wrapping it up

Christmas is around the corner, and after a couple of years out of academia, that means Christmas break again for me. I have one more exam on Thursday until I'm free for a couple of weeks. I'm quite excited for a break, and I've mostly run out of energy for studying. It's been a busy, but good semester. I took Health Assessment and Pharmacology. Pharmacology at Trinity wasn't anything to write home about, so I've really enjoyed this class this semester. Health Assessment was also very interesting. I now know how to do a full, very detailed head-to-toe assessment. Unfortunately, I don't know what to do with most of the information I gather from the assessment :) I have common problems next semester, so after that I should be feeling a bit better about actually seeing real patients!

I feel like this holiday season is flying by. Maybe it's because school was so busy; maybe it's because Thanksgiving was so late. I have so much to be thankful for, and I haven't done a very good job of actually sitting down and dwelling on that statement. We have a warm house; we have plenty of food to eat; we have a Christmas tree with presents under it for each other as well as for other family and friends. The bathroom remodel is almost complete, and subsequently, the dusty atmosphere we currently call home will clear up for good soon. I have a great job that gives me a good amount of flexibility, and both of us have passed all of our grad school classes so far!

I could go on and on, but I do need to study for my exam...last one before I can bake up a storm :)

learning

This summer has been one of immense learning. We've learned about our house (immense rain + downward sloping driveway + clogged drain = flooded garage); we've learned about animals (groundhogs can run back into their burrow faster than you can get the gun loaded); and we've learned about gardening (3 zucchini plants produce far more zucchinis than 2 people can eat). Gardening has been my favorite. Our neighbors love the fact that we have more garden produce than caloric need and freezer space, and judging by the nibbles in my tomatoes, the neighborhood creatures are thankful for our garden too.

I feel like I've learned so much related to gardening and plants this summer, and I'm looking forward to another garden next summer. Our dirt will be better, and we won't plant a bunch of pumpkins. But now that the produce is rolling in, I'm enjoying learning how to do stuff with it. I'm freezing some things, but I'm pretty much out of freezer space now, so I've entered the world of canning. Batch #1 of salsa was a success. Aside from Tim's comment of "Huh, for the amount of time you spent on that, I thought there'd be a lot more salsa," it was a pleasant experience. I love being in the kitchen, and spending a couple of hours blanching, chopping, and stirring was therapeutic. Stay tuned for more afternoon projects that are more interesting than watching on-line lectures.

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distractions

Tim says we're officially no longer in the honeymoon phase...pssh :) It's odd, because part of can't believe it's already been 2 years, and the other part of me says, "Really, only 2 years?" so I guess it's all good!

Writing my research paper has been on my to-do list for quite a long time. I finally read through all of the supportive research, and decided that I should start writing before the 3 days before it was due, and then I got distracted. Granted, my distractions were quite productive (as they usually are), but my paper was due today, and I started writing on Tuesday. It got done - I suppose that's the big plus side.

 Last week when I kept telling myself I should work on it, though, I took a little trip up to Wisconsin and picked 55 lbs of strawberries. They were perfect - just as good as Gettings, and much cheaper. Then I picked the cherries off our trees. I worked the 2 days they were just finishing up their ripening and we got 1.5" of rain, so most of them burst and molded, but we got enough for a pie, some scones, and few more in the freezer to add to smoothies.

Side note on cherries: the internet will tell you that a paper-clip is the answer to all your pitting problems and you won't have to spend a dime. I tried. I tried hard. I kept trying, and I made a huge mess and mutilated hundreds of cherries. Maybe I'm just more uncoordinated than most, but after picking the 2nd round of cherries, I went to Target, spent 100 dimes, and happily finished pitting cherries.

I hope everyone's anniversaries and birthdays are enjoyable and being happily celebrated!

