The weather cooled off a bit today.  It was still pretty but just a little cool (yeah yeah all you people in Utah, I know your weather was just fantastic today).  I decided to take advantage of the little cool off since it's supposed to warm right back up in coming days, so I whipped up a pot of "poo stew".  Mmmm, what a yummy dinner- plus easy enough that even I can make it.  It's just beef and vegetable soup.  Poo is actually not one of the ingredients.  (Ha ha Matthew... remember Ross- "dress for less").  Good times.

I love it when the weather starts to warm up.  I have just been thinking about really fun things that I've done when the weather was warm.

-Backpacking- I haven't gotten out to do it in several years actually, but I love it.  I particularly love those Southern Utah hikes, with the gorgeous red rocks.  I have a not so fond memory of that time in the Uintahs when it poured rain and we didn't bring a tent so we just huddled up under a tarp.  Brrrr, it got cold that night.  So maybe that time doesn't count as a warm weather activity anyway.  I really do miss those gorgeous Utah mountains.

-Beach Bumming- Somehow, it was really fun to go to the Great Salt Lake and swim with my cousins when I was a kid.  I went again a couple of years ago and found that it wasn't really that fun because of all the salt, but the beach was still really pretty.  I've also bummed on the Pacific Coast a couple times.  Also, we used to go to Bear Lake every single summer- lots of beach time there.

-Sunbathing- Nope, not the kind where I'm trying to get a tan.  I think that's just a huge load of stupidity (sorry all you gals who are into that).  Skin cancer is very real.  I prize my pale skin, and I like the kind of sunbathing where you load up on sunblock and just enjoy the warmth of those rays for a few minutes.  

-Not wearing a coat.  Yes, this deserves celebration.  I love that day where I get to hang my coat in the closet and not get it out again for several months.

-Vacationing- My parents always made vacations really awesome.  It didn't matter if it was a huge vacation to DC or Boston or something closer to home.  We've enjoyed Mesa Verde, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Disneyland, Moab, and others.  I would like to follow that tradition in my own family when we start having kids.  Even if we can only do a little getaway, just spending that time as a family is awesome.

Life just seems better when it's warm.

  

Where to live

Hi ho apartment hunting.  Saturday is a good day for such activities.

So far I've experienced the following thoughts (this list is by no means comprehensive) 

-Too small.  Way too small.

-That's it for closet space?

-What is that stuck all over the burner on the stove?

-Wow, this guy is a slob.

- This apartment has more closet space than my current apartment has bedroom space.  

-*gasping for air*  This building REEKS

-Um, I don't think so.

-I will break my neck lugging the laundry down those stairs.

-What, I have to lug my laundry to a laundromat?

-Geez, I hope that all of this furniture comes with the apartment.

-Geez, I hope none of this furniture comes with the apartment.

-Holy huge TV!

-No dishwasher.

-No dishwasher.

-No dishwasher.

-No dishwasher.

-I like it but__________

And then finally, we got to our last viewing of the day.  It's not huge but it's big enough.  There's sure a lot more space in the bedroom than we have now, the bathroom is pretty good sized, and it has enough closet space (you'd be surprised how few apartments do).  It has hardwood floors, and was the first apartment we've seen with a DISHWASHER (no, that's not the only reason I like it).  It's in a location that's nearly as ideal as the one we're in right now- it's probably about the same walk to the closest public transportation stop, close to the grocery store, and close to a pizza place we like too (not a requirement, but there's nothing wrong with that).  So we put it on hold (which basically means we called them and asked them not to let anyone else lease it for a couple of days).  We're going to squeeze as many more apartment viewings as we can in the meantime to make sure it's really what we want, but we figure that the good things go fast so we'd better jump on something sooner rather than later.  I'm excited.  Moving is a pain.  It will especially be a pain since we'll be the week before finals (but if we postponed it until the end of summer, we would be moving during finals week, so this is at least better than that).  But even with all that, I think I've said before that I really like going into a place a making it my own.  Plus a change of scene is always nice.

