Udates, with a baby bunny!

So, not much has gone on lately. We've celebrated a HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Jennifer! Yay! And that's about it lol.

Work had given me weird hours, but, because of those weird hours I was finally able to see my friends! You all should still be mad at me cause the little, simple gifts I brought back from Jamaica in FEBRUARY for you I still keep forgetting to bring to you! Its not like they're packed or anything. They're practically sitting in the open just waiting to be taken to you all, but I just suck!

This weekend, Brandon is testing for Denton Police Department. He feels "really good" about this test, he says. So, despite the fact its in DENTON, ugh, wish him luck, pray for him, send vibes, whatever your avenue is. We'd appreciate it. Its his dream and he thinks a college town like Denton would be just absolutely awesome to work in, since its large, and has so many elements to it.

My one year anniversary of working for UT Southwestern University Hospital Zale Lipshy (how retarded long of a name is that?) is coming in September!!! Weird, isn't it! I've been a nurse for a year-ish now! Feels like it was only like a few months ago I took that stupid NCLEX and passed it. Course, as soon as Brandon gets hired, I'm going to be looking to take the GRE. I hope to apply for the next fall semester, Fall 2010, to begin graduate course-work towards obtaining my Family Nurse Practitioner. After that is my plan to quit formal education. I really don't have any sort of desire for a PhD or anything of that sort.

So, random story time. Recently we were talking about books. I forget why, but I made some off comment about writing a book (joking) and Brandon said I should write one about Ribby, our beagle. (/sigh) All I dreamed about last night was about what kind of beagle book I'd write, a kids book, that I thought the name of the dog should rhyme with beagle, or we'd just call him Ribby the Hound dog, and that somehow the radio station 1310 the Ticket would be promoting this. Because of the Ticket's involvement, that means the stupid kid's book would have to be about sports, and how do people write kids' books anyways? Does it make sense to write the book, "Ribby the Hound goes to a football game"?! Lol, I seriously had CRAPPY sleep for HOURS thinking of this IN MY SLEEP! How random, right?

On a side note, I THINK I like fantasy books. Mix a little action with a touch of a love story (no romance novels please, I don't want that kind of stuff) and you might have me hooked. But I don't know a good book to read. I like the MAGICAL stuff. Call me a kid or say I have an overactive imagination, but I don't give a crap. I need a new book to read.

So, here is picture time. My mom actually found, courtesy of my dearest puppy dog JJ, a baby bunny hopping around in the garage today! (don't worry! JJ just alerted to it and made my Mom look, he was no where near to killing the sweetie) So when Brandon and I got home from eating out tonight, mom had a baby bunny! Now, after some internet research (and you know everything you read on the internet is TRUE! *sarcasm*), it seems that if we get the right food, and feed it once a day, and handle it minimally, then we can help it grow and release it into the wild again. The reason we took it in, despite it looking so healthy, is two reasons: 1) older bunnies might eat it, and 2) the douche bag bunny might hop into the back yard and get eaten by my dogs. Now, before you think that either option might be a long shot you have to see a) how many freaking bunnies there are in this neighborhood, and, b) the idiot baby bunny kept hopping/walking towards the fence of the backyard that contained my death givers.

So we put it in our old hamster cage, with some water and soft stuff to lay on, followed the directions we read and put it in a secluded area of the house, and left it alone. However, we took pictures while he was outside! (and don't worry! we're fully aware of the fact that he may not survive and that we may have to keep him as a pet. I have had to wrangle my dog Bella in all night, since she's mandatory house arrest because of her knees, and put up the baby gate so she can't get near the room the baby bunny is in right now). All pictures are courtesy of my dad! My camera took a nice one...but before I could take many fun ones my battery died. :( Always at the good moments. :(

...So how the hell did this happen?

Ok, I'm late posting this cause a) I am lazy, b) I'm a procrastinator, and C) all of the above. I've had the pictures, but didn't want to bother putting the reader in the laptop. Besides, I hate typing on the laptop on the cooling station.

