Thanks. Dirty underwear. And more thanks

This past week has been crazy... but it could've been much crazier without all the generosity and support I have received.  This is a shout out to all those who offered to help when you found out that my clinical sites are ridiculous to get to without a car.  I owe a very special public thanks to Becca and Tyler.  Unfortunately, this blog isn't horribly public, but it's the best I can do.  Anyway, they let me use their car several times over this past week.  I used it to get to the 2 far away clinicals last week and also to get to 2 far away car dealerships (which were in opposite directions), logging probably nearly 200 miles in that time.  I do not know what I would have done without that help, and because of their generosity, we were able to find the car that we hope to purchase.  We may never have found such an incredible deal without the ability to drive to where the deal was.  So thanks guys.  I was in a real bind without you, and I really can't thank you enough.

We're not quite out of the woods yet in the whole ordeal.  I am surprised how calm I feel in light of that fact that I started the term on a shaky foot, trying to figure out what we were going to do about a car, and spending time with my dad while he was in town.  I got hardly any studying done.  I guess I feel so calm because I had my priorities straight, and I know that things work out when priorities are preserved.  So here I am with about a bzillion chapters left to read, clinical preparation to do, 3 quizzes this week (2 already down, thank goodness), 3 quizzes next week, a bunch of things going wrong with my financial aid, and no clean underwear to wear tomorrow (I'm sure you wanted to know that)- but I feel good.  Ask me tomorrow and the story may be different, but I feel very thankful this moment.  I'm thankful for good friends. I'm thankful that I got to spend time with my dad.  It's the first time I've seen any of my family since last Christmas time.  I'm thankful that my husband has been sweet and supportive, and took a bunch of time out of his activities to help make my week (and future weeks) a little easier and more pleasant.  And I'm thankful that it's almost October- I LOVE Halloween!

Old

Someone made a comment in class today during which she said that "All of us in this room are well into our 20's."  "Everyone but me," I thought, remembering how I have only found 1 girl in this program so far that is younger then me.  Then it hit me- I'm 23.  That's pretty solidly into the 20's.  I don't know about well into the 20's, but solidly.  How did I get so old so fast?

Back To School

Yes oh yes, my 2 weeks of freedom are over and it is time to go back to school again.  Week 2 of my vacation was a lot more low key than week 1.  I had a fabulous day watching the 5 hour Pride and Prejudice with a couple of the girls (thanks for humoring me ladies), and another day we trekked to Atlantic City with some other awesome friends (we love you guys). Another night we went out to dinner downtown then walked home, adoring the fabulous weather and the gorgeous sunset.  Other than that, I read a little, worked on my scrapbook some, and completely ignored the fact that school was starting again soon.  It was very enjoyable.

Interestingly, I have to admit that I am happy to be back.  While boredom is a rare feeling these days, it's definitely not my favorite, and I knew that the sooner I started this program back up, the sooner I can be done all together and actually be a nurse.  Additionally, I have one class in particular this term that I am very excited about- Community and Public Health Nursing.  This is an area that I think I may be interested in.  It's so hard to decide exactly where I want to end up working after graduation.  One great thing about nursing is that I can change my mind if I don't find the right fit right away.  But it would be nice to have some idea about what I want to do.  I have thought for a while that this may be a good option for me.  I am excited to have to chance to do the clinical rotation and see if it really is a good fit.  

