Fun at the Beach

Anthony and I decided to use one of my rare Fridays off of work to spend the day at the beach! This was Brownie's first time at the beach and she loved it. Her favorite was running through the shallow water, but only if I was running with her. Bitsy of course is not very fond of the water, especially water that attacks you (waves) but she loved digging holes in the dirt and eating sand fleas that Anthony caught for them. It was really fun walking along the beach and laying out on the sand. On a funny note, the tide came in REALLY fast and we weren't paying attention. Suddenly, a huge wave crashed over us, all of our stuff, and the dogs as we were laying down enjoying the breeze. Luckily, Anthony saved my purse :) We took some pictures, but since Anthony was the photographer, they are only of me and the dogs.

Top Chef Season 4

So Top Chef is down to the final four! I think that it is amazingly awesome that the majority of the top four is women. Girl power!!! I know that it is kind of cheating to make a prediction this late in the game, but I am convinced that Stephanie is going to be the first female top chef. She has been consistently fabulous, winning numerous challenges and quickfires without getting involved in any of the drama. I think that that will help her win, as the judges keep in mind leadership and teamwork qualities when making the final decision. To be honest, she reminds me of Harold from the first season, who quietly stayed off the radar until he came forward with a spectacular win. Only time will tell...

Yea Anthony!!

Anthony's diploma came in the mail this weekend. Congrats again to Ant-dawg!

All done! (Almost)

Today I "finished" my cross-stitching project that I have been working on called Celtic Winter. I say "finished" because I still have a few beads to put on and a few finishing touches, but for all intents and purposes I feel done. This is just one in a series of four different projects that look similar to this one (one for each season). I think the next one I will do is Celtic Spring. It is beautiful! (I have a picture on my current project section) I can't wait to work with all of those colors :)


Also, I got this in my email today and I just had to share it:

A sad, sad world

Get ready, I'm going to talk about school-related stuff, so if you aren't interested, feel free to go make a sandwich or something :)

Today I attended a conference on sexual battery called "Pathways to Healing: From Trauma to Recovery". It was overwhelming. I don't even know if I can really put into words all that I felt, but I feel like I just have to write about it.

It was an all day conference with two keynote speakers and an option of workshops. The first keynote speaker was a woman named Sharon D'Eusanio. She works for the Attorney General as assistant director of the division of victim services. She mainly travels around the country, giving speeches and serving as an advocate for victims of violent crimes, especially victims who have a disability. Her story was awe inspiring. She is blind as a result of a horrendous attack from a complete stranger who ran her off the road and then kidnapped her,assaulted her, shot her, stabbed her, and left her for dead. When she decided to go public with her story, she thought that she would do that for a few years and then get on with her life. That was over 30 years ago! Now she is a stalwart victims advocate and voice and described her own path to recovery.

I had heard that she was a powerful speaker, so I signed up for her workshop that was after her morning speech. The fire and passion that emanated from this woman was amazing! She seemed to pick up where she left off and spoke for another two hours, never really repeating on the same topic. You could tell that she had so much knowledge about dealing with victims of sexual crimes along with so much compassion. There has been a lot of media coverage recently about a woman who was raped in broad daylight in a well-to-do side of town, so as a result camera crews from TV20(our local news station) came to the conference to highlight what people in our community are trying to do about sexual crimes. (If you watch the news tonight, you can see the back of my head clearly :) Still, I know that there is a lot of sexual crime in our city and I don't think that it is a coincidence that there is so much coverage of this particular incident and its occurrence in an up-scale neighborhood and that is sad to me.

Anyway, the second workshop I went to was about Batterers' tactics and the speaker went through the many strategies and tactics batterers use to control and diminish their victims. I feel like I learned so much, but at the same time I feel bombarded with the sadness that there is so much of this in the world. There were many "survivor/thrivers" as they refer to themselves at this conference and even though it was inspiring to see them there, it made me realize how uncomfortable I am around them. I feel like I don't know what to do with myself, or what to say. At lunch, an older women was sitting quietly at our table. One of the girls from the program asked her if she was a mental health counselor, and she responded that she was a survivor/thriver. This hush fell over our table and another girl from my program said, "umm, I don't really know how to say... congratulations?..." and then she turned beet red. She meant it in the kindest way, but I feel like that illustrated how we all felt. How do you deal with the reality? Hopefully I will be able to figure it out as I get more counseling experience.