Anyways, a few weeks ago, dearest Hunter (lovingly far too often referred to as Huntard) showed up with two scratches on his head. On above his eye and one on the inner canthus of his eye. Whatever, my dogs have such crazy battle wounds from battles I probably never wanna know about, so I didn't think anything of it really. Hunter has lost 2 teeth already from some serious tug-o-warring, whats 2 scratches?

Well, fast forward I guess a weekish and during morning doggie breakfast Brandon says, "Hey, Hunter has pus all over his cut." Of course I doubt him first cause, well, I'm lame. He assures me it isn't doggie spit that has managed to be slung up on top of Hunter's head, and it isn't one of Hunter's massive eye boogies that dislodged and moved to his cut (Hunter has huge eyes, so the greater the surface area the more likely it is to collect dirt which leads to eye boogies the size of which you would never have imagined).

Anyhow, I look at his scratch after its safe (translation: all the dogs have both finished eating and marking, and re-marking, my mom's poor flower pot), and, yes, there is purulent discharge all over the scratch on his forehead. Huh, first infected wound on my sweetest man Hunter. That sucks.

Being the gross person I am, I squeeze to get more of the ewy-gooey out til no more comes. Get some 1/2 hydrogen peroxide and 1/2 water mix and clean it out a little. He'll likely be fine. Its a small wound. I go to sleep (remember, I work night shifts. Its normal for me to go to sleep at like 10am.)

So, 6pm-ish, I get up and go feed the doggies their dinner and check out Hunter's icky scratch. I squeeze it again and he whines, and not much comes out...but I still see white stuff in there, but nothing comes, Hunter just whines. (anyone who enjoys popping pimples - not that I enjoy that, *cough* - knows that seeing more white usually means stuff could come out) I kinda get a closer look and notice its solid...the white thingy in there. Oh crap, someone's freaking toe nail is stuck in my dog's head. Figures. It goes along with how I imagined he got hurt. He and JJ like to ram chests like goats or something and I could imagine JJ's freakishly long toe nails he refuses to let me, and anyone else, trim, scratch Hunter's head.

I bring Hunter in and get Brandon to hold Hunter's head still, as well intrigue him with doggie bacon treats, while I utilize the fancy tool of tweezers to try to pry that thingy out of my dog's head.

Well, it sure as crap doesn't look like a toe nail. That looks like a tooth!!!

Oh my gawd someone broke their tooth off in my dog's scalp!!!????

Mouth checks begin. And my dogs don't like their mouths checked. They don't believe in brushing their teeth, they cover their teeth when they're playing, and I generally only see their teeth cause they're panting. Mouth checks of course are a pain.

So, as far as I can tell from the total of 10 seconds combined looking in 4 dogs' mouths (cause, unless he's more talented than I thought, I don't think Hunter embedded one of his own teeth in his scalp) the tooth did not come from any of my doofuses.

Course now that the tooth is gone, and Hunter trusts me, finally, to not poke at his head, his head is healed. Like completely. Bring on the hair growth please. And he still smells like a skunk.

I just don't think its a skunk tooth. Maybe it is. Maybe its a possum. Doubt its a raccoon...I've never seen any around here. And yes, my dogs are covered on their rabies shots. From personal experience I know I do not need to go and reboost the shot...learned that when we found the dead skunk.

Besides that, works has been way too freaking busy, but my patients family brought us all cheesecake. Omg. If you are ever unfortunate enough to be stuck in a hospital (the poor thing, the nature of what happened to her means that no matter how good she feels, she was stuck in the ICU for a minimum of 2 weeks) and you like your nurses, they ALWAYS enjoy food, especially CAKE, ICECREAM, and CHIPS and SALSA! Fruit trays and veggie trays are welcome, too.

I was also right about one of my patients and the doctors didn't think that was the problem at first. Hah. A holes.

