all shiny and new!

The Garage picture I promised! Isn’t it gorgeous! Amazing, how getting that one house issue out of the way changed my whole perception of our house and the neighborhood… I feel like I got an extreme make-over!

Actually, there have been a lot of changes around here lately… I went from 6 days a week at work back down to 4 and already feel a renewed sense of calm and anti-craziness settling on me. I keep taking deep breaths and realizing that my stress level is not as high as I expect it to be…

Christmas and New Years were wonderful this year! We did not make it back to New England again (boohoo), but we had a wonderful time making the most of what we did have! We went up to MI to visit the Dyer clan again, and had a wonderful time monging and unwrapping. Ashley went to the climbing gym with us for the first time and showed the big kids how it's done. It was a most wonderful trip. Leeloo discovered how to open presents! On New Year's we went out to see the movie MILK, you know, a date... at the theatre. Great movie, a must see.

We had to replace the transmission in Annie, our 2003 Corolla. The repair had to wait because of the costs of the garage. Grr. And after doing that, the battery died. Not that we are complaining about that, it did last 80,000 miles and was original to the car. So, while we waited for it to be installed, we drove a couple of the other cars that were on the lot around… and found this nice little 2001 corolla with only 60,000 miles on it….

And Curt’s car needed a lot of wear and tear replacement parts (tires, struts, brakes…)…

So we traded it in and got a new-to-us car! A new car! She is so pretty! We’ve named her Carina. She is pretty basic- no cruise control, we have to roll our windows and manually lock the doors. But she is in excellent shape and will be a more practical car than the rapidly aging Saturn. It has been raining like none other here, so the picture is a little dank, despite our spirits!

For Christmas this year, Curt and I got tickets to Wicked in Louisville. We headed out there today and it was awesome! We haven’t been to a show since we moved to Kentucky… we really needed this date. When we got back we reconnected with our friend Erin, who’s been traveling a lot lately like me. We had sushi. SUSHI. YUMMY SUSHI….

I think I am in heaven now. Pardon me while I ooze.

a long time gone

oops, so i haven't posted in a while...
so much has happened. in no particular order here are some of the high-lights :)


we got rid of the rotten, foundationless, structurally unsound thing mascarading as our garage, and replaced it with a lovely new, structurally sound, foundation clad garage of joy. it makes me soooo happy. never mind the fact that we went for a loan to cover everything, and then the market crashed and we only got half of what we asked for. we'd already started building so we finished the project. We did have to remove a tree in the process because the center was rotten and the loss of the roots was too much for it. As the directions it could fall involved taking out power to the neighborhood, takingout power to the house, falling on the new garage, or taking out the house... we decided to safely take it down before any of these things happened...
and i just realized we don't have a finished garage pic yet... will get that up soon (and you all know what soon means when I say it...)




CARRIE! finally got to see carrie and meet the clyde man. he is a ham and Leeloo loved the company. We also got to meet Carrie's boyfriend adam and hang out in Pennsylvania. Sooo nice to have friends in far away places... even if it is a really loooong drive for sushi and indian food... and leeloo wonders if this sharing thing is all it is cracked up to be...

MOMMY! mom came to visit on her way out to her fabulous new condo in sunny arizona! she moved around her whole life to line up with my one day off (read here work has been up to 6 days a week here and when it wasn't i was in jury duty) because SHE LOOOOOOVES ME! and for once nothing in our house broke while she was here... 'course, that means that the transmission in her van needed replacing before the next leg of her journey and her stay got extended (whopee for me! sad for car and wallet, boo) but we did have a fabulous day at the toyota plant (a little piece of walt disney world in rural kentucky... like the peter pan ride, only the cars are flying and you drive around in a little trolley). mom and dave got to see a little more when they weren't fretting about the van (so proud of them, i am a natural fretter, which is better than being a natural fritter...mmmm, fritters).

DADDY! dad and candy came down for a visit and see the new house. And what fun! we toured around all the must-sees: the red-river, the chocolate factory down the street from us, getting lost on the streets of lexington.





