When C&M Trains You.

Trains you in what? Pharmacy, of course you crack heads! (Speaking of crack heads, an interesting past week in the pharmacy, I caught one of our regulars stealing over the counter items. It’s a little obvious though when you swipe a whole shelf. So if you’re going to steal guys, don’t take the whole fucking shelf.)

Things are finally calming down a wee bit but the next couple of days I have to dedicate my evenings to writing a new technician training manual for the pharmacy. The new tech starts Friday. (I’ve been attempting to get this manual done since we got back from Nashville but with all the overtime since firing The Great Tampon Thief, I just couldn’t squeeze it in.) I’m going to make myself look really good as lead technician and be late that day. Samus has an appointment with a new vet we’ve seen in town for Ozzy. It’s just for her yearly things but she’s a very fearful dog so vet visits are always stressful for her and I both. The on-duty pharmacist knows of course so I’m sure it will be fine but first impressions and all.

Other than that, not a whole lot going on. I’ve finally been able to squeeze more reading in again and started Beyond Redemption which is so dark, it’s juicy. In the beginning of August, Ignited Moth and I begin a buddy read on A Plague of Giants. You’d think we did buddy reads more often but it only happens every couple of years. Probably should change that Ms. Moth. 😉

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July? WTF.

How did we get here already? And why the hell is it so fucking hot?

I only finished (actually am still technically working on) three out of the four books I planned to read in June. Life just won’t slow down right now. We fired one of the technicians at work so it’s been busier, mostly because one of the pharmacists has also been on vacation since this happened. We were going to hire another technician anyway but now we just need to do it a little sooner.

What did previous technician get fired for your wondering? Well, among many things over the years, the final straw was stealing over the counter stuff. Tampons, sunscreen, sun tanning lotion. Stupid shit. Now they’ve earned the monikor, The Great Tampon Thief.

You might be wondering, Were they poor? Could they really not afford these things? The answer is no. Financially, they were just fine. Either it was the thrill or they thought the company owned them these things or a combination of the two.

Besides being extra busy, the atmosphere in the pharmacy is much better. They brought a black cloud to hang over the workplace every day. They will not be missed.

So what can we expect from C&M in July? 

Not much of fucking anything. Maybe cleaning up some reading and hopefully going to back to being free to read whatever I want. I feel like reading some non-fiction here soon. My brain craves knowledge.

Oh I might bake something this week. Doesn’t happen enough anymore so that’s exciting.

Nashville + PioneerRx

I have returned my little beauties! Nashville was fun. We stayed at a resort that was like an indoor city all itself. We didn’t have to leave at all since the convention center and hotel was inside the resort, but of course we needed to explore Nashville a little as well.

It was the CMA Music Festival which was unfortunate for the likes of us, as we’re all metal fans. (Boss included.) So we avoided the downtown area and checked out The Gulch and Midtown. The Gulch was pretty awesome and Midtown was filled with college kids and quickly became annoying. However, it had an awesome pizza joint called Two Boots. If you don’t want to wait in the long line for Hattie B’s hot chicken, Two Boots is a couple blocks away and has a hot chicken pizza. You should always ask your Uber drivers about local venues to check out, otherwise, we would have never found this place. We checked out two local breweries as well. I’ll review those in another post.

The PioneerRx conference was fantastic. If your pharmacy isn’t already using this software system, you need to check it out. We’ve had it since we opened the pharmacy 6.5 years ago and I still learned a ton about features we hadn’t even touched yet. The speakers were inspiring and the whole thing pumped my boss and I full of ideas for the pharmacy. We’re basically going to revamp the entire place. Work is about to get even busier, but I’m excited about it.

I needed the time away to reinvigorate my motivation to focus on fitness and really getting some things done in my life. The food in Tennessee was wonderful and probably completely unhealthy, which I was planning on, kind of a last hoo-rah before I got down to business when I returned.

I’m so happy to be home though. I missed my tiny personal queendom and my fur critters.

A couple pics of the lovely resort, the Gaylord Opryland Resort:

 

Pharmacy Lady C&M

I will be scarce this next week. If you’re just tuning into this blog, I work for an independent pharmacy. I helped open it 6.5 years ago. Every once in awhile, a conference comes up that will help continue to grow the business. I’ve been to Pittsburgh to learn how to set up a medication synchronization program. (That’s been a big success.) I’ve been to Atlanta to a vitamin/supplement conference. (We barely use the vitamins anymore but their probiotics are on point.) Now I trot off to yet another state to see what pharmacy wonders we can learn. This time, it will be pharmacy software related. We’ve used an advanced software program since the day we opened but now we’re going to learn about some of the features we haven’t even tried to touch yet.

So I won’t be posting until I return but you can follow my shenanigans on Instagram as it’s easily accessible.