So, for now, I guess thats it. Not too much exciting going on. Patch 3.2 dropped in World of Warcraft. Blizzcon is soon so maybe we'll hear about the next expansion. I got Mario Kart for the Wii (which we're conviscating from my mom since she never plays her gift and she's had it more than a year) and I'm better at it than Brandon...least right now. He's not too pleased so he just sticks to his Nintendo DS Mario Kart for now. OH! And YES! Jennifer, it looks like you can meet up with your friends online on Mario Kart Wii. We'll have to plan that out!!!

K, I'm going to go eat whatever you wanna call my 2nd meal since being awake even though its 3am.

I'll leave you with possibly my new favorite song for right now:

Just an Update

So, I haven't written cause truly nothing exciting has happened.

Brandon decided, for now, against applying to be a Trooper because he'd have to leave his mom with only me taking care of her for 6 months or so just for us to not know where we'd be heading after those 6 months. So, he's going to try some departments around here first and if those don't come through, then he may revisit the Trooper thing. Also, he's going to keep on taking his core curriculum classes to get more credits.

Oh, for some reason San Antonio is advertising on the Dallas Morning News website that they're hiring police officers. That sucks cause now Brandon wants to apply to work in San Antonio. I dunno. I think it would suck to live there. So we'll see what the hell happens.

For me, not much to say. Got to see the Harry Potter movie. I want to see it again though cause I saw it with a grumpy person so it wasn't as 100% fun as it should have been.

Nothing new with the doggies. They're crazy as ever. Hunter still stinks like skunk since I never bring him in to bathe him...I'm a bad doggie mom.

Work is busy, as it has been lately. Don't really understand why we're at capacity and over all the time lately, but whatever. People get sick, we do our best to help them recover.

Oh, we left our guild in World of Warcraft. Long story as short as I can make it. We got mad someone was promoted to an officer position who totally didn't deserve it, stepped back from playing so often, and then realized we totally don't feel like playing as long as we're playing with that guild. There are some nice people there, but overall the others are childish and obnoxious, and even worse when raiding, which is what we really want to do. So, we left. I feel bad about it, but oh well. Can't make everyone but myself happy.

Oh, and one last thing. We went out "on the town" the other night with friends from Brandon's job. Wow. I've never been in a bar before, just hanging out, and have a police officer in full uniform, on duty, come up and just chat cause he wanted to. Later that night, that same police officer went to Walmart, bought a change of clothes, and hung out with us more. Then, we all went to Whataburger where another on duty police officer came and ate with us. It was very weird. Normally alcohol + police officers = bad night for everyone. Nope, this was just weird. Lol.

On a side note, we ran into a dispatcher for Brandon's city and she invited me to a "passion party." She assured me that there will be things for "partners" there. I dunno. If anyone wants to go lemme know. Otherwise I'm claiming laundry night to get out of that. I think I'd want to know someone really well before I did something like that.

Anyways, trying to keep this thing going since I'm always told I don't blog enough! :P

An Ode to the Maxima

Many of you know that my mom's car since 1997 has been her '97 Nissan Maxima. However, most of you do not know that recent events have meant the car is going to Heaven. Poor thing is circling the drain.

Before I get into my best attempts at poetry about a car, here is the Maxima's eulogy.

Kathy's Nissan Maxima suffered fatal injuries June 22, 2009. As one of its last acts for the family, it served as the transportation for Jimmy and Kathy, driven by Kimberly, to the airport so that Jimmy and Kathy could go visit Jarod in St. Louis, and move him to El Paso. Later that day, it was generous enough to allow Brandon to conduct it to Farmer's Branch so that Candy could visit her doctor in greater comfort. On the way home, it started feeling a little sick. The brake light came on along with the voltmeter light, along with an odd smell, that of components and plastic burning. Later that night, after it had rested, it was started to find that the alternator had caught fire and was emitting that burning smoke. After Brandon so courageously poured a cup of water on the alternator to put out the car fire, it was sent to the car hospital that had in the recent past taken such good care of cars like the Chevy Camaro, when she got her new engine. The word came a few days later that the Maxima should be placed on end of life care, and thus has finished her days as the family car. Oil oozing from various orifices would be the cause of death.

