B.J. Has a Wedgie

The title of this post is from kind of a long story. I'll shorten it. Brianna's middle name is Joan, so her initials are B.J. And my sisters and I couldn't find anything to rhyme with B.J., but "wedgie" sounds kind of similar. Hence that nickname. It's one of many.

Brianna is the third born in our family. Beads is also one of my best friends. We have very deep, wonderful conversations. We've spent MANY hours on the phone together, because we never live in the same city. Sigh. She is a very passionate, deep-thinking individual.

Beads is extremely, extremely smart. Holy crap. When I was in college, I didn't have a job, and I only took 16 credits per semester, and I got A's and B's. (Except for the humanities class I flunked. That is for another post.) But Brianna worked two jobs, plus took like 20 credits per semester, and she was taking stuff like anatomy and chemistry, and she was Suma Cum Laude. Or Magna Cum Laude. Or something like that. Extremely smart girl. Her mind moves really fast, so sometimes it's hard for her to converse, because she's like ten steps ahead of everyone else. When we play our family's card game, Bitter Nertz, we need to give Brianna a huge handicap in her pile, because her mind moves so quickly that she whips us all soundly, at every hand. Smart, smart, smart.

She adores animals. She has trained horses from about the time she was ten or so, I think. And she really has a way with them. And she doesn't take their crap. She had to sell her horse about a year ago, and it was really hard for her. But she couldn't take it to New York with her. She has two enormous, very sweet dogs, and she adores them. She felt badly for them when she was working 12-hour days (she's a nurse), so she would take them to Doggy Day Care. She takes really good care of her animals. Her dog had puppies a year ago, and there were complications from the delivery, resulting in two pups that were in really bad shape when they came out. Brianna sat and gave them mouth-to-mouth and worked with them, trying to keep them alive, for hours and hours. They ended up dying, and she was really upset about that for a long time.

Brianna is really, really playful. She is so much fun to joke around with. She is a trauma-ward nurse, and at her hospital in Arizona, doctors would call on her line to talk about patients or whatever, and she would answer, "This is Brianna, what's your favorite color??" She loves Will Farrell movies and owns a shirt that says, "More Cowbells!" She does this dance called the Bumb Jiggle Dance, which is really funny:

Brianna is a cuddle-meister. If her hubs or any of her sisters are in the room with her, she is on top of them, cuddling them. So cute. But she hates to give straight-on hugs to any of her sisters, because she feels like having the boobs co-mingle is just sick and wrong.

Beads is very, very responsible. She takes extremely good care of her patients. She not only makes sure that they are alive - hard to do in a trauma ward - but when they're stable and unconscious, she trims their nails, shaves their faces, etc. I think that is really sweet. She has held countless numbers of brains and organs in her arms while trying to save peoples' lives, and she doesn't flinch.

Beads is an adrenaline junky. She loves roller-coasters. (I hate them.) Her favorite vacations always revolve around big roller-coaster parks. You should see us together on roller-coasters. I scream and scream, and then come very, very close to fainting. And she just laughs the whole time. She thinks I'm the best person to go on roller-coasters with, because I'm so ludicrously frightened.

Love this girl.