Ah, so tired...but life is good. :)

I have come home every day this week just drained. Everyone at work is worked up into an absolute ball of anxiety over the impending SURVEY [drum roll, please]. It's affecting me, too. Usually, we do fine (last time was a 98 out of 100), but apparently this year we just don't know what to expect. It's rather like a kid who's made high marks all through high school afraid of making that first 'C' in college. The thing is, everything in your facility can be damn near perfect, but if one mistake on one record is found, you can get branded with something called a "Type I"--not good--and no matter how good we are, perfection is a little unrealistic. Also, over the last few years, they took away language like "accredited with commendation", etc., so it reads now that you either just passed or failed miserably. So, life at work has been very busy. We're not actually doing anything except our normal practice, but we're doing it with more vigour and mania than normal, I suppose, with everyone wondering if they'll be the one to drop a wrench in the works.

Last time I never even saw the surveyors. This time I'm much more likely to, because I'm now a patient area with our family resource centre. The librarian at one of our other hospitals was brought in to one of the meetings, too. So...well, among other things, I really need to leave work behind and enjoy myself.

It's also supposed to get very cold tonight (1 degree Fahrenheit, colder than it's been here in about five years). Fortunately, I have good heat and warm animals. But for those who have drafty homes or, Gods forbid, are homeless--it's going to be an awful couple of days, and it's snowing, too, at a temperature too cold for salt to do much good. Our nursing administrator gave me a ride home this evening and actually gave me her home phone number for tomorrow because she was concerned about me walking. Unfortunately, I have some errands to run (being payday) earlier that morning, so I probably won't be able to take her up on it.

However, I did receive good news. Last Saturday I went to see Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, as I reported earlier. What I didn't blog about was being left out in the cold for 20 minutes before the theatre would open the doors despite very cold, windy weather. They had been short-handed so didn't open the doors until just before the movie because they had no one to cover the cash. The manager was singularly unresponsive (I doubt she was more than twenty, and she was more defensive and genuinely didn't seem to understand why the twenty or so people who had been freezing outside might be upset). She never once truly apologised, or offered to make things right. I wrote a complaint in to the corporate website on Monday, and today got back a very nice letter from someone above her which apologised, made it clear that they usually would have opened up, and should have done so, and offered to send me free passes. I'm not really used to having my complaints taken seriously, especially by corporate giants, so this was a pleasant surprise. I thanked him immediately.

Well, I've eaten pizza and I'm all warm and snuggy and I think I may go read for awhile. I'm almost halfway through The Fellowship of the Ring. I'm actually enjoying myself, once I ploughed through the slower bits at the beginning. I think I just needed to be in the right mood. I'm slowly being converted to Macs and Tolkien. What's next, oh dynamic duo (Zabet and Hubby)?