                                                   best purchase of the week - hands down

                                                                   2 years! Yikes!

progress

     Remodeling inside the house has been virtually non-existent aside from a much needed new front door. Outdoors, however, we've been relatively busy. Tim & his dad tiled the backyard in mid-May, and then we tilled up the garden area. Tilling was an interesting experience. We unearthed more garden hose, hundreds of feet of Christmas lights, trellis pieces, a creature skull, dozens of very large rocks, cinder-block pieces, and lots and lots of edging. Despite my convictions that what we were tilling was not truly dirt and that nothing could ever possibly grow in it, our garden is flourishing. I give credit to the generous amounts of plant food we put in the bottom of each hole we dug.

     We kind of forgot about our ground-hog until we realized that between Saturday evening and Sunday morning, all of the leaves disappeared off of the muskmelon and cucumber plants. There was a nice burrow under the fence, so I'm blaming the ground-hog. Unfortunately, there seems to be a conspiracy against all suburbanites wishing to kill critters by keeping all farm-grade pesticides out in farm land. We've got the Root Beer...now we just need the fly bait. 

     Tim's back in school now too, so when we're not keeping ourselves sane outside, we're studying. I've never had school in the summer before, and I must say, it's pretty awful. If I had to imagine what ADD was like, I'd say it's like this - it's ridiculously difficult to focus when I really just want to be outside! 

     Hope you're all doing well!

                                                               one of my little flower pots                                                          

  one of our cherry trees - we'll get some, but not too many - there's a lot of little black pits just hanging there

our garden!

nerves

It's been hard to study or do anything inside lately as the warmth and sunshine in Chicago has increased. We're almost done getting rid of our giant pile of junk in the yard, and Tim built me a composter! We bought our first lawn-mower (one of Tim's friends from dental school actually asked if he could come over and mow our lawn for us b/c he wanted to do something outside...), and pruned the fruit trees. I'm also excited because my tulips do have flowers, and they just started blooming this week! 

So why on earth would I leave the sunshiny warmth of Chicago for snow, clouds, and cold? 1) I love my family. 2) Derek, John, & I are doing the Siouxperman triathlon on Saturday. I was feeling pretty good about this a few weeks ago considering spring was in the air, and I was expecting sunshine and weather no colder than 55 deg. Well, IA pulled a fast one on me. The forecast is now for rain, wind, a high of 38 - feeling like 30 with the wind. I'm just trying not to think about it - it makes me nervous. 

I'm not sure what we've gotten ourselves into, but it should be interesting. At any rate, Tim is having fun reminding me that it's still sun-shiny in Chicago.

spring

While my parents received a little surprise ice/snow storm last week, spring has been steadily making its presence known here in Lombard. I have tulips popping up all over the front yard (although knowing how much little care Jose gave the rest of the place, who knows how much attention the tulips received...we'll see if they bloom). The birds sing every morning, and we've been getting our fair share of April showers. Derek came to visit for the weekend, and yesterday (Sunday), we had one of the most beautiful days yet this year. We went for a nice bike ride and explored the arboretum just a few miles from our house. Unfortunately, people here don't like to see bicycles on the road. Nobody ever honked at us in Indy.

Upcoming projects for us are:

• winding down the school year (aka: it's getting nice outside, our goals are now to simply pass our classes)
• remodel the main bathroom (probably after Tim finishes this quarter)
• replace the front & kitchen door (this has always been part of the plan, but it may have moved up the list a bit after Derek came and said, "It all looks so nice...then there's the doors...")
• clean up the landscaping attempt of a 70 or 80-year-old-something man who did nothing up to code and everything as cheaply as possible (I would like to add that we also do everything as cheaply as possible, and Tim's ADHD brain has a special little area devoted to "How little can I spend on this project," but when $ needs to be spent to do a job correctly, we do it)
• plant a garden. Unfortunately, before we can do that, we need to remove the 5+ year accumulation of grass clippings, branches, and trash that we inherited. We also need to tile the backyard since the whole yard slopes down from the road to a small creek at the back of the property and any amount of rain turns the whole thing into a muddy mess. 
• find a way to keep the raccoons, skunks, opossums, and ground hogs out of our yard
• fill nail holes on trim. I need to just suck it up and do this sometime. Maybe today's the day.