Unfortunately, I used up all my luck in the 1st 2 terms.  I got generally very close and accessible clinical sites (3 of the 4), and the 4th one ended up being okay with the help of my sweet husband and a little luck in the scheduling.  So this term I was due for some terrible ones- not terrible in terms of what they are but in terms of accessibility for me.  And I got them.  I can't complain completely.  One is completely accessible.  But the other two are really creating a pain in my neck.  In fact, the day I got my clinical assignments, I balled my eyes out like a baby for a few hours, then wrote a fuming post on here about how I hate Drexel.  I ended up deleting it because I was just being silly and letting anger dictate everything I wrote.  I know that things have a way of working themselves out, even if it makes for some inconvenience.  For now, we have settled on the idea that it's time for us to buy a car.  We had been planning on doing so in a few months anyway, after I was done with school, but with the situation being what it is, it looks like that time has come earlier than expected.  So now we're car shopping, which is kind of fun even though it's completely overwhelming and we don't really even know where to start. Yay. I know this post has been all over the place.  I'll try to write something more coherent soon, but I hadn't written in a while and figured I might as well update my blog as not.

Picture-tacular

So I've finally gotten around to posting some pictures of our little getaway.

The first day in New York was a wet one.  It rained the entire day, and into the night.

Zack outside the theatre where they film David Letterman.  We stopped by the Hello Deli around the corner and saw Rupert, but Zack decided he was too shy to go for a picture there.
I got to see WICKED!

After Wicked, it had finally stopped raining, and someone offered to take a picture of the 2 of us with the lights of Times Square.

For all you fans of The Office, here's a shot of me with my favorite New York pizza place. :)

Day 2 (my birthday!) brought much nicer weather.  Here is me with the New York stock exchange... not the happiest place on earth right now.

My handsome husband with the beautiful Lady Liberty.

Isn't this Brooklyn Library just awesome?  We really liked Brooklyn.

Here's one of those New York waterfalls I mentioned in the previous post.

What a fun trip we had.

Week 1

I seriously don't think I have enjoyed vacation from school so much in my life.  This has been a fantastic 1st week off.

When we moved into this apartment, it was in the middle of a school term.  It's a wonder that we actually got in and got all the furniture squared away and got the apartment to a livable state under those circumstances.  When I got my first break, we spent pretty much the whole time partying in upstate New York, so the apartment wasn't really a priority.  Needless to say that it hadn't been cleaned since we moved here.  I don't mean cleaned like vacuumed and dusted and all that.  I've done that stuff multiple times.  I mean CLEANED- the kind where you wash all the windows and clean the bugs out of the light fixtures, and scrub the baseboards, and finally get around to cleaning out under the radiators, which I imagine haven't been cleaned under in several decades.  I know that's maybe not the way everyone might enjoy spending a break, but I have been absolutely longing to do these things so I got to work and, over the course of several days, I got it all done.  I take that back- I haven't deep cleaned the bathroom yet, but that is the one room that has already been deep cleaned since we moved in because it is the bathroom, and I couldn't bear to wait on a room like that.  I'll do it this week, but it seemed to be the bottom of the priority list since it has been cleaned really well before.  I did clean the bugs out of the light fixtures in there, which is very pleasing to me as they had been bugging (ha ha) me for months.  I even scrubbed my wood floors with a delicious smelling soap recommended by Zack's mom.  I had a blast.  I moved around all the furniture to make sure that even under the bed and the couch and so forth would be spick and span.  I took Lysol to the entire kitchen, cupboards included.  Mmmm, I love the smell of clean.  Basically, I just had fun. I think pretty much anyone, including those who have been here before, would walk in and notice little/no difference, but I know, and I am one happy camper about it. This week, I also went to lunch with some darling ward girls at Reading (pronounced Red-ing) Terminal Market (think National Treasure- the part where the woman ducks behind the counter of a little meat shop to hide from the scary bald man that's chasing her).  We went to a Phillies game with our friends newly returned from a 6 week tromp through Argentina and Brazil.  And then, of course, there was our weekend trip to NEW YORK!

