The Edge of Empty

A E loves to wrestle.  Teeth play an important role in this play--or at least that is what seems to be the case in our house.  To protect ourselves, we often wear a pair of the Hubster's old thick wool dive socks.  We call them the "sock monkey".  The sock monkey is A E's favorite wrestling partner--whether or not there is a hand in them.  A E particularly likes to defeat Sock Monkey from the inside.  Here A E is preparing his attack. The attack is well under way here: Stealth is key to victory, so pretending to fall asleep lulls the opponent into a false sense of security. Although you can't really tell from the picture, A E's head is at the toe of the sock in this photo.  It is really funny to watch when he is fully into the sock like this.  Inside the sock, he is trying to bite the toe of the sock.  While doing so, he lifts his head up and moves it around--it is similar to watching an earth worm. Soon he will emerge the victor in anoth...

Our unit has had a continuing problem with staff turnover.  Without a written employee handbook, this meant that what was be obvious to one person may be missed by another.  Besides creating an employee manual, I have been working to automate as many processes as possible.  Automating processes has the benefit of reducing human error and forgetfulness. Fortunately, CryWolf® has many tools to assist in this effort. Although CryWolf® has the ability to communicate with CAD (computer aided dispatch) systems, we are not taking advantage of this capability...yet.  This means that my staff must manually enter relevant information into CAD.  Unfortunately, a review of recent actions showed that some notes were added and some were not.  I find it especially disturbing that notes placing an address in No Response status remained in CAD long after the status had been removed in our office. The solution that I settled on was adding a pop up note that appears when ...

As a person with sensitive skin and a mother of a child with sensitive skin, we don't do a lot of soap and detergent changing.  Once we find a product that doesn't irritate our skin, we stick to it for life--or as long as they manufacture it.  One product that I have been using since I was a child is Ivory soap.  It's gentle, reasonable priced, and it floats .  When Youngest was packing for school, I picked up a multi-pack when I was at a local retailer.  One day in the shower, I noticed a pleasant new scent.  I didn't equate it with the new bar of soap though because everyone knows Ivory is unscented.  After several days of trying to find the source, I finally concluded that Ivory must have added a scent to the soap even when I knew how ridiculous that was. When I finally took a look in the closet, here is what I found: The scent is Simply Aloe (the classic is now called Simply Ivory).  But wait, according to their history timeline , Ivory in...