Anything you want to tell me feel free!!

Anything you want to tell me feel free!!

I have been cleaning and organizing our house for weeks now. Kevin moved into this town house about a year ago and I moved in not long after. We have spent most of the year without even really unpacking.

Finally this summer, with a lot of help from Ali I got started on cleaning and organizing the bedroom and then a good start on the living/dining room. After that great start, there ended up being a stack of boxes with semi organized contents stacked in the dining room, the hallway and the office. And the office had yet to be touched.

I managed to ignore this for a while and our world continued to be incomplete. Finally, in my recent urge to try and take control of my world attacked the house. I started this week by organizing the closet in the office and continued by organizing the contents of all the boxes, and creating a livable space. I ordered some really cool filing cabinets as well as a great drafting table.

We haven't gotten the filing part down yet, but i have created a work space for myself as well as a house that doesn't look like we just moved in and isn't full of boxes. Kevin was a huge help last night in the final throws of cleaning. I have a really great sense of completion. ;)

Its amazing... I almost don't believe this is the house I live in!

Woo hoo... I made the house clean, organized and a happy place to live! Now lets look for a new house!!

PS: oh yeah... and I served my first dinner in my nice clean house tonight. Here is the menu, drool away:

Baking is not my strong suit!

I'm making some happy snicker doodles to cheer up some friends. The problem with baking is that you actually have to read the directions exactly. With cooking the recipe is kind of like a guideline, I can make some changes and make the food in my fashion.

With baking I have to do it just right. I guess I'm too distractible today.

First I started out making the snicker doodles but accidently started using the recipe next to it for ginger snaps.

-scrap that and start over-

Then I start the snicker doodles and read the measurements wrong, ended up doubling some of the ingredients by accident. oops... gotta double it all now.

Snicker doodles galore!!

Anything you want to tell me feel free!!

I'm having a good day!!

Given, it took me a little longer than anticipated to package up and send out the photograph proofs from the recent event I photographed. But they are sent out and it looks great.

Our Amazon order came!! Woo Hoo we now have new Invader Zim, Buffy Season 6, and the new Jasper Fforde book. This makes me awfully happy!!

Talked to Rex again, he was finally released from the hospital yesterday and is doing well. Got a couple casts to deal with before full rehab starts, but he is doing well. AND he is not in a evacuation area of Florida, he'll get a good storm, but nothing horrible. We are making plans for my visit out there in a couple weeks. I haven't seen him in so long... I'm looking forward to see him again, and bossing him around cause he can't get up and do anything about it! ;)

And to top the whole day off I have a date with Kevin tonight!! I'm so very excited... I'm really looking forward to a relaxing evening with someone I love!!! *sighs of happiness*

Have I mentioned 13 is my lucky number? *big Friday the 13th grin*

This is Oscar. He is my little sister's boyfriends new puppy. I felt the need to share the cute!!

Edit And a little more cute!

Anything you want to tell me feel free!!

Motiviated by both a really cool upcoming trip (its been in the works for a while now, things are recently becoming more solid - I'll share details very soon) and an overwhelming need to take control of the portions of my health that I can, I have started to build a routine that will get me in shape.

The piece of the workout is Kevin and I's weekly bike ride. We have been doing it (usually Thursday Mornings) for a little while now, but we have begun increasing the length. Yesterday our bike-ride took us 9.63 miles around the Mountain View/East Palo Alto Baylands reserve. My original guesstimate had been longer for this trail, but thats okay, we have a few additional loops we can add onto our current one to make it longer.

I'm loving it, I usually want to turn back during the first 15 minutes as my muscles remember why I do it, and then it becomes a blast. It took us about 1 hour 20 minutes, though 15 minutes was spent at our halfway stop photographing an egret. Our top speed was 16 mph (short racing bursts), gotta love Kevin's GPS.

Oh, and to add in a little bit of the "we are way too cute of a couple and we should make you all sick" feeling to the post, check out the heart shaped route we took:

To top it all off I joined a Health Club yesterday. I took my first yoga class today and next week I plan to take a kickboxing class and play racquetball with Kevin. With the help of Ali I'll soon be adding a weight work out plan to the mix. I'm excited... I just hope I can keep it up and really get in shape by October. Woo hoo... *does a little dance*

Oh yeah, and there is the great exercise of dancing every week too.

*and geeky kudos to anyone who actually remembers where the post title came from* ;)

Anyone who was having issues with my RSS feed, I have updated the code so everyone should be able to use it now.

Anyone on Live Journal you can use phxfeather to keep up on my blogs too.

Enjoy!!

No, he's not really my brother, but he might as well be. He has been my best friend and big brother for about eight years now. I made mention of his accident at the end of my last post, but now I have finally talked to him and have details so I'm catching you up.

About a week ago while Rex was driving in a 45 mph zone, some one going the other direction swerved and hit him head on at 90 mph. There is speculation it was a drunk driver, but I really don't know much about this end of things yet.

The injury list has been given to me at a few different levels, and truthfully I'm a bit dazed and don't really remember it all. I know he broke both legs in several places (one I know was turned all the way sideways at one point) as well as his femur (I think thats his foot/ankle) and his right knee. There are other scrapes and things but no internal damage and for that I'm ever so thankful.

In the past week he has undergone 3 separate surgeries with a day recovery between each one. Through all of this he is still in good spirits and even though he is in a lot of pain he is being stronger and better about this than I think I could ever hope to be.

