PRAHA, CZ

we are safe and sound in Prague (Praha here)... it is absolutely georgeous! will add pics later! the old architecture is astounding, the former communist housing block where we are staying particularly mind numbing, and the food is suprisingly fantastic! i was a little scared!

for all those who know us, YES, we are consuming many fantastic and weird foods that are oh so tasty... and full of eggs, cabbage, strange meats foreign to our digestive tracts, and other gas producing items useful for propelling us up and down hills!

yesterday we hit the castle, many other bohemian landmarks, saw cz period dancing and art exhibits, and really enjoyed a stroll down by the river. this city does it right! and, had we been awake, it even has a great night life. recession, prague laughs at you! hahahahahahaha. that and the fact that we went over 36hours with no sleep. zombie tourists! waahoo!

on another note, the keyboards here are easily navigated, the facebook webpage is very funny looking in chesky, and in trying to find english we have both changed our pages to pirate! my status was update 2 grains of sand ago! hehehe

off to rockclimb in Jic(h)in at Cesky raj (pronounced chesky rai- means czech paradise) for the next few days... that and find out what the locals eat for breakfast! see yas!

and we're off!

so it is derby weekend... and we have left the state! for some reason, horseracing seems to be lost on us!

so instead, we are in michigan with the kids. haveing a tumble before our flight to slovakia. the bags are packed, the climbing gear is sorted and stowed, the backpacking gear is downsized (amazing how little you need when you aren't sleeping in a tent!), and most importantly, the *CAREPACKAGE* is finished for annie and sean. deet nestled in plastic far far away from the peanut-butter chocolates i spent yesterday dipping.

so my stress level has plummetted in the last 12 hours! AND my sleep schedule is soooo screwy right now i think i am subsisting on caffeine and sugar, but that will only help my jet lag, right?! AND, curt hasn't killed or disowned me for being a tad on the short side lately... a fact he passes off as "well, you haven't even been home, so how could I?" hmmm. there's some truth to that!

so, we will be gone for 2 weeks. we will have shady e-mail access during that time. we will not have phone access. we will not be speaking english even! should be exciting! i can't wait!

i will update if we get the chance, but don't hold your breath!

love!

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!