We left Friday and took the bus to New York City, which is about a 2 hour ride.  It turned out to be a rainy day in New York, but we made the best of it and saw the sites anyway.  Friday, we mostly explored uptown.  We saw Grant's Tomb, went past about a million really really ritzy apartment buildings, and decided that we must return another time to go the the Met.  We beat around Times Square for a while in the evening, and had some dinner, and then we went to Wicked!  One day, several months ago, out of the blue, I just decided that I had to see it.  I don't know where that came from, but it came, so I read the book, and I bought the music (I wanna say CD but I just bought it on itunes), and I was all about it.  For a while, it looked like there was just no chance because, let's face it, it's just not cheap to go see it, and we are poor, but I eventually found sorta decently priced tickets (still expensive, but about as good as it gets) online, so we splurged and bought them, and Friday night, we finally saw it.  Woo hoo!  Loved it.  Very well done.  Happy ending (very unlike the book).

Saturday was also just amazing, except without the rain.  We started out in Times Square again and made our way downtown to City Hall, world trade center site, and, of course, the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.  Due to lack of time, we didn't get to spend nearly as much time as we would've liked on Ellis Island, but still enjoyed it thoroughly.  Next we explored Brooklyn (love it!  I would consider living in Brooklyn... Manhattan, not so much).  After Brooklyn, we took a little cruise out on the water where we saw this "art" display that is currently taking place called the NY Waterfalls- it was basically just 4 huge scaffold looking structures in various locations that pumped out water- not horribly exciting, but we enjoyed the rest of the cruise, with fabulous views of the Manhattan, Brooklyn, and New Jersey skylines.  We wrapped up our evening with a nighttime tour of Manhattan and Brooklyn, and, at 11 PM, we hopped a bus back to our dear Philly.  I have to say that it was about the best birthday I have ever had.  No presents to unwrap, no cake to eat, but that's ok, because who wouldn't trade that for a fabulous NY trip, broadway play included.  I was exhausted when I got up this morning but 1 ridiculously long nap later, I am wide awake, and I am one happy girl.  We had one of our fun married couples dinners tonight with the peeps, and I have another week off sitting gloriously in front of me.  Sheer bliss.

Pictures to come a little later.  I am too lazy this second.

My Sarah Palin post

Everyone who knows me knows that I could go on and on about pretty much anything under the sun. I could go on and on about all the stuff in the news cycle that's had to do with Sarah Palin. But I just want to make two quick observations. The first one seeks to be more comical even than it is observational and the second is much more principled.

I've heard a lot of people, especially those with anti-abortion political views tout that Sarah chose to have her son, Trig even though he has Down Syndrome as part of her "pro-life credentials." I think that's a joke. You can't have it both ways. If abortion is as wrong as this camp claims it is, you don't get bonus points for choosing not to abort a fetus. If abortions is murder, then it is not the kind of thing you pat yourself on the shoulder for avoiding. (Personally, I'll agree with the church's stand that it's much more ambiguous than that, especially as a matter of public policy.) To me, simultaneously maintaining that abortion is an absolute evil and praising Sarah Palin for not aborting her son sounds about as ludicrous as this. "I love Barack Obama. He is such a caring and charitable person who loves all people. As a matter of fact, I saw him driving down the road one day in Chicago and he really did something incredible. When a light turned red, he stopped. A tear came to eye as I looked and noticed that he had stopped even though there was a child with cerebral palsy in the crosswalk. What an inspirational man‽ He decided to let this child live even though it had a serious disability." You can't have your cake and eat it, too.

Here's the real point I want to emphasize about Sarah Palin though.  I could hardly care less about Bristol's pregnancy although I do find it comical that suddenly conservatives feel like women have a right to privacy where decisions about carrying a baby to term or aborting the fetus are concerned since that's the central legal question that Roe v. Wade is about and they're suddenly on the opposite side of it. No, the point I want to emphasize is that, if John McCain (heaven forbid) were to win the general election, Sarah Palin would be expected to take the following oath office:

"I, Sarah Palin, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God." (or some variation thereof)

As we consider anyone's candidacy, we should think about the way they will keep their oath. And Sarah Palin has a ridiculously bad black spot on her record where it comes to supporting and defending the Constitution.  As Time magazine reported, then-Wasilla-mayor, sarah Palin asked the librarian how she could go about banning books. Luckily, the librarian's response was that she absolutely would not cooperate with any effort to take books off the shelf. The librarian was later rewarded with a letter saying that she would be fired because Palin did not feel that she had her "full support." The librarian saved her job by publicly demonstrating her support. 

