to react to me like I was a sex-industry worker fueled by meth. Too bad they couldn’t come inside so we could all be warmer, I could make some coffee  tea hot chocolate, I could throw a sweatshirt on, and we could chat more like regular people. I was dying for some adult conversation, but of course, being on a mission and all, the proselytizing had to start at some point…

Elder 2: Well what religion are you and your partner?
Me: My husband and I are agnostic.
I may look like I’m a mess with a naked-bastard child, possibly even advertising myself for sex on my shirt, but I had better let these guys know I am a married mess!
Elder 1: That’s too bad.
Me: Actually, it’s what we chose. We feel that organized religion has too much power and corruption.
Elder 2: Yeah, sometimes that can happen.
I couldn’t stop my eyes from rolling. The guys still are looking at the floor and don’t notice.
Elder 1: You seem to know a lot about the church.
Me: Yeah, a lot of my family and friends are Mormon. We’re supportive of them.
Elder 2, looking straight at my naked daughter: We focus on growing strong, whole families. You should come again.
There are few moments of pleasant chatter about already having been to church, growing up in Utah, and - although they still can’t look at me - they hand me an invitation to a Christmas program. Then they are on their way to the neighbor’s house.

I think I heard them exhale after shutting the door. Remembering it makes me giggle. I love embarrassing people. I should probably get rid of that shirt before Lu can read. That would be embarrassing!

Please pray for me and my family. God knows we need it!

A Post-Script:
This was in no way meant to be a religious debate or offend anyone of any religious belief. But if you send missionaries (or any sect) to my door after reading this blog, I will make sure I embarrass them too!

Herb-Roasted Turkey with Pan Gravy ala Martha Stewart

You bet my turkey is going to look as good as yours, Martha!

Sweet Potato Rolls
Grandma Sylvia’s Candied Yams
My dad holds the “secret” recipe. It involves orange juice and brown sugar, but that’s all I’m going to share.
Grandma Carroll’s Cranberry Mold
It tastes amazing with a smear of mayonnaise! It’s a jello-cranberry-walnut wreath of strange goodness.
Cranberry Sauce
I really don’t care if it’s Ocean Spray or homemade, it just tastes delicious on my turkey.
Traditional Stuffing ala Market of Choice
Honestly, Stove Top was my idea of stuffing until my husband introduced me to this stuff. I’m drooling right now.
Roasted potatoes and Other Assorted Root Vegetables All Slightly Smashed
This is the beautiful, gifted, and delicious child resulting from the union of garlic smushed red potatoes and the herb roasted root vegetables that Maria’s husband made for us starving nurses last year. I have no idea how to make it, but this is a fantasy.
Garden Fresh Sauteed Green Beans
My garden is now a pile of mud, but somebody surely has fresh green beans somewhere.
Pumpkin Cheesecake

Dutch Apple Pie

I made that Dutch Apple Pie, and it was GOOD

Thanksgiving is a time to spend with loved ones, so of course my family would all be there: My husband, kids, parents, sister, and grandparents. While the family is all here, my Aunts and Uncles should all join in too. That would be a fun crowd. However, I’m having a hard time deciding where to seat my best friends. Alec Baldwin can’t sit next to a certain outspoken uncle of mine, that would cause a ruckus for sure. There wouldn’t be a kids table because Lu wouldn’t have it, but there won’t be enough room at the table for all Heidi Klum‘s and Angelina Jolie‘s children. The most perplexing situation is where to sit President Obama and Prince William… They can’t both sit at the head of the table, can they?

Back to reality… I have Thanksgiving off this year! My family will be celebrating gratitude and good food at my parents’ home. They have a gorgeous new kitchen to break in this year. The turkey is something I love working on, and Martha’s recipe above has done me well over the past few years. I think I will make the sweet potato rolls, but I haven’t baked yeast breads before so it will be interesting. The pumpkin cheesecake and apple pie are definitely going to show up for the festivities too. Hopefully this week, the toddler and I can crank out some Thanksgiving art projects to decorate the table. The food, the traditions, the planning, the fun, the eating, all with my favorite people - I’m looking forward to it.

Playing board games after stuffing ourselves silly.

Our wedding cakes were gorgeous and even more delicious. HEAVEN!

Fast forward nearly five years and we’re busy managing life with a toddler in a piss-poor economy. Sometimes life sucks. I think it’s been a couple of months since my husband and I had some grown-up time, let alone a date. Now I can remember, it was our anniversary in July when we last experienced that strange phenomenon. The daily routine had us grunting need-to-know information to each other once or twice a day between errands, work, and dirty diapers. Then fate intervened. My husband won some tickets to a comedy club, we both were work free that night, the teenager was more than happy to be left alone to play the new Call of Duty, and my best friend was happy to watch the toddler. I heard angels singing. No, actually it was laughter, our beautiful laughter.