My inspiration

For those of you that don't already know, I am slightly obsessed with the Xbox 360 game, Dance Dance Revolution. It was originally an arcade game and now it is adapted so that you can play it at home. I got it for my birthday last year and I have played it close to every single day since then. My main motivation is that it is a GREAT cardio workout and I don't get bored and quit because I have to maintain my status as Dance Champion(!) and earn more points. The game also tells you when you are being lame, playing horribly, or occasionally asks you if your dance pad is broken if you aren't giving it 100%. This is a youtube video of a 5 year old playing dance dance and hitting every single step perfectly. *Sigh* Maybe one day I will be this good. :)

Lake Wauburg

After class today, Anthony and I went to a lake owned by UF that is just outside of Gainesville. Anthony has gone fishing there before (go figure), but I have never been there. They have a lot of fun activities like a climbing wall, sail boats, kayaks, canoes, swimming, beach volleyball, etc... There weren't many students there because of the summer time, so it was nice to be able to do whatever we wanted. A few of our friends were there having a barbeque as a going away party and it was fun to get to visit. Anthony and I went out on the lake on a two-person kayak. It was my first time kayaking ever! I liked it a lot more than I thought I would :) We saw five alligators, which Anthony had us chase until we got close and they went under water. In addition, Anthony insisted on going near any low hanging tree branches on the shoreline to check for snakes. The funny thing about all of this is how excited I was. I kept thinking, "yeah, this is just like crocodile hunter!". Since marrying Anthony, I really have built up a tolerance for reptiles, amphibians, and slimy things!


Anthony also went fishing Wednesday with some buddies from work and caught quite a few sharks and small trouts. One of his fishing buddies even hooked a shark that was so big and strong that it took the entire spool of fishing line off of his reel and got away! So, somewhere out in Cedar Key is a BIG shark with a lot of fishing line trailing behind him.

What did you say?!! That's what I thought....

Today was my first class of the summer: Sexuality and Disability. It is only 6 weeks long, so the material is pretty intense and fast paced since we are only going to meet 12 times before it's done. The class is being taught by the sweetest professor you will ever meet. She is soft-spoken and strikes me as the type that would rub your back while you cry over a bad relationship/bad grade/bad day.

So with that in mind, our first group exercise was a little shocking. Our professor put large sheets of paper all around the walls of the room with headings listing names of male and female body parts and sex acts. Our assignment for the next 20 minutes was to write under the columns every possible bad word/slang term that might be used instead of the proper term. To say the least, it got colorful. The entire time I was thinking, "My upbringing did not prepare me for this!" (which I consider a good thing) and "Really? THAT's what that means?" The funniest part of all of this was our soft-spoken professor calling out dirty words that we had forgotten to write. How surreal. But oh, it gets better. After we had exhausted our minds and memories of middle school (and other's recollections of explicit movies), our professor explained that she wanted us to be able to say all of the words without giggling/stuttering/etc.. so we had to recite all of the words on one of the columns. Luckily we got to choose which one, so I just volunteered for the one with the most tame synonyms. This is going to be an interesting six weeks...

Cat Drama

We've been having some issues with our cat, Belle. She has been urinating outside of her litter box off and on for awhile now on our new couches (!) and especially on our papasan chair. It got so bad, that we seriously considered throwing the chair away and getting a new one that has wipeable upholstery, like leather. Up until recently I thought she was peeing on things because she was upset about something because it seemed to happen right after clipping her nails or being away for the entire day. Yes, she is THAT kind of cat. However, in the past week or so the peeing got so frequent that Anthony and I decided that there must be something wrong. I happened to have a UTI test strip from the pharmacy, made for humans of course, and we actually got her to pee on it. It tested positive, so I quickly made an appointment with the vet. (It turns out the cat urine will always make the test strip positive, but hey, we tried :)

So, today was her appointment and man was it an experience! It turns out that cats rarely get urinary problems related to bacteria, or actual infections. Usually their problems stem from inflammation and Ph imbalances in their urine. Dr. Bob (our vet) diagnosed her with Feline Idiopathic Cystitis, which believe it or not is mainly associated with psychological stress! Apparently, our rambunctious puppy has stressed her out to the point of physical illness! Our vet gave us a list of strategies to help her reduce her stress and encourage her to take in more fluids. I guess it makes sense considering she has to go through a puppy gauntlet to get to her food and litter box and she has to share the water bowl with the dogs who take every chance they can get to attack her. The kicker of all of this is that our vet also wrote Belle a prescription for Valium!!!! My dogs stressed out my cat so much that now she has to be on a sedative!!