I find myself being mad at the world. Besides Rex's accident and my stomach problem (which is ever so minimal in comparison to everything else), we have had the death's of Kevin's father and grandmother in the last year, my sister has been having problems with her uterus, Kevin's cousin Steve's wife Susan had complications with her pregnancy (luckily everything turned out fine), my friend Ryan has two friends who recently lost babies though.

My friend DanaMarie's mother had some pre-cancerous growths removed from her colon and while that went well she seems to now have an infection in her diaphragm, in addition her cousin Tara has been diagnosed with cancer in her uterus. And to top it all off this weekend one of our friends Mark had a rare accident where the spark plug popped out of his car and set it on fire; even rarer was the fact that it didn't explode, he was fine. However Krissy's boyfriend Noah was not as lucky as the other day a car cut him off on his motorcycle and he was forced into the the center concrete barrier. Like Rex he is also currently in the hospital. He had surgery on his ankle and is in a lot of pain but should be going home and starting rehab possibly tomorrow.

All of this stuff has happened in the last year. About 95% of it happened in the last two or three months. Its driving me nuts, I'm pissed at the world, I'm worried about all of my friends and family, I've even been a little scared while driving.

Everyone in the world is too negative lately, there is too much bad energy floating around. I'm scared and worried, but I'm working on turning it around. I need to think good thoughts and send good energy everywhere I can. Please, if you find yourself being upset or reckless or stressed, take a moment and think about someone you love, some moment of happiness, something good and send a little good energy into the world. I know its all cheesy and stuff, but I can't take any more of these things happening, and no one else should have to either. Also send Rex and the rest of the people I've talked about here and everyone you know some good thoughts. They will all appreciate it.

I'm ending this post now, and knowing that a lot of my past posts have been sad, depressed or dismal in some way I am now making a conscious effort for my posts for the next few weeks to be upbeat and fun. Stay tuned...

Anything you want to tell me feel free!!

I'm about sick and tired of hospitals!

Kevin and I went to Vegas to visit my Mom and Dad this weekend. It was their first vacation in about 13 years and the first real one where they weren't dragging kids in tow and having to entertain them too. It was nice to be able to visit with them, also have entertainment around us, and also have the ability for them to be alone and for us to do a couple things on our own too. Overall it was just good to see them again since I hadn't seen them since Christmas.

I could have done without the trip to health center clinic though (very much like an emergency room). We got there Sunday afternoon, and by sunday evening I had a cramps in my upper abdomen, just below my ribcage, just left of the center of my torso. I ignored it, it was a dull pain and it would go away. But it didn't go away, and by 2pm the next day it was getting worse. A stronger constant pain which became sharp pains whenever I took a deep breath. I tried laying down for a while, laying on my back made the pain go almost completely away. I rolled onto my front so I could maybe sleep and found myself in horrible horrible pain.

At this point Kevin called his cousin Steve who is a doctor. I really hope he doesn't mind us bugging him. Its nice to know there is someone to talk to and get advice about whether something needs to be checked out right away or if it can wait.

Steve asked me lots of questions and in the end decided he that without examining me he couldn't figure out anything further. He didn't think it was a super emergency, but he didn't think it was nothing and wanted me checked out by someone. So we tried to find the hotel doctor, or which the Paris hotel did not have. However just behind the next-door hotel was a 24 hour health clinic. Kind of that step in between the hotel doctor and going to the ER. I was hoping that it might not take as long as a ER would, but either way it would have to do.

Sadly we were there for about three hours, 4pm till 7pm. They poked and prodded me eventually finding the spot that brought me to involuntary tears when she poked. She was pretty sure it was my stomach but mixed up this cocktail I had to drink, which would numb my stomach and she would be able to be sure that was the area of the problem. That cocktail was weird, my tongue got numb, my tonsils got numb, my throat, down the pipes and to my stomach which go very numb. When she came to poke me again it didn't hurt anymore.

My stomach already has digestion problems that we are trying to figure out, but it now has more. I have a new medicine that is supposed to help make the acids my stomach needs to break things down. That might help. There could be something wrong in the lining of my stomach. We aren't sure, Steve was happy with the immediate progress but I need to follow up with my home doctor now to figure out the rest of the specifics.

For the rest of the day my tummy was still numb. I would take a deep breath and brace for the pain and there would be none. I was a void of pain where I knew it should be and that was weird. The next day there wasn't as much numb as just the fact that I could feel that my stomach wasn't completely happy, but also not in pain. Hopefully things will get better, but it all at least allowed me to relax and have a bit more fun with my family and Kevin.

I'm back now, and I'm only holding off making my doctors appointment to find out when I might be going to florida. You see, like I said at the beginning I'm tired of hospitals and the need for them. When I arrived home last night at about 11pm, there as a voicemail from DanaMarie telling me that Rex, one of my dearest best friends, was in the hospital. He had been in a car accident, broke both his legs and his ankle and apparently there is a longer list of injuries. He has been in surgery once and is going in again soon.

I have his phone number for his hospital room, but its been busy. So I'm writing all this down. I'm anxious to find out what happened. I really want to go be with him. I know I've barely been home for the last two months and that I have lots to do here, but most of it can all wait. My friend is in the hospital, and if he wants me, I feel a strong desire to be there, at least for a day or two.

*sighs* I'm tired of hospitals.