The date was amazing. The comedians were funny. Our hearts and bellies were full. And then Greg Behrendt, comedian and co-author of He’s Just Not That Into You, started talking about cake. I couldn’t believe it. Another person who also believed – and shared in hilarious means – that life is worth living because there might be cake. And cake is always good. Cake is fan-freaking-tastic.

It was just what I needed: Time away from the daily grind with my husband, lots of laughter, and a reminder to enjoy the simple things in life. Although I didn’t get a chance to eat any cake, there was plenty of cake for my heart and mind.

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I hate gnats! They are nasty little flying vermin. Well, actually they are fruit flies, or Drosophila melanogaster. Whatever the case, they gross me out. A gnat up the nose is gross, but it happens to all of us. Nothing tastier than a little extra protein on your ripe banana – not. Getting a fruit fly stuck on your contact lens - that is something that you just can’t ever get over.  Trust me, I know. Now, you have to understand that I’m neurotic in multiple ways: I may hate the stupid little bugs, but I hate and fear the idea of me and my family inhaling all sorts of toxic chemicals. Plus, with the recent death of our parakeet friend Charlie and his subsequent replacement with two birds (Brad and Angelina), I really don’t want to buy any more damn birds. With these flashbacks and phobias in the forefront of my mind, I set out to destroy the tiny creatures that seem to come from nowhere.

My husband sagely advised that I should set up a fan in the kitchen. My girlfriends suggested wine or fruit juice in a variety of home-made traps. Of course, being the know-it-all I am, I had to confirm that these tricks would not be a waste of my time. So a quick Google research trip and I saw that Grandmas have been killing fruit flies for ages with similar chemical-free (And green! And cheap!) tricks. 

What worked? The fan kept my kitchen pretty fly free, until I turned it off. My fly paper has been covered in little yucky bugs for quite some time, but as soon as it was gone the flies returned heavier than ever. Rubbing a bar of plain soap on gnat-frequented surfaces didn’t seem to keep them away, but they were surprisingly avoiding my compost jar’s lid. My toddler loved helping with this particular trick, she unwrapped an entire Costco-sized pack of Ivory bars and “drew” all over the walls and cabinets. A solution of rubbing alcohol and water in a sprayer did stop the flies in their tracks, but I have a feeling they were up and buzzing again shortly. Juice and especially wine attracted the gnats like crazy, but not all of the traps worked. I had no success with the drops of soap in juice or wine, but the wine bottle with a cover worked fairly well.  However, I did learn that fruit flies highly prefer St. Chappelle Soft Red to the other (cheap) varieties of wine I set out.

It seemed that no matter how often I emptied the compost jar, garbage, recycling, and shut our produce away in the fridge the gnats always found something to eat. Extreme cleanliness would probably keep the gnats away, but that’s just not possible when there are teenagers, toddlers, dogs, birds, and two working adults attempting to run the house. Finally the stupid little things started to dwindle at the end of October. My dad, who is pretty much an entomologist, informed me that fruit flies can’t survive cold temperatures. And I had forgotten to turn up my heat after a warm spell last month. One or two cold nights pretty much took care of the gnat problem, I’ve only had a few stragglers in the compost jar since then.

1. Fly Tape
   Pros: inexpensive, effective, chemical free, odor free
   Cons: UGLY, not preventative, sticks to everything
   Bottom Line: I’ll continue to use this outside during the summer and if the gnat problem gets bad again.
2. Alcohol Spray
   Pros: super inexpensive, effective, instant gratification of dead flies
   Cons: not preventative, not always lethal, smells like rubbing alcohol
   Bottom Line: I’ll use this trick for future fly takeovers, but I hope that I don’t need to.
3. Fan
   Pros: free (if you already have a fan), mostly effective
   Cons: not preventative, gnats return quickly, makes messes when cooking and baking
   Bottom Line: I’m going to use this trick in warm weather.
4. Soap Rub
   Pros: inexpensive, preventative
   Cons: not especially effective
   Bottom Line: I probably won’t be rubbing anything else with soap, but who knows if my toddler will.
5. Wine or Juice Traps
   Pros: super inexpensive, attract-trap-kill features, often effective
   Cons: variable results, takes experimentation to get it right, may attract more flies, ugly
   Bottom Line: I just put away my most effective wine bottle trap (wine bottle with 1 inch of wine in bottom, covered with plastic wrap secured with rubber band, 3 pinholes in plastic). I will default to this if there is ever a gnat problem again.
6. Clean House
   Pros: free, your house is clean, preventative, usually effective 
   Cons: time-consuming, requires all household members to clean up food messes, not always effective
   Bottom Line: It’s a constant work-in-progress.
7. Cold House
   Pros: free, preventative, usually effective
   Cons: your house is cold, the gnats will return
   Bottom Line: I’m not going to rely on the weather to keep the fruit flies away.

