So today is Administrative Professionals Day. As the high level admin here, I took one for the team and ordered flowers for everybody. I used an online flower site.

Little did I know that this site sends its bouquets in boxes, unassembled!! So I had to assemble 11 sets of Alstroemaria this afternoon...oh the irony. Anyway, in the process I discovered one of the perks of working in the health care industry. On my 9th set of flowers, I sliced my left index fingertip open pretty soundly with the scissors, and wasn't sure what to do to stop the bleeding. (Small cut, but lots of blood...) Who should wander into the kitchen but the Manager of Hospital Development, who of course has a nursing degree and also happens to be a Mom. In a flash she created a makeshift butterflied tape thing to "seal" the wound, gauzed it, and then stuck another band aid on top. After profusely thanking her as a coworker, boss, nurse, and mother (don't worry Mom, you're still my favorite nurse-mother!), I was then faced with the dilemma of finishing my flower arranging duties without getting my little war-wound wet. Perk # 2: an ample supply of surgical gloves.

But I also happened to have my own pair. We're filming a training video for a specific type of donation: Donation after Cardiac Death, or DCD. It's a slightly different and less common occurence than donation after Brain Death, so the video is to familiarize our staff with the differences. I volunteered to act in it and got slated with the role of grieving sister (so, in case you were having an existential crisis about whether or not I could cry on cue, then know this -- I can and did. I credit the staff members who were playing themselves, though, because their obvious sympathy and support is what made it real enough for me to cry). In any case, we filmed in a nearby hospital's ICU and OR and I sneaked a pair of bright blue surgical gloves, since they're handy (har har) for just about everything under the sun. And I happened to be wearing the coat we filmed in, the gloves forgotten in an inside pocket, to work today.

The DCD video will be shown at the staff meeting next Tuesday. I'm thinking of dressing up Academy Award styles...

I also have to give a shout-out to my friend Noah, who dedicated 4 hours of uncompensated time to editing the film for us, thereby giving me a shotgun education in the wonders of Final Cut Pro. Thanks Noah!

A shot of the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco from the top of Hawk Hill. You can only really see the wakes of a couple of them, but there were boats everywhere, as you can imagine... 

A shot of the Pacific from the top of Hawk Hill. You can see what a gorgeous day it was! 

A shot of the headlands from the top of Hawk Hill. 

Wow, what an eventful but totally unplanned weekend. On Saturday, Steve and I drove across the golden gate bridge and up to the top of Hawk Hill in the Marin Headlands and just sat at the top, looking down at the city, the bay, and the Golden Gate bridge, and enjoying the crystal-clear, beautiful weather. All kinds of wildflowers were blooming, especially brilliant orange california poppies, and I was torn between looking at the hillside and looking at the view!

As we headed back down we stopped to read all the sign-boards about the various military installments built into the hill, and then Steve happened to remember the Marine Mammal Rehabilitation Center nestled up in the hill, so we visited that too. We watched them training underweight elephant seal pups (rescued from various beaches in the area) how to swallow fish. For those of you who have never heard a baby elephant seal vocalize, let me tell you, these things don't roar or bark -- they literally squawk, the most gravely, high-pitched squawk you can imagine coming from a sea creature!!

Since we were over there, we decided to stop in and see Sausalito -- a very cute area -- and then Steve also remembered an exhibit his Dad had taken him to many moons ago -- a working scale model of the tidal forces for the entire bay area. (Unfortunately, there's only one image on the website and it conveys absolutely no sense of the thing...but if you're curious, here's the website.) Imagine yourself in a giant warehouse filled mostly with shallow chlorine pools (about waist high). Now imagine that those chlorine pools were cut into the shape of all of the bays in the bay area, and that the bottoms of them were filled or dug-out to mimic the actual underwater topography of each area. Visitors walk on the 'landmass' part of the exhibit (you can stand at the tip of San Francisco, for example) and can look out into the pools, which have all the bridges represented, all the towns labeled, and are used to determine how building bridges or dams or digging channels for shipping or what have you might affect the bay area.

It was pretty darn interesting for the first 10 minutes and then you got the gist of it!! But it was still cool to see.

We headed home and spent a low-key night preparing for our whale watch on Sunday -- which was then canceled due to anticipated thunderstorms. Bummer!! So we decided to make it 'home improvement day,' and trundled off to Lowes to buy odds and ends for pet projects we'd been wanting to do for ages. By the end of the day, we managed to morph our second bedroom space into what we can actually call a respectable 'den,' rather than 'room full of boxes and books with a desk that you can't really use for all the crap that's on it.' (~i_i)

It was a busy but satisfying weekend, especially in that we didn't plan a single moment of it!!