And please give me a break. This is my best attempt at telling a long story and rhyming at the same time. No one is awake to proofread for me!

Now,

An Ode to the Maxima

The Maxima car, one very comfortable and quite fast,
Was the car my mom bought when I was a freshman at last.

Only too well do I remember mom driving us home, new car smell fresh,
And how, in the Taco Bell drive-thru, mom said, "What is this?"

Of course, she popped the trunk from the front seat special release,
Having me jump out, looking a fool, to close it at least.

Then, a few years later, the car stretched its extent
to fit ELEVEN people within it for a my birthday guests.

It did not matter that one person fell out when we opened its latches,
what matters was the car performed more than we could have expected.

It was championed as the family car that had a good bit of SPEED,
and trust me, 120 miles per hour was witnessed by my brother and me.

Granted, that speed only tied the Firebird it raced on that night,
but that Firebird was a V6, so spare us much of a fight.

How about the day I got lost in Garland, Rachael and Julie shot-gun,
Jarod and Chris B. giving Jennifer G. bruises in back just for fun.

Why was I lost in Garland you seem to be inquiring?
'Cause Jennifer's parents said no highway driving.

That day, it started raining and I tapped the brakes to slow down,
as cars in front of me fish-tailed on the road, making me frown.

However, something strange happened, and, "Oh shit," I did chant
because the car didn't slow or stop until the very last safe moment.

Then what about the experience that car and I shared,
trying to drive to go dancing, exiting Galloway for a yummy fare.

Stupid drivers, can't learn where or when to slow for the exit,
The car in front of me stopped on the off-ramp because of another half-wit.

The ignoramus chose not to slow down, as cars were departing,
thus my two lanes were taken, sending me off-roading.

After a super loud BANG!, slamming of the brakes, and honking at them,
the car survived, the three of us safe, with other drivers to condemn.

Then there was that one night, with Rachael and her date, Paul,
in whom she was not interested, not very much, not at all.

He sat in the back seat, unfortunately, ignored,
and somehow got sticky stuff all over the door.

That window roll down button never worked quite the same,
but he never pursued Rachael again, thus he never got blamed.

Then came college, and graduations, and even more school,
the car kept on with little to improve.

It survived the massive force of nature, that is blond and quite furry,
we all like to think of him as mom's dog named Chewy.

Chewy was not its first dog, as that would likely be Jake,
but Jake was sweet, Chewy commonly left terror in his wake.

I'm sure my brother Jarod would have some interesting things to say,
but this is my ode to that car, so he can comment away.

In the past, I had washed, waxed, vacuumed, and cleaned,
that car was as close to mine as I could possibly glean.

My first flat tire experience was while driving that car,
that whooshing of air I'll always remember by far.

Though I moved on, and my mom is doing so now,
We'll always cherish you, Maxima,
for the love,
for the time,
for the sweat, tears, oil, gas, and room,
as our one, our only,
Maxima of which we've been so proud.

Member of our family from 1997-2009
260,000+ miles
very little maintenance required

Tried a new recipe tonight!

So, I'm bored with the limited amount of dinner recipes I have in my brain arsenal. I can pull off a handful of things, but, most of them run in the same "dinner families," as I'll call them, so I can't use many of them in a week.

For example, tacos and enchiladas. Both easy. Both yummy. Both Mexican/TexMex in flavor, so you really don't want both in one week.

Parmesan chicken, pesto chicken, spaghetti. All kinda Italian-y. Don't want them all in one week.

