(Edited to add: I typed this up on Thursday and forgot to come back, finish and post it. Better late than never?)

My dogs are barking.


Woof. Woof.


I am so tired!

I started a new job on Monday. You know, last year I left my nursing home to go to work at a mental retardation facility for more money and benefits, and all that other stuff, that apparently don't really matter in the long run.
To make a long (and boring) story short (but still boring) , the job I have been at for the past year turned sour. I've been working the overnight shift, and was basically miserable, but still, THE PAY! and THE BENEFITS! turn out looking like the pay and the benefits when you get no sleep.
The straw that broke the camel's back was when I came back from all the surgery and found that my schedule had changed. Drastically. What had been every other weekend off and one day in the week off, changed to working 5 weekends and then ONLY ONE off.

As you can imagine, I was pretty pissed off.

As fate would have it, that same night I opened the paper (really, not specifically for the want ads) I saw a big ad from MY nursing home with a great position for hire. So, the next day I called my old DON, and was offered the position over the phone. (New title: Assistant DON. AWESOME.)
The pay is actually a Tiny-Insey bit less than what I was making and of course, bye bye benefits. (Like LOTS of vacation and sick time. And I mean LOTS.) But I am able to get overtime pay at the new place, where I couldn't before, so that will more than make up for it.
The absolute best part? It's dayshift, no weekends. I get off in time to pick up the kids and it's fairly flexible in which hours I want to work.
Also, it's HOME. I love that place. Everyone goes out of their way to be nice to each other (mostly) and the residents (and their families) are like my family. I am in love with my job.

I do a lot more physical work than at my last job, where I basically sat on my ass until I got a page to give someone a tylenol or to tell the staff to call me again if the client has any more diarrhea. It was a total waste of time and skill.

(I guess I was wrong about the long story short thing, sorry about that, but I was totally right about the completely boring thing.)

Bigger news: I almost died. (Gotta work on my dramatic delivery, huh?)

At 4:30 this morning I was awakened from a deep sleep by my daughter screaming up the stairs to GET UP! WE HAVE TO GET OF THE HOUSE! THERE'S SOMETHING WRONG WITH THE FURNACE! GAS LEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAK!
Apparently, my neighbors had heard some very loud banging and popping noises that woke them up. They thought someone was breaking into their house, so they got up to investigate. I assume that the only reason they woke up so easily is because their house was broken into just last week. Oh, but not us. We can sleep through a train wreck. They went outside and discovered the very loud noises were coming from our furnace and there were FIREBALLS coming out of it. They smelled GAS, outside, where it was WINDY. They actually could smell it outside.

So, the man called the fire department while the woman came over to wake us up. (She later told me that we are very hard to wake up.) Even when we sat outside, we didn't fully understand what was going on. Dan had turned the furnace off on his way out of the house, so we actually never heard or saw the big booms. The neighbors offered to put our poor, freezing children in their house where it was warm. That was really nice. The firemen capped off the gas to our furnace and left. Then we all went back inside, only about 30 minutes later. When we came back in, we realized the house was FULL of gas. I had never smelled gas that strongly. I opened a few doors and windows and let the house air out for a few minutes. Everyone else went back to bed. Then the gas man came to make sure there were no more leaks, and he said we were all clear.

Today, the landlord was called and he hired a "furnace guy" to come over and survey the damage. He just came in and told me that some part (the heat exchanger) is broken, cracked or something, and it was letting the gas pour out and then it would try to light, basically creating a fireball. It must have happened over and over before and after the neighbors heard it. The neighbors did tell us that it shook their entire house. The furnace guy then told us we were lucky that it didn't catch the house on fire the first time, let alone all the other times it happened.

I like to think our guardian angels were watching out for us.

So, for these wonderful people that live next door, I got them a really nice thank you card and a gift certificate to our fanciest restaurant. It's not even a fraction of the gratitude we feel for them, but it's all I could think of.

What do you all think? Is there something more I could do?