Thanksgiving! went to see the dyer clan in michigan and eat til bursting such wonderful things as gluten free cornbread stuffing and turkey and all kinds of yummy beverages... the kids all played kennel and fort. we went rock-climbing at the old gym and stuffed ourselves silly at zimmerman's roadhouse. lots of time to relax and rub the belly:)

whirl of a week

what an awesome week we've had!

it all started with drinking liberally 2 weeks ago... had some of the greatest conversations there to date and met lots of cool people. but especially one of them...we found a new friend at drinking liberally and she is fabulous! she has wine nights and likes to do out-doorsy things and is spiritually in touch with herself and smart and has no filters to what comes out of her mouth... PERFECT! and her schedule is about as crazy as curt and mine are, so no worries there! and she's also fairly new in town, so we can go check out town together...

so we went to wine night and met her fabulous friends

and then we bbqed on our new back patio and got to know each other... and curt got really drunk... it was hilarious! tra la la

i had such a good weekend... even though i worked both days... i got to see my old friends up at florence and curt cleaned the whole house (except for the bathrooms which i had already tackled) and i have been social and life is FABOO. i have the greatest husband ever... EVER EVER EVER!

curt and i have joined the uk fall into fitness challenge which means that we are trying to do some exercise-like activity 4 days a week. so far so good. we're starting to do yoga again at home, and yesterday evening at the gym 2 poeple doing a piece on the climbing wall for the school newspaper asked curt and i to have our pictures taken while climbing... we're posterchildren for the climbing wall, who knew?! i'll see if i can get a copy of the pics to post. so we both are starting to feel better physically, too.

now if only i could get my work-life to be as good as my social and home life... because i have transferred hospitals i have lost my e-mail account, lost my 401K and health/insurance, and even my electronic abilityto punch into work. so much fun! there have also been problems with my state licensures that i have to work out on my time off... ah well. life can't be all fun!

curt is enjoying work as well, he is trying to get into good study habits, is leading some meds students, is still working on traumatic brain injury, and is looking for a clinical study to help out with for the year.

hope all of you are enjoying yourselves there in the real world... or at least having as much fun as us.

laboring very hard at having fun!

oh, so much to report! our anniversary was wonderful, curt bought me flowers (daisies) and we had a lovely dinner at home after i got home from work. nice, quiet, relaxing evening which is what the drs ordered.

for curt's birthday we went to visit carrie at her new digs. AWESOME weekend! leeloo got to meet her cuzzin clyde. they got along wonderfully, and it is a good thing they are both adopted because by the end of the weekend clyde was humping leeloo like there was no tomorrow! they played and played and PLAAAAYYYED and played... leeloo had the time of her life! so did clyde. and it was ever so nice to see carrie again! she lives too far away.

so i started my new job traveling and doing relief work, and so far so good.

this last weekend curt and i both had 3 days off for laborday, so we packed up and headed out to big south fork at the ky/tenn boarder. did 6 and a hlaf miles in that day with leeloo sporting her backpack happily along. walked through lots and lots of poison ivy... camped by a lovely stream, and got up the next morning to continue on. we put our old socks on as we had a lot of wet stream crossings ahead, and started off on a 17mile day! saw an owl, some black beavers, and a rattlesnake. cooled off halfway with a dip in the big south fork itself where, much to our suprise (and most likely hers as well), leeloo went swimming! with a current and everything! so was all had a grand splash before hiking out of the gorge and onto the plateau. got some lovely views and set up camp near a scenic overlook on the john muir trail. that's when we sat down and looked at our legs. we were covered in ticks! hundreds of 'em! so, we started scraping them off as we let our poor wet feet dry off. when we took off our socks, we noticed that we both had a bad rash on our ankles and calves... you guessed it! poison ivy! seems the river helped to spread those oils around! and we had continued the deed while removing those pesky ticks...

the next morning we were off again, with thick morning fog that turned into a humid day like the one before. after a lovely shower we headed home with our dirty dog...

and stopped at a most cursed mcdonalds on the way home! they messed up our order (we ordered twice before the manager came over), the manager had to fix it, the salad only had about 10 pieces of lettuce in it, then the large sweet tea lost it's lid and splattered all over my lap in the car... filling the cup-holders and soaking the seat and my clothes (and the frenchfries). so my salad tasted like sweet tea...

but all in all, it was a fabulous weekend! and we had thai food for dinner when we got home. YUM!

headcramp

the dreaded migraines have returned...

i still don't have my schedule for august yet. the reason for this... corporate american veterinary medicine does not have the job locally that they promised me. they have some part-time work, and some travelling to ohio, indiana, and louisville, etc as needed to fill a full-time position. kvatch.

so, i can continue to work with them, not gain a clientelle and not work on developing my infrastructure here; i can burn this bridge by looking for another job; or i can actually take up that underwater basketweaving profession i have so actively dreamed of for so long.

i have applied for my indiana and ohio licenses.

in other news, our garage is still standing. things have been a littleon hold as we hold our heads and try to make the spinning stop.

curt and i saw a great drag show here in town last week... it was so much fun to have a night out!
and curt loves his residency. he was on call this weekend and things seem to have gone very well.

and this week is the boone county fair... the one year anniversary to my first introduction to being a southerner! add in curt's birthday and our anniversary, and visiting carrie in pa, and there is a lot of sunshine ahead to look forward to!

i'm baaaaaaack!

so, i tried to blog... honest... but blogger wouldn't let me in. now it will. whatever. so be it.

so, anyway, what's happened?

both of my parents came to visit (at different times) and we had a blast... several trips to the red, hit the chocolate museum, miguel's pizza, the horse park, got lost ALL over lexington... bbq, lots of hugs, all sorts of important stuff like that. so much more to do here when it's warm out!