Brandon doesn't like pork chops, which sucks. I really liked the pork chops I used to make, thanks to a really cool person at church submitting the recipe to the church cook book. Its SO easy and you only really get one big pan dirty. Maybe a bowl or two, but thats it! Veggies, meat, sauce, all one pan. Love it. But Brandon does not. Grr.

So, on the way to the store today I got on his iPhone and looked up some stuff on mobile.foodnetwork.com. I found this (from the non-mobile site) Spicy City Chicken. Now, do not trust its prep time and such. Its like not right lol. But, I'll give you the low down.

First, I loved it. If you like chicken enchiladas with tomatillo sauce, this stuff is up your alley. A little bit of spice (or more, depending on how heavy your hand is with some of the ingredients) mixed with a nice sweet flavor.

Side note: we used regular yellow onions instead of shallots because, well, thats what we could find, we're not going to a specialty store for this. And we didn't get the scallions because the Produce guy in Kroger was doing something that took more than 5 minutes in the exact spot where the scallions were, so we decided to just ignore them. Oh, and we used only chicken breasts without skin, cause thats how we roll.

Other alterations Brandon made. He chopped up the cilantro and tossed it in the pan. And I really don't think he strained the sauce after he pureed it, but I liked it that way. It was probably thicker and had more fullness to it. But I bet it worked better because he chopped the cilantro.

What I REALLY want to do is make that sauce, put some chicken and mild cheese in some corn tortillas and smother them with the sauce. It would be a different kind of enchilada but a good one!

So, the thing says prep time 20 min and cook time 1 hour. Flip that. Prep time 1 hour cook time 20 min. The sauce really is the thing that takes the longest. So if making the sauce is part of prep, then its 1 hour of prep time. If making the sauce is cooking it, then its 1 hour cooking it. Broiling or grilling the chicken is dumb fast. Like 12 minutes maybe. We broiled it. We dragged it out a bit cause I had the chicken ready and Brandon was still working on the sauce. It was a partnership to make diner tonight. :)

Oh, and what was funny was the smells. It smelled a lot like the goat curry from Jamaica, especially since it was green in color, just like the goat curry. But its flavor was more like the sweet and spicy tomatillo flavors, which I LOVE along with cilantro. Yum.

We liked it. Thought I'd share. It makes plenty, too. I'm looking forward to left overs.

Crossfit

So, we did it. We went and participated in our first Crossfit work out. Of course they went easy on us the first day, and John, they guy who runs the one in Richardson we are going to, is really nice. He said we'll probably go a little easy for a couple weeks til we get the hang of it, know how our bodies respond to Crossfit, and learn all the techniques.

Today we did this:

Warm Up:
400 meter jog
PVC pipe stretches

Work-Out:
400 meters row
50 squats
40 sit ups
30 push ups
20 box jumps (you don't actually have to jump, but its like a 2 foot box you get up on 20 times)
10 pull ups (with the lovely help of the most awesomest rubber band thingy)

Cool Down:
Stretches, walking it off

I think I completed mine in 18min and some odd seconds and Brandon did his in like 19 minutes and some odd seconds. I have better strength in my lower body than he does, so I think, and thats why I think I beat him by a minute.

I couldn't tell you what everyone else's work out was cause I don't know all the exercises, but I know they were supposed to run 400meters, then do the same distance running backwards, then come in and basically do a combined situp, toss a huge ball, received the huge ball from your buddy, do the situp, toss, repeat, as well as other things.

http://www.crossfit.com

Thats the master website.

But why not try to do as much as we can? Why just go slowly to "see how your body responds?"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhabdomyolysis

That link there takes you to the condition that some olympic athletes have caused by pushing themselves too hard doing Crossfit lol. Awesome, huh?

Anyways, going back tomorrow. Just promised I'd say something about it after my first day.

We're moved!!!

And, oh my God, I'm never doing that again. In College Station I lived in a dorm you basically moved most of your crap out of every Christmas and moved completely out every summer for THREE years, then I lived in an apartment, moved to another apartment, then moved to another apartment, and all of that was WAY easier than this experience has been.