Besides apartment hunting, we're going to see the Phillies play the Cubs tonight.  Woo hoo!  Except who should we cheer for?

Thursday

Nope, I'm not just procrastinating again.  The website where I can access my classes is down and I can't really make much progress without it at the moment, so I thought I'd kill some time here while I wait for it to come back up.

I absolutely love Thursdays right now.  I only have 1 class and it's not until 2 in the afternoon, so I can sleep in as long as I want, lounge around for a while, and just take my sweet time for once.  It's especially nice that I have a good Thursday this term since I absolutely despise Wednesdays, so it's a good way to follow up that oh-so-awful day.  I have hated Wednesdays for sometime now.  This isn't a new development related to the fact that Wednesday is my clinical day, or that my husband is always so busy with homework on Wednesday nights (although those don't help).  I just don't like them because they're just stuck there right in the middle of the week.  The end of the week still seems too far away to get excited about, and there's been enough days since the beginning of the week for me to start feeling like I'm about ready for the end of it to come.  I always wanted to get married on a Wednesday to help me get rid of the whole negative stigma it has in my mind but, due to a complicated set of circumstances which I won't take the time to describe here, it just didn't work out, so I ended up on a Tuesday instead.  I did get married in August though, which I also really wanted to do because there was nothing exciting about the month of August.  This year when August rolls around, I'll have something to celebrate.  My anniversary could've been a Wednesday this year even, but the whole leap year thing screwed that up. The leap year also screwed up my birthday falling on a Friday, which I really enjoy because it's a Friday the 13th- and for those who don't know, I was born on a Friday.  I won't get a Friday birthday again until I'm like 28 or something.

School is going pretty well.  I have to admit that I am really tired and a little overwhelmed.  I know it has to be pretty hard-core from the very beginning with an 11 month program, but it feels kind of crazy when they are like "read 20 chapters this week, next week you have a quiz and a paper due, don't forget that you need to be working on these 2 group projects, learn how to take vital signs and make beds properly and transfer a patient (luckily I've already learned all that stuff), practice doing a health assessment on your family and friends every single day, write a care plan (when you haven't really even learned what a care plan consists of)- oh and today in clinical, I'm just going to give you a patient's chart, let you read it, and then put you in the room with the patient.  Good luck."  I feel very grateful that I have some experience with this stuff, although I am realizing more and more how limited my experience really is.  But at least I have actually heard some of the medical terminology before.  I can't imagine just starting from scratch with that.  And at least I have some pretty good experience in the very basics of patient care.  I am so glad that I have actually interacted with patients before, otherwise I probably would have just died when my clinical instructor just set me loose on a patient.  This is just the beginning too.  Nevertheless, I feel like it's going well.  My sanity is intact thus far.  I still think it's so fun to put on my cute little uniform and get on the subway feeling like I'm all official or something.  2 weeks almost down- I don't dare think of how many more to go.

I should write something exciting on my blog since the last thing I wrote was kinda boring.  Unfortunately I don't have anything exciting to say, so I'm afraid this post will be as boring as the last.  Mostly I'm just procrastinating doing more studying right now.

Apartment shopping is coming along very well.  We have been to see just one so far (it was alright but not fabulous) but we have found a whole bunch that look promising and have set up a load of appointments for this weekend.  I have to admit that the building we are in now is in basically the most convenient location we could imagine.  The subway stop is just right outside.  It will be hard to leave that after being so spoiled for the past months.  But we don't plan to stray very far from the subway when we move, so I'll get over having to walk for 5 minutes to get to it instead of 30 seconds.  I can use the time I saved by having a dishwasher to walk to the subway.

I am learning that I have been way too intolerant of Zack's tidiness level since we have been married.  I have turned into the biggest slob since school started.  Why waste precious energy picking those pants up off the floor?  Who cares if there's dust on the TV stand or if the picture frames are crooked.  Why did I ever care about having the clothes in my drawers organized by color?  It's funny how priorities shift based on the circumstances- but it can definitely be a good thing.  I will be much more sympathetic toward Zack now when he leaves some clothes on the floor or when his desk looks a little cluttered or when he doesn't even notice that the towels in the bathroom are hanging crooked.  He works so hard in so many other ways.  