CURT SURVIVED INTERN YEAR! his last month was the worst because he was on blue trauma surgery. so he would work a 30hr+ shift once every 3 days. he had no sleep scedule. and every time he was home and awake (rare), he would see helicopters headed to the hospital and cringe because he knew he'd be taking care of whoever was in the copter soon. ahh, the drama of a level one trauma center. now he sees them and comments on how he is NOT at the hospital. he is going through the post-traumatic sleep-deprived stress syndrome that i went through in vet school. it is nice to see him emerge on the other side. i missed him.

that said, we had a lovely weekend together! we were supposed to go camping, but it was too rainy (measure of this is if we are willing to have leeloo sleeping in the bag wth us after the mud and rain of the day. answer this time: HECK, NO!) so, we stayed home and bummed around, hit the 4th of july in town (we haven't been out in public for a while)- it seems so much less organized than in small town north andover... went out for italian... YES! gluten-free italian! HEEHEEHEEHAW*snort* giggle giggle.... wasn't bad. wasn't great either, but the idea of pasta in a restaurant was too much and i had to. celiacs is friggin' well known now.

went climbing on saturday (the old fall-back). went with our good buddy jay to climb some of the classic routes at the red. we only climb them about once a year because they are pumpy and difficult, and i used to have no problem with them but now they make me sore... i used to be in such good shape.

then, oooohhh, then! curt and i went on a DATE! a real, bonified, dressed up, go out and do something date! we went to see the local bellydancers at their annual show. some of it was actually bellydancing! my schedule hasn't let me check out the belly scene here, but the only classes they offer are in tribal... so i have been a little dubious. for good reason. but i am not really willing yet to drive to cincinn for a troupe, so i suppose i should engage more here. and, like i said, some of it was actually bellydancing! and some of it i wasn't nearly drugged or drunk enough to understand.

so, all in all, it has been good here. there have been some stressful and sad things, the "tragic death" at work, work in general, losing the air conditioning in the company car i drive... that sort of thing... but everything is on the up and up. little dirty birds have finally given me some timeframe for work... and then my gas bill will go waaaaaaaay waaaaaaaay waaaaaaay down. like, a couple extra hundred a month! i'm looking forward to setting up a social network here, which should happen once i work within a half-hour of where i live and have time in the evenings:) more on that when it actually happens...

mwah!

the grand canyon was... GRAND

it is so hard to wrap my finger and my thoughts around this trip... but here's a go.

i went to the grand canyon in high school on a girl scout trip. we had wanted to do a camping trip below the rim. so we started planning, but we weren't allowed to take a troup of 3 girls. so after doubling the size ofour troup, the backpacking was out as none of them knew how. so the trip was very touristy and not what i had wanted.

THIS was my dream grand canyon trip. something i was not prepared for a decade or so ago...

mom picked us up at the airport with the exciting news of a new condo! we spent a wonderful night at the rim and she dropped us off at the trailhead. first warning you are in for an adventure... when the description of the trail is "the new trail a crazy old miner made when the old native american trails washed out." second clue... when the directions to find the trailhead are: go a mile past the outlook and look for a no parking sign. this trail (the new hance trail down red canyon) was amazing. curt and i got lost twice and it was like grand canyon desert meets rockslides in the white mountains... the drop-offs were incredible! we made it down to the colorado in about 6 hours and set up camp on a dune (i know, i cringed too, but there is one dune set aside for camping and the others are ecologically sound).

the real issue with the grand canyon is that it is one mile deep and 10 miles across. this means that the perspective you get from the top, the middle, and the bottom are all completely different. and to make it more interesting, each individual tributary further amplifies the canyon with their own lead-ins. so... if you start down from one of the tributaries and end up at the colorado, you cannot see the actual top from where you came down. it is too far back. it is a maddening trick of perception similar to, but more intense than the false summits experienced when climbing mountains.

