The explanation. . .

Okay, so here's the explanation to the previous post, (hopefully this will alleviate all fears about me living in a psych ward or making up my work - Thanks Rach, for the assessment by the way :)
For anyone who may not know, I work for the Maricopa County Tobacco Use Prevention Program. I am currently the coordinator for our youth coalition, high school prevention program and college advocacy programs. These programs each focus on raising awareness about the risks of tobacco use and promoting cessation (quitting tobacco) by doing projects, events, activities at their school and/or in their community. Our model is a "capacity building model" which basically just means that rather than me going out to all these schools to plan and put on events, I recruit and train staff and students at each location, supply them with resources, materials and funding and they plan and put on their own events/projects etc. within the parameters I set. They then report certain things back to me and I approve their reimbursements, record their data etc.

I spent the majority of last Thursday inventorying and restocking carts full of visual aids that we checkout to each college who participates in our program. The colleges use these materials at campus events, when giving presentations to high schools and on other projects. Each cart contains:
A chemical box - a box of products containing chemicals that are also found in tobacco smoke, including toilet bowl cleaner (ammonia) and mascara (stearic acid) among other things.
1 set of pig lungs (one healthy, one with the effects of smoking simulated) - these are sealed in plastic and have to be resealed if the bag is punctured and formaldehyde starts leaking.
A "tobacco girl" poster mounted on foam board that illustrates several different diseases that are caused by tobacco use.
A "hairy tongue" poster (trust me, it's icky)
A tablecloth in a plastic container
A fake mouth showing oral cancer, cavities, yellow teeth, gum disease and other health conditions that can affect the mouth.

So now to my list. I went through our 13 carts, some of which were used last year and some of which I was putting together with supplies we had around the office. I discovered that apparently people liked to steal the mascara and toilet bowl cleaner since many of the kits were missing those products. I decided to just take mascara out of all the kits since there were only a few that had it, but since I was only missing 4 toilet bowl cleaners I made a note to replace those. 3 sets of lungs were leaking so I had to reseal those, I only had 8 Hairy tongue posters, so I had to go find out where the other 5 got put, and made a note that I still needed to get the 4 new tobacco girl posters mounted on foam board (this keeps them in better shape and makes them easier to use). After all was said and done I realized that part of the #13 cart was broken, so I traded it for a new one. Going through all this stuff and seeing what was missing made me remember that I still needed to get the new hookah back from my coworker who had borrowed it. A hookah is a smoking apparatus. We recently bought one to use as an example, attention getter when discussing the risks of smoking hookah, since society seems to think that it's safer than smoking cigarettes when in reality smoking hookah for an hour can be the same as smoking up to 5 packs of cigarettes. And last but not least, since I hadn't been able to find any more plastic containers to keep the tablecloths in, I made a note to ask Alaina (our business manager) to order some more.
So there you go, hope my miscellaneous thoughts make a little more sense now, and perhaps you learned something about my job along the way. :)