Well, that's about all the procrastinating I can justify.

Savor the View

It really is a lovely day in Philadelphia today.  Yeah, it's overcast, but still lovely.  I get to go to school right downtown, so I am really in the thick of things.  A couple of my Tuesday classes are basically on the parkway, so when I walk out of class, I get some awesome views.  

I didn't actually take either of these pictures.  The first is a view down the parkway toward the muesum from Love Park (focus particularly on the area under the love sculpture to see what I'm talking about.)  The second is a view of City Hall from the parkway.

The parkway is basically a big, wide road that stretches a mile between City Hall and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (ever seen Rocky?  The museum is the building where he runs up the steps in that oh-so-famous scene).  It is really beautiful.  So I walk from my class building, cut through Love Park, and go down into the subway right across from City Hall.  I was just savoring that short walk today.  There are flowers blooming like crazy.  Some men were cleaning out the fountain at Love Park in preparation to turn it on.  The air around the park smelled like flowers.  Then, once I got back to our apartment, I was enjoying the trees outside, which are covered in beautiful pink blossoms.  It really feels like spring, and I am so excited.

Also, as I was walking and staring at City Hall, I was thinking.  I know that after I moved here, I would see images of Salt Lake and cry because I missed it.  I would see pictures of those places that I had been so many times and  I would imagine familiar places and trace familiar routes in my mind.  I often took those beautiful sights and wonderful experiences for granted.  I don't want to do the same thing here.  I want to savor the views and the experiences.  We won't live here for forever.  We'll most likely be somewhere else a year and a half from now.  When we're living in the next place, I will miss it here, but I will know that I took advantage of living here as much as I could during my time here.  Then I won't regret that I didn't take a minute to take in the view and commit it to memory.  

I hope this blog has been more happy face for you all than the last one.

Repetition, macs, and drinking glasses

I was sitting in class today being slightly annoyed that we were going over a bunch of information that we had already covered in lab earlier this week.  It was slightly more irking because I am already somewhat familiar with a lot of these basic concepts (vital signs, bed making, body mechanics, how to bathe people, etc) since I had been working as a CNA for like 4 years now.  Then it dawned on me- there's absolutely no reason to be annoyed.  Sometime in the very near future, we are going to get to material in that class that I won't be as familiar with or that I won't know at all, and when that time comes, I should be jumping for joy if we go over the material more than once since it will give me an extra chance to get to know it better.  Also, I should quit being a stuck up snob and admit that there is always something new to learn, even about this stuff I already feel like I know.  So now I am happy that we covered the material twice.  I am sure I will be hearing about it again too.  Bring it on.  Let's do that with all the topics.

I also have to say that people should quit forgetting about us Mac users.  I have run into problem after problem this week with compatibility issues and so forth since the PC users of the world seem to forget that we exist.  I think it's voluntary forgetfulness because they have Mac envy.

Isn't it funny how fast glasses break? (I mean the kind you drink out of).  When we got married, Zack and I found these glasses at Target that we just loved.  We really wanted them.  So we got some for our wedding (thank you, whoever that was), but for most of our gifts, we just returned them to a Target in Utah, took the store credit, and bought the exact same thing once we got here so we could avoid the cost of shipping all the stuff.  The glasses were no exception.  Problem was, once we got here, we could not find those glasses.  Well that's not quite true.  We found one box.  But we really wanted 2.  We looked at a couple of different stores.  We even checked more than once, thinking that they maybe were just out of stock the first time we looked... no luck.  It was all the more annoying because we had already bought the first box, so we would have to buy a box of glasses that didn't match the first box rather than just settling for 2 boxes of completely different glasses.  We told Zack's mom about it and she kept an eye out for them at various Utah Target locations.  She had no luck either.  This went on for several days, then weeks, and then a month when suddenly we caught a break.  Zack's mom had found a box of them at a Utah store, and she had mailed them to us.  In addition, they all arrived in one piece.  We were sitting pretty. (As a side note, when we went to Target a few weeks later, we found some of the glasses too.  They were in a different box than the first batch, but it was definitely the same thing.  Too bad they didn't have those in stock earlier.)  A few weeks ago, one of them broke.  It was so sad.  They are cute and after all that effort to get them, it broke.  Another glass got a big crack when I was putting the dishes away. And then, when Zack put a piece of ice in his drink, another of the glasses spontaneously cracked.  We are still using that one, but the crack seems to be growing longer and longer as time goes by and it's only a matter of time until it is unusable.  We have been married almost 8 months now.  2 glasses down.  So let's say we break a glass once every 4 months for our entire married life (probably more once we have kids).  That's 150 glasses by the time we hit our 50th wedding anniversary!  So I have decided not to get attached to any more glasses.  I'll enjoy these ones until the last crack though.

