Wednesday ramblings... tea, Ghost, and more pumpkins!

Sitting here on my bed drinking a cup of peppermint tea and multi-tasking... meaning I'm also reading a mystery novel, knitting, and texting with a friend who is house-bound due to ankle replacement surgery. Ghost usually keeps me company...

DH and I were up early Tuesday morning in order to run a few errands. We went to the cleaners, dropped one car off to be inspected, went to vote, then did our *walk about* at the mall... yes, the mall with all the pumpkins I mentioned in my previous post. Here are more pictures of the abundance of pumpkins there:

I told you... they're everywhere... all colors and sizes! DH and I were wondering just what they did with all of them after Halloween??

In this last picture you can see one of the ponds where there's usually ducks and/or turtles. Right now there are turtles (Red Sliders I believe).  Most were in the other pond that is connected under the bridge you see on the far left of this top picture.

We also received NEWS yesterday about a new Ebola specialty facility that is being created at one of our area hospitals. I don't know much, but from what we hear it is is to be another one of the CDC Special  Ebola Centers... similar to the ones in Atlanta, Maryland, and Nebraska. Since it is basically  *in our backyard*, we naturally have mixed feelings. First feelings were OMG, then... well,  we certainly need more hospitals that are trained and equipped to care for Ebola cases.

Since it seems that we may have things under control at the moment in Dallas with the first group of quarantined and self monitoring persons deemed well, we are only waiting for the second group to have the same outcome. So possibly we're on the right track in our ability to contain this issue. Let's hope and pray that this is true.

our own personal faerie...

I was looking through Facebook this morning at family pics that I hadn't seen and came across this one of youngest grand daughter. She will be 2 next month. She has a very Irish name due to both our ancestry and her parents visit to Ireland before she was born. However, seeing this picture made me think that perhaps she does have a bit of the faerie dust about her. This was not taken in Ireland, but if I close my eyes, I can almost see the ancient stones in the background.  What do you think?

My daughter went in to have some bloodwork taken this morning. She called to tell me she *blacked out* while they were doing this. She has done this before, but it's been years. She said that it hurt terribly and that she tried to hold it together, but finally lost the battle somewhere between the 4th and 5th vial.  I told her that it shouldn't hurt terribly... that perhaps the tech doing it was not very good.  With my C history, they take blood all the time, and it doesn't hurt . The one time it did hurt was when my veins had probably collapsed due to dehydration as part of the preliminaries for a colonoscopy. At that time none of the nurses could find a vein... and that *digging* did hurt.

And talking about techs and nurses, we just heard that  a second nurse that worked with Duncan (the Dallas Ebola patient) has become ill.  They are testing her for the Ebola virus, but more than likely she is also infected. I tend to trust that the CDC knows what it's doing, but I really wish that these Ebola patients would be sent to the 4 CDC hospitals throughout the country that are equipped to handle this type of thing.  Other hospitals are being *trained*, but those CDC hospitals are already trained and equipped. Since the number of cases at this time is so low, it seems that it would be safer to have the patients contained there then at hospitals that are in the mist of being trained. Later it may be necessary to use any and all hospitals available, but for the time being it seems sensible to use the CDC facilities (IMO).

Closing with a poster I came across on someone's site and thought it was great. I'm sorry that I forget where I saw it or I would post the original source.

This is what our kitchen floor looks like on grocery days...