Some of you may, some of you may not know, but I want to be a librarian when I grow up. ... No, seriously. That's what I want to do with the next big chunk of my life, so this hits awful close to home for me. I like this statement from People for the American Way:

“People can disagree about a lot of things, but censorship is completely beyond the pale. Our democracy was founded on the belief that government shouldn’t tell people what kinds of books to read or what kind of beliefs to hold. No one with that kind of history should be anywhere near the White House. Sarah Palin needs to clarify her stance on freedom of speech immediately, and John McCain needs to explain why he chose a running mate with so little regard for the Constitution.”

I could not agree more. No one with that kind of record should be allowed into any elected office. That is precisely the kind of power that the government should never be allowed to have and exactly the reason that the Founding Fathers added the Bill of Rights. Being a librarian ought to be an incredibly apolitical position, and it sickens me to think that any elected official in this country would try to take books off the shelf (especially when the library only has a collection of 52,000 items). 

It should be noted that Sarah Palin claims that the conversation -- which she started at least twice -- was "rhetorical." I don't buy it one bit. Whether she was actually planning on banning books is certainly ambiguous. I don't think there's any way to slice this that makes her look like a good, reasonable person. It seems quite clear that she would have had no problem with books being pulled from the libraries and probably would have sided with the book censors over the library. 

I was already very firmly in the Obama camp, but it's hard for me to imagine an opposition ticket that I could be more adamantly against with the addition of a Veep candidate who has previously spat in the face of something that I hold so dear.

Sarah Palin really does need to explain herself and/or apologize for her previous attacks on the United States Bill of Rights before she can swear again to support and defend it. It's disgusting enough that a governor has this kind of record and has lied through her teeth to make a similar oath to the Constitution.

Freedom

I have been burned out for the last several weeks, and so I am happy to say that today I completed the last 2 of my 7 finals, and now my 2 weeks of sweet freedom can begin.  We went and got some delicious dinner tonight to celebrate, but I wasn't feeling as cheery as I should have because I really thought some of the tests were pretty darn hard, and I was honestly cutting it really close in one of my classes.  I was scared to death that I wasn't going to pass.  Seriously.  I have had this cloud of fear hanging over my head ever since I took those finals.  Thankfully, as of tonight, all the exam scores have posted, and I passed and will be moving onto the next term as planned.  Relief!  So now the celebration can really begin.

What should I do for fun/relaxation/excitement during my break?

Poopy

We are going to be dog sitting this coming weekend.  We went to dinner at our friends' house yesterday evening to meet the dog.  It is such a beautiful dog, so excited to see new visitors, so full of energy.  The whole time we were there, I kept thinking about Onyx, the dog who lives at my parents' house back in Salt Lake.

Somewhere early along the line, she picked up the nickname "poopy" and everyone calls her that. She will answer to Onyx too, but mostly she's just Poopy.  She is a black lab mix, so she's a little smaller than a regular black lab would be, and now that she's getting older, she has grown this white patch on her chin that looks like a little white beard, which is just cute as can be.

Poopy LOVES my dad.  When dad comes home from work or being out, she will throw herself against the window to try and get his attention.  If he is in the room, she will ignore anyone else. I am sure she would just be content to just follow him around all day if she could.

Mom told me that Poopy just learned how to open the back gate.  The other night, mom heard a knocking on the front door, and when she opened it, the dog was there.

One of my sister's friends once pretended to karate chop in Poopy's general direction.  Now she hates that friend, and barks her head off whenever he comes around.  She is actually a very nice dog, just protective.

I wish I had a better photo, but here's one from last December.  I miss my Poopy.