 

5 Myths About the Flu Vaccine

There have already been confirmed cases of the flu in Michigan, which is a little ahead of the usual flu season. Usually we start seeing cases in mid-October, not beginning in mid-September. As a pharmacy technician, I thought it important to battle some of those common myths about the flu vaccine. We hear them every year and they seem to get more and more out of control. Once, my husband was told that he would become sterile if he got a flu shot. I’ll admit that this one blew my mind. Much to his coworkers dismay, if this was true, it would only encourage him since we don’t want kids

1. You can get the flu from the flu vaccine – False. The vaccine contains only a piece of a dead virus in order to teach your immune system what it needs to watch out for. It takes two weeks for your immune system to build a defense against the virus. Many times people get the flu within this two week time span and blame it on the vaccine, when really you unfortunately came across the virus before your body had time to mount a defense. If you contract the flu only a couple days after receiving the vaccine, it means you actually already had the virus in your system, it takes a few days before symptoms of the virus show themselves. (Incubation period.)

Pills & Chocolate

With my coworker on vacation, I’ve logged overtime this past week and there will be plenty more next week. With zero baking time and limited reading time, you may only be getting drowsy evening rants for the next week and a half. Good thing most of you follow me for my witty antics alone.

Counting pills by day, eating chocolate, reading and ranting by night. This week should get interesting.

Currently reading:

5 Ways to Make Your Pharmacy Hate You

1. “Can’t you do it faster?” – Well of course I could. I could just pick some random ass bottle off the shelf, throw it in the RX bottle, not even look at your other meds in case they interact and just hand it to you. Hell, you don’t even have to pay for it!
2. Drop off compound, expect it done in 15 minutes.  – Why no, we don’t have to combine all of the raw ingredients and use special procedures to mix them together.
3. Hand us your used tube of vaginal cream. – Even if you didn’t touch your vagina when using this, we’re still skeeved out.
4. “Why isn’t it on the $4 list?” – This isn’t Wal-Mart.
5. Insist that the LACK of blue dye in your oxycodone 30 mg upsets your stomach, so could you please swap these white ones with blue ones. –  No, and way to out yourself that you’re selling them on the street.

 

That Holiday Hustle

Woooo. I am tired. That week leading up to Christmas was crazy at the pharmacy. Everyone wanted their meds, not only before the holiday but before the end of the year. Everyone crams as many meds as their insurance will pay for before the beginning of the year when their deductible resets. That being said, the next four days before the New Year are bound to be chaos once again.

But I have today off and plan to spend it recharging my batteries. Of course there are things that I should get done, but I most likely won’t. My only real agenda is to write a review for The Hero of Ages. I’ve lost my husband for the foreseeable future to Pokemon Sun, Watch Dogs 2 and completing FFXV, so I should have plenty of time to write.

I was going to hold off reading any more books until the New Year but decided to throw one more book in because I can’t go more than a day or two without reading. So I borrowed House Rules (book #7) in the Chicagoland Vampire series from the library because I could not decide what I felt like reading. The series started out strong but began slowly teetering downwards. I have a feeling that this may be the last book in the series that I read but we’ll see how it goes. If there is one more relationship flip-flop with the two main characters, I’ll have to resist throwing my Kindle at the wall.

Baking. I hope you’re ready for some extreme baking in 2017. My husband and roommate/friend went in together and bought me a stand mixer. They watched me struggle mixing various recipes the days leading up to Christmas, all the while knowing a solution to my problems lay waiting 10 feet away. They are now referring to it as my ‘last trials.’  No more straining my puny human arms making tasty treats!

I hope everyone had a fantastic holiday and got some really sweet stuff. What was your favorite thing you received this year??

Bah Hum Bug

Oi, the holidays. And aren’t we just getting started? Usually I really enjoy the holidays, this year, especially after Thanksgiving, I’m feeling pretty Grinchy. All I really want to do is prepare for winter to hit. Prepare meaning, I have a sufficient supply of books, coffee, cocoa, and blankets because I’m not leaving the house unless I absolutely have to. I can handle any amount of snow the universe wants to throw at me, but bitter cold is another thing altogether.

I literally just spent 10 minutes trying to find an appropriate coffee addiction meme. However, every single fucking one of them was not an acceptable file type. Coffee meme people, get your shit together!

So, ahem, I’ve been absent thanks to holiday crap. Now it’s time to add coffee to an IV bag and get caught up on things. Including all your lovely blogs, I’ve been a bad blog friend and I intend to make things right! I made a bomb ass bread recipe that I’ll be sharing here soon. The new kid at work was finally was fired. I can’t even tell you how happy that made me but it does mean that I’ll be working a lot more weekends until we hire another pharmacy technician who can handle their shit. I have high standards so it may take awhile.

Forthcoming book reviews:

 

  

NOS4A2 – Book Review

4 out of 5 stars

I know it’s not fair to compare a newer author with their legendary author parent, but I’m doing it anyway.

Once upon a time, I used to really enjoy Stephen King books. Then there came a time when I began to feel that King wasn’t really trying anymore. He had a famous name so he could crap something out and people would praise his genius, regardless of if it was actually good or not. I was not one of those people. I was still a teenager when I dumped King. He and I were not seeing eye to eye anymore. I began to feel that his characters were repetitive from book to book, not to mention just down right boring. If I don’t care what happens to your characters, how is it going to effect me when something bad happens to them? It’s not. And if I can skip to about the middle of your book and feel like I haven’t missed anything important, then you’re spending too much time building crappy worlds and crappier plot lines.