Basement: Before, After and a Surprise

Before: Dark gloomy basement: View to the west.

Low loop pine green carpet.

Ewww...

After: Not gloomy now basement: View to the west.

A tad bland, but pictures on the walls and furniture will jazz it up later.

The new carpet: beige with fireplace rust flecks and sage green flecks.

(and it is super soft....)

Basement before: view to east.

Basement after: View to east.

I've been researching a lot about 50's ranch houses. The basement was usually used as a recreation room.

With very specific elements.

As the carpet guys started tearing up the old rug, I watched and waited, hoping....

And my hope was not in vain.

A true 50's style entertainment center: an INLAID shuffle board court was under that dismal old carpet.

Ahhh...one of the joys of discovery that comes with remodeling an older home.

Can't you just picture it now?

A roaring fire, bottle of soda pop and chex mix...

The kids all dressed like Richie and the gang from "Happy Days"?

Cool!

It just broke my heart to have to cover it all up again.

But since floor tiles are made of that oh so popular '50's style asbestos...

(which is fine is you don't scuff or buff or break it in anyway...with scuttling shuffle board pucks for instance)

it had to be safely covered again with wall to wall carpeting.

Sigh.

At least I know it is there.

The packers will be here in the apartment in an hour, gotta run.

It is moving day again...the third time in five months.

One more 'moving day" to go, when our Houston household furnishing gets moved into the house in March.

After that, I just want to find a good (safe surface) shuffleboard court and play away the day.

Monday , Tuesday, Happy Days....we're gonna rock around the clock tonight!

Ranting For Our Future RNs

I am livid.
Stark raving pitch a fit in the front office ranting until my eyes bug out livid.

One of our employees is signing up for a skin care program now being offered by our school.
Why is she doing that?
She figures that with that training, along with her massage therapy degree she will be able to make enough money to fund her true academic goal:

Getting a degree in nursing.

That is, of course, if she can get into a nursing program.

She is plenty smart. The problem is that there are not enough nurses who are willing to become college faculty at $20-40 thousand a year (after getting a Master's Degree) when they could be out there making twice that much money working as a nurse with just a basic degree.

So selfish of them....

Now why does this girl's plan to "Mask and Moisturize for Moolah" make me livid?

Because if she was a guy who wanted to go to college to play a sport, her entire tuition would likely be paid for.

And if she was good at her sport (in the same way that she currently is "good" at nursing related skills) she would not have to worry about not having anyone available to teach her required course work at a greatly reduced salary.

Why is that the case you may ask?

Answer: Because the "Faculty" for a degree in football get paid...are you ready for this?

Typically One MILLION dollars. Or more. Per year!

For "teaching" a goofy sport for five months a year.
Other kinds of sports "teachers" get paid almost equally well.

(oops, there isn't really a degree called "football" or "basketball" or "golf" , but there is money given to people who go to college to PLAY those games.)

Of course people (and by that I mean MEN) would argue that a good sports team brings lots and lots of money into the school.

So true.

Call me a sicko, but frankly seeing the owner of the Utah Jazz having a double amputation makes me wonder: was it important to him that he had nurses available to assist him as he recovered?

Or would it have been enough to have a couple of B-ball boys hanging with him until his stumps scabbed over?

Was the owner of the Carolina Panthers appreciative of the nursing staff following his recent heart transplant, or did he really wish the RN could have been a RW or QB instead?

Those guys make a living from the those sports scholarship folks that brought lots and lots of money to their schools. Money which in turn mostly gets used to build bigger and better sports programs which will bring in more money to build...you guessed right, more sports programs.

Once, just once, I'd like to see universities give all their sports program dollars to build their nursing programs, and pay nurses a six figure salary to teach LIVE SAVING INFORMATION for a change.

I'd like to see ALL aspiring nurses be PAID to go to school. A stipend, which they would get in addition to their "Paid in Full" tuition, just like the sweaty (but useless in an emergency) jocks get.

And if that is not possible, then I would suggest an alternative strategy:

Everyone involved with college sports and professional sports will not be able to have nurses available to them when they need them.

Just like the rest of us won't be able to have nurses when we need them either in a few years.
Maybe it will all even out: No nurses to care for sports injury = no sports.

It would be a lose-lose, but we can take comfort in knowing that if we won't be able to see professional football games, we can just tune into porn instead.

Lately, between Janet Jackson and this past SuperBowl, I'm not sure we could tell the difference anyway.

(Aside: Comcast apology: We are mortified by the incident and we apologize to our customers.
Apparently, like the child molester who was mortified by being caught but not actually mortified for molesting, we can be sure Comcast will continue to deliver porn with nary a twinge of guilt. Isn't the Super Bowl the only time that men aren't paying to view the stuff? That free sample was probably a great idea to get the guys back to it after the game was over!)

Learn more about the nursing shortage here.

And the next time someone wants to talk about sports, talk about nursing instead.

(This post is dedicated to LauraRN and RunningWildlyRN, PG and all the other nurses out there who should actually have their very own trading cards, Bowl Games, cheerleaders and product endorsement deals for fancy cars and nursing shoes. You go girls!)

somebody...please...help us....the colors...aggghhh!!!

So on Friday we figured out PERFECT downstairs carpeting.
Easy peasy, after one trip to Home Depot and Lowes who assured us carpet could be delivered in three short weeks.
Oops...want NEW carpet BEFORE taking up residence downstairs.
Headed over to a local carpet company, found just the thing, and dragged a sample home, just to be sure.
It was PERFECT!
Great price, great color, great texture, love how it feels...so happy are we!

Jeff dropped by.
"You are getting that carpet? Everyone has that carpet."
(No Jeff, actually everyone does NOT have that carpet. We don't have that carpet...yet. After we get it, THEN everyone will have that carpet.)

The carpet folk will measure on Tuesday and the new carpet will be deliver on Friday.
That means we've got to get the downstairs painted NOW!

So you tell me: what wall color goes with this?
$75 per hour interior decorator suggested very dark grayish green.
(Dark grey green for a basement room with one window???)

As you can see, those wacky '50s folk have knocked themselves out with combining pinkish mauve mortar and orangey red bricks with dark brown speckles.

This is the pit of heck where I am trying to get the "naughty pine" to give up it's nearly black brown bottom paint and white white top paint.
We went ahead and painted the rest of the room a color called Friendly Beige.

Or maybe it was named Light Beige.
Whatever.
Something fairly blah.
You can see it on the wall beyond the fireplace.
It really made the room look great, except where The Paint That Will Not Be Stripped lives in the corner.
Today I made progress on it using a hair drier and sand paper with grit the size of bird gravel.

After painting the walls and the rest of the panelling, we needed to paint the baseboards some color.
White seemed too pure next to the fireplace, so we dropped down three tone on the seven chip paint sample stick to stay in the same color grouping.
Bought a sample jar, and B. painted up the baseboards and door casing.

I was very suspicious of the color which was called Toasty. It looked like baby poop golden brown to me, and oddly it clashed with the somewhat pinkish Friendly Beige.

B. said he needed to see more of the baseboards painted to decide.
After two more hours of painting down on his hands and knees, he was sure he didn't like the color either....

And that, boys and girls, is why God made hot tubs.