Autumnal Musak

I'd love to say that since the last time I posted about my music I've gathered up an amazing collection of songs that will blow your heart away.

I mean... it's been since October 8th!  Surely in 102 days I can come up with something grand, or spectacular or wonderful!  Right?

Umm...  no.  Unfortunatly including the three songs that I just now purchased, I have only accumulated 10 new songs.  And one of those is a Christmas song.

It's just been a dry few months for me and music.  I thought starting the new job in November would be a boon to my music collection.  A whole new crew of co-workers to bounce music ideas off of, several radio stations including a 'Classic' rock station that also plays new rock music.

But I swear, I think I ended up in some kind of music purgatory at work.  The first problem is that a majority (maybe 60%?) of the nurses there prefer to have NO music playing at all.  NONE!  Many of those nurses are at least on the early shift, so by 3pm they're all but cleared out.  But the nurses that remain for the rest of my shift?  There's the nurse that prefers christian music.  I have no problem with Christianity, but just as I don't look to the Vatican to make a good dramatic movie, I don't look to the Christian media companies to put out good music.  Even if I could get past the singular nature of the music subjects (there's the one about praising God, and then the one about how we're all horrible people until we take God into our hearts... that's it.  Variations on those two subjects.)  their music tends to focus on hearing the message.  Meaning that it's clearly spoken lyrics with some sort of musical accompanyment.  It's not about good music, it's about spreading a message.  I'm sure I said this before, but I look at the singer as merely one piece of the music and it shouldn't be the sole focal point.

Time - Over and Annual

So the new job has a couple new wrinkles when compared to my old job.  These are neither good nor bad in and of themselves... they just, Are.  The first is overtime.  I'm going to go ahead and include Holiday Pay in this category.  To put it bluntly, there is none.  At the old job there was a few ways to get overtime and almost every single pay period included at least SOME overtime.  I could have had a busy day and not finished my documentation until 10 minutes after my scheduled end time.  That's 10 minutes of overtime that was perfectly acceptable according to the supervisors.  Even on a slow day there could be an urgent or emergent case that comes up just a few minutes before the end of shift.  In general we wouldn't hand that off to the next nurse up, so we would stay and finish it up.  If that means staying an hour after shift, then that means an hours worth of overtime.

Then of course there is the 'nightmare' scenario.  Being mandated.  I was mandated a total of three times in my two years as a state employee.  Twice it was to stay over night, while one time I had to come in early.  Neither of those are any fun at all and I didn't appreciate the overtime for it... but the overtime pay WAS impressive in hindsight.  Eight hours at 1.5x pay.

Then there's Holiday Pay.  The way this works is that there are 13 paid holidays in the year.  Each paid holiday is 8 hours of pay.  If you are working the holiday (or more specifically, not taking any time off during that pay period) that 8 hours of pay is immediately overtime.  Basically that's 12 hours of free pay.  And those holidays are bunched up at the end of the year.  Thanksgiving and the day after Thanksgiving are both paid holidays.  Christmas Eve and Christmas are both paid holidays.  New Year's Eve and New Year's Day are both paid Holidays.