Granted, I did have help and this was just Brandon and I, and this apartment had been lived in for 12 years with left overs from them moving from a house to an apartment, but oh my God. His mom had basically packed up her room and we had the movers move her. She took care of most of the unpacking of her apartment. But what was left was in sane. Its why we took a week off of work to do it all.

But, our accomplishments are:

Here is the attic, finally completely empty (this attic was stuffed to the brim before our efforts):

After cleaning this bitch out I came out with a total of 6, I think, itchy bug bites that looked creepily like chigger bites, but they were mostly on my torso, which so isn't the common place to find chigger bites.

This is what the living room looked like with all the attic mess in it:

We managed to sort everything, get it all labed with store at his mom's, store at my parent's, garage sale, or throw away. Throughout the entire thing I think we took at least 9 pick-up truck beds FULL of trash to the poor little dumpster at the apartement complex. Oh, and we learned that if in a fight between Brandon's head and a light bulb on the attic ceiling, that Brandon will win. (no worried, only the light bulb was hurt in the incident and wonderful Mr. Vacuum took care of the mess).

We filled up my grandma's garage for the garage sale. Literally. There was no where to walk through all the boxes and crap we took to the garage sale. Not everything sold, but we did unload a good amount of stuff. We put one furniture piece on the side of the road with a lovely sign that says, "Please take me." Come to think of it, I should check in with my grandma to see if its gone yet.

We also finally managed to get rid of the fish tank. We got it up on Craigslist kinda late and basically said you can have everything for x price (super duper cheap, especially for everything) if you just come and get it and we don't have to move it at all. Well, our emails got neglected in trying to finish cleaning out the apartment, cause we were working up til 5pm on Sunday and the key needed to be in the drop box by 9am Monday morning. So, we ended up having to break it down and start taking it downstairs. We were just gonna leave it by the dumpster and let the Craigslist peoples know where we left it, when I said screw it, I'm calling the guy that emailed us the most and asked us the most questions. Catch is, we already knew he couldn't come pick it up cause he was at work til 6 and, well, we wanted to raid on World of Warcraft at 7pm.

So I talk to him, and he asks questions, and gets to the point, "What are you really saying is the bottom line?" I tell him, "Look, we're just trying to find someone to take this thing other than Mr. Dumpster in the back of the apartment. We have somewhere we want to be at 7, so we're going to leave it sitting outside. Its free, cause no one will be here to take any money, ya know?" He laughed and said, "Well, then there is nothing to think about is there?"

His poor wife. Since they lived nearby, she apparently called a friend to bring her friend's car to come and try to get the pieces (cause the original plan was he was gonna have his wife walk over and sit with the fish tank equipment until he got off work, which totally would've sucked for her). She and her friend had no idea what they were getting in to, but I'm glad it went to them. They desperately needed the tank right then cause a guy from his "fish forums" (which totally meant to me he was a super hobbyist, which makes me feel better) gave them an 8 inch turtle for his 3 year old and he needed a bigger tank to hold the turtle in, which is why our tank was perfect for him immediately.

So, that unloaded, we left the cleaned apartment happy to be done. We raided, and Brandon died. To prove he died, I have the picture.

Yep. Thats him sleeping with Bella! She was on the bed first so he scooted in with her. He's totally sleeping on my side in this picture!!!! So when I went to bed, I had to move him and the dog, who ended up sleeping with us all night.

So, we're done. And we're happy about it. We've decided we never want to own a 2 story house. We never want to move his effing TV again, and if we ever buy a new one, we're not getting one that weighs 150 effing pounds, and especially not keeping it upstairs if it does. I think we'll think twice about hobbys that involve heavy, bulky equipment. And be more inclined to throw crap away (even though I can't bring myself to toss my Nursing school books yet.)

I'm sure my next blog entry will be about this new fitness thing we're going to start, but I'm not going to say anything til we've paid our money and went to our first class deal.