Less plan, more replan

So, I had good intentions for today. I thought I’d wash, get dressed, and work. Take a brief break to run some batteries to the metal recycling with Nikki and her handily available review Renault ZE (she asked for a real world test suggestion, I thought running the half ton of batteries to the scrap metal merchants was an excellent suggestion – incidentally, the ZE did this job without a hitch and actually, seems like quite a neat EV – more my taste than the leaf (in the wholeheartedly practical vehicle sense)), but basically set aside today as a Dissertation Day.

Annnyhow. So that battery lugging bit went quite well, but battling with Scopus was frustrating and…long. Scopus is a database, for those of you who don’t know, and actually it’s just because each database has its own search grammar and trying to take one search across to another database just doesn’t work, so there’s lots of tweaking to make it work that makes the whole job frustrating. But unlike Ovid which is old and painful, Scopus is actually fairly intuitive, and it was just tedious tweaking the search to work right.

After a while though, I got that sorted and worked my way through the hits. The plan then was rinse-and-repeat for Web Of Knowlege (that being the last database I need to re-search) but it’s been informing me, helpfully, that:

“Thank you for using Web of Knowledge
A system error has occurred.”

Which impedes my ability to search somewhat. So instead I decided to tackle another thing from the to-do list. The final tweaks to Kathryn’s Bicycle. Now it has brakes (at least working, could do with a bit more tweaking) and gears (all 3 actually seem to be working), and I’ve fitted the replacement cotter pin (to replace the one I munged fairly dramatically). So I shall maybe take it for a quick test ride on Wednesday :)

And for all being such lovely people, here’s a picyture.

I also discovered today that ripping to MKVs from blurays is all very well, if your media player can handle them. It turns out that the VMP74 can’t. So the poor old media server is now tasked with transcoding them to MP4 / M4Vs, which it can manage at about 6 frames per second.

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.

Distance

So, the plan remains to move to Canada. As those of you who are up on the whole plan thing are aware, this has been the plan for a long time, and we poke this plan with pointy sticks every so often just to check its not curled up in the corner and died.

It hasn’t, the plan is still the same. Kathryn found somewhere that looks gorgeous, and there are, incredibly, jobs posted to work in the ER of the local hospital. Well, I say the ER. They are to work in the entire local hospital, including the ER, because the entire local hospital has fewer beds than my current ER. I was going to say ‘less than my current ER including the observation ward (8 beds)’ but then I realised the addendum was unnecessary. It’s actually fewer beds than majors and resus combined, completely disregarding the trolleys in minors.

Wow, that’s dinky.

So I’d guess that you just are a nurse there, and that anything that comes in is ER’d right there on the spot. So that all sounded quite fun. And the area is simply gorgeous. The photos of it just make my soul sing right there and then.

(looksie, more)

I just look at those photos and will myself into being there. So I took it upon myself to explore the two slight problems that exist with this concept. See, you may have noticed that we’re not straight. There’s a certain amount of gayness in our union, and communities out in the boonies can be less than accepting of such things. They can also be awesomely, totally pro such things. Indeed, Hebden Bridge is one fine example of exactly how cool places can be (all things considered*). But some places can be less pleasant, and if, say, you were going to move thousands and thousands of miles and landed up somewhere that was filled with homophobes, that would be bad. So that was problem the first. I have no idea whether they’re pro-or-anti gay, all I’ve managed to discover is that the area is represented by the NDP, which is positive. But hardly a resoundingly solid answer. But at least it wasn’t a *bad* answer. No, it’s the other one which makes things a bit sticky.

So, we found the job spec for the nurse there, and there, after the happy little ’3-5 years ER experience’ was their Mission Statement. It was….god-y. Quite god-y. And we posited the (optimistic) possibility that it was a phrase more honoured in the breach than the observance… So I’d held onto that until today. When I watched a sort of, well, I suppose an infomercial for the hospital and it turns out that it is really quite a problem, in that the hospital is part of the United Church of Canada, and they’re quite shouty about it. Well, maybe not shouty, but certainly… it’s something they mention and say it’s an important part of how and why they do what they do.

If you can imagine me deflating somewhat, that’s what happened. See, I’m not Christian. I’m sort of vaguely Buddhist, if I needed to put any kind of fixed thing on it, but even that’s really overstating it. But being in a strongly Christian workplace? That would work out to be rather friction filled, I suspect. I’ve helped patients maintain their faith, that’s fine, but I think I would struggle and find myself really uncomfortable in a place where it seems expected to make Christianity part of your life. Ah well. Never mind.

And I’d gone and subscribed to this blog’n all. Still, I guess it’ll give me a flavour of life in remote Canada, anyhow. Feh. So I guess we keep on looking :-/

* Don’t you just love NPR? I love NPR almost as much as I love the BBC.

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.