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Crazy.

There’s so much that I could write about it.

The dealings with the patients I encounter in the hospital. The cases I learn about from reading or lectures. The characters, fictitious and real, seen in the media. The people I see in my community. The experiences I’ve had dealing with depression and anxiety. The stigma surrounding it. The word itself.

Recently an instructor of mine from nursing school (perhaps I should be calling her a colleague now that I’ve graduated and joined her in the nursing career) reminded me that the word crazy isn’t the correct term for the mentally ill. Or the coginitively-impaired. The delirious. The demented elderly ladies. The addicted. The chemically altered. They can all crazy-making, but don’t deserve to be written off as simply crazy.

The most frustrating elements of my job are those that require me to become the coordinator of care and psychological counselor for so many under-served patients with significant psychiatric and cognitive disorders. I find myself wanting to pull out my hair after cyclical arguments over non-negotiable rules. Hours spent on hold with various agencies and disciplines trying to arrange discharges only make it worse. I signed myself up for several lectures regarding some of the more vexing disorders that I encounter frequently. Between Understanding Personality Disorders and The Triple Threat: Delirium, Dementia, and Chemical Dependency I gathered knowledge and understanding of the ”crazy” patients that can frustrate me and ideas to work with them, and even make hospitalization easier for them.

I attended Understanding Personality Disorders with several of my colleagues several weeks ago. Surprisingly, the event was packed with other RNs, many of them acute care staff nurses like us. Everyone, regardless of their profession, there was trying to gain insight and strategy into working with people who have unusual, and often difficult, patterns of thought and behavior. People with personality disorders present many challenges to nurses. People with personality disorders are the people who come to your mind when you hear the word “crazy.” Serial killers are disordered in this way. Imagine trying to form a plan of care and coordinate a discharge with someone who is manipulative and dramatic. It’s tough stuff. This lecture reinforced the difficulty of working with people who have personality disorders, the frustration of not being able to change someone else’s personality, and the importance of clear limit-setting and explaining expectations. Not only did the reinforcement of clear limit-setting help me at work many times since then, I’ve been a better parent to my toddler. Now I’m an expert at “No we may not do ____ because it is not safe. I would like to see you do ____ instead” and the like.

This week I was able to attend a nursing conference about the most common cognitive disorders we encounter on the medical floor: Dementia, Delirium, and Chemical Dependency. There were three different speakers, one on each subject. All three subjects are near and dear to this medical-surgical nurse’s heart. I love so many of the patients with dementia I’ve come to meet throughout my career. The lecturer on dementia was incredibly interesting and had very relevant and usable information. She reinforced many things I’ve always felt about working with demented patients: Reorientation doesn’t usually help or work, they feel best when they are included in happenings, and they are seeking a way to productively contribute to their community or family. The speaker on delirium (a temporary confusion that is often caused by illness or medication) also reinforced my knowledge of the subject and specific nursing interventions to keep these patients safe while hospitalized. What I didn’t know was that if the root cause of the delirium is not treated thoroughly, the confusion and cognitive deficits can become permanent.  The chemical dependency lecture focused on treatment of alcohol withdrawal. Not many lay-people understand that withdrawal from alcohol can lead to lethal seizures. In the hospital we are good at preventing the seizures, but patients often become confused, very anxious and agitated, and the behavior associated with that is difficult to manage. This conference set my mind on fire thinking of ways to keep our confused patients safe, busy, and feeling secure while in the hospital.

I’ve had a few very difficult patients with cognitive deficits, mental illness, and personality disorders since bingeing on education. The knowledge made it a little easier to set limits without losing all of my hair. “Crazy” is still something I’m trying to strip from my vocabulary. Because as hard as I work to compassionately help even the most difficult patients in a broken health care system, everyone deserves to be cared for without the stigma of crazy.

Some footnotes:
-This post has taken a stinking long time to write and I’m still not happy with it (but it was what I received the most feedback on after my interactive posting experiment). There’s too much to say! I’m sure it won’t be the last.
-Yes, I do have chronic trouble with depression and/or anxiety, and NO that doesn’t make me crazy. I’ve learned how to manage it quite well using medications, therapies, and have become the wonderful person I am today because of all the hard work. I’m sure that’s not the last I’ll say about that either.
- Adrienne at No Points for Style posted about the misuse of psychaitric terms, it’s interesting and her blog is moving.
- I have all sorts of links, names, books, articles, etc. If anyone is interested, just shoot me an email or comment.