Today's hodgepodge of thoughts

It has been a cloudy, drizzly sort of day here in Philly today, but just a few moments ago, the sun came out.  It is 70 degrees so it has really turned into a gorgeous day.  I know I'm speaking too soon, but yay for spring.  I am so ready for it.  

I went to a full day of classes today and I am just taking a few minutes to relax before hitting the books.  I knew they were serious about this program being hard core, but I really realized that all the more yesterday when I came home from my first day of classes with 15 chapters of textbook reading for a single class for this week. (Nope folks, it's not an April fools joke). Add that to the stuff from the other 3 classes I have now attended at the 2 I have not been to yet, and this could get ugly really fast.  And they brag about how this is the easy term with the light workload.  What have I gotten myself into?

Seriously though, I am still so thrilled.  I dug into several of those 15 chapters last night and it's interesting stuff.  I never once thought "when will I ever use this stuff?"  Today I had my first lab, which means I got to put on my cute little nursing student uniform (not actually that cute considering that the top is a putrid shade of "gold"- aka yellow- but I do get to wear a lab coat, which is fun) and pretend to be a nurse with a few other totally clueless students traipsing around in gold tops.  It was sorta awkward but actually pretty fun.  I guess I shouldn't speak about it being awkward yet.  In a couple of weeks, we get to wear those gown things they make you wear when you get a physical or whatever, and do even more thorough exams of each other.  Today we were just examining hair and fingernails and such.  I guess it's time to lose my personal space bubble, and also my inhibitions about invading that of other people.  I really thought it was fun, despite my complaints about awkwardness, and ugly tops.  

Tomorrow, I get to do my first clinical, which is actually going to just be a lab this week, but will be in a care center (I think) next week. 

Wow, this blog post is dry.  Not that any of them are really exciting, but this one feels particularly like a grocery list of what I have done.  

Speaking of lists, I actually want to make one.  I love lists.  So I think that I am just gonna list a few things I am happy about/grateful for.  

-MY HUSBAND!  Wow, he is the sweetest thing.  He got up at early AM with me yesterday and went and got me some breakfast for my first day of classes.  He came home from work early last night so he could hear all about it and make me dinner.  I don't know what I would do without him.

-The weather right now.  I know I already waxed on about that so I'll just leave it there.  

-Dishwashers, bathtubs, and ample closet space- all things that my next apartment will have (hopefully).

-Raspberries.  The ones at the grocery store looked so good that we just had to buy them.

-Philly.  I love living here.  This city had changed my perspective so much.  I have met some of the nicest people since I have been here.  Sure, it has its problems, but there's just a lot of good too.

-My wedding ring.  I like to stare at the diamonds.  

-That I have the support system that I need to make it through this nursing program. (Thank you parents and Zack)

-My siblings- thanks for calling me yesterday BJ, for chatting it up with me on Facebook Michelle, and for talking to me on Sunday Matthew.

-History- it will always be a love affair.  

-Cheryl.  Gosh I need to call that woman.

-Fried foods.  Yummy!

-Fruit snacks. Yummier!

So there you have it.  Not at all comprehensive or anything- just a few things that came to mind.  It just seems like a good day to be happy and grateful.