the next day we went up to a plateau about 1000ft above the colorado to a trail called the tonto trail and headed west to hance creek. it was freezing above the rim, but it got into the high 90's every day down at this elevation. so spring was in full swing. all the plants were flowering... yucca, cacti, desert rose... EVERYTHING! desert flowers are such a contradiction in terms that it is constantly startling and brilliant. finding the creeks running is an added benefit... and you know you're getting close when you see green cottonwoods. color perception is weird in the canyon. the first day we looked at so much red rock that when i looked at my skin (slathered in as much sunblock as it could hold), it looked blue! so these cottonwoods were GREEN. we camped in a box canyon with a fabulous waterfall and the sounds of frogs.

from hance creek we left the tonto trail for a day and went over horseshoe plateau. we got to see a spring (tainted with especially heavy levels of arsnic), and found an old mineshaft. well, we're crazy, so we got out our headlamps and headed in... wow. mines of moria has a whole new meaning now. man-made holes are frightening. 200years is not a very long time when you think of rock formations, and it wasn't long before the heebie-geebies set in... but we found a couple of branchings, saw the old iron rail and enjoyed what we could with our feeble light. can't wait to look online and see what we can find out about the depths of this mine! from the debris pile, it looks like it was a copper mine.

continueing to the top of the plateau, we could see other mines that were started, as well as the remains of their old camphouse and tin can trashheap. very cool. we had heard from a park ranger when we were planning the trip that there was a cave on top of the plateau and we set off to find it. we were not disappointed! the cave of domes, which we later saw from our campsight on the other side of the plateau, is literally on the side of the plateau, and goes in far enough for us to find a caver's box (sign in and out if you want to go caving there) and has some great features in the rock. there is apparently some graffitti from the 1800's but our headlamps were not strong enough to find it. in fact, only one was strong enough to navigate by at all, and i was taking pictures with the flash in order to see what was in front of me! needless to say, we could not explore too far without the caving gear necessary, but boy was it ever an awesome sight! made doubly strong by eerging from the cave to views of the grand canyon... some cosmic sense of humor that was!

we rejoined the tonto trail and followed a level path westward towards the more touristy area of the canyon. this course gave us amazing views as we wound in and out of tributary canyons and got to see slit canyons, box canyons, and astounding drop-offs as well as some amazing sandstone features! the rocks change depending on how deep in the canyon you are and it is common to see petrified shells and such in several of the layers...

in our free time we followed the creek beds in several areas. at this time of year, it was easy to find springs and areas where the streams come up above the ground for a while... loads of tadples, frogs, and other creatures we associate with water (even mosquitoes) having a lovely time... and every night our camp was somewhere completely different. we found antlers and deer jawbones, and lots of feces (deer and small mammal) everywhere we explored... and there were TONS of lizards.

our last night was the only dry campsite we had, and so we loaded up on water at a spring a couple miles from boulder creek and hauled 12 liters around the dry cremation creak to a camping spot out on the plateau. this was the only night we were not sheltered from the wind. for some unknown reason, i did not expect it to be as severely windy as it was. which is really silly if you think about it, as there are channels to funnel the wind, and the wind is responsable for many of the features that make the canyon so extraordinary... so. it was windy the last night, but the view was INCREDIBLE. and because no one wants to haul heavy water around, the trail was barely used and sometimes difficult and fun to follow. we also got some solitude in the best sense of the word. we thought there would be fewer people than there were, but due to the season and the easy availability of water, we found 10-15 people camping near us every night the first 3 nights! from the afternoon of the 4th day to the evening of the 5th day, we saw noone. amazing.

the last day we had 4 liters of water each (what was recommended, but nearly twice as much as we needed) when weset out. after 1.5-2 miles of well travelled trail from dayhikers staying below the rim, we hit the tip-off point, where the south kaibab trail intersects the tonto trail... 4.4 miles from the top and 2.5 miles from the colorado. we resisted the urge to see the river again, wanting to be sure there was enough time to catch our bus... and headed out of the canyon. the south kaibab is one of the most heavily used trails... even used by donkeys to restock phantom ranch at the river... so it was an abrupt change from what we had been doing. there was trail maintainance and stone edging nearly the entire way up, and we could walk side by side when there was no traffic. i was sad not to meet a donkey team, but there was plenty of fresh feces to go around... and we flew up the trail, admiring the areas of cobblestone and built-up embankment made by the ccc boys during the depression. this is one of the rare trails that goes up the butt, instead of following a tributary, so the views were a consistant inspiration and the breeze very welcome. we got to the top before 11am, having made such good time that we were laughing and giggling about it. we had time to shower and refresh and embiggen ourselves with food before meeting our van to return to the world of the living. spent the night in an old hotel in downtown flagstaff, enjoying local entertainment and antique elevators and fabulous thai food... and caught the van back to the pheonix airport in the morning.