Orientation is over

I hope you're not getting too used to these daily posts. I actually had my 4 days off this weekend, so I feel like i finally got enough sleep. Now I'm back to work for four shifts starting tomorrow. I'm a little nervous about going back to work, mainly because I'm now done my official orientation to Maternity. Before coming here, a month sounded like a really long orientation, I was going to learn so much! Now that the orientation is over, I want another month. I must admit, it's not like I'm left alone. I will be shadowed for the next month, so that's a plus. But I was really enjoying having a buddy to work with, not being counted on the roster so we get extra staff on... plus, I was orientating with a nurse that I've become friends with, and now we're on polar opposite shifts. I'll actually have time to hang out with her only about once a week now.
I was beginning to feel sorry for myself about being done orientation, but then I realized that it's really no different than any other area of nursing that I've learned to work in. You start out buddied up with someone, then they just check in on you, then you work independent and use the nurses with more experience to bounce things off of. It's all part of the learning, and you learn better for it. (I'm sounding all philosophical now, and you're wondering if I actually believe what I'm spouting off!) So anyways, I'm still on a sharp learning curve, and if I'm too tired to write anything, I hope you'll understand.
Anyways, just a side note... Yesterday when I woke up, I looked out the window and saw... well something similar to this:

Overcast sky with snow blowing everywhere. The hospital, which is normally quite easy to spot from my apartment, was a fuzzy haze. (Yes, the sun was up, yes, I slept late, no, I will not tell you how late.) I let the curtain (which actually happens to be a tablecloth I picked up cheap at a thrift store and converted to work as a dark curtain) fall back over the window and started chanting, "please be a snow day, please be a snow day!" Unfortunately, I had a mandatory training session at work from 1-2pm that afternoon. I figured a snow day would be about perfect. Alas, it wasn't to be. Turns out it was actually quite warm out, and so even with the blowing snow, it only got down to -30C. The other hazard was the ~10cm of snow that had already fallen, which made walking harder, and streets slippery. As I walked down the hill to work (there are no sidewalks on that road), a taxi that was coming up the hill past me tried to wave me off to the side. Um, if I move over any more, I'll be in snow up to my knees... that doesn't work for me. If I move over more than a couple feet, I'm going over the side of the embankment, which at that part of the hill was about 15 feet straight down. I don't think some people think things through sometimes. Once I was at work, some people were late due to having waited 25min for a taxi. So while we waited, we sat and watched cars trying to get up the hill I had just walked down. It was quite amusing, as some weren't making it, some spun out, some ended up sliding backwards a ways, and some just kept going at a fairly decent speed, the only way to make it up a steep slippery hill. At least no one went over the side.
Winter here is a little like in Winnipeg. Nothing comes to a complete stop, or is shut down unless the visibility is almost nil or the roads have snow piled too high for a car to plow it's way through. Though here, that comes with an extra condition. When the taxis stop running, that's when things shut down. I went to the grocery store to pick up milk (I'm forever running out of milk) right after my meeting, and on the way home, the taxi driver had to get special permission to go up the hill I live on. Apparently they stopped sending taxis up there about the time we were laughing and watching cars try and make it up the hill. I lucked out... they had sanded the hill. With the amount of sand they dump on roads here, I'm beginning to understand why everything was so incredibly dusty when I got here in August. It would almost make sense to keep the roads gravel just to give people extra traction in winter!

High temp: -10C Low temp: -17C Windchill: (low) -21C Light snow most of the day. Sunrise: 08:50am Sunset: 13:57 (1:57pm)