Nurse of the Year

This past Friday, Anthony, my parents, his parents, and I attended his awards ceremony for getting nurse of the year at Shands for his unit. It was really nice! They had chello players playing classical music in the background, the Vice-President of nursing conducted the ceremony, the Chief Nursing Officer for Shands gave a rah-rah nurses speach,and the the CEO of Shands was there too. It is really impressive when a company goes out of their way to support and reward their employees' efforts. It makes you want to work that much harder knowing that you are appreciated. Anthony got a gold nursing pin that he put on his badge and a gift certificate for the mall that he is trading with me for more money in his aquarium budget :)

As coincidence would have it, the awards ceremony is in the same building at UF where I have all of my classes. The building has three different colleges: the college of nursing, the college of pharmacy, and the college of public health and health professions (my college). Anthony's parents wanted to see where I had classes, so I showed them around a little bit. Here is me posing in the first floor of the building. Move over Vanna White!

Narnia

Today I finished reading C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia, the entire 7 books in the collection. They were amazing!! I read them in chronological order, from the first book that describes the creation of Narnia to the last book that describes the end of Narnia. My favorite thing by far about the books was the symbolism to the gospel and Christ found everywhere! For example, The first book talks about a boy searching for a fruit that makes you immortal and Aslan (the Christ figure of the book) creates Narnia by "breathing life" into animals and plants and trees. The second book, (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe which is an awesome movie by the way) has Aslan sacrificing himself to the White Witch for the sins of a boy, and then coming back to life. The last book describes the characters as coming to Aslan's country and eating of a fruit that "if you had once eaten that fruit, all the nicest things in this world would taste like medicine after it. But I can't describe it. You can't find out what it is like unless you can get to that country and taste it for yourself".

I really love reading books that help me understand the gospel more. Even if they are not written by LDS authors (although I am sure many of us want to claim C.S. Lewis as one of our own) they help add more to my understanding and make me think about gospel principles more often then I normally would throughout the day. This is, I think, my absolute favorite passage from the last book (The Last Battle) referring to death:

"And as he spoke [Aslan], He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of a real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before."

You can't resist the cuteness

A friend from work showed me this website that has literally thousands of cute animal pictures. If you are a cat person the website is:
http://icanhascheezburger.com/
If you are a dog person the website is: http://ihasahotdog.com
Of course, I had to look at the dachshund pictures and these are a few of my favorites. I have to admit, I have wasted many an hour going through the pages on these websites. They are just so cute!

It's a big one!

Anthony came home from fishing today victorious! He caught this black drum out at Cedar Key. It was 36 inches long and he said that it weighed at least 30 pounds (it was too heavy for his scale). His fishing partner estimated that it weighed more than his son who is 37 pounds! The point is it was a BIG fish! It is a good thing he took these pictures (with our new "boat" digital camera bought off ebay for $15) so we could see the majesty of it :)

Dogwood Park

Last week, Anthony and I took Brownie and Bitsy to check out a local dogpark. We've been putting it off for awhile since I had heard that their monthly rates were pretty expensive. It turned out to be such a blast!!! The park has around 15 acres of land with two different ponds and multiple segregated areas (small dog/dry, small dog/wet, etc...) so if you don't feel like dealing with a muddy wet dog that day, you just go to a different area in the park. Here is a picture of our favorite pond there:


The dogs loved it so much that we decided to join. We even got a discounted rate for just going on weekdays (I always have to work on the weekends). We've gone several times since and it has really improved the dogs' behavior because they are so tired out afterwards, that they don't have the energy to get on my nerves! Anthony went fishing today, so I loaded them in the car and took them myself. It was so nice to sit in the shade, read a book, and just let them explore. Here are some pictures from today:



This is a basset hound called Bonita that LOVES Brownie and was trying to play with her for at least 30 minutes

Bitsy is still terrified of the water, but Brownie loves it! She won't fetch to save her life on the grass but she will fetch pine cones and sticks from the pond for hours on end.

The grades are in!

Final grades were posted today and I got straight A's this semester!!!! Yea!!!!

Milestone

So the semester is finally and truly over! Anthony got A's in all of his classes and has officially graduated from UCF with his Bachelor's in nursing. We are all so proud of him!!! Sometimes it is difficult for me to sit back and realize what an accomplishment it is, since I am always thinking about the next step (graduate school) but this degree is definitely something to celebrate. Of course it means a significant raise at the hospital (10 cents) and I have to remind myself to spend the extra money coming in wisely ;)