Saturday Potluck

I found some really cool blogs while dipping and diving around the tubes this week:

New York Hack — A female cabbie in NYC who’s written a book: Hack: How I Learned To Stop Worrying About What To Do With My Life and Started Driving a Yellow Cab

The Best Night Ever:

I had an amazing night on Tuesday. So many people came out and the store sold out of my book! The whole thing was pretty damn special. A few cabbies came out, one regular passenger was in attendance, lots of friends and family, and even a bunch of people I didn’t know showed up. The room was packed, all the chairs were filled, and there were crowds of people standing in the aisles! It was probably one of the best nights of my life so far.

Blue Kitchen — A fantastic food blog that even the folks who can’t boil water will enjoy.

A Few Simple Ingredients Take Center Stage:

This particular soup came out of a failed attempt at a promising sounding recipe that just didn’t deliver. I’ve talked in the past about my overflowing, unkempt binders of recipes. As often happens, I was flipping through them looking for one recipe when I found another, for Tomato Bean Soup with Pasta. I love cannellini beans and I thought they would have more of a starring role in this soup. But the recipe turned out to be too busy, with too many ingredients all vying for attention—the white beans that caught my interest originally and tomatoes and pasta and either swiss chard or kale. In the end, the results were only okay, with no one flavor asserting itself.

Emergency Nursing Notes — Nursing from a male perspective.

Empowering Nurses:

Regardless of how good we may feel about the work we do, hospital nurses work in bureaucratic organizations which sometimes make our work and how we feel about it difficult.

Recently, I have been involved in a process at our hospital to improve the quality of nursing services. Oddly enough, however, no interest is expressed in improving the autonomy of nurses.

Although the nursing staff constitutes the largest group of employees at the hospital and generates the overwhelming majority of direct patient care hours (approximately 95%), we are not empowered by administration or the board of directors to conceive of ourselves as a organizational entity that may have interests and concerns that do not mirror the organization’s as a whole. Hence, we are permitted minimal self-determination.

Secret Scotland — Cyber-tour of “secret, hidden, or otherwise notable Points of Interest in Scotland” with it’s own Wiki. Mostly former military installations, but still interesting.

Corrugated Iron Buildings:

Following the recent offer for sale of a Corrugated Iron house, it was interesting to learn more about these old structures.

They come in many forms, and it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to learn that the Portable Buildings, as they were known at the time, were available in a wide range of configurations, ranging from simple houses, all the way to dance halls and churches.

Dating back to their beginnings in the 1820s, their name/description is possibly a little confusing, and even unfair, as the Corrugated Iron referred to in their build is not the flimsy, general purpose steel sheeting we recognise today, but was then actually Wrought Iron, galvanised to resist the weather, relatively cheap, and able to produce a quickly assembled structure.

the (okay, not quite) daily word — Learn something (almost) every day!

curium:

cu·ri·um: A silvery metallic synthetic radioactive transuranic element. Its longest lived isotope is Cm 247 with a half-life of 16.4 million years. Atomic number 96; melting point (estimated) 1,350°C; valence 3. According to information found on the Wiki site, “Curium was first synthesized at the University of California, Berkeley by Glenn T. Seaborg, Ralph A. James, and Albert Ghiorso in 1944.”